i THE MIDDLE AGES BY THE SA3IE AUTHOB. — • — THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY. 12mo, cloth, net ^2.00. (Postage 20 cts. extra.) — • — For sale by all Catholic booksellers, or by the publishers, BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York : Cincinnati: Chicago: 36-88 Barclay St. 343 Main St. 211-213 Madison St, THE MIDDLE AGES SKETCHES AND FRAGMENTS BY THOMAS J. SHAHAN, S.T.D., J.U.L. PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. ; AUTHOR OF " THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY," ETC. NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO BENZIGER BROTHERS PRINTERS TO THE HOLT APOSTOLIC 8EB 1904 Wtfjtl ^ UNiVE:RsiTY THE MIDDLE AGES. GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE BARBARIAN WORLD. The latter part of the sixth century of our era offers to the student of human institutions a fascinating and momentous spectacle — the simultaneous transition over a great extent of space from an ancient and refined civilization to a new and uncouth barbarism of manners, speech, civil polity, and culture. It was then that the great mass of the Roman Empire, which generations of soldiers, statesmen, and administrators had consolidated at such fright- ful expense of human blood and rights, was irrevocably broken by the savage hordes whom it had in turn attempted to resist or to assimilate. One moment it seemed as if the fortune of a Justinian and the genius of a Belisarius were about to regain all Italy, the sacred nucleus of conquest, and to proceed thence to a reconsti- 9 10 GBEGORY THE GREAT, tution of the Roman State in Western Europe. But it was only for a moment. Fresh multi- tudes of Teutonic tribesmen swarmed from out their deep forests along the Danube or the Elbe, and overflowed Northern Italy so effectually as to efface the classic landmarks, and to fasten forever on the fairest plains of Europe their own barbarian cognomen. It is true that the bureaucracy of Constantinople, aided by the local pride of the cities of Southern Italy, by a highly- centralized military government, by the prestige and the influence of the Catholic bishops, as well as by the jealousy and disunion of the Lombard chiefs, maintained for two centuries the asser- tion of imperial rights, and a steadily diminish- ing authority in the peninsula and the islands of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But, by the end of the sixth century, all serious hope of reorganizing the Western Empire was gone. Thenceforth (thanks to the Lombard) the Frank and the Visigoth, luckier than their congeners the Ostrogoth and the Vandal, might hope to live in peaceful enjoyment of the vast provinces of Spain and Gaul, and the fierce pirates of old Saxony could slowly lay the foundations of a new empire on the soil of abandoned and help- less Britain. In the West not only was the GREGORY THE GREAT. 11 civil authority of Rome overthrown, but there went with it the venerable framework of its an- cient administration, the Latin language — that masterful, majestic symbol of Roman right and strength — the Roman law, the municipal system, the great network of roads and of intercom- mercial relations, the peaceful cultivation of the soil, the schools, the literature, and, above all, that splendid unity and consolidarity of interests and ideals which were the true cement of the ancient Roman State, and which welded together its multitudinous parts more firmly than any bonds of race or blood or language. Notwithstanding the transient splendor, the victories and conquests, of the reign of Justinian, the condition of the Orient was little, if any, better than that of the West. The Persian and the Avar harassed the frontiers, and occasionally bathed their horses in the sacred waters of the Bosphorus. The populations groaned beneath the excessive taxes required for endless fortifica- tions, ever recurring tributes, the pompous splendor of a great court, and the exigencies of a minute and numerous bureaucracy. Egypt and Syria, no longer dazzled by the prestige or protected by the strong arm of Rome, began to indulge in velleities of national pride and spirit, 12 GREGORY THE GREAT. and, under the cover of heresy, to widen the political and social chasm that yawned between them and the great heart of the empire. The imperial consciousness, as powerful and energetic in the last of the Palseologi as in a Trajan or a Constantine, was still vigorous enough, but it had no longer its ancient instruments of good fortune, wealth, prestige, and arms. /The shrunken legions, the diminished territories, the dwindling commerce, foreshadowed the dissolu- tion of the greatest political framework of antiquity ; and in the quick succeeding plagues, famines, and earthquakes, men saw the ominous harbingers of destruction. The time of which I speak was, indeed, the close of a long, eventful century of transition. Already the political heirs of Rome and Byzantium were looming up, both East and West. In the East, fanatic, con- quering Islam awaited impatiently the tocsin of its almost irresistible propaganda, and in the West the Frank was striding through war and anarchy and every moral enormity to the brill- iant destiny of continental empire. We may imagine the problem's that beset at this moment the mind of a Boethius or a Cassiodorus. Would the fruits of a thousand years of Greek and Boman culture be utterly blotted out? GREGORY THE GREAT, 13 Would the gentleness and refinement that long centuries of external peace and world-wide com- merce and widest domination had begotten be lost to the race of man ? Would the teachings of Jesus Christj the source of so much social betterment, be overlaid by some Oriental fanati- cism or hopelessly degraded by the coarse natu- ralism of the Northern barbarians ? Could it be that in this storm were about to be ingulfed the very highest conquests of man over nature and over himself, the delicate and difficult art of government, the most polished instruments of speech, the rarest embodiments of ideal thought in every art, that sweet spiritual amity, the fruit of religious faith and hope, that common Christian atmosphere in which all men moved and breathed and rejoiced ? We all know what it was that in these cen- turies of commotion and demolition saved from utter loss so much of the intellectual inheritance of the Graeco-Roman world, what power tamed and civilized the barbarian masters of the West- ern Empire, fixed them to the soil, codified and purified their laws, and insensibly and indirectly introduced among them no small share of that Roman civilization which they once so heartily ha-t^d, and which in their pagan days they looked 14 GREGOBY THE GREAT. on as utterly incompatible with Teutonic man- hood and freedom. It was the Catholic hierarchy which took upon itself the burden and responsi- bility of civil order and progress at a time when absolute anarchy prevailed, and around which centred all those elements of the old classic world that were destined, under its asgis, to traverse the ages and go on forever, moulding the thought and life of humanity as long as men shall admire the beautiful, or reverence truth, or follow after order and justice and civil security. It was the bishops, monks, and priests of the Catholic Church who in those troublous days stood like a wall for the highest goods of society as well as for the rights of the soul ; who resisted in person the oppression of the barbarian chief just emerged from his swamps and forests, as well as the avarice and unpatriotic greed of the Roman who preyed upon his country's ills ; who roused the fainting citizens, repaired the broken walls, led men to battle, mounted guard upon the ramparts, and negotiated treaties. Indeed, there was no one else in the ruinous and totter- ing State to whom men could turn for protection from one another as well as from the barbarian. It seemed, for a long time, as if society were returning to its original elements, such as it had GREGORY THE GREAT. 15 once been in the hands of its Architect, and that no one could better administer on its dislocated machinery than the men who directly represented that divine providence and love out of which human society had arisen. The keystone of this extraordinary episcopate was the papacy. The Bishop of Rome shared with all other bishops of the empire their in- fluence over the municipal administration and finances, their quasi-control of the police, the prisons, and the public works, the right to sit as judge, not alone over clerics and in clerical cases, but in profane matters, and to receive the ap- peals of those who felt themselves wronged by the civil official. Like all other bishops of the sixth century, he was a legal and powerful check upon the rapacity, the ignorance, and the collu- sion of the great body of officials who directed the intricate mechanism of Byzantine administra- tion. But over and above this the whole world knew that he was the successor of the most illustrious of the apostles, whose legacy of authority he had never suffered to dwindle ; that he was the metropolitan of Italy, and the patriarch of the entire West, all of whose churches had been founded directly or indirectly by his see. 16 GREGORY THE GREAT. From the time of Constantine his authority in the West had been frequently acknowledged and confirmed by the State and the bishops. In deferring to his decision the incipient schism of the Donatists, the victor of the Milvian Bridge only accepted the situation such as it was out- lined at Aries and Antioch and Sardica, such as Valentinian formally proclaimed it, and the Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian made the funda- mental law of the State. Long before Constan- tine, the Bishop of Rome seemed to Decius and Aurelian the most prominent of the Christian bishops, and since then every succeeding pon- tificate raised him higher in the public esteem. Occasionally a man of transcendent genius, like Leo the Great, hroke the usual high level of superiority, and shone as the saviour of the State and the scourge of heresy; or again, skilful administrators like Gelasius and Hormisdas piloted happily the bark of Peter through ugly shoals and rapids. But, whatever their gifts or character, one identic consciousness sm^vived through all of them — the sense of a supreme mission and of the most exalted responsibility in ecclesiastical matters. Did ever that serene consciousness of authority need to be intensified ? What a world of suggestion and illustration lay GREGORY THE GREAT. 17 about them in their very episcopal city, where at every step the monuments of universal domina- tion met their gaze, where the very atmosphere was eloquent with the souvenirs of imperial mastery and the stubborn execution of the imperial will, where the local mementoes of their own steady upward growth yet confronted them, where they could stand in old St. Peter's, even then one of the most admired buildings of antiquity, over the bodies of Peter and Paul, surrounded by pilgrims from all parts of the world, and echo the words of the first Leo, that already the spiritual rule of the Roman pontiffs was wider than the temporal one of the Roman emperors had ever been ! It was to this office, and in the midst of such critical events as I have attempted to outline, that Gregory, whom after-ages have styled the Great, succeeded in 590 a.d. He could boast of the noblest blood of Rome, being born of one of the great senatorial families, a member of the gens Anieia, and destined from infancy to the highest political charges. His great-great-grand- father, Felix II. (483-492), had been Bishop of Rome, and he himself at an early age had held the office of praetor,, and walked the streets of Rome in silken garments embroidered with 18 GREGORY THE GREAT. shining gems, and surrounded by a mob of clients and admirers. But he had been brought up in the strictest of Christian families, by a saintly mother ; and in time the blank horror of public life, the emptiness of human things in general, and the grave concern for his soul so worked upon the young noble that he threw up his promising camera, and, after distributing his great fortime to the poor, turned his own home on the Coelian Hill into a monastery, and took up his residence therein. It was with delibera- tion, and after satisfactory experience of the world and life, that he made this choice. It was a most sincere one, and though he was never to know much of the monastic silence and the calm lone-dwelling of the soul with God, these things ever remained his ideal, and his correspondence is filled with cries of anguish, with piteous yearnings for solitude and retire- ment. On the papal throne, dealing as an equal with emperors and exarchs, holding with firm hand the tiller of the ship of state on the angriest of seas, corresponding with kings, and building up the fabric of papal greatness, his mighty spirit sighs for the lonely cell, the obedience of the monk, the mystic submersion of self in the placid ocean of love and con- GREGORY THE GREAT. 19 templation. His austerities soon destroyed liis health, and so he went through fourteen stormy years of government, broken in body and chafing in spirit, yet ever triumphant by the force of his superb, masterful will, and capable of dictating from his bed of pain the most successful of papal administrations, one which sums up at once the long centuries of organic development on classic soil and worthily opens the great drama of the Middle Ages. In fact, it is as the first of the mediaeval popes that Gregory claims our especial attention. His title to a place among the benefactors of human- ity reposes in great part upon enduring spiritual achievements which modified largely the history of the Western Empire, upon the firm assertion of principles which obtained without contradic- tion for nearly a thousand years, and upon his writings, which formed the heads and hearts of the best men in Church and State during the entire Middle Ages, and which, like a subtle indestructible aroma, are even yet operative in Christian society. The popes of the sixth century were not un- conscious of the fact that the greater part of the Western Empire had passed irrevocably into the hands of barbarian Teutons, nor were they 20 GBEQOBY THE GREAT. entirely without relations with the new possessors of Roman soil; but their temporary subjection to an Arian king, the Gothic war, and the cruel trials of the city of Rome, the meteoric career of Justinian, as a rule deferential and favorable to the bishops of Rome, the painful episode of the Three Chapters, in which flamed up once more the smouldering embers of the great christological discussions, the uncertain re- lations with the new imperial office of the exarchate, as well as a clinging reverence for the empire and its institutions, kept their faces turned to the Golden Horn. They had welcomed Clovis into the church with a prophetic instinct of the role that his descendants were to play, and they kept an eye upon the Catholic Goths, on the Suabians of Northwestern Spain, and on the Irish Kelts. Individual and sporadic mis- sionary efforts originated among their clergy, of which we would know more were it not for the almost complete destruction of their local annals and archives in the Gothic wars. But withal, one feels that these sixth-century popes belong yet to the old Graeco-Roman world, that they hesitate to acknowledge publicly that the im- perial cause is lost in the West, that the splendid unity of the Roman and the Christian name is GBEGOBT THE GREAT. 21 only a souvenir. On the other hand, the barba- rian was too often a heretic, too often slippery, selfish, and treacherous, while the Roman was yet a man of refinement and culture, loath to go out among uncouth tribes who had destroyed whatever he held dear. In a word, he nourished toward the barbarian world at large that natural repulsion which he afterward reproached the British Kelt for entertaining toward the Saxon destroyer of his fireside and his independence. Gregory inaugurated a larger policy. He was the first monk to sit on the Chair of Peter, and he brought to that redoubtable office a mind free from minor preoccupations and devoted to the real interests of the Roman Church. He had been praBtor and nuncio, had moved much among the bishops and the aristocracy of the Catholic world, and was . well aware of the inferior and painful situation that the New Rome was preparing for her elder predecessor. The careers of Silverius, Vigilius, and Pelagius were yet fresh in the minds of men, and it needed not much discernment to see that, under the new regime, the Byzantine court would never will- ingly tolerate the ancient independence and tra- ditional boldness of the Roman bishops. It was, therefore, high time to find a balance 22 GREGORY THE GREAT. to the encroachments and sinister designs of those Greeks on the Bosphorus, who were drift- ing ever further away from the Latin spirit and ideals ; this the genius of Gregory discovered in the young barbarian nations of the West. It would be wrong, however, to see in his conduct only the cold calculations of a statesman. It was influenced simultaneously by the deep yearnings of the apostle, by the purest zeal for the salvation and betterment of the new races which lay about him like a whitening harvest, waiting for the sickle of the spiritual husband- man. While yet a simple monk he had extorted from Pelagius the permission to evangelize the Angles and the Saxons, and had proceeded some distance when the Romans discovered their loss and insisted on his return. Were it not for their selfishness he would have reached the shores of Britain, and gained perhaps a place in the charmed circle of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who were during that century engaged in the losing conflict for independence which ended so disastrously at the Badonic Mount. This is not the place to relate the details of the numerous relations which Gregory established on all sides with the barbarian peoples of Europe. GBEGORY THE GREAT, 23 The nearest to him were the Lombards, that resistless hammer of the Italo-Roman state, and one of the most arrogant and intractable of all the Teutonic tribes. His policy with them is peace at any price. Now he purchases it with Church gold, sorely needed elsewhere ; and again he concludes a treaty with these iron dukes in the very teeth of the exarch. He takes their rule as an accomplished fact. He refuses to be an accomplice in the base, inhuman measures of the Byzantine governors. He rests not until he has converted their queen Theodelinda, and their king Agilulf; with a certain mixture of bitterness and joy he proclaims himself more a bishop of the Lombards than the Romans, so numerous were their camp-fires upon the Cam- pagna, and so familiar the sight of their hirsute visages and the sound of their horrid gutturals among the delicate and high-bred denizens of Rome. It was he who restrained this rugged and contemptuous race ; who started among them a counter current against their brutal paganism and their cold, narrow, unsentimental Arianism ; who left to them, in his own person and memory, the most exalted type of Christian manhood — at once fearless and gentle, aggressive and 24 GBEGORT THE GREAT, enduring, liberal and constant, loyal to a decay- ing, incapable empire, but shrewd and far-seeing for the interests of Western humanity, whose future renaissance he must have vaguely felt as well as an Augustine or a Salvian. Beyond the Alps the descendants of Clovis had consolidated all of Gaul under Frankish rule. Though Catholics, they were too often purely natural barbarians, restrained with difficulty from the greatest excesses, and guilty in every reign of wanton oppression of Church and people. They sold the episcopal sees to the highest bidder, and they often intruded into these places of honor and influence their soldiers or their courtiers. With great tact and prudence Gregory dealt with these semi-Christian kings. In his correspondence he argues at length, and explains the evils of a simoniacal episcopate ; he pleads for a just and mild administration; he warns them not to exert their power to the utmost, but to temper justice with mercy, and to learn the art of self-control. In all the range of papal letters there is scarcely anything more noble than the correspondence of Gregory with the kings of Gaul, Spain, and England. This fine Roman patrician, this ex-praetor, recalls the palmy days of republican Rome, when her con- GREGORY THE GREAT, 25 suls and legates smoothed the way of success as much by their diplomacy as by their military skill. He speaks with dignity to these rugged kings^ these ex-barbarian chieftains, yet with grave tenderness and sympathy. He recognizes their rank and authority, their prowess and their merits. He reminds them that they are but earthly instruments of the heavenly King, and that their office entails a grave responsibility, personal and official. At times he dares to in- sinuate a rebuke, but in sweet and well-chosen words. He ranks them with Constantine and Helen, the benefactors of the Roman see. His language is generally brief, but noble, courteous, earnest, penetrating, and admirably calculated to make an impression upon warlike and un- tutored men, who were delighted and flattered at such treatment from the uncrowned head of the Western civilization. Childebert and Brune- haut, Recared and Ethelbert and Bertha, be- came powerful allies in his apostolic designs, and opened that long and beneficent career of early mediaeval Christianity when the youthful nations grew strong and coalesced under the tutelage of the papacy, which healed their dis- cords, knitted them together, arid transmitted to them the spirit, the laws, the tongues, the arts, 26 GREGORY THE GREAT. and the culture of Greece and Rome — treasures that, in all probability, would otherwise have perished utterly. We are in great measure the descendants of these ancient tribes, now become the nations of Europe, and we cannot disown the debt of grati- tude that we owe to the memory of that Roman who first embraced, with an all-absorbing love, the Frank, the Lombard, and the Gael, the Os- trogoth and the Visigoth, the Schwab, the Wend, and the Low-Dutch pirates of the Elbe and the Weser. Hitherto their chiefs had es- teemed the vicarious lieutenancy of Rome, so deep-rooted w^as their esteem for the genius of the empire. But they knew now what a pro- found transformation was worked in the West, and they began the career of independent na- tions, exulting in their strength. Politically they were forever lost to the central trunk of the empire, but they w^ere saved for higher things, for the thousand influences of Roman thought and experience. They were made chosen vessels, not alone of religion, but of the arts and sciences, of philosophy and govern- ment, and of that delicate, refined idealism, that rare and precious bloom of long ages of sincere Christian life and conduct, which would GREGOET THE GREAT. ^ 27 surely have perished in a new atmosphere of simple naturalism. No act of Gregory's eventful career has had such momentous consequences as the conversion of the Angles and the Saxons. They were, if possible, a more hopeless lot than the Lombards, revengeful, avaricious, and lustful, knowing only one vice — cowardice — and practising but one virtue — courage. Though distant, the fame of their brutality had reached the ends of the earth. Moreover, they had already nearly ex- terminated a flourishing Christianity, that of Keltic Britain. In a word, they were not so very unlike the Iroquois when Brebeuf and Lallemant undertook their evangelization. I need not go over the recital of their conver- sion. All his life Gregory cherished this act as the greatest of his life. He refers to it in his correspondence with the East, and it con- soled him in the midst of failures and discour- agements. His great soul shines out through the pages of Bede, who has left us a detailed narrative of this event — his boundless confi- dence in God, his use of purely spiritual weap- ons, his large and timely toleration. For these rude Saxons he would enlist all the sympathy of the Franks and the cooperation of the British 28 GREGORY THE GREAT, clergy. He directs in minutest detail the prog- ress of .the mission, and provides during life the men and means needed to carry it on. Truly he may be called the apostle of the English, for, though he never touched their soil, he burned with the desire to die among them and for them, he opened to them the gate of the heavenly kingdom, and introduced them to the art and literature and culture of the great Christian body on the continent. Henceforth the Saxon was no longer the Red Indian of the classic peoples, but a member of the world-wide Church. Quicker than Frank or Lombard he caught the spirit of Rome, and as long as he held the soil of England was un- swervingly faithful to her. Through her came all his culture — the fine arts and music and the love of letters. His books came from her libraries, and she sent him his first architects and masons. From her, too, he received with the faith the principles of Roman law and pro- cedure. When he went abroad, it was to her that he turned his footsteps ; and when he wear- ied of life in his pleasant island home, he be- took himself to Rome. to end his days beneath the shadow of St. Peter. In the long history of Christian Rome she never knew a more GREGORY THE GREAT. 29 romantic and deep-set attachment on the part of any people than that of the Angles and the Saxons, who for centuries cast at her feet not only their faith and their hearts, but their lives, their crowns, and their very home itself. Surely there must have been something extraordinary in the character of their first apostle, a great well-spring of affection, a happy and sympathetic estimate of the national character, to call forth such an outpouring of gratitude, and such a devotion, not only to the Church of Rome, but to the civilization that she represented. To-day the English-speaking peoples are in the van of all human progress and culture, and the English tongue is likely to become at no distant date the chief vehicle of human thought and hope. Both these peoples and their tongue are to-day great composites, whose elements it would not be easy to segregate. But away back at their fountain-head, where they first issue from the twilight of history, there stands a great and noble figure who gave them their first impetus on the path of religion a»d refinement, and to whom must always belong a large share of the credit which they enjoy. As pope and administrator of the succession of Peter, Gregory ranks among the greatest of 30 GREGORY THE GREAT. that series. His personal sanctity, his influence as a preacher, his interest in the public worship, and his devotion to the poor, are only what we might expect from a zealous monastic bishop; but Gregory was eminent in all these, while surpassingly great in other things. No pope has ever exercised so much influence by his writings, on which the Middle Ages were largely formed as far as practical ethics and the dis- cipline of life were concerned. They were m every monastery, and were thumbed over by every cleric. Above all, his book of the " Pas- toral Rule " fashioned the episcopate of the Middle Ages. By the rarest of compliments, this golden booklet was translated into Greek, ^nd Alfred the Great put it into Anglo-Saxon. It was the vade-mecum of every good bishop throughout Europe, and a copy of it was given to every one at his consecration. It was reck- oned among the essential books that every priest was expected to own, and it would not be too much to say that, after th^ Bible, no work exercised so great an influence for a thousand years as this little manual of clerical duties and ideals. It filled the place which the " Imitation of Christ " has taken in later times ; and in the direct, rugged Latin of its periods, in the stern. GJREGORY THE GREAT. 31 uncompromising doctrine of its author, in its practical active tendency, in its emphasis on the public social duties of the bishop, and in its blending of the heavenly and the earthly king- doms, are to be found several of the distinctive traits of the mediaeval episcopate. He laid out the work for the mediaeval popes, and in his person and career was a worthy type of the bravest and the most politic among them. Though living in very critical times, he main- tained the trust confided to him and handed it over increased to his successors. There is no finer model of the Latin Christian spirit ; and some will like to think that he was put there, at the confines of the old and the newj between Romania and Gothia, to withstand the flood of Byzantinism, to save the Western barbarian for Latin influences, and to secure to Europe the transmission of the larger and more congenial Latin culture. Yet he was, like all the Catholic bishops of that age, devoted to the ideal of the Christian Empire, and while he recognized the hand of Providence in the breaking up of the once proud system, he did not spare the expression and the proof of his loyalty to the emperors at Constantinople. Though virtually the founder 32 GEEGOBT THE GREAT, of tlie temporal power of the papacy, he ever held his temporal estate for and under New Eome, and was never happier than when he could safeguard or advance her interests. Like most men of his time, he believed that the last of the great empires was that of Rome, and that when it fell the end of the world was close at hand. Indeed, the well-known couplet (made famous by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims) belongs to his epoch, and strikingly conveys the popular feeling : — "While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall ; And when- Rome falls, the world." Long ages have gone by since he was gath- ered to his rest (604) in the portico of old St, Peter's, with Julius and Damasus, Leo and Gelasius, and all the long line of men who built up the spiritual greatness of Rome. Le- gends have gathered about his memory, like mosses and streamers on the venerable oak, and calumny has aimed some poisoned shafts at his secular fame. But history defends him from the unconscious transformation of the one, and the intentional malice of the other, which ever loves a shining mark. She shows to the admiring ages his portrait, high-niched GREGOBY THE GREAT, 33 in the temple of fame, among the benefactors of humanity, the protector of the poor and the feeble against titled wealth and legalized op- pression, the apostle of nations once shrouded in darkness, now the foremost torch-bearers of humanity. He appeared to posterity as one of that very small number of men who, holding the highest authority, administer it without fault, lead unblemished lives, and find time and opportunity to heal, with voice and pen and hand, the ills of a suffering world, and advance its children on a path of unbroken progress, guided by the genius of pure religion, consoled, elevated, and purified by all that the noblest thought and the widest experience of the past can offer.^ 1 The works of Gregory the Great are reprinted in Migne (Pl. Ixxv.-lxxix.) from the Benedictine edition of Sainte Marthe (Paris, 1705, 4 vols. foL). A critical edition of his " Registrum Episto- lariim," or "Letter-Book," is now at hand, owing to the learned industry of P. Ewald and L. M. Hartmann (Mon. Germ. Hist. Epistolae, I. -II., Berlin, 1891-1899). His account of St. Benedict has been reedited from the "Dialogues" by P. Cozza-Luzzi (Rome, 1880), and the " Homilies," by G. Pfeilschifter, under the auspices of Dr. Knopfler's "Seminary of Church History" (Munich, 1900). There is an English translation of the " Regula Pastoralis," or "Shepherd's Book," by H. R. Bramley (London, 1874). The English philologian, Henry Sweet, edited and trans- lated into English the West Saxon version made by King Alfred for the edification of his priests and people (Early English Text Society Publications, Londoo, 1871). Concerning his correspon- 34 GREGOBT THE GREAT, dence with St. Augustine of Canterbury on the toleration of heathen customs, cf. Duchesne, " Origines du Culte Chretien " (Paris, 1899, 1902), and Sagmiiller, Theol. Quartal. SchrifL (1899), Vol. 160. The age and authenticity of the " Sacramentary," or Old Roman Missal, that goes under his name, are discussed by Duchesne (op. cit.) and by Dr. Probst in a work of much erudition, " Die abend- landische Messe vom V. bis zum VII. Jahrhundert" (Miinster, 1896) . The origins of the so-called Gregorian Chant are treated by F. A. Gevaert, " Les Origines du Chant Liturgique de I'JEglise Latine " (Gand, 1900), and " La M^lopee Antique dans le Chant de PEglise Latine" (Gand, 1895) ; cf. G. Morin, " L'Origine du Chant Gr^gorien (Paris, 1890). The oldest priiited lives of Gregory the Great are those by Paulus Diaconus, at the end of the eighth cen- tury, and by Johannes Diaconus (Migne, Pl. Ixxxv. 69-242) about 872 or 873. There is said to exist in England a manuscript life of him composed at a still earlier date. Among the latest and best works on this great pope are Wisbaum, "Die wichtigsten Einrichtungen und Ziele der Thatigkeit des Papstes Gregor d. Gr." (Leipzig, 1885) ; Clausier, "St. Gregoire le Grand, Pape et Docteur de i'Eglise" (Paris, 1886) ; C. Wolfsgruber, "Gregor d. Gr." (Saulgau, 1800), and the articles entitled "II Pontificate di S. Gregorio Magno nella Storia della Civilta Cristlana" in the Civilta Cattolica (1890-93), Series XIV. , Vols. 5-9, and XV., Vols. 1-5. A useful account of his life is that of Abbot Snow in the " Heroes of the Cross " series (Lon- don, Th. Baker, 1897). The celebration of the thirteenth centenary of his death (604) will doubtless call forth many learned tributes to his manifold greatness and significance. His relations to the Em- peror Phocas are discussed by * Fr. Gorres in the Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Theologie (1901), Vol. XLIV.,pp. 592-602, and the accusation of ignorantism, by * R. Labbadini, " Gregorio Magno e la Grammatica," m Bullettino di filologia classica (1902), Vol. VIIL, pp. 204-206, 259 ; cf. * Fr. and P. Bohringer, " Die Vater des Paps- thums Leo I. und Gregor I." (Stuttgart, 1879), in the new edition of "Die Kirche Christi und ihre Zeugen." The asterisked writers are non-Catholic. For a full bibliography of Gregory the Great cf. the new edition of Chevalier's " Repertoire Historique du Moyen Age," and the second edition of Potthast, "Bibliotheca Historica Medii ^vi." The reader may consult with profit the historians of the City of Rome, Gregorovius, von Reumont, and Grisar, and for a literary appreciation of the pope the classical (German) work of Ebert on the "Latin Literature of the Early Middle Ages." JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A.D. 527-565). Perhaps the most crucial period of Christian history, after the foundation century of Christ and the apostles, is the sixth century of our era. Then goes on a kind of clearing-house settle- ment of the long struggle between Christianity and paganism. It was no false instinct that made Dionysius the Little begin, shortly before the middle of that century, to date his chronol- ogy from the birth of Christ, for then disap- peared from daily use the oldest symbols of that pagan civil power which had so strenuously disputed with the new religion every step of its progress. The annual consulship was then abol- ished, or retained only by the emperor as an archaic title. That immemorial root of Roman magistracy, the thrice-holy symbol of the City's majestas, could rightly pass away when the City had fulfilled its mission and function in the ancient world. The Roman Senate, too, passed away at the same period — what calls itself the Roman Senate at a later time is a purely local and municipal institution. The old relig- 35 36 JUSTINIAJSf THE GREAT. ion of Rome was finally no more than a mem- ory. For the two precedmg centuries it had gone on, sullenly shrinking from one level of society to another, until its last representatives were an individual here and there, hidden in the mighty multitudes of the Christian people of the empire.^ The schools of literature, philosophy, and rhetoric were no longer ensouled with the principles of Hellenism. Their last" hope was buried when the Neoplatonists of Athens took the road of exile to beg from the Great King, that born enemy of the Roman name — the prophet of " Medism " — ^ a shelter and support.^ In dress, in the system of names, in the popular literature, in the social institutes, in the spoken language,'^ in the domestic and public architec- 1 V. Schultze, " Untergang des griechisch-romischen Heiden- tums " (Jena, 1892), Vol. II., pp. 385-389 ; cf. also pp. 214, 215. The documents for the disappearance of Western paganism are best col- lected in Beugnot, "Histoire de la destruction du paganisme en Occident" (2 vols., Paris, 1835). Since then it is the subject of many learned works. 2 Gregorovius, " Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter," Vol. I., p. 58, does not believe that any formal edict was issued by Justinian against the continuance of the pagan schools ; they lapsed into desuetude. 3 Bury, " The Language of the Romaioi in the Sixth Century," " History of the Later Roman Empire," Vol. II., pp. 167-174; Free- man, " Some Points in the Later History of the Greek Language," Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. III. (1882) ; Tozer, "The Greek- speaking Population of Southern Italy," ibid., Vol. X., pp. 11-42 (1889). JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 37 ture, in the spirit of the law, in legal procedure, in the character of city government, in the ad- ministration of the provinces, in the very con- cept of the State and of empire, there are so many signs that the old order passeth away and a new one even now standeth in its place. The symptoms of internal trouble, noted on all sides from the time of Marcus Aurelius and graphically diagnosed by St. Cyprian, had gone on multiplying. They did not portend that decay which is the forerunner of death, as many had thought while the ancient society was dissolving before their eyes,^ but that decay which is the agent of great and salutary changes. Their first phase, the long and eventful Wandering of the Nations, had broken up. East and West, the old framework of society as the Greek and Roman had inherited, created, or modified it. On the other hand, that most thorough of all known forces, the spirit of Jesus Christ, had been working for fifteen generations in the vitals of this ancient society, disturbing, cleansing, casting forth, healing, binding, reno- vating, a social and political organism that — 1 "Sic quodcumque nunc nascitur mundi ipsius senectute de- generat, ut nemo mirari deberet singula in mundo deficere coepisse, cum ipse jam mundus totus in defectione sit et fine." — St. Cyprian, "Ad Demetrianum," c. 4, ed. Hartel. 38 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. " Lay sick for many centuries in great error." In such periods of history much depends on the ideals and character of the man or men who stand at the helm of a society that is working its way through the straits and shoals of transi- tion. Was it not fortunate for Europe that a man. like Charlemagne arose on the last limits of the old classical world, with heart and brain and hand enough to plan and execute a political basis sufficiently strong to hold for centuries to come the new States of Western Christen- dom ? It is here that Justinian enters on the stage of history and claims a place higher than that of Charlemagne, second to that of no ruler who has affected for good the interests of his fellow- men. He is not, I admit, a very lovable figure. He stands too well within the limits of the Grgeco-Roman time to wear the illusive halo of Teutonic romance. But in the history of humankind those names shine longest and brightest which are associated with the most •universal and permanent benefits. Is he a bene- factor of society who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before ? Then what shall we say of one who established for all time the immortal princi|)les of order and justice and JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 39 equity, without which all human endeavor is un- certain and usually sinks to the lowest level ? ^ 1 The principal authority for the life and works of Justinian is the contemporary Procopius, the secretary and lieutenant of Beli- sarius. In his account of the Gothic, Vandal, and Persian wars he exhausts the military history of the empire. His work on the buildings of Justinian and the "Anecdota" or "Secret History" that bears his name are entirely devoted to the emperor, the former in adulation, the latter in virulent condemnation. Agathias, also a contemporary, has left us an unfinished work on the reign of Jus- tinian that deals chiefly with the wars of 552-558. To John Lydus, one of the imperial officers, we owe an account of the civil service under Justinian. Theophanes, a writer of the end of the sixth century, has left some details of the career of the emperor. The " Church History " of Evagrius and the " Breviarium " of the Car- thaginian deacon Liberatus are of first-class value for the ecclesi- astical events. His own laws (Codex Constitutionum and Novelise) and his correspondence, e.g. with the bishops of Rome, are sources of primary worth, as are also at this point the "Liber Pontificalis" and the correspondence of the popes with Constantinople. In his chapters on Justinian, Gibbon follov/ed closely Le Beau, "Histoire du Bas Empire" (Paris, 1757-84). Among the general historians of Greece in the past century who deal with the events of this reign are to be named Finlay, " A History of Greece" from its conquest by the Romans to the present time (146 b.c. to 1864 a.d.), new and revised edition by H. F. Tozer (Oxford, 1877, 7 vols.) ; Bury, " A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene " (395-800) (2 vols., London, 1887). The German histories of Greece by Hopf (1873), Hertzberg (1876-78), Gregorovius (histories of mediaeval Rome and Athens, 1889), and the modern Greek histories of Paparrigopoulos (1887-88) and Lambros (1888) cover the same ground, though they differ considerably in method and apprecia- tions. There is an "Histoire de Justinien " (Paris, 1856), by Isambert, very superficial and imperfect, and a life of the empress by Debidour, "L'lmp^ratrice Theodora" (Paris, 1885), to which may be added Mallet's essay on Theodora in the English Histori- cal Beview for January, 1887. Several essays of Gfrorer in his " Byzantinische Geschichten" (Graz, 3 vols., 1872-77), notably pp. 315-401, are both instructive and picturesque. For all questions 40 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, I. Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, the modern Sophia and capital of the present kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant of his historians says that he came of an obscure race of barbarians.^ Nevertheless, in an empire every of chronology pertaining to the reign of Justinian the reader may- consult the classic work of Clinton, "Fasti Romani : The Civil and Literary Chronology of Rome and Constantinople" (to a.d. 641), (Oxford, 2 vols., 1845-50) ; cf. also Muralt, " Essaide Chronographie Byzantine" (St. Petersburg, 2 vols., 1855-73), and H. Gelzer, " Sextus Julius Africanus " (Leipzig, 1880-85). An attempt has been made to collect the Greek Christian in- scriptions from the fifth to the eighteenth century. " Inscriptions Grecques Chr^tiennes " (St. Petersburg, 1876-80), pp. 11-143. Mgr. Duchesne and M. Homolle promise a complete "Corpus." Cf. Bulletin Critique (October 5, 1900, p. 556). The coins and medals of the period are best illustrated in Schlumberger's " Sigillographie de I'Empire Byzantin" (Paris, 1884), a work that rounds out and replaces the earlier treatises of De Saulcy, Banduri, Eckel, and Cohen. 1 It is worth noting that the Slavonic origin of Justinian has lately been called in question by James Bryce, English Historical Review (1887), Vol. II., pp. 657-686. It is said to have no other foundation than the biography by a certain Bogomilus or Theophilos, an imaginary teacher of Justinian. This biography is not otherwise mentioned or vouched for than in the Latin life of Justinian by Johannes Marnavich, Canon of Sebenico (d. 1639). Bryce holds that Marnavich gives us only echoes of a Slavonic saga about Jus- tinian. Jiricek ("Archiv fiir Slavische Philologie" (1888), Vol. II., pp. 300-304) condemns the whole story as a forgery of Marna- vich. Thereby would fall to the ground all that Alemannus, the first editor of the "Anecdota" of Procopius (1623), writes concerning the Slavonic genealogy, name, etc., of Justinian. Cf. Krumbacher, *'Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur" (Munich, 1891), p. 46. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 41 soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky soldier. Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite such another " paysan du Danube " as Lafontaine describes in one of his most perfect fables (XI. 6) : " Son menton nourriasait une barbe touffue. Toute sa personne velue Representait un ours, mais un ours mal lechd. Sous un sourcil epais il avait I'oeil cache, Le regard de travers, nez tortu, grosse levre : Portait sayon de poll de chevre, Et ceinture de joncs marins." He may have been not unlike the good Ursus in " Quo Yadis/' or that uncouth Dacian in " Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long service of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and succeeded, with universal consent, to Anastasius when that hated "Manichaean" died childless. The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered to make a Roman holiday — the land had long been Romanized, had even furnished the empire with a succession of strong and intelligent rulers, those Illyrian emperors whom Mr. Freeman has so magisterially described. Jus- tin was an uneducated barbarian, and cut his signature painfully through a gold stencil plate, as did his contemporary, the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, king of Italy. Yet he had the wis- 42 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. dom of experience, the accumulated treasures of the sordid Anastasius, the counsel of good civil officers, old and tried friends in many an Isau- rian, many a Persian, campaign. Above all, he had the devotiorf of his youthful nephew, Jus- tinian. Possible pretenders to the throne were removed without scruple — a principle that has always been prevalent by the Golden Horn. Before Justin died his nephew had reached the command of all the imperial forces, though never himself a warlike man. In 527, on the death of his uncle, he found himself, at the age of thirty-six, sole master of the Roman Empire. It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, after the drums and tramplings of a dozen con- quests. The West, indeed, was gone — it seemed irretrievably. At Pa via and Ravenna the royal Ostrogoth governed an Italian State greater than history has seen since that time. At Tou- louse and Barcelona the Visigoth yet disposed of Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and Orleans and Soissons the children of Clovis meditated vaguely an empire of the Franks. The Rhineland and the eternal hills of Plelvetia, where so much genuine Roman blood had been spilled, were again a prey to anarchy. Britain, that pearl of the empire, was the scene of tri- JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 43 umphant piracy, the new home of a half dozen Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited by the great State's hour of trial to steal one of her fairest provinces, and were obliterating in blood the faintest traces of her civilizing presence. Even in the Orient, where the empire stood rocklike, fixed amid the seething waters of the Bosphorus, the Hellespont, and the Euxine, it knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids of Persia threatened the vast level plains of Mesopotamia, while a new and inexhaustible enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and Slavonic tribes, terrible in their numbers and their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold, amenable to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and mur- der and universal disorder. Justinian must have often felt, with Henry the Fourth, that the wet sea-boy, ^^ cradled in the rude imperious surge," was happier than the king. Withal, the empire was yet the only Mediterranean State. It yet held Syria and Egypt. Asia Minor was faithful. The Balkan provinces, though much troubled, and poor harassed Greece were imperial lands. ^ The empire alone had navies 1 The political geography of the empire in the sixth century may be studied in "Hieroclis Synecdemus," edition of Gustav Parthey 44 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered.^ Alone as yet it had the paraphernalia of a well- appointed and ancient State — coinage, roads, transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with arts and literature and all that is implied in the fair old Latin word humanitas. It stood yet for the thousand years of endeavor and progress that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. And well it was for humanity that its destinies now passed into the hands of one who was penetrated with the keenest sense of responsi- bility to God and man. Though he reached the highest prize of life before his prime, it has been said of him that he was never young. The ashes of rebellion and insurrection had been smouldering in the royal city since, with the death of Marcian (457), the old, firm, Theodosian control had come to an end. The frightful political consequences of the great Monophysite heresy that was born with the Council of Chal- cedon (451) were dawning on the minds of thoughtful men. The Semitic and Coptic Orient (Berlin, 1866). Here are reprinted the " Notitias Episcopatuum " or catalogues of ecclesiastical divisions known usually as the ' ' Tac- tica." Cf. also Banduri, " Imperium Orientale " (Paris, 1711, fol.) ; " Antiquitates ConstantinopolitansB " (Paris, 1729, fol.). 1 Gf rorer, " Byzantinische Studien," Vol. II., pp. 401-436; "Das byzantinische Seewesen.'' JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 45 was creating that shibboleth which would serve it for a thousand years against Greek and Eoman — a blind and irrational protest against the real oppressions and humiliations it once underwent. Of its own initiative the empire had abandoned, for good or for ill, its historical basis and seat — Old Rome. It had quitted the yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer the scene of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassa- nid with the sea at its back, to create a suitable forum for the government of the world, where Christian principles might prevail, and where a certain inappeasable nemesis of secular wrong and injustice would not haunt the imperial soul as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital one thing was left behind — perhaps it was irre- movable — the soul of Old Rome, with all its stern and sober qualities, its practical cast and temper, its native horror of the shifty mysticism of the Orient and the unreality of the popular forms of Greek philosophy. There is some- thing pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the Great, " The art of arts is the government of souls." It is like an echo of the sixth book of Vergil, " Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento." Perhaps this is the germ of solid truth in the legend that Constantine abandoned the civil au- 46 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. thority at Rome to Pope Silvester. He certainly did abandon, to the oldest and most consistent power on earth, — a power long since admired by an Alexander Severus and dreaded by a Decius — that rich inheritar^ce of prestige and authority which lay embedded in the walls and monuments of ancient Rome. Within a century something of this dawned on the politicians of Constanti- nople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle to help its bishop to the ecclesiastical control of the Orient. In history there are no steps back- ward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the last consistent, if romantic, prophet of the em- pire, was wont to shiver with indignation at the thought of the consequences of this act. But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of government, they gained a Greek soul. It was an old Greek city they took up - — Byzantium. Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with Hellenism, whose far-flung outpost it had long been. History, climate, commerce, industries, the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of Ro- man men and families, the contempt for the pure Orientals, forced the emperors at Constantinople from the beginning into the hands of a genuine local Hellenism that might hav.e shed its old and native religion^ but could not shed its soul, its JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 47 immortal spirit. Henceforth the world was governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre.^ This meant that government for the future was to be mingled in an ever increasing measure with metaphysics ; that theory and unreality, the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the fleeting elements of life, were to have a large share in the administration of things civil and ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth — " Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 1 " The Greek characteristics of the empire under Justinian are calculated to suggest vividly the process of ebb and flow which is always going on in the course of history. Just ten centuries be- fore Greek Athens was the bright centre of European civilization. Then the torch was passed westward from the cities of Hellenism, where it had burned for a while, to shine in Latin, Rome. Soon the rivers of the world, to adopt an expression of Juvenal, poured into the Tiber. Once more the brand changed hands ; it was trans- mitted from the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, once more eastward, to a city of the Greek world — a world, however, which now dis- dained the impious name 'Hellenic' and was called 'Romaic' By the shores of the Bosphorus, on the acropolis of Graeco-Roman Constantinople, the light of civilization lived pale but steady for many hundred years — longer than it had shone by the Ilissus, longer than it had gleamed by the Nile or the Orontes, longer than it had blazed by the Tiber, and the Church of St. Sophia was the visible symbol of as great a historical idea as those which the Par- thenon and the Temple of Jupiter had represented, the idea of Euro- pean Christendom. The empire, at once Greek and Roman, the ultimate results to which ancient history, with Greek history and Roman, had been leading up, was for nine centuries to be the bul- wark of Europe against Asia, and to render possible the growth of the nascent civilization of the Teutonic nations of the West by pre- serving the heritage of the old world." — Bury, "History of the Later Roman Empire," Vol. IL, p. 39. 48 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers from Rome. They one day mounted the throne in their worst shape, the shape of the sophist, in the person of Marcus Aurelius ; but, indeed, they had no proper place in Rome, where government has always tended to keep its head clear and calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the average practical and attainable. Not so in the Greek Orient. With the triumph of the Chris- tian religion the gods of Hellas fell from theii* rotten pedestals. But they were never the gov- erning element, the principe generateur of the Greek life. That was the individual reflective mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things, seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, not for any definite purpose, but because this restless research was its life, its delight ; because at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised the outer and visible world as an immense phe- nomenon, a proper and commensurate subject for the ruinous gicidity of its criticism. It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of these opmiosissimi homines of Greece which be- gat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nes- torius, and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even partially conquered in their defeat, for they com- pelled, to some extent, a philosophical refutation JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 49 of their own vagaries; they helped Plato, and later Aristotle, to their high seats in Christian schools. With sure instinct the earliest Chris- tian historians of heresies set down among them certain phases of Greek philosophy. " Quid Academice et Ecdesice ! *' cries Tertullian in his book on Prescription, as though he smelled the battle from afar. In the intense passion of the Arian and chris- tological discussions the highest Greek gift, metaphysics, and the finest Greek training, dia- lectics, came to the front. In every city of the Greek world the most abstruse and fine-drawn reasoning was indulged in habitually by all classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its ob- scure origin among those third-century philoso- phers of Antioch who gave to that school its grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He appeared at Nicaea in the company of pagan philosophers, and when defeated carried his cause at once before the sailors and millers and wandering pedlers along the sea front at Alexandria. And for two centuries the shop- keepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and Alexandria would rather chop logic than attend to their customers. For the victories of the mind the burdens of the State were neglected or 50 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of thought was carried into the council chamber, to prevail therein very often to the detriment of the commonwealth. The great officers of the State were too often doubled with theologians. The emperor himself took on gradually the character of an apostolic power, with God-given authority to impose himself upon the churches, formulate creeds, decide the knottiest points of divinity, make and unmake bishops great and small, and generally to become, in all things, a* visible providence of God on earth .^ This is what the Eastern world acquired by losing its Roman emperors and gaining a succession im- bued with the spirit of Hellenic thought, and accustomed to the exercise of despotic power in a city that had no old and stormy republican tra- ditions, being no more than the high golden seat of imperial authority from its foundation. Were it not for the magnificent resistance of Old Rome in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bish- ops would have allowed the cause of Christianity to become identified with the Csesaro-papism of the emperors. If we add to the loss or absence of desirable 1 Cf. Rambaud, " L'Empereur Byzantiu," Bevue des Deux Mondes (1891). JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 51 Roman qualities on the part of these great gov- ernors of imperial society, and the acquisition of undesirable Greek qualities, certain influences of the Orient, we shall, perhaps, better understand the situation in which Justinian found himself. It was noted very early that in contact with the Orient the extremely supple and impressionable Greek genius suffered morally. It lost its old Dorian or Argive independence, and, stooping to conquer, took on the outward marks of seiVitude while dwelling internally in its own free illimit- able world of opinion and criticism. Long wars, commerce, travel, especially prolonged sojourns in corrupting Persia, had habituated the Eastern Greeks to political absolutism. Since Alexander the habits of servile subjection of their own con- quered populations of Syria and Egypt were in- fluential in this direction. The Roman emperors from Diocletian on were themselves caught by the externals of the Great King's court, and seem to have transferred much of its ceremonial to their own. The presence in Constantinople of a great multitude of miscellaneous Orientals and the exaggeration of style and rhetoric pecul- iar to this as to all other times of decadence, added strength to this current servilism. 62 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. II. The great problem tliat faced Justinian on his accession was the very character and limits of the Roman State for the future. Were the en- croachments of one hundred years, the extinction of the Imperium in the West, to be finally con- doned to those victorious Germans who in the last century had absorbed the political control of Italy, Gaul, Africa, Spain, Sicily ? Or should an effort be made to reestablish again an orhis ter- rarum, the ancient world-wide cycle of imperial authority ? Should Carthage, Milan, Ravenna, Trier, Rome itself, be forever renounced; or must one last struggle be made to win back the cra- dle of the empire and the scene of its first con- quests ? Every possible argument pointed in an affirmative sense — the raison d'etat, the relig- ious considerations and influences, the demands of commerce and industry, the incredibly strong passion of sentiment evoked by the memories and glory of Old Rome. In the heart of Justin- ian burned the feelings of a CaBsar and a Cru- . sader, a great trader and carrier of the Royal City, and a Hellene scandal-stricken at the over- flow of barbarism and '' Medism " that was foul- ing all the fair and sweet uses of life. In the JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 68 person of Belisarius he found a worthy general, one of the most intelligent and resourceful men who ever led troops into action. He found also for Belisarius a secretary, Procopius, who has left us a brilliant record of the great campaigns by which the ancient lands of the empire were won back. For twenty-five years the world of the Mediterranean resounded with the din of universal war. Around the whole periphery of empire went on the work of preparation, a thousand phases of mortal conflict, a thousand sieges, truces, and bloody battles. Belisarius broke the short-lived and fanatic Vandal power in 531, and Carthage, so dearly bought with Roman blood, was again a Roman city. Jus- tinian lived to see the heroic resistance of the Ostrogoths made vain, after the death of their noble king, by the total subjugation of Italy and its reincorporation with the empire. In the meantime the great corn-granary of the em- pire, Sicily, was won back, and the constant fear of famine tliat hung over Constantinople and the army disappeared. Scarcely had he relief in Africa or Italy when the emperor moved his troops to the plains of Mesopotamia or even to the rocky fastnesses of Colchis, the modern Georgia, chastening at once the proud Mede and 54 JXISTINIAN THE GEE AT. the fierce shepherds of those inaccessible hills. With the exception of the Persian campaigns, these wars ended successfully for the Roman State. One last outpouring of Teutons — the long advancing Lombards — wrenched away Northern Italy from the immediate successor of Justinian and interposed a hopeless barrier against any attempts to reconquer Austria, Switz- erland, and Bavaria. But Central and Southern Italy were saved. A praetorian prefect was set over Northern Africa ; Sardinia and Corsica were once more integrant portions of the great Medi- terranean State. A praetor again governed in Sicily as in the days of Cicero. From the inac- cessible marshes of Ravenna an exarch or patri- cian ruled the remnants of the Roman name in the original home of that race. Even in Spain Justinian recovered a footing, and several cities of the coast recognized again the authority that had so long civilized the Iberian peninsula. Doubtless it was owing to the incredible exi- gencies of the Persian wars that Central Eu- rope swept finally out of the immediate vision of the emperor. The men, ships, moneys, and efforts of all kinds that it took to carry on these long and costly and unsatisfactory campaigns against the Persian, could well have availed to JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 55 reunite the lost lands of the West and to make the Rhine and the Danube again Roman rivers. The interest in the island of Britain grew so faint that it appears in Procopius only as the home of innumerable spirits, a vast cemetery of ghosts ferried over nightly from Gaul by terrified mariners who are chosen in turn and compelled by supernatural force .^ The Frank went on absorbing at his leisure the Rhineland, Switzerland, Bavaria, Southern Gaul, and threatened to sweep Spain and North- ern Italy into his State.^ Indeed, out of the fragments that escaped Justinian and Belisarius, the greatest of the Frankish race, the mighty Karl, would one day resurrect the Roman Em- pire in the West. If Justinian did not recover all the Western Empire, at least he brought to an end the Germanic invasions by exterminating Vandal and Ostrogoth and reestablishing in the West some formal and visible image of the old Roman power and charm. Henceforth Thuringi- 1 Nothing could illustrate more forcibly the thoroughness of the decadence of the old Roman power in the West than the presence in Procopius of this curious survival of old Druidic lore. Cf. Edouard Schur^, " Les Grandes L^gendes de France " (Paris, 1892), p. 154. '■2 Gasqurt, " 1/ Empire Byzantin et la Monarchic franque " (Paris, 1888) ; Lecny de la Marche, " La Fondation de la France au V. et VI. slides " (Paris, 1893). 56 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, ans, Burgundians, Alemans, Visigoths, Suevi, Alans, the whole Golden Horde of tribes that first broke down the bounds of the empire, tend to disappear, submerged in the growing Prank- ish unity. The one unfortunate race that came last — the Lombards — was destined to be utterly broken up between the three great Western powers of the two succeeding centuries, the chil- dren of Pepin Heristal, the Byzantine exarchs of Italy, and the bishops of Rome. Could Justin- ian have kept the line of the Danube free and secure, the course of mediaeval history would surely have been changed. This was the origi- nal weak spot of the empire, and had always been recognized as such. Trajan tried to Roman- ize the lands just across it — the ancient Dacia — but his successor, Marcus Aurelius, had to withdraw. An inexhaustible world of miscella- neous barbarians — an officina gentium — ^was at the back of every frequent rebellion, and their warriors were like the leaves of the summer forest. Here, too, was the fateful margin of empire, along which broke eventually the last surges of every profound social or economic disturbance of the far Orient, flinging across the great river in wild disorder Hun and Slav and Avar and Gepid and Bulgar. The first JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 57 encroachments on Roman life and security cul- minated, after a century of warfare, in the ever memorable campaigns and retreats of Attila. And when the empire of the mighty Hun fell apart at his death, the Germans, Slavs, Bulgars, and other non-Hunnic tribes whom he had governed from his Hungarian village, took up each its own bandit life and divided with the Hunnic tribes the wild joys of annual incursions into those distracted provinces that are now the modem kingdoms of the Balkans and Greece, but were then Illyricum, Moesia, Thrace, Thes- saly, Macedonia, Epirus. The Avars and the Huns, remnants perhaps of the horde of Attila, were the most dreaded in the time of Justinian. But they only alternated with the Slavs, to whom they gave way within a century, so end- less was the supply of this new family of bar- barism. These latter were tall, strong, blond, with ruddy hair, living in rude hovels and on the coarsest grain,- fiercely intolerant of any rule but that of the father of the family, jealous and avaricious, faithless like all barbarians, yet child- like in their admiration for power and grandeur. They harassed yearly the whole immense pen- insula of the Balkans. They climbed its peaks, threaded its valleys, swam its rivers, a visitation 58 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. of human locusts. The regular armies of Jus- tinian were of no ayail, for these multitudes fought only in ambuscade, a style of warfare peculiarly fitting to the Balkans, which are like the "Bad Lands" of Dakota on an immense scale. They shot poisoned arrows at the Romans from invisible perches, and at close quarters were dread opponents by reason of their short and heavy battle-axes. It was in vain that line within line of fortifications were built, that in isolated spots the watch-towers and forts were multiplied and perfected, that every ford and pass and cross-road had its sentry boxes and castles. The enemy had been filtering in from the time of Constantine/ and was already no small element of the native population. So, as German had called to German across the Rhine, Slav called to Slav across the Danube ; the Ro- mans were caught between the hammer and the anvil, between the barbarian within and his brother from without. Nevertheless, it was not without a struggle that filled four centuries more that Constantinople let go her mountain bul- wark. Every river ran red, and every hillside 10. Seeck, "Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt," (Berlin, 1897), Vol. I., Part II., c. 6 ; "Die Barbaren im Reich," pp. 391-548. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 59 was drenched with blood, in that memorable contest, in which she sometimes saw from the walls of the Royal City the plains of Thrace one smoking ruin, and again all but cut off, root and branch, her Slavonic and Bulgarian enemies.^ Doubtless the heart of Justinian was sore pressed at his impotency against the swarming Slavs and Avars. He loved his Illyrian home, and built on the site of his native village a city, Justiniana Prima (near Sophia), which he fondly hoped would be a new Byzantium in the Bal- kans. With a foreconscious eye he made it a bishopric, even a patriarchate, and ordered for it honors second only to those of the most ancient sees of the Christian world. This act was productive of grave consequences in later times that fall beyond our present ken." The long wars of Justinian with Persia were otherwise important. Here it was a death strug- 1 The influence of Constantinople in the later Slavonic world is incontestable. Besides the "Chronicle of Nestor" (French trans- lation by L. Leger, Paris, 1884), cf. Gaster, " Grseco-Sclavonic " (London, 1877); Rambaud, "La Russie Epique" (Paris, 1876); Krek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-geschichte " (Graz, 1877), pp. 461-473 ; and the pro-Byzantine work of Lamansky (in Russian), " On the Historical Study of the Grseco-Sclavonic World " (St. Petersburg, 1871). 2 Duchesne, " Les Eglises Sdpar^es" (Paris, 1897). 60 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. gle between Persia striving to reach, the sea and Constantinople struggling to keep her back. These wars lasted more or less continuously from 528 to 562, and sometimes coincided with the greatest expeditions in the West. From time to time a peace was concluded or a truce — the peaces were really only truces. The usual result was the payment of a heavy tribute on the part of the emperor, amounting at times to as much as a million dollars, not to speak of the numerous sums paid by the cities of Mesopotamia and Syria, and the incalculable treasures carried off in each of these campaigns. If the Persian resented new fortifications in the vicinity of the Euphrates, war was declared. If the Saracen sheiks who stood with the Romans fell into a dispute with their brethren who served Persia over a desert sheepwalk, it was settled by a long war between the Romans and the Persians. Endless sieges of fortified cities, heavy ransoms from pillage and burning, extraordinary single combats, marching and countermarching across Syria and Mesopotamia, fill the pages of the historians. The local Jews and Samaritans, yet numerous and powerful, were no small source of weakness to the Romans. So, too, were the ugly heresies of the Monophysites and Nestori- JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 61 ans, with all the hatreds and heartburnings they occasioned against Constantinople, the protec- tress of the orthodox faith of Chalcedon, a general council almost universally misunder- stood, and equally hated in Syria and Egypt. In 532, for example, Justinian purchased peace for eleven thousand Roman pounds of gold (about two and a half millions of dollars). He was then in the throes of the Vandal war in Af- rica and on the point of the expeditions against the Moors and to recover Sicily. When Belisa- rius was in the very heart of the Gothic war in Italy, Chosroes again broke the peace, solicited by Witigis, the head of the Gothic forces, and joined by many dissatisfied Armenians, who con- sidered themselves oppressed by the Romans — perhaps, too, embittered by the persecution directed against the Monophysites. In their own way these wars are of value for the history of military engineering. Great and ancient cities fall before the engineers of Persia. Antioch, the Queen of the East, for the second time saw a Persian king within her walls. Chosroes even reached the shores of the Medi- terranean, gazed on the great Midland Sea, bathed in its blue waters, and on its shores offered to the sun the sacrifice of a fire-worship- 62 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, per. He had strong hopes of reaching and con- quering Jerusalem and of bringing all Syria under his yoke, but desisted therefrom. Inter- nal disorders and the plague seem to have held him back. The last phase of these Persian wars was unrolled at the extremity of the Black Sea, among the Lazi, in old Greek Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, now Mingrelia and Geor- gia. The people were Christians and under an uncertain Roman protectorate. But they abut- ted on an unruly portion of the Persian Empire, and so were a thorn in the side of Chosroes. Moreover, he had long desired a footing on the Black Sea, whence he could create a navy that would place Constantinople at his mercy and permit him to come into easy contact with those Huns and Slavs and Avars who, from the mouths of the Danube and the plains of Bes- sarabia and Southern Russia, were harassing the Royal City. Hence the great importance of the long and weary struggle for the wild and barren hills of ■ the Caucasian seashore. They were doubly important, because these narrow passes could keep back or let in the trans-Caucasian Scythians and create a new source of ills for a State groaning already under a complication of them. In the end the Persian was shut out, JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 63 chiefly because, the population was Christian and unsympathetic to him, but not without a war of seven years' duration, filled with romantic epi- sodes and revealing at orice all the weaknesses and also the strong points of the Koman mili- tary system. The victory, as usual, cost a nota- ble sum of money. Justinian agreed to pay about one hundred thousand • dollars yearly for fifty years, of which nearly a million dollars had to be paid d6wn at once. Nevertheless, he kept the Persians from becoming a naval power and from undertaking the anti-Christian propaganda that a century later fell to the yet despised Arabs and Saracens who were serving in both armies, unconscious that on the great dial of time their hour was drawing nigh. For the thirty-eight and odd years of his reign the emperor was never free from care as to the existence and limits of the State. It was no ordinary merit to have provided for the defence of the common weal in all that time, to have recovered a great part of what his predecessors had lost, to have restored the prestige of the empire over against Frank and Ostrogoth, to have kept Persia in her ancient limits, and to have saved the Royal City from the fate of Old Rome, which had fallen before the first on- 64 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. slaught of Alaric. No doubt he had able gen- erals — Belisarius, Bessas, John the Armenian, DagisthaBus, Wilgang, and others. It was an age of mechanical inventions and engineering skill, the result of good studies among the ancient books and also of new needs and experi- ences.^ The peculiar character of the barbarian wars and the multitude of old populous cities through the Roman Orient gave opportunity for the development of fortifications. By this means chiefly, it would seem, the emperor hoped to withstand the attacks of his enemies. III. The armies of Justinian were recruited on pretty much the same principle as those of his predecessors. Since Diocletian and Constan- tine, conquered barbarians had become the mer- cenaries of the empire and received regularly, as wages, the gold which they had formerly 1 In the " Variae" of Cassiodorus are found many curious con- temporary traces of the survival of the ancient skill in engineering and architecture. Cf. the formula (VII. 6) for the appointment of a Count of the Aqueducts, and (VII. 15) for the appointment of an "Architectus operum publicorum." "Let him consult the works of the ancients, but he will find more in this city [Rome] 'than in his books." The "Letters of Cassiodorus" are partially translated by Thomas Hodgkin (London, 1886). JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 65 extorted by the irregular and uncertain methods of invasion and plunder. Isauria in all its in- accessible strongholds became a pepiniere of soldiers for the empire just as soon as it had been demonstrated to these untameable hill-folk that Constantinople would no longer tolerate their impudent independence. The Catholic " Little Goths " of Thrace were good for many a recruit. The disbanded and chiefless Heruli, ousted from Italy by Theodoric, were at the disposition of the emperor. Sometimes the barbarians came in as foederati or as coloni, half soldiers, half farmers. Sometimes they rose to the high- est offices by bravery and intelligence, like a Dagisthseus, a John, a Wilgang, a Guiscard, five hundred years ahead of that other Guiscard, who was to beard in Constantinople itself, the suc- cessor of Justinian. It was a heyday for all the barbarian adventurers of the world. Never since the palmy days of Crassus and Caesar, of Antony and Germanicus, was there war at once so griev- ous and widespread, so varied in its fields of battle, and claiming so much endurance, ingenuity, and industry. Then was in demand all that the art of sieges had gained since the Homeric pirates sat down before some lone Greek trader on his 66 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. isolated perch in the ^gean. If Shakespeare's Welsh captain could read of the famous sieges of Daras and Edessa, his soul would go up in flame for joy at these wars carried on with all the science of a dozen Caesars. Trench and counter-trench, wall and parapet, ditch and mine, tower and rampart, battering ram and beam and wedge — a hundred industries were kept going to lay low the huge fortifications of monolith and baked brick that dotted the land of Eastern Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it was by his enormous system of fortifications that the great emperor assured the restored peace of his domains. It is true, as Montesquieu has said, that " France was never so weak as when every vil- lage was fortified.'' Yet under the circum- stances this was the only immediate remedy against countless enemies from without and within, ceaselessly plotting the ruin of the ven- erable old State. The best national defences are those which we can most easily set up and most strongly defend, not what the theorist or philosopher of war can suggest. From Belgrade to the Black Sea, from the Save to the Dan- ube, citadels with garrisons and colonies were lo- cated and provided with weapons of defence and JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 67 attack. In Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, over six hundred forts were established for observation and resistance. Many of them, perhaps, were such watch-towers and lonely bar- racks as we yet see in the Roman Campagna, whither the shepherd and his herd could turn for a momentary refuge from marauders. All the scum of the northeastern world was floating loosely over the plains of Southern Russia, faintly held back by the Greek cities of the Crimea. The peninsula of Greece was par- ticularly open; the unwarlike character of its thin population was patent since Alaric had burned and pillaged his way across it in all directions early in the fifth century. Since then its woes are best described by dropping a black pall across the annals of one hundred years. " The centre of earth's noblest ring " was a howling desert, save for a few cities in which, perhaps, the old Greek blood was propa- gated, and some spark of the philosophic mind nursed against a better day.^ The pass of 1 "If we go to look in modern Greece for pure and unmixed Hellenes, untainted by any drop of barbarian blood, that we as- suredly shall not find. . . . The Greek nation, in short, has, like all other nations, been affected, and largely affected, by the law of adoption. . . . The Sclavonic occupation of a large part of Greece in the eighth and ninth centuries is an undoubted fact, and the 68 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. Thermopylae was again fortified and garrisoned. The Isthmus of Corinth was strengthened as a buffer for the wild Peloponnesus, half-heathen as it still was in its remotest valleys and hillsides. The long wall of Thrace that protected the kitchen-garden suburbs of Constantinople was strengthened — not so well, however, that irregu- lar bands of Huns, Avars, and Slavs did not reg- ularly break through and insult the holy majesty of the empire with their barbarian taunts, that mingled with the flames of costly churches and municipal buildings and with the cries of the dying and the outraged. As we peruse these annals it is hard to keep back a tear and a shudder, and we comprehend the preternatural gravity that hangs about every coin and e^gy of Justinian. To him it must have seemed as if the original sanctity of order, the rock basis of society, were tottering to its fall. Alas! he could not see that those flames which lit up the Propontis and the Isles of the Princes,^ which fell across the site of ancient Troy and the origi- nal homes of Dorian and Ionian merchants, were not the awful illumination of a " Night of the Sclavonic element in the population of Peloponnesus may be traced down to the time of the Ottoman conquest." — Freeman, "Medi- seval and Modern Greece," op. cit.^ pp. 340-841. 1 Schlumberger, " Les lies des Princes" (Paris, 1884). JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 69 Gods/' but the dawn of our modern society.^ In such pangs and throes does social man usually reach his highest place, his highest calling on this sad footstool of earth ! Though the quasi-extermination of Isauria by 1 "The first chief who fenced in the Palatine with a wall did not dream that his hill-fortress would become the head of the world. He did not dream that it would become the head of Italy or even of Latium. But the prince who fenced in the New Rome, the prince who bade Byzantium grow into Constantinople, did design that his younger Rome should fulfil the mission that had passed away from the elder Rome. He designed that it should fulfil it more thoroughly than Milan or Trier or Nikomedia could fulfil it. And his will has been carried out. He called into being a city which, while other cities have risen and fallen, has for fifteen hun- dred years, in whatever hands, remained the seat of imperial rule; a city which, as long as Europe and Asia, as long as sea and land keep their places, must remain the seat of imperial rule. The other capitals of Europe seem by her side things of yesterday, creations of accident. Some chance a few centuries back made them seats of government till some other chance may cease to make them seats of government. But the city of Constantine abides and must abide. Over and over again has the possession of that city prolonged the duration of powers which must otherwise have crumbled away. In the hands of Roman, Frank, Greek, and Turk her imperial mission has never left her. The eternity of the elder Rome is an eternity of moral infiuence ; the eternity of the younger Rome is the eternity of a city and fortress fixed on a spot which nature itself had destined to be the seat of the empire of two worlds." — Freeman, "The Byzantine Empire" in "Historical Es- says," Vol. III., series 1892, p. 255. On the city of Constantinople, besides the classic description of Hammer in his " Geschichte der Osmanen," there are for modern times the books of De Amicis, Grosvenor, and Hutton ; for the Middle Ages the "Esquisse topo^ graphique" of Dr. Mordtmann (Lille, 1892) ; for the early Middle Ages " Constantinopolis Christiana" (1729, fol.), and Riant, "Ex- uvise Sacrae Christianse" (Geneve, 1877, 2 vols.). 70 JUSTINIAN TEE GREAT, Anastasius gave peace on the mainland of Asia Minor, Justinian was obliged to protect that vast heart of the empire, with all its superim- posed and ancient civilizations, by great walls towered and flanked at intervals from the Crimea to Trebizond on the Persian frontier, a stretch of %NQ hundred miles. The Iberian and Caspian gates, those narrow sea margins and mountain throats that control the entry to the Black Sea from the steep ranges of Caucasus, had also to be fortified, or, rather, the strong hand of the emperor must compel the rude mountain chiefs to render to him as well as to themselves this necessary duty. The very sources of the Eu- phrates, forever a dark and bloody line of battle, had to be secured against the feudal satraps of the Great King. In the Mesopotamian plain Amida, Constantine, Nisibis, holy Edessa, must rise up, clad with impregnable armor and filled with warlike men. Restless, unsympathetic, proud, discontented, abused Armenia — the tor- ture of Rome since th^ days of Mark Antony and still the plague of statesmen — must be fastened once more^ however unwillingly, to the body of the Roman State. In the whole Orient rose up one hope of vic- tory, one sure refuge, the great Gibraltar of JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 71 Daras. One hundred years had Rome toiled at that barrier against Persia. Only the inces- sant wars in Italy and the Mediterranean pre- vented Justinian from making it the capital of Roman power in the Orient. As it was, Daras was the chief thorn in the side of Persia, a living monumental insult pushed far into the lands that the Great King looked on as his hereditary domain, and an encouragement to all his own rebels as well as a promise to the thousands of unattached Saracens, the Bedouins of those grassy deserts on whose surface we now look in vain for traces of the greatest fortress that Greek genius ever constructed. Egypt, too, the land of the wheat-bearing and gold-producing Nile, needed the assurance of fortifications against the hordes of Ethiopia and Nubia, and inner unexplored Africa, against the tribes of the Soudan, who, from time imme- morial, under many names, waged war against civilization on its oldest, richest, and narrowest line of development. Justinian never forgot the arts of diplomacy in the midst of all these warlike cares. He was always willing to pacify by tribute the various broken bands of Huns. This had been always one line of imperial policy, even in the palmy 72 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. days of a Theodosius the Great. Much was always hoped from the internal discords of the barbarians, who often dissipated their strength in orgies and self-indulgence. One tribe was played off against the other by arousing avarice. The Goths, for instance, hated the Franks and the Alemans, so they were willing to exter- minate seventy-five thousand of the latter, who might have helped them to cast out thoroughly the Roman power. The emperor encouraged the King of AByssinia against the King of the Homerites in Southern Arabia, and made thereby a useful Christian friend, while he broke up an anti-Christian Jewish power. He took in as a body of auxiliary troops the Heruli of Italy, so brutal and stupid that nobody would have them as neighbors. He gave the Crimea to three thousand shepherd Goths and cultivated the principal men among the Tzani, the Armenians, the Lazi of Colchis. Chosroes could say in 539 that soon the whole world would not contain Justinian, so happy seemed his fortunes about that date. Yet he could also taste the cup of despair, for in 558 he was obliged to witness a small body of wild Huns come up to the very gates of the Royal City, an advance guard of other hordes that were pillaging Thrace and JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 73 Greece. The aged Belisarius could find only- three hundred reliable soldiers in a city of one million inhabitants ; yet with them he scattered these Huns and saved the city. The old historian Agathias tells us that there should then have been in the army six hundred and fifty-five thousand fighting men, but it had dwindled down to one hundred and fifty thou- sand. " And of these some were in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others in Colchis, others at Alexandria and in the Thebaid, a few on the Persian frontier." It is to this decay of the army, caused perhaps by jealousy of its immortal leader and by female intrigue, that the same judicious historian, a contemporary and a man of culture, attributes the growing ills of the Roman State. His thoughtful phrase is worth listening to ; soon this current of philosophic observation will cease, and commonplace chronicling take its place in the seventh and eighth centuries of the Byzan- tine Empire. "When the emperor conquered all Italy and Lybia and waged successfully those mighty wars, and of the princes who reigned at Constantinople was the first to show himself an abso- lute sovereign in fact as well as in name — after these things had been acquired by him in his youth and vigor, and when he entered on the last stages of life, he seemed to be weary of 74 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, labors, and preferred to create discord among his foes or to mollify them with gifts, and so keep off their hostilities, instead of trusting his own forces and shrinking from no danger. He consequently allowed the troojDS to decline, because he expected that he would not require their services. And those who were second in authority to himself, on whom it was incumbent to collect the taxes and supply the army with necessary provi- sions, were affected with the same indifference and either openly kept back the rations altogether or paid them long after they were due ; and when the debt was paid at last, persons skilled in the rascally science of arithmetic demanded back from the soldiers what had been given them. It was their privilege to bring various charges against the soldiers and deprive them of theu" food. Thus the army was neglected and the soldiers, pressed by hunger, left their profession to embrace other modes of life." IV. The very religious mind of Justinian could not but be much concerned with the social conditions and problems of his time. His legislation bears the impress of this preoccupation — it is highly moral throughout, and constantly seeks a con- cord on ethical and religious principles. Thus, to go through his code haphazard, we find him concerned about the building of churches and their good order and tranquillity. He is said to have built twenty-five in Constantinople alone, and to have chosen for them the most favorable sites in public squares, by the sea, in groves, on eminences where often great engineering skill was demanded. The rarest woods and the JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 75 costliest marbles were employed, and multitudes of laborers given the means of life. They were usually paid every evening with fresh-coined money as a tribute to religion. He built and endowed many nunneries, hospitals, and mon- asteries, notably in the Holy Land, where he also provided wells and stations for pilgrims. Bridges, aqueducts, baths, theatres, went lip con- stantly ; for building he was a second Hadrian. And all this had a social side — the employment of vast numbers of men, the encouragement of the fine arts, great and little. He is concerned about institutions of charity of every kind, and in their interest makes his own the old and favorable laws of his predecessors. In his day every sorrow was relieved in Constantinople. The aged, the crippled, the blind, the helpless, the orphans, the poor, had each their own peculiar shelter, managed by thousands of good men and women who devoted themselves gratuitously to these tasks.^ The slave and the debtor had their rights of asylum acknowledged in the 1 Bulteau, "Essai de I'histoire monastique de I'Orient" (Paris, 1680). The late work of the Abh6 Morin, "Les Moines de Con- stantinople" (Paris, 1897), and the study of Dom Besse, very rich in details, "Les Moines d' Orient anterieurs au Coacile de Chalc^- doine" (Paris, 1900), permit the student to obtain a complete con- spectus of the monastic history of the Orient. 76 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, churches and regulated according to the de- mands of proper police order. The right of freeing the slaves was recognized especially in bishops and priests ; to them was given the power to control the "defenders of the city'' — a kind of popular tribunes, whose duty it was to supervise the proper administration of justice. He undertook to abolish gambling, claiming, logically enough, that he had the same right to do that as to carry on war and regu- late religion. Blasphemy and perjury and the greater social crimes and sins were visited with specially heavy sanctions, though we may doubt if they often passed beyond the written threat. He legislated humanely for the rescue of aban- doned children and for the redemption of those numerous captives whom the barbarians daily swept away from the soil of the empire. No female could longer be compelled to appear in a theatrical performance, even if she were a slave, even if she had signed a contract to do so, being a free woman. The bishop of each city was authorized to carry out this law. An actress might henceforth marry any member of society, even a senator. He was personally interested in the thousands of poor girls who came yearly to the Royal City, and were often the prey of OF JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 77 designing persons who had travelled through the provinces, "enticing young girls by promising them shoes and clothes." In the last century it was a custom to offset such creditable details by reference to the ter- rible pages of the " Anecdota," or " Secret His- tory" of Procopius. And Gibbon has not failed to expend on them some of his most salacious rhetoric and to violate, for their sake, his usual stern principles of doubt and cynicism.^ Per- 1 In a few vigorous phrases Edward Freeman lias laid bare a structural weakness of Gibbon : " With all his [Gibbon's] wonder- ful power of grouping and condensation, which is nowhere more strongly shown than in his Byzantine chapters, with all his vivid description and his still more effective art of insinuation, his is cer- tainly not the style of writing to excite respect for the persons or period of which he is treating, or to draw many to a more minute study of them. His matchless faculty of sarcasm and depreciation is too constantly kept at work; he is too fond of anecdotes showing the weak or ludicrous side of any age or person ; he is incapable of enthusiastic admiration for any thing or person. Almost any his- tory treated in this manner would leave the contemptible side uppermost in the reader's imagination ; we cannot conceive Gibbon tracing the course of the Roman Republic with the affection of Arnold, or defending either democracy or oligarchy with the ardent championship of Grote or Mitford." — "Historical Essays" (1892), 3d series (2d ed.), pp. 238-239. This recalls what Morison said of Gibbon — that "his cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause." Coleridge's well-known judgment in his "Table Talk " may be worthy of mention, viz. "that he did not remember a single philo- sophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline and fall of the empire." In an otherwise sympathetic study Augustine Birrell has recorded an equally severe judgment on the historical method and principles of Gibbon : "The tone he thought fit to adopt toward Christianity was, quite apart 78 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, haps I cannot do better than cite the very recent judgment of a special student of Byzantine history : — "The delicacy or affectation of the present age would refuse to admit the authority and example of Gibbon as a sufficient reason for rehearsing the licentious vagaries attributed to Theodora in the indecent pages of an audacious and libellous pamphlet. If the words and acts which the writer attributes to Theodora were drawn, as probably is the case, from real life, from the green rooms of Antioch or the bagnios of Byzantium, it can only be remarked that the morals of those cities in the sixth century did not differ very much from the morals of Paris, Vienna, Naples, or London at the present day." ^ from all particular considerations, a mistaken one. No man is big enough to speak slightingly of the construction his fellow men have put upon the Infinite. And conduct which in a philosopher is ill- judged is in an historian ridiculous. . . . Gibbon's love of the unseemly may also be deprecated. His is not the boisterous impro- priety which may sometimes be observed staggering across the pages of Mr. Carlyle, but the more offensive variety which is heard sniggering in the notes." — "Res Judicatae" (New York, 1897), pp. 79, 80. 1 Bury, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 61. On Procopius in general, cf . Dahn, *'Prokopios von Csesarea" (Berlin, 1865) ; Gutschmid, "Diebyzan- tinischen Historiker" in the "Grenzboten" (1863), Vol. I., p. 344 ; Ranke, " Weltgeschichte " (1883), Vol. IV., 2, pp. 285-312; Bury, " History of the Later Roman Empire" (1889), Vol. I., pp. 355-364. Ranke is of opinion that the " Secret History " contains genuine material from the hand of Procopius, as, for instance, the adultery JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 79 Still milder and more favorable is the judg- ment of Kraiise as to the morality of the city of Constantinople, even at a later date, when the first vfervor of Christianity had cooled, and the city had suffered from the immoral contact of Islam and had become almost the sink of the Orient. From its foundation in 330 to its fall in 1453 Constantinople was always a Christian city, sometimes fiercely and violently so, never- theless an essentially Christian foundation. The social life, therefore, of the city, and the empire ' that it gave the tone to, could not but be of a higher grade than the pagan life had to show, whether we look at the condition of woman, the poor, the slave, or the child, those four usual factors that condition the moral life of all ancient society. All the betterments of Chris- tianity were here available for the slave, and they were many and great. Numberless con- vents opened their doors to women and pro- claimed in them the dignity and independence of human nature in the only way possible in antiquity. The diaconal service of the number- of Antonina, wife of Belisarius. Only such materials have been interwoven and overlaid with other assertions not due originally to Procopius, but to jealous and disappointed persons, especially those affected by the stem conduct of Justinian in the Nike sedition (532). 80 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, less churches was largely in their hands ; it was they who cared for the orphan and the poor and the aged. In the schools they conducted, the maidens of the city were taught to read the great classics of the Greek fatherland in a way that did not force them to blush for the first principles of decency. The letters of a Basil and a Chrysostom, the poems of a Gregory of Nazianzum, were written in a language scarcely less pure and elegant than the best masterpieces of Attica.^ The frequent sermons of renowned orators in the churches and the daily conversation of men and women in the best rank and station, par- ticular in language and manner as the Greeks always were, offered a superior culture. Though they had lost their rude liberties, they had not lost their fine ear for verbal music, their keen and disputatious minds. The society of Con- 1 Withal, mediaeval society was deeply indebted to the empire for the materials and traditions with which it began its career. (Cunningham, " The Economic Debt to Ancient Rome " in " West- ern Civilization in its Economic Aspects" (Cambridge University Press, 1900), pp. 5-9; cf. also for the mediaeval influence of Constantinople on the West, Dollinger, "Einfluss der griechischen Kultur auf die abendlandische Welt im Mittelalter," Akad. Vor- trage (Munich, 1890), Vol. I., pp. 162-186; Burkhardt, "Renais- sance" ; Voigt, "Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums " (2d ed., 1881) ; and BikSlas, " Les Grecs au Moyen Age," in "La Gr6ce Byzantine et Moderne" (Paris, 1893), pp. 3-88. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 81 stantinople was at all times famed for the ad- mirably bred women it could show. Pulcheria, Athenais, Eudoxia, were women of the most varied gifts, and they actually governed the gov- ernors of the world by the use of these gifts. The letters of St. John Chrysostom to the Deaconess Olympias, the story of his own mother, of the women of the great Cappadocian family of saints and theologians, reveal a fine and original culture penetrated with religion, but also enthusiastic for all that is holy and per- manently fair, worthy and sweet in life. Whence, indeed, could come the strong men who so long held the Royal City above the waves of barba- rism and disrupting war and internal disorder but from a truly great race of women ? When Con- stantinople was founded, a place was made for the consecrated virgins of the Christian Church. And forever after they held that place of honor so worthily that the tongue of slander has scarcely wagged against them. For over eleven centuries the city stood in the seething waters of secular iniquity, human weakness, Oriental depravity, Moslem immorality, and the miscella- neous filth and sinfulness of the corrupt East. Yet she never ceased to fill these religious houses of men and women, especially the latter, 82 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, and never ceased to behold in them models of the highest spiritual life on earth. We know how to praise the Theophanos, the Marias, and the Anna Komnenas of the Greek Middle Ages. But who shall say how many souls of noble women Avent their way silently along the ancient cloisters by the Bosphorus, wanting indeed in fame, but not wanting in a multitudinous rich service to every need of humanity ? The Greek sinned tragically against the duty of Christian unity, but he never lost the original Christian respect for the way of sacrifice and perfection. V. The ancient life about the Mediterranean was governed by principles and manners unknown or unappreciated by us.^ The warm sun and the abundant waters of inexpressibly delicate hues, the rich and varied vegetation, the cool and calming winds, render many of these lands the most delightful of the world. Life there has always been an out-of-door life ; all the higher forms of social amusement have been affected by the climate and the geography. It was so in Old Rome, it is so in all the lands of Italy, Spain, 1 Lenormant, "La Grande Gr^ce" (Paris, 1881-84), 3 vols. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 83 and Southern France to this day. The peasant dances on the public square ; the strolling player with his bear or his marionette sets up his tent near-by. The harvest festival, the church fete, the relics of old pagan superstitions baptized into harmlessness by innumerable centuries of tolera- tion — all these are lived out in the open air under a cloudless sky, amid- balmy breezes laden with the scents of olive and vine, fig and orange, and the most aromatic shrubberies. As these ancient peoples moved up in the forms of gov- ernment their political, life was all out of doors — the speaking, the voting, the mighty contests of eloquence. And when the Greek cities lost to Rome their national isonomy, they could still hire some famous sophist or rhetorician, like Dio Chrysostom, to keep up on the "agora" some faint echo or image of their adored old life.^ So it was that when Constantinople was built, the life of the city soon centred in its great hip- 1 The municipal and domestic life of the Constantinople of Jus- tinian is illustrated somewhat freely in Marrast, "La Vie Byzan- tine au VI. Siecle " (Paris, 1881), For the following centuries, cf. Krause, "Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters " (Halle, 1869) ; Schlum- berger, "La Sigillographie Byzantine" (Paris, 1884). The work of Am^d^e Thierry on St. John Chrysostom contains admirable sketches of early Byzantine life, that are to be supplemented now by the indispensable volume of Aim6 Puech, " St. Jean Chrysos- tome et les Moeurs de son Si6cle" (Paris, 1890). 84 ' JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. podrome. Since Homer described the races by the much-resounding sea, the peoples of the Med- iterranean have been inexplicably fond of horse racing, chariot and hurdle racing. If George Moore had lived among them, he would have produced a superior Esther Waters. General Lew Wallace has left a classic page or two descriptive of the races at Antioch that will per- haps live while our tongue is spoken. But no one has yet caught the spirit of that great hip- podrome by the Golden Horn. It came fresh from Old Rome, with all the prestige of imperial splendor and fondness. In that mighty circus whose ruins yet appall us at Rome an imperial people had ruled, had felt almost as vastly as a god, had raged, thundered, compelled, made to die and to live, had experienced an oceanic ful- ness of life, a glory of self-adulation such as might befit the highest and whitest Alp or the solemn depths of the Hercynian forest. And so, when at Constantinople the emperor sat bediademmed in his chosen seat, the autocrator, the pantocrator, the Basileus, the golden King of Kings, it seemed as if his were indeed an "eternal countenance, sacrosanct, holy, inviola- ble.'' In him that awful mob saw itself mir- rored. Each one, according to his own passion JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 85 or aspiration, saw the reach and the limit of his own possibihties. Nothing affected more profoundly the society of Constantinople than the hippodrome or circus. The great multitude of men and women con- nected with this "peculiar institution" were divided from time immemorial into factions — once red, white, blue, green, from the color of the ribbons attached to the axles of the chariot wheels or to the ears of the horses. These were the s3niibols borrowed from Old Rome, and in the time of Justinian they had dwindled to two, the Blues and the Greens. The sympathy of the million inhabitants of the city was divided between them, but with the inconstancy of the mob. In the time of the great emperor the Greens had become identified with opposition to the Council of Chalcedon, had become the Mon- ophysite factor of the city. They had, moreover, attracted the hatred of the Empress Theodora. The Blues were the favorites of the imperial family. The contentions of both were endless and very dangerous. They held open and con- temptuous discourse with the emperor during the races, and clamored wildly for justice on their respective enemies. The stormiest scenes of the Pnyx, the fiercest contentions in the 86 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, forum, were child's play to the rocking passions of the great mob of Blues and Greens on some high day of festival. These colors eventually became the symbols of all discontent and rebel- lion. In 532 their violence reached its height in the sedition of Nik^, whereby thirty thousand souls perished in the circus and on the streets, and a great and splendid part of the city was consumed by flames, including the great Church of the Heavenly Wisdom, or St. Sophia. Per- haps this uprising was the end of the genuine city life of the ancients, some remnants of whose turbulent freedom had always lived on in Old Rome and then in Constantinople. With the awful butchery of those days the aristocracy of the city was broken under the iron heel of the cold-faced man who dwelt in the Brazen Palace. Neither priest nor noble ever again wielded the power they once held before this event, which may in some sense be said to mark the true be- ginning of Byzantine imperialism, being itself the last symbolic act of popular freedom. It is significant that the last vestiges of the free po- litical life of Hellas were quenched in the city of Byzas by thousands of ugly and brutal Heruli whom a lucky Slav had attached to himself as so many Great Danes or Molossi! JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 87 The fiscal policy of Justinian has been criti- cised as the weakest point of his government. In his time the Roman Empire consisted of sixty-four provinces and some nine hundred and thirty-five cities. It had every advantage of soil, climate, and easy transportation. Egypt and Syria should have sufficed to support the imperial majesty with ease and dignity. The former alone contributed yearly to the support of Constantinople two hundred and sixty thou- sand quarters of wheat. The emperor's pred- ecessor, Anastasius, dying, left a treasure of some sixty-five million dollars. It is true that terrible plagues and earthquakes devastated the population and reduced its spirit and courage to a minimum. But they were still more dis- heartened by the excessive and odious taxes. An income tax on the poorest and most toilsome in the cities, known as the " gold of affiiction," earned him a universal hatred. The peasants had to provide vast supplies of corn, and trans- port it at their own expense to the imperial granaries, an intolerable burden that was in- creased by frequent requisitions of an extraordi- nary kind. The precious metals decreased in quantity, partly through the enormous sums paid out annually in shameful and onerous tributes, 88 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. partly through pillage and the stoppage of pro- duction, owing to endless war. Weapons, build- ings, fortifications, alms, the movement of great armies and great stores of provisions, consumed the enormous taxes. Heavy internal duties were laid, not only on arms, but on many ob- jects of industry and manufacture, thus render- ing any profitable export impossible. The manufactures of purple and silk were State monopolies. The value of copper money was arbitrarily raised one-seventh. The revenue was farmed out in many cases, and the venality of the collectors was incredible. Honors and dignities were put up for sale. The office of the magistrate became a trade, out of which the purchaser was justified in reimbursing himself for the cost. The rich were compelled to make their wills in the imperial favor if they wished to save anything for their families; the prop- erty of Jews and heretics was mercilessly confis- cated. With one voice the people execrated a certain John of Cappadocia, the imperial banker and minister of finance. For a while the em- peror bowed to the storm of indignation, but he could not do without the clear head and hard heart and stern principles of this man, and so recalled him to office. His example of avarice JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 89 and cruelty was, of course, imitated all along the line of imperial officers and agents. On the other hand, economies that were unjust or un- popular or insufficient were introduced — the civil list of pensions was cut down, the city was no longer lit up at night, the public carriage of the mails was abandoned, the salaries of physi- cians reduced or extinguished, the quinquennial donative to the soldiers withdrawn. Though the unfortunate subjects of Justinian suffered untold woes in Greece and Thrace and Syria from invasions and the constant movement of large bodies of soldiery, their taxes were never remitted, hence a multitude of abandoned farms and estates. In a word, Justinian "lived with the reputation of hidden treasures and be- queathed to posterity the payment of his debts." His reign is responsible for the economic ex- haustion of the Koman Orient, that was pro- longed long enough to permit of the triumph of Islam in the next century — one of the most solemn proofs of the intimate connection of social conditions with religious change and revolution. Justinian had one passion, the imperial passion par excellence, the passion of architecture.^ He 1 The art and architecture of ancient Constantinople have never ceased to fascinate a multitude of writers since Ducange. Indeed, 90 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, delighted in great works of engineering, in prod- igies of mechanical invention. We have seen that he built many churches, and rich ones, in the Royal City. He eclipsed them all by his building of St. Sophia, little thinking that he was raising it for the wretched worship of the successors of an Arab camel driver. For him Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletum raised in the air this new thing in architecture, bold, light, rich, vast, solemn, and open. Ten thousand men worked six years at it. They were paid every day at sunset with new-minted pieces of silver. And when it was done, the emperor, standing amid its virgin and shining the series begins much earlier. Procopius added to his fame as a writer, if not to his character for honesty, by his "De Edificiis" (Bonn ed., 1838). His contemporary, the Guardsman Paul (Silen- tiarius), described in minute detail the glories of Sancta Sophia, and a mass of curious information that drifted down the centuries lies stored up in the book of the antiquarian Codinus, "De Edificiis " (Migne PG., Vols. 157 and 158). The monumental works of Sal- zenberg and Labarte have found worthy followers and critics in Pulgher, Paspatis, Unger, Bayet, Ferguson, Miintz, Springer, Kon- dakoff, and Kraus. Cf. Choisy, "L'Art de batir chez les Byzan- tins" (Paris, 1884); Bayet, "L'Art Byzantin" (Paris, 1883); and Mrs. J. B. Bury in " History of the Lower Roman Empire," Vol. II., pp. 40-54. For the very abundant literature of this subject, cf. Kraus, " Geschichte der christlichen Kunst" (Berlin, 1898-99, 2 vols.). Its profound influence on the symbolism of the Middle Ages may be traced partly through " The Painter's Book of Mount Athos" in Didron's "Manuel d'Iconographie Grecque et Chr^ti- enne" (Paris, 1845). Cf. Edward Freshfield on "Byzantine Churches'* in Archceologia, Vol. 44, pp. 451-462. JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 91 splendors, could cry out, " Glory to God ! . . . I have vanquished thee, Solomon ! " It still stands, after twelve hundred years of service, a stately monument to the grandeur of his mind and the vastness of his ideas. He also built in the city the great Chalk e, or Brazen Palace, so called from a bronze-ceiled hall, and across the strait the gardens of the Heraeum on the Asiatic shores of the Propontis. Cities rose everywhere at his command, and no ignoble ones. We have seen what a circle of forts and walls he built about the empire, what expensive enterprises he carried on in the Holy Land. He built and endowed many monasteries and churches else- where in the empire. And if he collected sternly, he knew how to spend with magnificence. The churches of Rome and Ravenna were adorned by his generosity — one may yet read in the Liber Pontificalis, drawn up by a Roman sacristan^ the list of church plate given by the emperor to the Church of St. Peter. He convoked and celebrated a General Council, which was always a heavy expense to the empire, for the trans- portation and support of the prelates. We do not read that he did much for schools. He is accused of closing those at Athens. But they were pagan schools, and modern critics like 92 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, Gregorovius and others doubt whether they were closed by any formal edict.- They fell away by reason of the general misery and the emptiness and inadequacy of their teaching, unfitted for a world that was destined to know no more the serenity of the old Hellenic contemplation, whose weakness it had exchanged for the saving severity of Christian discipline. It is certain that he opened law schools at Berytus, Con- stantinople, and Rome. He made wise provisions for the teaching and conduct of the young lawyers on whom the civil service of the State was to depend. Justinian was no philosopher ; he was a theologian and a grave Christian thinker. Perhaps he felt little interest in the propagation of Greek culture. He was a religious, orthodox man, troubled about his soul, and concerned with much prayer and inner searching of his spirit. The sweet figments of old Greek poets, like the pure mild ra- tionalism of Confucius, were no food for the ruler of many millions in a decaying and ruinous state, no concern of an Isapostolos, the earthly and civil Vicegerent of the Crucified. He could read in the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, scarcely dead a generation before him, of the follies and the criminal heart of a Julian the JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 93 Apostate, his predecessor. He saw all around him the hopeless congenital weakness of pagan philosophy to bear the appalling evils of the time. Only the Son of Man could save this last stage of the old Grseco-Roman society. To Him, therefore, and the Holy Spirit of Celestial Wisdom be all public honor rendered ! VI. Had Justinian done nothing but restore to the empire the members torn from it by the convulsions of a century, his name would be for- ever famous among the great rulers of that ancient State. But he did more — he recast the laws of Rome and made them serviceable for all time — those ancient laws in which, as Sir Henry Maine and Rudolph von Ihering have shown, are deposited the oldest experiences and the most archaic institutions of the great Aryan family to which all Western peoples belong. By this act he passed into a higher order of men than even the autocrators of Old or New Rome ; he became a benefactor of humanity — one of its solemn pontiffs, peer of Solon and Lycurgus, of Aristotle and Plato, of Ulpian and Papinian — nay, a greater than they, for their laws have 94 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, either perished from society or survive by the act of Justinian. It is not easy to put in a nut- shell a subject of such infinite charm and im- portance. Gibbon thought it worthy of the most immortal chapter in his book, and pens innumerable have labored at describing this great work as men describe the Pyramids or the Alps, with minds distracted by admiration and the stupor that all true greatness inflicts upon us. The Laws of Rome ! It was a long and varied process by which they grew, the steady exercise of that terrible Majestas Populi Ro- mani. Leges and plehiscita, seyiatus-consulta and responsa prudentimi^ i.e. the laws of the forum, the Senate, and the renowned opinions of learned jurists — they had grown century by century, until their number was legion and their indi- vidual original wisdom was crossed by their suc- cessive contradictions and repetitions. For seven hundred and fifty years before Christ had the City been growing. In that time every human interest had come up for consideration. The functions of war and peace, of conquest and division of spoils and administration, of trade and industry, commerce and luxury, production and exchange and distribution — every interest JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 95 arising from the soil, or from the family, or from human agreements, or from the attempts of social authority to assure peace by justice and equity — all these had been the object of Roman legislation. Originally local and jealous, so local that it looked askance at the men of Veil and Proeneste, scarce a day's walk away, it expanded mightily and took in what was good in all the legislations of the past, all the solid deposit of business, common sense, and com- mercial practice as it was floating around in what came to be known as the Law of Nations. The common Roman might see in expansion only a chance for trade and power ; the great thinkers of the State conceived the purpose of this ex- pansion of the city to be, as the Younger Pliny put it, '' ut humaiiitatem hommi daret,'' i.e. the spread of the light of civilization and its bene- fits, by the red right hand and the dripping sword if need be. Could we read the minutes of the meetings of the Roman Senate on the annexation of Northern Africa after the Jugurthan war, we should be reminded, I dare say, of a certain late session of our own august body of legislators, so true is it that history repeats itself. When the republic lapsed into an empire, so gently that the first emperor dared only call 96 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, himself the foremost citizen, the lawmaking power was the first to pass away from the people. Henceforth there are no leges — the world is governed by the will of the imperator, and he acts through constitutions and rescripts, i.e. general and particular decisions, which are registered in the imperial chancery and become the actual law of the land. Besides, there was a peculiar annual legislation of the prastor, or city magistrate, and another body of law arising from the opinions of licensed lawyers — ratioci- nated decisions that originally won the force of law by their reasonableness, and in time were collected in books and held almost as sacred as lex or constitution. What all this reached to, after five centuries of imperial government of the world, one may well imagine. As the will of the emperor was the real source of law since Caesar's death, so the first attempt at a reform or a codification of the law must begin with the imperial constitutions. Two hundred years and more before Justinian, in Old Rome, this need had been felt, and the Gregorian and Hermogenian codes had been pre- pared for official use. But they were soon antiquated, and a new one, the famous Theodosian Codex, was issued in 438 by the Emperor JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 97 Theodosius II. But it was rare, bulky, costly, and therefore not always at hand. Moreover, numerous grave constitutions had been added since 438, precisely a time of transition, when the lawmaking genius is called on most earnestly to adapt the rule to the facts. Justinian estab- lished, February 13, 528, a commission of ten men -^ decemviri — to execute a new code. Tribonian and Theophilus were the principal lawyers, and they were charged to see that only up-to-date constitutions were incorporated, minus all that was obsolete or superfluous or repetition or preamble. They might erase, add, or alter words in the older constitutions they accepted, if it was necessary for their use as future law. He wanted three things, brevity, compactness, and clearness, and in less than fourteen months he received them in the document to which he gave the name of Codex Justinianeus, and which was published April 7, 529. The next step was harder — it was a question of collecting and sifting the responsa prudentum, or answers given by recognized and licensed lawyers, and which had always enjoyed a high degree of consideration before the magistrates of Rome.. They were the real philosophers of the law, but philosophers after the Roman 98 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, heart, — terse, grave, direct, — condensing a para- graph of diffuseness into one strong, luminous hne that seemed to shed truth and peace along its whole length. These answers had been given for over a thousand years, and were then scattered about in numberless treatises — it is said over two thousand, to speak only of those enjoying actual authority. They had been the bane of the Roman bar for many a day. Since they were all good law, and apparently equal, the practice of law had degenerated into cita- tions — whoever had the most dead men to speak for him was the victor. This was intol- erable ; it came at last to the famous Law of Citations, that fixed the ^yq greatest names, and among them, as senior or chief, the immortal Papinian, that high priest, king, and prophet of all lawyers, past, present, and to come. At this huge mass of ancient law, therefore, a new commission was directed, under the authority of Tribonian. From this Golden Dust-heap they were to extract, to e7iiccleate, what was good and useful as law or interpre- tation or illustration. Out of all the materials they should erect a fair and holy temple of justice, divided into fifty books, and these prop- erly subdivided and paragraphed and numbered. JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 99 It meant that the decisions of thirteen hundred years had to be gone over, and, according to present ntihty, a choice struck and the balance rejected. Seventeen specialists did it in three years. The work was called the "Digest/' or " Pandects." There are in it something less than ten thousand sententice, or brief opinions of an- cient lawyers, harmonized, castigated, clarified ■ — at least Justinian and his lawyers thought so. Could Cujas or Donelli have been at their side, what reproachful looks they would have cast ! For the Middle Ages hunted out end- less contradictions in the huge mass of these '^ opinions " that only external authority had united. Thereby the ancestors of our present lawyers lived fair and lovely lives, with rich benefices and fine gowns of silk or brocade, and the noblest palaces in the town, and ample esteem from Church and State. How they must have smiled when they heard Boccaccio or Pietro* Dante commenting on the poet's famous line, " D'entro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano.** It is calculated that by the edition of the Digest a law library of one hundred and six books was reduced to five and a third, a com- 100 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. parison that only faintly reflects the relief that its publication gave. Finally the emperor caused the preparation in four books of a manual of the principles of Roman Law, which he called the " Institutions." It became a part of the codified law, being largely a reproduction and adaptation of a similar work of the second century that was owing to the great jurist Gaius.^ This work of Justinian has met with some reproaches from our modern critics ; perhaps they are deserved. It has been accused of too much theorizing, too much ratiocination, too much blending of the schoolmaster with the leg- islator to the detriment of the latter. But what man of heart will blame the emperor for per- mitting the pagan Tribonian to preserve the color and tone of second and third century Stoicism, for the occasional brief reflections on the origin and nature of human liberty and human dignity ? They are delicious oases in a desert of rigid rules and sententious decisions. In this new Roman Law it is the spirit and the content of the Law of Nations that pre- dominate. The old, hard, selfish Romanism is 1 The vicissitudes of the law of Justinian in the Lutin Middle Ages have been described fully in the classic work of Sa^igny, and by a host of later writers. For its history in the Orient, cf. Mortreuil, " Histoire du droit Byzantin" (Paris, 1843-40, 3 vols.). JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 101 eliminated. From the Golden Horn the Genius of Order lifts up an illuminating torch to shine afar over the Euxine of the Barbarians and the Hellespont of the Greeks — nay, across the Mediterranean and JEgesm, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to follow forevermore with its sunlike radiance every path of human endeavor, every channel of human contention, every relation of man to man and of practical government to its subjects. This Roman Law, after all, was the salt and the light of the Middle Ages. For love of it, even before Justinian^ the Ataulfs and the Wallias, standing at the parting of the ways, had renounced becoming a Gothia and were willing to be incorporated in "a Romania. They adopted it at once, begging the Catholic bishops of their new kingdoms to accommodate it to their present needs, their racial genius, and their immemorial customs. So arose the invaluable Leges JBarharorum of Frank and Burgundian and Visigoth and Vandal. Only, the Catholic Church would have no separatist barbarian law, even of that kind. All her ecclesiastics lived by the genuine and common Roman Law, the Law of Justinian : Ecdesia vivit lege Romana. Indeed, she was its second saviour, and thereby 102 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, the saviour of good government, for in the West it gradually went over very largely into her Canon Law. It was the basis and glory of her oldest university, Bologna, and was the usual path to honor and fame and power. There are those who regret its excessive vitality, since it bears along with it the stamp of its origin, the absolute will of one ruler, which makes it at all times the favorite code of centralized power. The Code Napoleon is built on it, as are most of the great modern codes of Europe. Even Mohammedan law as it arose, in Egypt and Syria especially, accepted and applied the ex- isting law of Justinian that had been working more than a century in these unhappy lands when, for their folly and stupidity, the night of Islam settled down on them. It is the Christian, however, who rejoices most at this act of Justinian. Those Roman laws that Tertullian denounced were now bap- tized.^ A spirit of humanity henceforth breathed from them. The rights of the moral code were 1 " Postremo legum obstruitur auctoritas adversus earn (sc. veri- tatem). ... Si lex tua erravit, puto, ab homine concepta est; neque enim de ccelo ruit." — Tertullian, "Apologeticum," c. iv, 20. The entire opusculum is the protest of a great Roman lawyer against the inhuman and anomalous iniquities of the Roman Law as applied to the Christians. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 103 incorporated into the legal code ; religion was not separate from conduct. The new law showed itself most practical in this, that it recog- nized Christianity as triumphant, as the popular religion, and in many ways made a large place for it, recognized its teachers and chiefs as the principal supporters of the State and of public order. The political life of the Middle Ages is all in the Law of Justinian, especially in the Code of his Constitutions, and for this alone it is the most remarkable of books after the inspired writings and the ancient councils. It is not wonderful that Dante, at once the greatest of architectonic poets and last prophet of the empire, crying out over its grave, should speak more than once of Justinian and his laws. In the famous lines of the "Purgatorio" (VI. 89) his whole soul flames out in irrepressible anger : — " Ah 1 servile Italy, grief's hostelry ! A ship without a pilot in great tempest ! No lady thou of provinces, but brothel ! ***** * What boots it that for thee Justinian The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle ? " In the superb sixth canto of the " Paradiso " he personifies in Justinian the imperial authority that to him is the basis of the State : — ** Csesar I was and am Justinian." 104 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, Into the mouth, of this shadowy shepherd of men he puts that glorious romantic account of the growth of the Roman name and power : — "What it achieved from Var unto the Rhine, Isere beheld and Saone, beheld the Seine And every valley whence the Rhone is filled ; What it achieved when it had left Ravenna, And leaped the Rubicon, was such a flight That neither tongue nor pen could follow it." The true career of Justinian appears to the mediaeval poet of Italy and Catholicism as that of a " living justice " inspired by God, as the career of a man who upheld the " standard sacrosanct " of order and equity, and thereby " placed the world in so great peace That unto Janus was his temple closed.'* Elsewhere (Canzone XVIII. v. 37) he gives voice to the deepest sentiment of the Middle Ages, when he hails in Italy the serene and glorious custodian of law and order, the true heiress of the genius and calling of the Im- perium that are indelibly stamped on the " Pandects " and " Code " : — " patria, degna di trionf al fama, De' magnanimi madre, ****** Segui le luci di Giustiniano, E le focose tue malgiuste leggi Con discrezion correggi, Sicche le laudi '1 mondo e '1 divin regno." JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 105 VII. In the preceding pages little has been said of Justinian from an ecclesiastical point of view, partly because it is the civil or profane side of his life that here attracts us, partly because of the vast and absorbing interest of the questions and problems that are exhibited when we lift the innermost veil of ecclesiastical history. It was the fate of Justinian to enter upon the last scene of a passionate conflict whose unity had not been broken for a century. The motives of the last protagonists were not always pure or praise- worthy. Local jealousies, festering old sores of a political or economic-social nature, velleities of Coptic and Syrian independence, violent con- tempt and hatred for the Royal City and its Greek bureaucracy that these paid back with interest, prevented the theological questions of the day from being viewed by all in the dispas- sionate light of simple faith and old tradition. The wrongs of Nestorius were still a rallying cry in Syria, and the injustice wreaked on Dioscorus still roused the fellaheen of Egypt. Obscene spirits, as usual, abounded, and fished fortune out of the troubled waters along which moved pain- fully the bark of Peter. Old sects, schisms, and 106 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, heresies, almost forgotten by tlie churchmen of the day, still lived on in remote corners of the Orient, to strike hands on occasion with the Nestorian or Monophysite against the common enemy by the Golden Horn.^ Here theology and tax-gathering were cultivated with equal ardor until the broken peasant by the Nile or the Orontes knew not what he hated most — the latest fiscal oppression or the noble Tomus of the great Leo that the local Monophysite clergy had so distorted as to make it pass for a blast from Antichrist. Every emperor, from the time of the second Theodosius, had longed to close these gaping wounds, and had even attempted the same with more or less success. In the wild and universal conflict the independence of the ecclesiastical 1 For the history of the government of the Greek churches in and since the time of Justinian the work of Cardinal Pitra is invaluable, "Juris Ecclesiastici Graeci Historia et Monumenta" (Rome, 1864- 68, 2 vols.) ; cf. the '« Oriens Christianus" of Le Quien (Paris, 1740, 3 vols., fol.), and the precious compilation of Leo Allatius, " De Ecclesiae Occidentalis et Orientalis perpetua consensione " (Cologne, 1649). Of great value to the historian are the materials collected by Miklosisch and Miiller, "Acta et Diplomata monasteriorum Orientis" (1871-90, 3. vols.), and by Cardinal Hergenrother, "Monumenta Grseca ad Photium ejusque historiam pertiuentia" (Ratisbon, 1869). Usually fair and well-informed is Neale, " His- tory of the Holy Eastern Church" (London, 1847-50, 4 vols.), of which the first two contain a general introduction, the latter a history of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 107 power was pushed aside as secondary to the res- toration of outward order and concord. It was an age of great personal and corporate ambitions, on the part of the Oriental clergy in particular. The rapid successions to episcopal sees, brought about by heresy and schism, roused an unholy cupidity in the souls of men otherwise inoffen- sive to Church or State. Only from Rome do we hear regularly the genuine principles of the relations of the two powers, and only there is any effective resistance preached and carried out against the evil Csesaro-papism that lurked in every imperial heart since Constantine.^ Jus- 1 Much has been written in the last three centuries on the rela- tions of Church and State at Constantinople. Cf. Riffel, " Ge- schichtliche Darstellung der Verhandluugen zwischen Kirche und Staat" (Mainz, 1836), Vol. I.; Niehues, " Geschichte der Ver- handluugen zwischen Kaiserthum und Papsthum im Mittelalter" (Mtinster, 1877-90, 2 vols.). The monograph of A. Gasquet, "L'Autorit6 imp^riale en matiere religieuse h Byzance" (Paris, 1879), and his "Etudes Byzantines" (ibid., 1888), are of superior worth. Admirable in every way is Charles Diehl's "Etude sur I'administration byzantine en Italic " (Paris, 1888), especially c. vi., pp. 368-417, on the relations of the Roman Church with the Em- peror of Constantinople. They may be read most usefully in con- nection with the notes, of the Abb^ Duchesne to his edition of the " Liber Pontificalis. " Cf. Ternovsky, " Die griechische Kirche und die Periode der allgemeinen Kirchenversammlungen " (Kiew, 1883) ; Gelzer, "Die politische und kircliliche Stellung von Byzanz " (Leip- zig, 1879) ; Krtiger, " Monophysitische Streitigkeiten im Zusam- menhang mit der Reichspolitik " (Jena, 1884). These latter works are colored by the peculiar convictions of their learned authors, as is also Pichler, " Geschichte der kirchlichen Trennung zwischen Orient 108 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. tinian was no exception. First among the em- perors he attains the character of a theologian by his edicts and decrees in the long conflict that arose with the condemnation of Origenism and, ended in the painful business of the Three Chapters. Here he recalled the worst day of Arianism, when Constantius at Milan laughed to scorn the \Canons of the Church and bade the bishops remember that he was their Canon Law. Justinian had been brought up religiously; the little manual of conduct that the good deacon Agapetus prepared for him is yet preserved, and has always been highly esteemed as the parent of those numerous Instructiones Principum, Mo7iitio7ies, and the like that we meet with in the Middle Ages. He was profuse, by word and act, in his devotion to the Apostolic See of Peter; he acknowledged the supremacy of its authority that had stood a rude and long test und Occident ' ' (Munich, 1864) . The Catholic point of view is magis- terially expounded in the first volume of the classic work of Cardinal Hergenrother, "Photius" (Regensburg, 1867-69, 3 vols.). It also contains the best r^sum^ of Byzantine church history before Pho- tius. Of this work Krumbacher, the historian of Byzantine litera- ture, says (p. 232) : " Hauptschrift iiber Photius ist und bleibt wohl noch langer Zeit das durch Gelehrsamkeit .und Objectivitat ausge- zeichnete Werk des Kardinals J. Hergenrother." In Pitzipios, "L'Eglise Orientale" (Paris, 1888), there is a popular description from a Catholic viewpoint of the politico-ecclesiastical role of the city and clergy of Constantirnople from its foundation. JUSTINIAN THE QBE AT, 109 in the Acacian schism just closed, and the "Liber Pontificalis" relates with complacency his gifts to the Roman churches. He received Pope Agapetus with all honor, but his treat- ment of the unhappy Vigilius has drawn down on him the merited reprobation of all.^ Perhaps he felt less esteem for the person of the latter, whom he had known intimately as a companion of Agapetus ; perhaps, too, his own final lapse into the heresy of an extreme Monophysite sect was a just sanction for the violence done to a sinning but repentant successor of Peter. He confirmed the ambition of the patriarchs of Constantinople and secured finally for them the second rank, at least in honor. Under him the third canon of the Council of Constantinople (381), and the twenty-eighth canon of the Coun- cil of Chalcedon (451), that Rome had energeti- cally rejected, were tacitly accepted. In the long struggle the honor and the liberties of Alexandria and Antioch had gone down in spite of the papal efforts to save them. The consequences of this w^ere seen within a century, in the rapid, unhindered spread of Islam over 1 Cf. "Liber Pontificalis'' (ed, Duchesne), s.v. "Vigilius" ; Du- chesne, "Revue des Questions Historiques" (April, 1895) ; Thomas Hodgkin, "Italy and Her Invaders" (Oxford, 1898, 2d ed.), Vol. IV., c. xxiii.; "The Sorrows of Vigilius," pp. 571-594. 110 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. Egypt and Syria, and its assimilation of Persia, whereby the fall of Constantinople was made certain. He ruled the churches at pleasure and with a rod of iron, divided ecclesiastical provinces, deposed and exiled the highest pa- triarchs, and not .only humiliated St. Peter in the person of Vigilius, but compelled his successors to ask for imperial confirmation and to send large sums of money to secure it. It was well for the churches that no second Jus- tinian followed him. But his despotic temper and his precedents were not soon forgotten. Perhaps it may be urged for him that he met habitually only a weak and sycophantic curial clergy, and that the ancient bonds of empire were all but dissolved in the Orient. He is still remembered in the Greek Church for his hymns, one of which is still in frequent use.^ 1 " Only-begotten Son and Word of God, Immortal, Who didst vouchsafe for our salvation to take flesh of the holy Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary, and didst without mutation become man and wast crucified, Christ our God, and by death didst over- come death, being One of the Holy Trinity and glorified together with the Father and the Holy Ghost, save us." — Julian, "Dic- tionary of Hymnology " (London, 1892), p. 460. Cf. Edmond Bouvy, "Les Origines de la Po^sie Chr^tienne," in "Lettres Chr6- tiennes" (1882), Vol. IV., and for the hymn, "Christ and Parani- kas," '' Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum " (Leipzig, 1871), p. 52; Stevenson, " Du rhythme dans I'hymnographie grecque" {Correspondant, October, 1876), and the epoch-making JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. Ill Indeed, lie is, perhaps, the oldest hymnographer of the Greeks. But when all has been said, it remains true that his was the timely, welcome, and long reign of an orthodox emperor, that he broke the impact of Monophysitism, that he was generous beyond measure to the churches, and to the poor extremely charitable. The Christian episcopate of the East looked on him as a father and a providence, and in the storms of the century he was never too far below his high calling. The Western churches loved to remember him as he is depicted in mosaic in San Yitale at Ravenna, clad in imperial purple, surrounded by his officers of state and offering gifts to the bishop of that see.^ essay of Cardinal Pitra, " Hymnographie de I'ifeglise Grecque" (Rome, 1867). 1 The admirable writings of Charles Diehl on the Byzantine regime in the sixth and seventh centuries are especially worthy of commendation, notably his " Justiuien " (Paris, 1902). Justinian holds a place of honor among the writers of Christian hymns ; cf . W. Christ and M. Paranikas, " Anthologia Grseca Carminum Christianorum " (Leipzig, 1871). For his policy in matters of re- ligion, cf. the dissertations of F. Diekamp, " Die Origenistischen Streitigkeiten im VI. Jahrhundert " (Miinster, 1899), and Hist. Jahrhuch (1900), Vol. XXI., pp. 743-757; A. Knecht, "Die Reli- gionspolitik Kaiser Justiniaus I." (Wiirzburg, 1896), and the article " Origenistic Controversies" in Smith and Wace, "Dic- tionary of Christian Biography," Vol. IV. The golden booklet " On the Duties of a Christian Ruler," dedicated to the emperor in 532, by his teacher, the deacon Agapetus, may be read in Migne, PG. , 112 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, To the bishops of the West, standing amid the ruins of Roman civilization, his person and reign appeared like those of another Constantine. He was, indeed, a beacon light, set fair and firm where the old world of Greece and Rome came to an end, and along its last stretches the stormy ocean of mediaeval life already beat threateningly. Ixxxvi., 1163-86. It opens worthily the long and important series of mediaeval 3fonita and Instructiones for princes, that contain so much Christian pedagogical material, and are usually neglected in all histories of mediaeval pedagogy. THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. The dogma of Islam is simple — one all-pow- erful God whose prophet is Mohammed, and who will reward the good and punish the wicked. But Allah is remote from the world, toward which he is indeed merciful through his prophets, but between which and him there exists no rela- tion of fatherhood and sonship. Islam recog- nizes a revelation closed in Mohammed, but no absolute necessity of redemption, hence no Incar- nation of Christ, who is to the Mohammedan only one of the admirable human prophets whom God sent at divers times and whose line ends in the son of Abdallah. It denies the Trinity and travesties the Christian conception of that august mystery. While it admits intermediary spirits, inspiration, the last judgment, and the resurrec- tion of the body, it clothes all these teachings in a gross, sensual, and repugnant form, which robs them of that divine charm that they possess in the Christian presentment of them. The Koran is the Bible of Islam, or rather its fetich, and upon and about it the doctors have built in 113 114 THE UELIGION OF ISLAM, the course of time a very Babel of expositions and human traditions, which in daily life affect the morality of Mohammedans no less than the teachings of their Sacred Book itself. Abul Kasem Ibn Abdallah, usually styled Mohammed or Mahomet (the praised),' was born about 570 A.D. at Mecca, in the Hijaz or west- ern part of Arabia, not far from the Red Sea, amid the bare granite hills and sandy wastes of that loneliest and most monotonous of regions. From the middle of the fifth century Mecca had been the centre of a little religious state, whose chief object of worship was the Kaaba, or holy black stone, supposed to have been given by an angel to Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, and close to which was the sacred well Zemzem, which sprang up in the desert for Hagar and her son during their wanderings. The inhab- itants of the town lived by commerce, for the Kaaba had already become the national sanctu- ary of many of the Arab tribes, and at the yearly fairs during the four months of the Sacred Truce its streets were filled with the Bedouin, whose usual home was on the pathless wastes, beneath the cloudless skies of a land phenomenally rain- less. Religion and commerce, friendship and poetry, drew the children of the desert yearly to THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. , 115 Mecca. They met there the caravans returning from Palestine, Syria, and Persia, and there they joined in the famous poetical tournaments, of which some remnant is left in the elegant Moal- lakats or '' suspended" poems, said to have been so named because written in letters of gold on parchment or silk and hung up on the curtains of the Kaaba. They were a fierce, natural, sen- sual race, self-reliant and daring, trusting to the camel and the horse, overflowing with the love of life and pleasure, but ever conscious that the sum of both was an evanescent quantity — hence the streak of gravity and melancholy which runs through their ancient poetic remains. Their lives ran on between the simjDle pursuits of a nomadic pastoral life and a constant series of razzias and vendettas, arising often from the most trivial cause, but which became sacred legacies through the intense domestic attachments of a people who had yet no higher notion of the State than a congeries of families. Withal, there were sprouting strong germs of national consciousness in the similarity of tastes and pursuits, the un- mixed strain of blood, the songs of the poets and the ancient genealogies, the souvenirs of com- mon losses and common victories. They defied from time immemorial the yoke of the stranger. 116 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. Persia, Rome, and Byzantium had never been able to obtain more than a precarious footing on their confines. They believed in a confused way in one God, but they prayed to the stars, to their amulets, to genii and ogres and demons. It needed only an enthusiast from their own race to compact the scattered elements of greatness which these clear, hard, passionate, untutored men offered to the founder of a religion or a state. This was the work of Mohammed, and in it he was singularly favored by internal and external circumstances. The morality of the Moslem may be reduced to the five great points and to the practice of certain natural virtues. The five command- * ments are the confession of Allah and his prophet Mohammed, prayer by prostration to- ward Mecca five times a day, fasting from sun- rise to sunset daring the month of Ramadan, at least one pilgrimage to Mecca, and the bestowal of two and one-half per cent, of one's property in alms. Add the duty of sacred war, the fre- quent ablutions, and the observance of Friday (without cessation of labor) as a holy day and we have the substance of the precepts of the Moslem morality. Honesty, benevolence, mod- esty, fraternity, and charity are recommended, THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 117 especially among the Moslems. Deceit, lying, and slander are severely reproved, while gam- bling and the use of wine and other intoxicating liquors are forbidden. Their external morality is essentially Talmudic, interwoven with a mul- titude of minute essential ceremonies. They acknowledge to woman a soul, the hope of im- mortality, and certain civil rights, but polyg- amy, divorce, slavery, and a jealous seclusion make her life that of an inferior and degraded being. Sin is the contravention of legal enactment; the Mussulman does not comj)reliend the Chris- tian idea that there is an inherent right and wrong in human actions, that God is a moral being. To him He is an absolute Oriental mon- arch, who has hung irrevocably the fate of each man about his neck and toward whom the chief, almost the only, feeling is an exaggerated and sickly quietism, Islam, which means submis- sion or resignation. Fatalism, the almost utter absence of correct notions concerning the spirit- ual life, the degrading example of the private life of the prophet who is for the Moslem the most stainless of men, the absolute exclu- siveness and intolerance of their religion, the impracticable amalgamation of the civil and the 118 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. spiritual^ the pseudo-theocratic basis of social life — all these elements are working to keep Mohammedanism a stationary religion, except among races of very inferior cultiu-e. It is yet powerful in Asia and Africa, where it controls the souls of two hundred millions, but with its political reverses, it has lost the secret of its success, and the four hundred millions of pro- gressive and energetic Christendom no longer fear the crescent, as in days of old, when it waved simultaneously in Spain and Greece, in Italy, Austria, and Hungary, and was only kept at bay by a line of venerable pontiffs, who found in the sole religion of Christ the means of arresting the triumphant course of Oriental fa- naticism and sensuality. Mohammed grew up poor, under the care of near relatives. He was a posthumous son, and his mother, a sickly, nervous woman, died while he was yet a child. He herded sheep and gathered wild berries for a living. Moslem writers relate many legendary and miraculous tales of this period, but they are evidently later inventions meant to glorify the youth of the prophet and to accredit his revelations. In time he entered the service of a rich widow, Kadidja, and after several commercial journeys in her THE RELIGION OF ISLAM, 119 interest, espoused her in his twenty-fifth year. It was the turning-point of his fortunes, for, though of the distinguished family of the Ko- raish, he had inherited ahnost nothing. With Kadidja he obtained not only social prominence and wealth, but a woman of spirit and intelli- gence, who plays no small part in his career. About 610 A.D. certain strange dreams and visions began to haunt him. He was naturally of a high-strung, excitable temperament, and according to some authorities, an epileptic. Certainly he manifested in this period of his life unmistakable symptoms of hysteria or of catalepsy. Long swoons, during which he re- mained unconscious, were not uncommon. His mind ran much on religious questions, and he was wont to retire yearly for a considerable time to a mountain near Mecca for prayer and medi- tation. On one of these occasions he seemed to see the angel Gabriel, who held before him a silken scroll, on which he read that " man walk- eth in delusion when he deems that he suffices for himself ; to the Lord they must all return." From this time, for two or three years, he was much troubled, but Kadidja comforted and guided him, with the result that all waverings passed away and he arose convinced of his mis- 120 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM, sion. At least it would seem that he was honest . in the early part of his career, whatever we may think of his later accommodation and tergiver- sation. To these years belong the older parts of the Koran and many of the purer and better elements of the revelation which he went on piecing together from day to day. It was in this period also that he fell in with the Hanifs, or Ara- bian ascetics, who seemed to have been half Chris- tian, and to have practised many of the virtues of those Christian solitaries who peo|)led the deserts of the border-land between Syria and Arabia, and who exercised from the beginning a profound influence on the neighboring Saracens or Bedouin Heretical priests, Jewish teachers, and Arabian monks seem to have had no small share in the formation of his spiritual character, and the influences of Christianity are all the more proba- ble because of his condition as a merchant and his voyages into Palestine and Syria. Whatever be the complex origin of his beliefs, he made converts slowly. His wife, his cousin Ali, his father-in-law Abu-bekr, an old slave Zaid, and a few others were all who came around him at first. His preaching was dis- tasteful to the Meccans, and the Koraish would have done him bodily harm if they did not fear THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 121 his uncle, Abti Talib, the head of the family. Several of his followers suffered much from the townsmen, who were incensed at a preach- ing that decried their idols and threatened to hurt trade and business. They were sheltered by the Christian Abyssinians. Mohammed en- tered on a kind of compromise at this juncture, but soon regretted it, whereupon the Meccans decided on his death. But he escaped by the aid of his family, especially of Ali, his most de- voted cousin, and took refuge in Yahtrib (Me- dina), where he had already made a number of converts, who had agreed to sustain him in spite of the opposition arid the interdict of the Koraish of Mecca. This is the famous Hegira, or flight of Mohammed, in the month of June, 622, from which date the Moslems have since counted the flow of time. Jewish proselytism. Messianic hopes, reminiscences of Christian virtue, had long been rife in Medina, and they now met in the head of a melancholy religious dreamer, together with scraps of apocrjrphal gospels and ignorant heretical expositions of Christianity. It was a marvellous period. All over the Orient a hundred heresies were pul- lulating, and in the unhealthy spiritual activity of the time many could not see the great differ- 122 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. ence between the simple dogma, the rational cul- tus, the earnest, moral ideal of Mohammed and many an heretical travesty of the Christian teaching. At Medina Mohammed built the first plain mosque, instituted the Moslem clergy, and laid the foundations of the theocracy which has since done service as a government in a great part of the Orient. His skill and success as a judge won the hearts of those of Medina, and he soon enjoyed the confidence of the entire community. From 622 to 630 he waged war with the Meccans, intercepted their caravans, overthrew their armies, and finally besieged and took th^ holy city in January of the latter year. The conquest of the national sanctuary re- acted powerfully upon Mohammed and Islam. At heart he was an Arab and a Meccan. He loved the glory and renown of his race. The Koraish, once his enemies, came over to him and took control of the movement. What was once an individual, internal, spiritual enterprise became a carnal, external pursuit of glory, power, and booty. The idols were destroyed, it is true, but transformed into minor spirits — djinn, div, peri, and the like ; the holy stone of the Kaaba remained intact ; Mecca was the na- THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 123 tional and holy capital ; most of the ancient ceremonies were retained. It cost the Arabs no change of heart, for there had never been more at stake than the business chances of the city, and that was settled by the victory of Moham- med and the acceptance of his formulas, for which they otherwise found justification in their ancient traditions of monotheism. They passionately loved booty and the foray, and the revelations of Mohammed and the successes of eight years opened up an endless vista of war and pillage — even the conquest of those dim, outlying worlds of Persia and Byzantium. The state of Medina had conquered the state of Mecca, only to bring to the latter the homage of victory. From every quarter came in adhesions to the political revolution in response to the missionaries sent out by Mohammed, and be- fore his death, in June, 632, he had the satis- faction of seeing all the masses of Arabian society accept the inevitable, and enter the new Semitic alliance. The Christian tribes were too weak to resist, but the Jews and the Magians made a bolder front, and for a while were re- spected. Prominent among the means of spreading the doctrine of Islam was the Koran, which means 124 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. reading or recitation, i.e. the revelations made by the Holy Spirit or Gabriel to the prophet. It consists of one hundred and sixteen sicras or chapter-like divisions, each of which contains from three to nearly three hundred verses. The whole is scarcely as large as the New Testament and contains an extremely varied matter — cere- monial and civil laws, answers and reproofs, dis- quisitions on the attributes of God, attacks on idolaters, the Jews, and Christians, narratives of prophets and saints, travesties of Christian teaching, echoes and even technical terms from the Talmud, histories from the New Testament Apocrypha, and a chaotic mass of instruction without any order, logical or chronological. It is full of the grossest errors and betrays the ab- sence of all literary culture in its compilers. It is doubtful whether Mohammed ever wrote any- thing — doubtful whether there were any Arabic books in the strict sense before his time. The Koran appears to many critics to be the first written work in the tongue, though the latter was long since a polished language. Its con- tents range all the way from short, oracular statements, that seem as though torn from the speaker under violent pressure, to cool, deliberate legislation. Much of it is surely the work of THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 125 reflection, compiled with deliberate intent to deceive, according as the circumstances made revelations useful or handy. Its gradual origin is tangible in the number of abrogated laws that it contains. In its present form it dates from the Chalif Othman, about the middle of the seventh century, who had a new recension made of the original compilation, executed by Zaid, the former amanuensis of Mohammed, at the command of Omar. At that time the suras were preserved only on bits of flat stones, on pieces of leather, ribs of palm leaves, and in the memory of the companions of the prophet. Yet it is believed that we have the Koran substan- tially as it was current shortly after the prophet's death. The Moslems believe that it is eternal and uncreated, immanent in God as His divine word, and that it came down from heaven in a series of descents. According to the Hanbalite sect, it lay from all eternity upon a shining white table of stone as broad as from east to west and as long as from earth to heaven, while an angel with drawn sword stood guard over it. The Mohammedan looks upon its style as something inimitably perfect and a sufficient guarantee of its divine inspiration. It is certain that it pos- sesses considerable beauty, much wild force of 126 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. passion, high imagery^ and vigorous rhetoric. But all European Orientalists do not see such sustained perfection in its rhymed phrase. Ac- cording to Noeldeke, there is much verbiage in it, loose connection of thought, repetition of the same words and phrases ; in fact, the book shows that the prophet was no master of style, although such a statement is worse than poly- theism to the ears of a pious Turk or Arab. The doctrine of Islam was spread by the sword. The idolaters, the heathen, were exter- minated ; the Jews and Christians, as " the peo- ple of the Book," were permitted to live, but in the most humiliating subjection and surrounded "with odious restrictions. For a long time the intercourse of the latter with the Greek Empire was absolutely forbidden, and the lot of the Ori- ental churches in the seventh and eighth cen- turies was the saddest imaginable. There have been wars innumerable among Christians in the name of religion — persecution, too, and oppres- sion — but they are against the sweet, mild law of Jesus ; whereas, according to the teachings of Mohammed, the sacred war ought to be chronic. Islam is a national Arabic travesty of some of the best elements of Judaism and Christianity, elevated to the dignity of a universal religion. THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 127 It is a poor, weak, grotesque worship, such as might arise in the brain of a cataleptic visionary and in the midst of a half-savage people. Like all national religions, it identifies the State and the Church. Its pilgrimage to Mecca, prohibi- tion of wine, the veneration of the Kaaba, and similar essential points, are no more than univer- salized Arabism. And it was the sense of politi- cal greatness, of national destiny, together with possible demoniac aid, that made its first fol- lowers so fanatically brave that everything yielded before their awful onslaught. No doubt the religious element was not wanting. The joys of paradise, the fatalist belief, the personal enthusiasm for the prophet, worked wonderfully on the desert tribes and helped to make them the scourge of Christendom. The Christians of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were sadly divided when Islam arose. The christological heresies of two centuries had filled every rank of society with division and embitter- ment. Long-concealed national impulses began to throb in the breasts of peoples never willingly subject to Roman rule. Persecuted heretics opened the gates of Egypt and Syria as, two centuries earlier, the Donatists delivered up Africa to the Vandals. Religious oppression and 128 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. the civil despotism of Constantinople reaped the same reward on the same day, and whole nations laboriously won for Christ were for centuries lost to religion and culture. Both Rome and Persia were exhausted after more than three centuries of irregular warfare, and military valor had declined in both States. In the rapid spread of the teachings of the prophet we must see also a providential chastisement of the discord, in- justice, tyranny, and immorality which fill the pages of Oriental Church history in the sixth and seventh centuries. Endless heresies had so disfigured the Christian faith in the regions in which Islam first emerged that many might be pardoned for not seeing in it anything worse than the ordinary forms of heretical Christianity. We must also remember that Islam may be meant to serve as a stepping-stone, a transition, for those races whose low mental culture does not permit them at once to appreciate so intel- lectual a religion as the Christian. It has served as a bulwark against the Mongol hordes to pre- vent any such human flood as that which Attila let loose in the fifth century. The Arab kingdom of Spain deserves well of letters and the sciences for its services in the eighth and ninth centuries, though the origin and the spirit of this literary THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 129 culture are not to be sought in the depressing, intolerant Koran, but in the literature of Greece, preserved for them bj Christian hands. Mediae- val scholasticism owes no small debt to the men who kept alive the study of Aristotle, and their dangerous philosophical heresies were the spurs which urged on men like Aquinas and Bonaven- tura to plan and execute a successful reconcilia- tion of the philosophy of the Stagirite with Christ and the Church — a problem that seemed an impossibility to a Tertullian. The polemics against the Moslem from St. John Damascene and Theodore Abukara down to Raymond Lullus sharpened the Christian intellect and kept alive abstract and philosophical studies where they might have died out for want of practical utility. It is to this practical need that we owe the famous work of St. Thomas, " Contra Gentes." In another direction, too, the Moslem was des- tined to influence Western Christendom. Under the best caliphs and in the palmy days of Arab rule, the sciences flourished in an eminent de- gree. We find in their literature many gram- marians and lexicographers of note, poets in abundance and of a high order, translators of many important works from Persian and San- 130 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. scrit, Greek and Syriac, among which occur more than one ancient Christian text. They pursued tlie studies of astronomy and mathe- matics with great eagerness, and in their pas- sion for alchemy were the forerunners of modern chemistry. The Hteratures of Greece, Persia, and India found sympathetic admirers at Bag- dad and Cordova. History and geography flourished, and there is scarcely a century with- out some excellent chroniclers, geographers, and cosmographers, at a time, too, when the latter class of studies was greatly neglected in the Christian West, which can only show for the same period the small geography of the Irishman Dicuil. The commerce of the Middle Ages was to a great extent in their hands. They traded in times of peace with Constantinople, where they had great privileges. Their ships went to India and even into the China seas. Their caravans went by land from Tangier to Jerusalem and from Damascus to the Great Wall of China. They penetrated deep into Northern Africa and sought ivory and black slaves on the eastern coast of that continent. The silks of China and the spices, camphor, steel, and precious woods of India were poured into their markets, while in turn they exported the finest glass, dates, THE BELIGIOJSr OF ISLAM, 131 refined sugar, mirrors, and blades of steel ; fabrics of silk and gauze and brocade ; figured muslins and striped satin stuffs. Tools, carpets, jewellery, and trinkets were among the staple articles of manufacture. The papyrus, and later the paper, used by the Western Christians were the product of the Moslems, and it was no small annoyance to the imperial and pontifical chanceries to have to use writing materials that bore the water mark of Allah and the prophet. All the trades and industries reached a high degree of prosperity, and in every city the retail commerce was repre- sented by shoemakers, saddlers, dyers, fruiterers, grocers, armorers, booksellers, druggists, per- fumers, and a host of similar small merchants. The Crusades let down the barriers between the Orient and the Occident, and thus the ac- cumulated treasures of the former — literary, ar- tistic, and social — became at once the common property of mankind. The intellectual wealth and the general refinement of the Oriental peo- ples could not be withheld from the West, but the struggle for political supremacy grew all the fiercer. From Godfrey of Bouillon to Mark Antonio Colonna is a distance of five centuries, but it needed all that time to curb the courage and determination of the hosts of Islam. It is 132 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. the popes to whom belong the chief honor of this long and glorious conflict. It was they who saw that a religion of the sword must be fought with the sword and who led on the forces of Christendom with never-failing courage and pru- dence. Charles Martel and Godfrey de Bouillon, Richard Coeur de Lion and Don Juan of Austria, were the lay leaders of this astounding conflict. But in the spiritual background we see the figures of the popes of the seventh century already concerned with the growth of Islam. Gregory IV., in the middle of the ninth, rebuilds Ostia as a protection against the '^ nation of the Hagarenes, hated by God, unspeakable," just as clearly conscious of the gravity of the situation as Urban II., Gregory IX., Pius II., or Pius Y. If the modern world has escaped the gloomy and cruel bondage of the Koran ; if • liberty and not despotism, progress and not stagnation, are the marks of our society; if the spiritual and the temporal have not been hopelessly confused ; if woman has maintained the dignity and the large freedom to which Christianity has called her ; if polygamy, slavery, mutual fanatical hatred and armed proselytism, are not rooted in our midst ; if we enjoy the splendid masterpieces of art and the charms of divinest music; if we THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. .133 have not become the slaves of Bedoiiin and Ottoman — we owe it above all to the Father of Christendom, who, by whatever name he went, — Gregory, Urban, or Pius, — made it his special duty to crush whenever and wherever he could the ambitious and stirring successors of the prophet. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 'What do we understand by Civilization ? It is usually taken to mean the refinement of man in his social capacity. Whatever uplifts, cleanses^ purifies, inspires man as a member of the common human family is held by all men to be civilizing. The word, if not the idea, comes to us from the masterful Roman people. They believed that their civilitas, or civilization, the sum total and the spirit of social progress attained in their city by their laws and language, their religion and philosophy of life, was unsurpassed, was the last and highest effort of mankind. In this 'they erred; and we need no better proof than the remnants of their life that have come down to us in one way or another. But they erred in noble company, for before them the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Persian had shared the same conviction, as they have left the same historical proofs of their self-illusion in many a great moniunent, many a proud inscrip- tion. Even the Greek, whose civilization is so intimately related to that of the Romans, and 134 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 135 through them to iis^ was unable to protect and propagate directly the spirit and the institutions of his own admirable refinement. In all purely human work there is a response of death, a certain futility and emptiness, as a reminder by Nature of man's transitory character and functions. Nevertheless, while the forms, the outer dress, as it were, of civilization, change from one epoch of time to another, there is forever com- mon to all mankind an irrepressible trend, like a rising flame or a flowing current, that impels us to create and share common interests and common enjoyments, that calls forth common efforts for causes that are common and therefore higher than any or all of us. In the common gains or attain- ments we bring to the front the best and noblest that is in each one of us. In the common strug- gle we learn to admire and love the natural forces, gifts, opportunities, and institutions which have been the means of creating what each race, or people, or epoch calls its civilization. So the flag of one's fatherland arouses the holiest of natural passions, for it compresses into one cry, as it were, the whole life of a great and ancient people through many stirring centuries. So the tattered colors of the regiment whip the blood of the soldier into a rapid flow, for they 136 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, recall the vastness and complexity of the com- mon efforts that culminated in the victories whose inscribed names are soaked with the blood of the bravest and best. Civilization is indeed a constant strife, and he alone comprehends it well who looks on it from the view-point of conflict. Not one genuine gain of civilization but counts its martyrs; not one step upward in the history of mankind but is taken amid the protests and opposition of those whose individual or particular interests are assailed, or seem to be. Mankind itself, even collectively, is not exempt from the blunders and follies, the errors and weaknesses of the indi- vidual. A Socrates can sacrifice to Esculapius, and a Montezuma can preside over hecatombs of human victims. It is precisely this atmosphere and character of conflict that lend to the period we are about to deal with its greatest charm. I. In the history of mankind, there is no more instructive, no more crucial, time than what we call the Middle Ages. Then the ancient civiliza- tion of Europe was overrun by the barbarism of the North and the East, and owed its preservation and resurrection, not to its own power and fasci- CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 137 nation, not to the pity or needs of rude and fierce conquerors, but to the influence and authority of the CathoHc Church. Roughly speaking, we may say that the Middle Ages are that period of one thousand years that opens with the over- throw of the imperial power of Rome in Central and Southern Europe about the year 500 a.d. and closes with the discovery of America and the invention of printing, just before the year 1500. In that time, there is, in greater or lesser degree, one form of government, the feudal system, based on permanent warfare, upheld by a monop- oly of the land, and the weakness of the central authority in every State. One race, the Teu- tonic, imposes its will on all the fair lands that were once the provinces of Rome — Spain, Gaul, Britain, Helvetia, the Rhineland, Italy herself. Throughout Europe the warrior rules, and the public life is marked by all the virtues and vices of the camp or burg. With few exceptions, the civil power is held by an aristocracy, more or less open from below, more or less restrained by king or emperor, but always violent and proud. The habits and manners of daily life are yet largely those of the forest and the marsh and the sea whence the invaders came. It was many a long day before the English thane forgot that he was 138 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. the son of Low Dutch pirates, or the Norman earl ceased to feel himself the descendant of men who had made a dozen kings to quake and emperors to do them homage. The Hidalgos of Spain, the Ritters of Germany, are long conscious that they hold their places by reason of the old Gothic and Sue vie or Alemannic conquests. At the basis of this society there is always the an- tithesis of might and right, the strong and the weak, the brutal and ignorant against the refined and educated, the selfish and individual greed or need against the purposes and utilities of pro- gressive society. When we look out over these ten centuries of human history, they come before us like the meeting of the turbulent sea with the waters of some majestic river, the Ganges or the Mississippi. On one side is the contribution of an orderly and regulated force, on the other the lawless impact of an elemental strength. The result is eddies and currents, islands and bars, reefs and shoals. A new and strange life develops along this margin of conflict between order and anarchy. All is shifting and chang- ing, and yet, beneath all the new phenomena, goes on forever the original struggle between the river that personifies civilization and the sea that personifies the utter absence of the same. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 139 So it was in the civil and secular world of the Middle Ages. There were indeed periods of advancement, stretches of sunshine in a gloomy and troubled climate, individuals and institu- tions of exceptional goodness. If the underlying barbarism of the civil life had its vices, it had also its virtues, that both pagan and Christian have agreed in praising. It had overrun Europe like a flood, but it brought with it a rich alluvial deposit of courage and ambition, the elasticity and ardor of youth, fresh and untainted hearts, an eagerness to know and to do, an astounding energy that was painful to the sybaritic society that suffered the domination of barbarism. For an event of so great magnitude, it is won- derful how little we know of the circumstances of the fall of the Roman authority in the West. The civilization that up to the end was heir to all the art and philosophy of Greece, all the power and majesty of Rome, suffered ship- wreck almost without a historian. Odds and ends of annals and chronicles, stray remarks apropos of other things — these are all that are left to us of those memorable decades of the fifth century, when Rome saw her gates dese- crated by one barbarian horde after another. Yet enough remains to show that it was the 140 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Catholic Church which stood between her and utter extirpation, so great was the contempt and hatred of Goth and Vandal and Hun for the city that had been long the oppressor of the nations. Here a bishop turns away the wandering hordes from his town, there another encourages to vig- orous resistance that is successful; here a holy virgin saves Paris from destruction, there an Italian bishop brings home a long procession of captives. Everywhere in this dark century thai; saw the old classic life enter on its decline, the Catholic bishop appears as the defender of the municipality and the people against every oppression. He also possesses a moral authority equally great with Roman and barbarian. Alone he is trusted by both powers, for he is the only social force left that is really unaffected by the collapse of the old world and the arrival of a new one. The bishop is the ambassador of emperor and people, as on that dread day in the middle of the century, when Leo the Great went out to Attila, on his way to Rome, and persuaded the great Hun to turn back with his half million savages and spare the Eternal City. As sorrow upon sorrow fell on the doomed cities and popu- lations, the civil power gave way completely, and the ministers of religion were compelled to take CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 141 up a work foreign to their calling, and save such wreckage as they might of the administration, art, and literature of their common fatherland. They became the premiers of the barbarian kings, the codifiers of their laws, their factotums in all things, their intimate friends and counsel- lors. There is not a state in Europe, and all of them go back to this time, that does not recog- nize among its real founders, the Catholic bishop before whom the original conquerors bowed. There is Clovis before Remigius, Theodoric be- fore Epiphanius and Cassiodorus, the Burgundi-an king before Avitus, and so many others that it is needless to detail their names or deeds. I recall the facts only to show that the very bases of our Christian society, the very foundations of medise- val Christendom, were laid by a long line of brave and prophetic bishops and priests, who saw at once in the barbarian conquerors future children of the Church and apostles of Chris- tianity. On the very threshold, therefore, of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church appears as the truest friend both of the old order that was going out, and the new one that was being ush- ered in amid the unspeakable horrors that always accompany the downfall of an ancient and highly wrought civilization. 142 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. II. All civilization begins with the soil. What have been the relations of the Catholic Church to the soil ' throughout the Middle Ages ? Ev- erywhere man is a child of the soil. Mysteri- ously he issues from it. He lives on it and by it. He goes down one day to his appointed place in the mighty bosom of Mother Earth. No matter how complicated society may become, it is impossible that conditions should arise in which man can be otherwise than dependent upon the earth that God gave him for a suffi- cient and suitable sojourning place. Institu- tions, laws, customs, and manners that sin against the God-given relations of man and the soil bear in them always the sure promise of death. Half, nay, nearly all the great events of history are directly traceable to the struggles for the soil, whether from within or without the State. The plebeians and the patricians of Rome create immortal principles of private law by reason of this, very conflict ; the Roman State itself goes on the rocks because it neglected good lessons learned in its infancy. The contests of warlike shepherds in China pre- cipitate masses of barbarian Goths and Huns CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 143 and Vandals on the Roman Empire and dis- locate the social fabric that the genius and for- tune and experience of a thousand years had built up. For another thousand years of feudal life the land is the only source and sign of wealth. The Middle Ages, economically, are that period of Western history when a few reaped the products of the earth, when the many bore the burden of the sowing, but at the reaping went empty-handed away. The Catholic Church is too much the Mother Church of the poor and lowly and humble, too much the Spouse of the carpenter's Son, that great Friend of all who labor and are heavy burdened, not to hear forever in her heart the tender yet puissant cry, ^' I have pity on the multitude." The life of the soil is really in the labor that makes it bear fruit. Until man appeared the world was indeed a bright garden, but growing wild and untrimmed, all its powers sleeping as though under a spell within its bosom. This labor the Catholic Church has always sanctified and held up as a necessary and a blessed thing. Her Founder was ac- counted the son of a common laboring man, Himself a toiler at the bench. Her first mis- sionaries were working-men — fishermen, pub- 144 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. licans, a physician, a tent-maker. She, first and alone, uplifted on her banner the symbols of labor and declared them worthy and holy. All her early documents bear the praise of labor. A^l her earliest legislation enforces labor as a duty for all. But the duty of labor brings with it a corresponding right to the fruit and reward of labor, and here she came at once into contact with the existing conditions of society. I shall say nothing of the relations of the Church to the soil under the pagan Roman Empire. Those three centuries were not un- like the three decades of the hidden life of Jesus, an epoch of divine education for her public life. But as soon as she is free we find her concerned about the treatment of the work- ing-man in the great ranches or villas of the Roman nobles. No more underground prisons, no more stamping with hot irons the face that has been cleansed in the baptism of Christ, no more compelling of girls to go on the obscene vaudeville stage of antiquity, no more maim- ing or abusing of the slave. She opens vast refuges in every city for . the poor and homeless driven off their estates by the growing monopoly in land. Every church door is a distributing CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 145 place for the bread of the ensuing week. One quarter of the funds of every church goes to the relief of her poor. Before the empire fell one of her priests arose and wrote an immortal page that stands forever to show that i^ was the abuse of taxation that brought it low and not the ris^ht hand of the barbarian, which in more humane days she had always beaten down. Economically, the old Roman Empire was always pagan, even in the hands of Christian men. Its principles and methods of adminis- tration never changed. It was an omnipotent, omniscient bureaucracy, that learned nothing and forgot nothing, until one grim day the Cross went down before the Crescent on the dome of St. Sophia and the Leather Apron was hoisted above the waters of the Golden Horn. But in all those trying ages, every bishop's house was a court of appeal for the overbur- dened peasant, and the despotic lord or cunning middleman was very likely to hear in a sum- mary way from Constantinople, or from the bar- barian kings turned Christian. A bishop sat on the bench with the judges. He visited the prisons, his church had the right of asylum for poor debtors or oppressed men generally. He was recognized by the State as a natural-born 146 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. spokesman of the people in city and country. He was the last link between the old Roman society and the new world arising on its ruins. In his person, for he Avas nearly always the ablest man in the city, were gathered all the best traditions of law and procedure, of tradi- tions and good customs. In the wreckage of the State he had saved, as it were, the papers, the family records, the registers, and the like, that in an hour of peace would enable order to be brought out of chaos by younger hands. Let any modern economist or lawyer read the letters of Gregory the Great and he will be as- tonished to see how tiiis great Roman nobleman, who traced his ancestry back to the Caesars, and who had been himself governor of Rome at the end of the sixth century, treats the relations of the peasant and the soil. Without interfering with the theories of the day that did not con- cern him, he upholds in a long series of docu- ments the just rights of his tenants on the four hundred farms that the Roman Church then owned in Sicily. He chides his agents for rackrenting and orders the excess to be given back. He provides for an adjustment of losses between the Church and the tenants. He writes to the emperor about false measure- CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 147 ments and exactions. Were all the noble prin- ciples he promulgates to be put into modern English, it would be seen that this ancient Bishop of Rome had asserted thirteen hundred years ago, at the beginning of our modern world, the principles that are yet basic in any society of men that pretends to stand and work well, with- out convulsions or revolutions. Now, Gregory was only the head of the system; he was not the inventor of those principles. He recalls them to his Italian bishops as being the purest spirit of the gospel. If we want to know what they are we have only to read the magnificent encyclical of Leo XIII. on the condition of the working-men. In it these principles are clothed in language scarcely different from that of his ancient predecessor. These ancient bishops of the decadent empire and the incipient States of Europe compelled the great land-owners to build numerous little chapels on their estates. Thus arose around the homes of religion the little villages of France and Italy and Germany. It is no mere chance that causes the Catholic Church spire in these lands to rise from ten thousand hamlets. The hamlets grew up beneath its beneficent shadow. In those little chapels were told to 148 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE- AGES. the noble and serf the truths of the gospel that gradually broke down the mediaeval servage. Before those little rural altars the gospel was first divided into sections as we read it to-day on Sundays. Then again yearly the bishops in synod taught the parish priests how to com- ment on it, how to apply it without fear of cringing. To-day it seems a small task to speak the truth before all, but one day, long ago, it required an abnormal moral courage for the son of a peasant to stand up before the owner of the great warlike castle on yonder peak and bid him cease from vexing, bid him live with one wife, bid him stop the rioting and dissipation by which he spent in one night the earnings of the estate for a year. Behind that poor semi- illiterate hind, dressed in the garments of a priest, there stood the bishop, and behind the bishop rose the powerful figure of the Church incarnate in the supreme Bishop at Rome. Countless times the thunderbolt flew from thence, straight and true, that laid low the awful pride and the satanic tenacity of some great Frank or some fierce Lombard lord. It was indeed the Catholic bishop who saved the peasants of Europe from the fifth to the eighth century. For three hundred years he was the CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 149 last court of appeal ; he was the gospel walking among men ; he was the only mternational force with power to execute its decrees. His cathedral was always in the heart of the city, and in its great doorway he sat regularly to judge justly and without price. His priests were usually the lawyers and notaries of the people. And on certain old Romanesque or Byzantine portals you may yet see in marble that lovely scene of the episcopal weekly tri- bunal. Around his house and in front of his church stretched the public square. He was the protection, therefore, of the little tradesman, the peasant, the pedler with his wares. To him came, the pilgrim, the stranger, the wander- ing penitent. To him the ambassadors going east and west, the king on his annual round, the great nobles charged with the administra- tion of justice or the collection of revenue. And when, after Pentecost, for example, or at Michaelmas, he gathered in annual .synod his clergy from the villages and ranches and villas and castles, and stood at his throne, mitre on head and staff in hand, it did seem to all the assembled multitude, and it was in its own way true, that the Sun of Justice was shining among men, that every wrong would be redressed and 150 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. every sorrow smoothed over, so far as it lay in the public power to do so. It is not for nothing that the Catholic episcopate won its incredible authority over the people. Such historical phe- nomena have alwaj^s an adequate cause. Right here it was three long centuries of intelligent and sympathetic protection of the people, at a time when the feudal law was a-forming and the benefit of Eoman law was in abeyance. All this time the old conditions of the Roman provinces of Europe were being deeply modified. Industry had been extinguished and commerce paralyzed by the first inroads of the barbarians. The east fell away from the west, whose jealous kings tolerated little intercourse with Constanti- nople. The loveliest lands of France and Italy went without culture, and soon forests grew where palaces had lifted their proud fronts. The wild beasts wandered among the baths and porticoes and temples of the ancients, and the very names of towns that were once echoed beyond the Ganges were forgotten. Then arose another mighty force of the Catholic Church, the monks of St. Benedict. Long while only laymen, subject to the local bishop and con- trolled by him, they grew very numerous in time. Their rule was an admirable thing for CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 151 the social needs of the day. It inculcated equally the labor of the field and the labor of the brain, and so during this period and long after, all Europe was overrun by the children of that good man whose mortal remains repose above the rushing Anio amid the sublime sce- nery of Subiaco. The Koman Bishop took them under, his especial protection, and together they formed a religious power that worked for good in every direction without any thought of self- advancement or any conflict of an unavoidable character. They chose usually for a home the waste and desert spots of Europe. Soon the forest was again thinned out and crops were again planted. Priest and brother, the edu- cated man and the common laborer, went down into the field together, and worked all day in silence side by side. They built the ditches, thej bridged the streams, they laid the neces- sary roads ; they increased the area of arable land in every decade, and thereby drove out the noxious wild beasts ; draining and irrigation on a large scale were carried on by them. Walls and fences and granges arose on every little estate that they had created out of nothing. The peasant, half barbarian, learned from them the traditions of old Roman agriculture, for 152 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. these men were often the best born and best educated men of the time. They leased to the peasant at a ridiculous rent and in real perma- nency the soil that they had themselves created. His children found employment in their kitchens and barns. One day the parents would lead their brightest boy to the abbey altar, where his little fist would be wound up in the altar cloth as a sign that they gave him to St. Benedict. Thus he would enter the order as a novice, to die My Lord Abbot of ten thousand acres, or Archbishop of Cologne, or perhaps Pope of Rome. There is one true source of modern democracy — that ever open door of the Church by which throughout the Middle Ages the high- est honor and emolument were ever open to the lowliest and poorest. In those old days there were few or no cities. With the exception, perhaps, of Northern Italy, the old municipalities of the great Roman prov- inces, with all their traditions of order and jus- tice, had been submerged. The collective life was everywhere a tender growth nourished by the Church. Its beginnings were often after the following fashion : — Over against the castle or burg of the local lord she set the little church or the small mon- CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 153 astery. These, too, became proprietors, and on their estates the peasantry could see other prin- ciples of government than those of the ra- pacious feudal lord. It was an old saying in the Middle Ages that it was a good thing to dwell beneath the crozier. As a fact, the green- est fields and the richest slopes, the best vine- yards, the best kept forests and fisheries, were those of bishop or abbot. Here religion forbade waste and riot, and education brought to their cultivation much knowledge handed down from the ancients. Tliough without wives and chil- dren, these great ecclesiastical lords, always elective, held a kind of a dead-hand over their estates. Thus were secured perpetuity of ten- ure, continuous culture of the fields, equality of rents, new tracts of reclaimed lands, mildness of administration, and a minimum of expense in the conduct of vast properties. The classical studies broadened their views and humanized bishop and priest and monk. The meditation on the gospel, the example of countless holy monks and hermits, the daily service of God at the majestic altars of some basilica or Roman- esque church softened their hearts. Those men and women whom the bishop or the abbot daily blessed, who brought in their woes with 154 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. their tithes, were his tenants, perhaps for many generations ; thus there arose a certain fraternal intimacy between the most powerful men in the State and the humblest serf who delved on the hillside or tended sheep along the uplands. Whole sections of Europe were in this way reclaimed, or for the first time cultivated. Prussia, Southern Germany, most of the Rhine- land, the greater part of Switzerland, great tracts of Southern Italy and Sicily, of Norway and Sweden, are the immediate creation of these churchmen. If we would have some idea of the duties of a mediaeval bishop we should have to compare him with the president of some great railroad and double that with many of the duties of the mayor of a city and add thereto the responsibilities of teacher and preacher. III. The States of the Middle Ages were almost purely agricultural. Yet even in such States problems of production and distribution arose. The population increased, wants multiplied, war and travel and awakening knowledge roused curiosity and desire. The bishop's house first, and then the monastery, was the great nucleus CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 155 of social life in the Middle Ages. Around the cathedral that the bishop built, perhaps in some lonely spot, if he was a missionary, or on the site of the old public buildings, if he dwelt in a once Roman town, gathered all kinds of work- men — tillers of the field, the weavers of cloth, the builders of houses, the decorators of the cathe- dral, the workers in linen and embroidery. Here were to be found the stone mason, the blacksmith, the joiner, the carpenter, the gold and silversmith, every artificer, indeed, for the little community. We see at once that all the germs of a city life are here. Indeed, this is the origin of a multi- tude of European cities. The day will come when fierce conflict will arise between the bishops and the serfs emancipated and enriched, the latter claiming corporate recognition *and a municipal constitution, freedom from imposts, and the like ; the former pointing to the fact that all they had was a benefit of the Church. There are some kinds of justice so complicated that time alone can grant them. -And so in the end the bishop lost his control and the cities won legal recognition. Similarly, the monasteries were centres of consumption and distribution. The revival of the cloth trade in England in the twelfth century owes very much to the con sump- 156 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, tion of black and gray cloth by tlie monks and the nuns, and^ indeed, was long in their hands. The preservation and protection of the culture of the grape, the viniculture of the Middle Ages, was almost entirely dependent on the immense multitude of churches, chapels, and altars. The minor arts, like delicate work in silver and gold, in ivory and wood, embroideries and tapestries, were kept alive by the constant need of new church furniture. In those days men lived much alone in castles or widely scattered hamlets. The annual fair with its products from all parts of the world was held under church auspices, about the mon- * astery or in front of the cathedral. The wares of east and west were there hawked about ; the traveller and the pilgrim hurried thither; the legal needs of the peasants — wills, marriages, contracts — were attended to ; distant relatives met one another; all the refining duties of hos- pitality were exercised. And above it all arose the holy and benignant figure of Mother Church. The fair was opened with all the solemnities of the liturgy, and the fair itself was known as '• The Mass " of St. Michael, e.g., or of Our Lady. Indeed, the great book-fair of Leipzig is still called "The Mass of the Books.'' CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 157 Thus, throughout those remote times both the cathedral and monastery preserved the germs of civil life, that without them w^ould have utterly perished, given the general ignorance and bar- barism of the lay life. It is to them that we owe directly the preservation of all the social arts and professions. How many reflect when they enter an apothecary shop that it is th-e out- come of the "infirmary" of the monastery where the simples and drugs were kept that were needed for the use of the inmates or the serfs, and later on the peasants of the abbey. The monks copied out the old medical manuscripts, treasured up and applied much homely domestic traditions of a better day, and, to say the least, were as useful in handing down Greek medical practice as the Arabs were in transmitting its theory. Every monastery had its brother de- voted to the sick, whose practical skill, was often very great. While in Italy, both north and south, there surely lingered no little scientific medicine of the past, in the west of Europe the monks were, to a very great extent, the gener- ous physicians of the rude and uncultured popu- lations ; memories of those days still hang about the cloisters of Italy, and those who have lived there long remember how often a rude dentistry 158 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. is gratuitously practised by §ome good Capuchin, how often the fever-stricken boy of the Cam- pagna throws himself at the entrance of the first cloister, how the women of the hamlet get from the nuns of the neighborhood the simple remedies they need. When we pass by some brilliantly lighted window and see exposed Char- treuse, Benedictine, and the like, we may re- member that these sweetened liqueurs are antique recipes of. mediaeval monks, originally meant for uses of health. Convents still exist out of the Middle Ages, like the Certosa at Florence and the Carmelites of the same old town, that were, and perhaps are yet, practically the dispensaries of the city. Indeed, one might add a page to the famous lecture of Wendell Phillips on the "Lost Arts," were he to recount the benefits conferred on the medical sciences by the devotion of the mediaeval clergy to the plain people. Only the other day, in reading Ian MacLaren's touching stories in the " Bonnie Brier Bush," I was led to reflect how much silent heroism of the same kind was practised in the mediaeval times, when a village doctor was unheard of, and the only available skill lay down in the valley or up on the tall crag where the men of God spent their innocent and benefi- CATHOLICISM IN TUE MIDDLE AGES. 159 cent days. Thus, whatever path of history or facts we tread backward for thirteen or four- teen centuries, we shall always find that the only stanch and loyal friend of the poor man was the Catholic priest ; that all the useful and hidis- pensable arts and professions of social life were gathered up by him out of the great wreck of Graeco-Roman life, or created anew amid the turbulence and lawlessness of barbarism ; that law and medicine found in him a humble but a useful bridge by which they were rescued from the flood of oblivion and ruin ; that the homely utilities of the soil, of food and drink, of clothing, the more complicated processes of production and distribution, were very largely dependent on him in all parts of Europe. At the top notch of his estate he was bisliop or abbot, at the bottom poor parish priest or monk, — but ever he was a friend of the people, and he earned their gratitude by an anonymous devotion, a nameless self-sacrifice, that covered one thousand years of the infancy of our modern states and was really then' period of gestation and nursing. IV. While the Church was developing among the youthful nations of Europe the notion of the 160 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. common weal, the higher good of the common- wealth, she was also creating another entirely new institution, the Christian Law of Nations, or what is known to-day as International Law. The old Roman law did indeed recognize, grad- ually, a certain universal province of general rights, but it was only in the domain of private law, of the relations between one individual and another, such as contracts and obligations, wills and judgments, and the like ; of a public law applicable to all peoples, higher than all and eminently fair to all, it had not the slightest inkling, and has left us no trace. Rome acknowledged no equal before the bar of man- kind. The only civilization that ever withstood her, the old Persian, she pursued and harried to the death. Perhaps in that dread hour, when the grim fanatic Arab arose in his stirrup above the prostrate bodies of Roman and Persian, it dawned upon both that they would better have arbitrated their pretensions, but it was too late. On the dial of time no power can turn back the 'solemn finger of history. It was otherwise with the Catholic Church in the West. She was the mother and nurse of a whole brood of young and ardent peoples, full of high and vague impulses, naturally jealous of one another, but CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 161 also mutually respectful of the great holy power that they felt was lifting them steadily toward the light. In their infancy their first mission- aries had been sent by Rome, and bore aloft their authority from the central see of Christen- dom. In time one agent of Rome, after another appeared to allay the fires of domestic hatred and revenge, to put bounds to ambition, to com- pel the execution of treaties, to protect the injured who were without redress. Often these men were of any nationality ; whatever shrewd head offered itself, whatever experience of man- kind was at hand, Rome accepted. Every king- dom and great family in Europe received and welcomed these men. Every decade of the Middle Ages is filled with their good deeds. They represent a central authority, entirely moral and resting on personal conviction of its sanctity. They appeal to the common law of the gospel and the general customs of Christian life and experience. They brought to their tasks a suavity of manner and a persistency of method that the lay world admired instinctively. The opposition they could not break down they turned. Peace was their object as war was the purpose of the feudal world. In time they created an unwritten code that governed the 162 CATHOLICISM 11^ THE MIDDLE AGES. world, the life-giving centre of which was the Person of Jesus Christ in His gospel enlighten- ing and soliciting mankind to follow Him, the Prince of Peace, to beat the sword into the ploughshare. At a later date, Hugo Grotius, Puffendorf, and other learned lawyers organized in detail this mediaeval institution; but it existed in practice long before them, and had long borrowed all its certainty of action from the Catholic Church. Only forty years ago, on the eve of the Vatican Council, David Urquhart wrote his famous " Letter of a Protestant to Pius IX.," begging him to declare again and formulate the old Pontifical Law of Nations, that nothing else would arrest the bloody, in- human practices of the slave trade, the opium trade, and all the other infamous arts by which the strong white races were waging a hellish war against the weaker colored ones. Only very lately there met at The Hague in inter- national conference the representatives of nearly all the civil powers of the earth to promote uni- versal peace, but the representative of Leo XIII., though invited by Russia and ardently desired by the Queen of Holland, was not allowed to enter. What good can ever come of such pro- ceedings ? They are fantastic and visionary, CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 163 to say the least. It is the play of Hamlet with the noble Dane left out. A universal peace is a mockery so long as religious convictions do not dominate the ancient and natural impulses of selfishness, public and private, the cruel leonine policy of the world from Sargon to Napoleon. V. It is a commonplace saying that there is no social progress possible without the recognition of authority in the State, and a respectful sub- mission to its due and licit exercise. But of what avail is all this if there be no habitual » discipline in the minds and hearts of men ? It is the creation of this docile temper, this trained submission to just laio and custom, that is one of the great glories of the Catholic Church. The modern world, in as far as it possesses this benefit, inherits it from her. A century of wild and incoherent efforts to base social obedience on any other lines than those she preaches has resulted in anarchy, or a practical appeal to her to help control the masses from whose hearts the balancing ideas of God, future retribution, sin, immortality, were driven by every ingenious means that could be devised. Neither Plato nor 164 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Aristotle, neither Zeno nor Cicero nor Seneca, were able to establish a code of principles that would command the willing and affectionate acceptance of all men amid all the changing circumstances of life. Only Jesus Christ could do that. Hence His gospel is not only the noblest revelation of God to man, but also a political document of the highest rank, as the centuries to come will most certainly demon- strate. Throughout the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was the sole recognized inter- preter of this gospel. Her decisions were law. Her comments were final. She did not call on men to obey a human will ; it was the divine figure and will of Jesus that she held up before men. It was not by preaching herself or her achievements that she compelled the unwilling submission of the most violent men the world has seen, men in whose blood the barbarian strain was still hot and arrogant. Let any one read the great " Papal Letters " of the Middle Ages, the letters of Gregory I. to King Ethelbert, of Gregory VII. to Henry IV. of Germany, of Alexander III. to Henry 11. of England, of Innocent III. to all the potentates of Europe, and the magnificent letters of the nonagenarian Gregory IX. to Frederick II., and he will be as- CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 165 tounded at the richness and abundance of pure gospel teaching, at the cogency of the texts, at the vigor and apostolic candor of their application. Judges and prophets, bishops and apostles, — these men speak as man never spoke before. And when their utterances were heralded in a few weeks all over Europe by the swiftest processes then known to man, the innocent looked up and rejoiced, the oppressed breathed easier, those who hungered and thirsted for justice had their desire fulfilled. The tyrant shook on his throne and all the ministers of religion felt that an invincible force had been infused into them. The moral battle had been won ; let gross might do its worst. Kings of every nation quailed before those dread spiritual arrows ; minor potentates stifled their evil passions for very fear of Rome ; the unholy and impure let go the estates that they had robbed, either from the weak or from the Church ; the usurer lifted his hand from the throat of his victim ; the orphans' rights were vindicated and the widows' portion restituted. The holy law of monogamous marriage, of one man to one woman, was successfully de- fended ; kingdoms were risked, and one day lost, for the sake of a principle. To all the sacredness of life was declared again and again 166 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. — '' Thou shalt not kill " — neither thy neighbor in unjust violence, nor thyself as God's own, nor the child in the womb. In a century of savage anarchy she declared the famous Truce of God that practically prevented warfare for more than half the year. Her altars were always places of refuge against hasty and unjust vengeance. She forbade any one to mount the steps of those altars whose hand was stained with the blood of his fellow-man. In that long night of storm and conflict she was everywhere the White Angel of Peace, everywhere, like the Valkyries, a presence hoverins: over the multitudinous scene of battle, but not like them an urger of death — rather the vicarious voice of God, His gentle spouse, bidding the hell of angry selfishness subside — appealing, in season and out of season, to the conscience of mankind, its natural probity, above all to the love and the will of the 'Crucified One. And so her own law grew, — men called it in time the Canon Law, — i.e . the law made up of the rules and regulations established by the authority of the Church. She disdained no human help and she loaned her strength to many a humane and good measure. But the substance of it all is the gospel ; the spirit of it CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 167 is one of peace, of friendly composition and arbitration where possible ; its very punishments have — what was unknown to the laws of man- kind before her — a medicinal or healing char- acter. Hitherto men were punished as a revenge of society for transgressing its collective will. Now men are punished that they may enter into themselves and be enlightened, and seeing, be made to walk as straight as they see ; that is, be corrected. Think of this legislation gradually spreading over all Europe from Sicily to Iceland, accepted as a quasi-divine code by all, and one sees at once what a stern but enduring discipline was imposed on men's hearts. 01)edience was hard, but it was useful. It was humiliating, but it cleansed and comforted. It was painful, but it made men Godlike, since it was exercised to imitate and please Him who had first given the most splendid example of obedience. The Lombard Gastaldo at Friuli, and the Duke at Spoleto, the Frank Comes at Tours or Limoges, the Exarch at Kavenna, the Herzog in the Marches, all looked on and wondered and trembled at the popular submission to one weak man's will. For the first time moral dignity prevailed, and the authoritative sentence of the 168 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, successor of the Fisherman had more weight than the laws of a dozen kings. This was a great step, for it hfted the administration of justice out of and beyond the sphere of the per- sonal and temporary into a high and serene atmosphere. It made the face of the judge to shine with a light reflected from heaven. It gave a kind of immortality to every utterance. It was like a new stringer laid on the fair and holy walls of the temple of justice. The de- cisions of one pope were sacred to his successor, and the wicked had the assurance that there was no reopening of their career before a tri- bunal that had judged them by the law of God. Such an authority, sacred and intangible by reason of long and useful services to European society, could deal with all civil authorities on the highest level. It had nothing to gain from flattery and nothing to fear from their ill-will. It had known the gloom of the Catacombs, the turbulent and selfish fondness of the first Chris- tian emperors, the whims and vagaries of the barbarous nations turned Christian. It is no exaggeration to say that the civil authority of the Middle Ages is the disciple of the Church. It learned from her the nature, scope, and spirit of authority. It got through her the most CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 169 moniTmental expression of that authority, the immortal law of Rome. It got from her a higher and more useful concept of punishment. It learned from her a hundred uses of authority that were unknown before. It learned how to temper severity with mildness ; how to restrain the ardor of justice by equity and prudence; how to insist on the written evidence and to preserve the records ; how to surround justice with the due solemnity, and to grant to all con- cerned those proper delays that are needed to prevent the triumph of wrong through error, ignorance, or chance. Many of these things are, indeed, the legacies of the Roman law of proce- dure. But we must remember that centuries before the Roman law was taught in the schools of Europe it was the law that the Church and her clergy governed by, and by which they gov- erned themselves in their synods and trials. Its procedure was made her own from the begin- ning and through her entered the chanceries and justice-halls of all Europe. Whatever was the actual belief of Shake- speare, his genius was certainly Catholic in the largest sense. He has always the true philo- sophic note when he touches her institutions. And so his bishops are the embodiment of law and 170 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. order. The principles of justice, the equity of war and peace, the nice points that affect the king's conscience, are decided by them. In "Henry V.," the king invokes the judgment of the bishops as to the moral character of his con- templated expedition against France. " My learned lord, we pray thee to proceed, And justly and religiously unfold Why the law Salique that they have in France Or should or should not bar us in our claim. 't' ^ ^ tI^ ^ ^ ^ And we will hear, note and believe in heart That what you speak is in your conscience washed As pure as sin in baptism." — Act L, Scene 1. The whole trend of public opinion in the Middle Ages was so overwhelmingly in this sense that it would have seemed an anachro- nism to have made the bishops of England as- sume an attitude different from what they had always held in ages gone by. So, too, in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation that theoretically dominated the political situ- ation in Europe, the chancellor of the empire was always the Archbishop of Trier, and as such was the emperor's spiritual adviser in all that pertained to justice or equity in public affairs or enterprises. In other words, the great States of Europe grew from infancy to manhood under CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 171 the solemn and public tutelage of the Catholic Church. What is good and lasting in their government they owe to her; what is faulty and imperfect to their own inordinate ambi- tions. The greatest public act that could fall to a churchman to perform in the Middle Ages was the anointing and coronation of a king. It is among the solemn acts reserved to a bishop, and as such is found in the Eoman Pontifical. In one of the great prayers said over the new king, the Catholic Church has herself given the char- acter, measure, and spirit of the civil duties of a regent of the people. It is almost a summary of her own career throughout the shifting and difficult circumstances of mediseval life. VI. Such a power as the Catholic Church, deeply rooted in history and in the hearts of all the nations of Europe, had necessarily a more than ordinary influence on the social life of the people and the institutions in which it manifested itself. I cannot do more than touch summarily on some important points. Those institutions that affect woman are fundamental in every society. With 172 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. an instinct both true and keen, the Catholic Church, at the break-up of the old Greek and Roman world, set herself to protect the weaker sex. It was now a world in which the example of the strong and the rich was all contagious. Bravely and persistently she resisted the at- tempts of the aristocracy from emperor and king downward to introduce polygamy. As the great nobles grew independent they grew restless under the restraint imposed upon ordinary men and asserted for themselves immunity from the law of the gospel. But they found in the popes and the Catholic clergy, generally, a wall of brass that they essayed in vain to overthrow. The history of her marriage legislation, of her dealing with di- vorce, is one of the proudest pages in the life of the mediaeval Church. In every nation of Europe the battle had to be fought over and over again, and always with the same result, "Thou shalt not." We have yet, for example, the admirable letters written by Innocent III. to Ingelberge, the repudiated wife of Philip Augus- tus. They furnish a sufl&cient commentary on the long catalogue of royal matrimonial causes that were ever before the Roman court through the Middle Ages. The impediments that she CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 173 placed to certain marriages had each, its own justification in history, in the relations with the civil power, or in that sure instinct of what was for the welfare of the people that I have already referred to. Thus the impediment of close rela- tionship acted very efficaciously in preventing the accumulation of land and power in the hands of a few families, not to speak of other useful consequences. It must be remembered that, as to those impediments that she created by positive enactment or by hallowing custom, she must be judged from the view-point of the times and the circumstances. Apropos of the transmission of wealth, had the mediaeval clergy been a married clergy, the wealth of Europe would have passed to their children, their great benefices would have been hereditary, and in- stead of an humble class of men rising by their own efforts to the highest rank, we should have seen the great prizes of the ecclesiastical life handed down by the laws of human affection, with the invariable decay of every ecclesiastical virtue and the spiritual ruin of the European population. If the Church built high the barrier about woman in some directions, in others she left her a freedom unknown to the ancients and opened 174 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, to her a career of extraordinary utility. No one might coerce her into marriage; the cloister was ever open. Only those who know how uncertain the perpetual turbulence of the Middle Ages made the condition of woman, how sad the life of the widow, the orphan, the desolate maiden, can appreciate the benefit that these holy refuges were to women in this stormy pe- riod. Woman governed freely such institutions, and when they arose to prominence, her posi- tion was only less enviable than that of a queen. As abbess of a great mediaeval monastery, she disposed of many and vast estates and revenues, and enjoyed in her own person the highest dis- tinctions of Church and State. In marriage the freedom of her consent was especially safe- guarded ; her position and rights were the same as those of the husband, and if she was inferior in what pertained to the disposition of property, it must not be forgotten that mediaeval life was in many respects different from our own, that man alone could bear the burdens of life as it was then lived. The bishop's court in the Middle Ages was another benefit to woman. Usually it was the court for wills and testa- ments, and well it was, for the bishop was nat- urally the father of the helpless and the lowly. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 175 Of two other conditions of life I shall say but one word — the poor and the slave. So long as a monastery existed^ no poor man could go hungry, and the duty of giving to the hungry and the poor was looked on everywhere as the holiest of all. War, pestilence, famine, worked their ravages, it is true, but in ordinary life the hungry and starving poor were rare in mediasval Europe. Nor was this accomplished by statute law, nor with painful humiliation, but in love, for Jesus' sake, because He, too, had been a poor man; because the poor man bore the likeness and image of the Creator even as his richer brother ; because, after all, the' rich ma,n was only the steward of his wealth and not its abso- lute owner. As for slavery, the Church did not formally abolish it, but it was incompatible with her doctrine and life. It gradually lapsed into servage; the serf was attached to the soil, a great blessing for him. He was often the Church's own man, and so he gradually merged into the free peasant, very largely through the agency of local churches, only too anxious to preserve on their lands the same families, with their knowledge of the soil and their loyalty to the owners. As to money itself and its functions, the 176 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. mediaeval Church knew not our wonderful devel- opment of industry and commerce. It was an agricultural world, and money did not seem pro- ductive in itself. Usury was the supremest hardship for the poor, as it is yet felt in purely agricultural lands like Russia and India. It was forbidden under the severest penalties, and out of sympathy with the multitudes that would otherwise have suffered incredibly in a time when their little bit of land, their crops, and their implements were all that nine out of ten poor men could ever hope to own. As to the uses of wealth itself, the ideas of the Middle Ages were thoroughly humane, even grandiose. Surplus wealth was not man's, but God's. The owner was the steward, the administrator, and he was bound, after providing for the suitable support of his own, according to their estate in life, to bestow it in other good works. Moreover, thereby he could atone while yet alive for his shortcomings ; he could further the relief of the poor, the weak, and friendless; he could be a helper of God in the government of this world ; he could root out the ugliest of all social cancers, the cancer of ignorance; he could elevate to God's glory a noble temple ; he could provide the sweet boon of education for those who would CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 177 never know its uses had not some generous soul been moved by such ideas. So common were these views that it was seldom a man or woman died without making some provision for the poor, for religion, for education. These moneys in turn flowed back into the community, and a perpetual exchange of good offices went on between the individual and the institution his generosity either created or sustained. So much money was given to education in Germany just before the Reformation that Martin Luther used to say it was almost impossible for a child to go ignorant under the papacy. So education, archi- tecture, the fine arts, the social needs, were for- ever provided for by the overflowing treasury of popular gift, and the Catholic people in turn escaped the danger of idealizing their wealth and hoarding it too jealously against a future that they had no means of controlling. Thus, for instance, arose countless grammar schools in Scotland and England that were so numerous before the Reformation that the poorest boy could get -a classical education in his own town and thereby enter the clergy. In Germany, France, and Italy, a similar education was to be had with almost the same ease, and that meant in those days the open door to office, preferment, 178 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, and wealth. Countless associations were en- dowed for the care of the poor, the burial of the deadj the dowering of poor girls, and the relief of every form of misery. If men made money largely, they spent it generously and intelligently. There was, perhaps, no time in the history of mankind, not even our own last few years, when men devoted to public uses so large a portion of their wealth. Not the least cause of it was tlie Catholic doctrine of the utility of good works for the welfare of the soul. Old churches were repaired j new ones were built all over Europe. Indeed, both Dr. Janssen and Dom Gasquet have shown, not only that the generosity of the fifteenth century was as great proportionately as that of any other age of the Church, but that it was extremely popular in kind, i.e. that down to the eve of the Reformation the people gener- ally accepted the mediasval view of the uses of money, notably for the common good. Shake- speare, who is so often the perfect echo of mediaeval thought and temper, puts into the mouth of the good Griffith as the best praise of the fallen Woolsey that he had built two noble schools for the education of youth, — a grammar school and a university college : — CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 179 Ever witness for him Those twins of learning that he reared in you Ipswich and Oxford ! one of which fell with him, Unwilling to outlive the good he did it ; The other unfinished yet so famous, So excellent in art, and still so rising That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue." — " Henry VIII.," Act IV., Scene 1. VII. In the early Middle Ages the sense of the common loeal was very imperfect. The Wan- dering Nations had developed the kingship through long and permanent conflicts, first among themselves, and then with Rome. But we see on all sides among them the rudest and most original independence. Here the great unity and centralization of the Church were as models to the State, that little by little arose to a similar concept. We have only to follow, for instance, the history of France from the days of Gregory of Tours to the foundation of the Capetian monarchy, to see how the churchmen contributed to the unification and solidarity of that great State. So, too, in Eng- land, the separate little kingdoms are brought ever closer toecether under the influence of Canterbury, its bishops, its synods, and the general unity of ecclesiastical life that was 180 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. there constantly visible since the time of St. Augustine. The mixed synods and councils of the early Middle Ages in England, Germany, France, Spain, were also a training school for the lay governors of society. They learned from the better educated ecclesiastics how to conduct popular assemblies with something more than the rude simplicity of their Ger- man forefathers by the Rhine or the Elbe. They learned, as we have seen, the use of written records, the patient sustaining of con- tradiction, the yielding to the majority, the power of eloquence and learning. But they learned something holier still — to look on public life from a moral point of view, to consider their offices as a trust from God, to become familiar with the idea that all power was from God and not from their great spears and their strong arms. Little by little genera- tions of rulers were formed who owned en- lightened consciences and listened to them, instead of the wild passions that were once their sole guides. Far deeper and more im- mediate than the influences of Rome and Greece on the modern state are the Christian influences. These are original and organic, the former academic and secondary. Later, indeed, the CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 181 common missionary enterprises, the opposition to Islam, the Crusades, boimd all Christendom together in links of common sacrifice and ideals that could nevermore be forgotten. I have already called attention to the signal services rendered by the Church in all that per- tains to the administration of justice, the corner- stone of human society. In the preservation of the Roman procedure, the new views of the nature and uses of punishment as a ^'medici- nalis operatio," in the obstacle that the right of asylum set against unjust vindictive haste, in the introduction of written evidence, she saved some admirable old elements and added some new ones to the civil life of European peoples. T7ie sanctity of oaths was insisted on by her, and the utmost horror of perjury inculcated. In the great mediaBval veneration for the relics of the saints and martyrs and confessors she found a fresh means of compelling veracity and obedi- ence on the part of the wicked and tyrannical. Many a wild baron or marauding noble cowered when he was asked to swear or promise by the relics of St. Cuthbert or St. Columbanus, St. Genevieve or St. Martin, and gave back ill-gotten gains that a king could not have taken from him. 182 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. VIII. If we would understand well the Middle Ages, we must ever keep in view that in those times public life was dominated by two great functional ideas — the sense of jpersonality and the sense of responsibility. Throughout those centuries, it was the universal persuasion that the final end of society was the perfection of each individual soul, or rather, its individual salvation. Not the comforts of life, nor an increasing refinement and complexity of earthly pleasures, not the scouring of earth and sea to minister to one hour's en- joyment, were the ideals of the best men and women of those times. Neither did they seek in the organic development of the collective unit, the earthly society, their last and sufficient end. To them it seemed that human society was organ- ized, not as an end in itself, but as a means to enable men to know, love, and serve the Master on this earth and be happy with Him in the next. Whatever furthered these views of life was good, and all things were bad or indifferent in the measure that they fell away from or were useless for this end. This is why the great men of the Middle Ages are not its warriors, not its legis- lators, not even its great priests and bishops, but CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 183 its saints. In a closer personal union with God men found the highest uses and meanings of life. It was a temperament essentially spiritual, mys- tic, that forever m^ged men and w^omen to neg- lect, even despise, what was temporary or earthly, to aspire to a world beyond the low horizon of threescore-ten and the grave. Holiness, a god- like purity of mind and heart, thorough detach- ment from the mortal and attachment to the immortal and the divine, was the keynote of this thousand years. During this time it is in saintly men like Patrick, Columbanus, Benedict, Boniface, Nor- bert, Bernard, Thomas of Aquino, Dominic, and Francis of Assisi ; in saintly w^omen like Bridget, Radegunda, Cunegonda, Elizabeth, Catharine of Sienna, that we must look for the fine flower of Christian growth. Since the Renaissance, with its reassertion of the basic principles of pagan- ism, it has been ever more fashionable to tax the Middle Ages with an impossible mysticism, with an unjust contempt for the beauty and comfort of the human body, with a false view of man's relations to the earth on which he lives and sub- sists, and the society to which he necessarily belongs. It is not my purpose just now to de- fend the medioeval view, other than to say that 184 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. they read the gospel simply and candidly, and took this meaning from the teachings of Jesus : that they were to seek first the kingdom of God and the justice thereof ; that they were to imi- tate the earthly life of Jesus Christ; that His precepts and counsels were preferable to all sug- gestions of nature or experience ; that He came on earth to reveal a new and higher life, in which men should be as free of the flesh and its limitations and perversions as God's grace could make them. They read in the gospel the praise and example of virginity, the assurance that the figure of this world passes away like stubble in a furnace, that for every idle word an account should be rendered, that the duties of religion and of char- ity, the devotion of self for others, were obliga- tory on those who would be perfect Christians. They were not always skilled logicians, at least not until Aristotle got a chair in the Christian schools, and they lived more by the heart than by the manual of the statesman or the formulas of the chemist. Therefore, to be brief, the Mid- dle Ages are more a period of noble personalities than of popularized science, a • time of strong, trenchant individualism, when each man and each woman leave a mark on the life about them. There are those who believe that there CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 185 is more magnetism, more genuine inspiration, in such a world and life than in a period of golden but general elevation, when all is mediocre by the mere fact that no one rises much above the general level. Just so, there are those who be- lieve that the rude hard life of the early history of our country developed more superior character than the cosmopolitan perfection we now enjoy ; that the strenuous days of the pioneers brought out more virtue than the finished municipal or- ganism of the present ; that the true use of his- tory consists in the great characters it reveals and uplifts ; that one view of the solitary white peaks of the Rockies is worth a week's journey across the fat plains of the Red River or Manitoba. Just because the view of life popular in the Middle Ages pivoted on personality, it was replete to the saturation point with a seiise of responsibility. How this affected the relations of man with God I have just indicated. It was the true source of sanctity, and its prevalence is shown by the great multitude of holy men and women who meet us on every page of medieval history and in every stage of its evolution. In man's dealings with society, it affected pro- foundly his concept of public office. According to Christian teaching all power comes from God 186 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. and is held for the benefit of one's fellow-mortals. It is not a personal inheritance, a thing trans- missible or to be disposed of by private will. Power over others is vicarious, the act of an agent, and as such its use is to be accounted for. The Church had not to go far to impress that idea on the clergy. It was brought out in letters of gold in the pastoral epistles of St. Paul, who only develops the idea set forth in the gospel. It was otherwise with the civil power. The lucky soldier who rose to wear the imperial purple had no education save that of the camp. The fierce Frank or Burgundian noble who had waded through blood to the high seat of Mero- vingian kingship thought only to enjoy the fruit of his courage and good fortune. But they met a priest at the foot of the throne who warned them that the power was not theirs, but a trust from God ; they heard a voice from the altar on holydays depicting the true kingship, that of David, of Solomon, of Constantine, of Grratian. They met at the council-table venerable bishops and abbots who discussed all methods from a view-point of divine revelation — notably of Christian history and the spirit of Jesus Christ. There was anger enough at this perpetual school- ing, wild outbursts of passion that they could CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 187 have no peace with these obstinate priests, fierce excesses of cruelty and periods of reaction. But the Catholic clergy succeeded in stilling the furnaces of passion that were the barbarian royal hearts, and in creating a public opinion in favor of an ideal Christian ruler. And when once a great ruler like Charlemagne had risen to incar- nate so many Christian public virtues of a master of men, his memory was held in benediction by all, and his shadow fell across all the centuries to come, blotting out the irregular and bloody past, and forecasting the great royal saints of a later day — a Henry of Germany, an Elizabeth af Thuringia, an Edward of England, a Stephen of Hungary, a Louis of France, a Wenceslaus of Bohemia. In time, this practical education of mediaeval rulers became academic, and we have a long catalogue of "instructions" for kings, "warnings" for kings, beginning with the golden booklet of the deacon Agapetus to his master the great Emperor Justinian, and coming down over seven hundred years to the fine treatise attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, " On the Government of Princes." You will see little reference to such in the ordinary histories of pedagogy. Yet they have had profound in- fluence in forming royal youth at a time when 188 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, the happiness of peoples depended much on the personality of their rulers. Public office was therefore a quasi-priestly thing in the Middle Ages, a trust, a deposit, and the proper adminis- tration of it a knightly thing, something to affect the conscience almost like the honor of the soldier or the good name of woman. No doubt there was plenty of human weak- ness, plenty of hideous contradiction of those ideals. But the ideals themselves were held up and even realized. Thereby no European people could fall into utter servitude morally and mentally like the subjects of imperial Rome or the millions of bureaucratic China. In the resplendent gospel of Jesus Christ, in the self- identical and constant teachings of His Church, in the great and shining examples of His saints, there was a source of self-judgment and self- uplifting that could never be quite dried up, and which, from time to time, the Angel of Reform came down and touched with salutary effect. IX. There is a story told of Ataulf, the general of the Goths and the successor of Alaric, the con- queror of Rome, at the beginning of this period, that he had long meditated the extinction of the CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 189 whole Roman power, and the substitution of Gothic life and habits throughout Europe. He was held back from this act by the reflection that without the laws of Rome he could not think of governing the world. Barbarian as he was, he had seized the first principle of good govern- ment, the creation of laws at once stable and equitable, tried by experience and adapted to the circumstances of the age and civilization. In the course of a thousand years Rome had built up such a system — the Roman laio. Tradi- tion, experience, equity, philosophy, religion, had contributed each its share, and the emi- nently practical and sober genius of the Roman people had welded the whole into a fabric that yet stands, the admiration of all thinking men. When the Middle Ages opened, with the military cunning and strength of Rome departed and a dozen barbarian nations camped trium- phantly over the Europe that Rome had subdued and civilized, this law of Rome, the basis of her great Peace and Order, the " Pax Romana " that she had established, was in the greatest danger of perishing. Indeed, it would have perished, save for the Catholic Church. By saving the law of Rome as her own law, she saved to all future society the idea and example, the spirit 190 CATHOLICISM IN THE IIIDBLE AGES. and the principles, of social authority in the State, such as it had been evolved at Rome in the long conflict of peoples and races that kept steadily widening from the Tiber to the extrem- ities of the habitable world. The homely re- publican virtues of Old Rome, the humane and discriminating soul of Greek philosophy, the vast ambitions of the Orient, the tradition of a golden age of equality and simplicity, the pro- found knowledge of the average human mind and its norms of action, a religious respect for distributive justice, a great sense of the utility and loveliness of peace and harmony — all these are so many visible traits or elements of the Roman law that render it applicable in all times to all mankind — -what St. Augustine used to call " human reason itself set down in writing." This law the Catholic Church through Europe elected to live by herself, at a time when every barbarian had the rude law of his own forest or mountains. Wherever a Catholic bishop gov- erned, or a priest went as a missionary, he bore with him the fulness of the law of Rome. It clung to his person when the civil centres were laid desolate, Rome, Milan, London and York, Saragossa, Paris, Trier, Cologne. The law of CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 191 contracts, the law of last wills and testaments, the laws that govern the life of the citizen in the walled town and the peasant in the open field, the general principles and the practical case-law that Rome had been creating from the Rhine to the Euphrates and from the Grampians to Mount Atlas, were now in the custody of the same hands that bore aloft the gospel through the forests of Germany, or uplifted the Christian sacrifice over the smoking ruins of the proudest cities of ancient Europe. It is owing to the Catholic Church that we now enjoy a regular procedure in the administration of law. Our legal procedure is substantially that of the Roman law. The barbarian peoples long detested the regular slow order of Roman justice. They despised the written proof, the summoning of witnesses, the delays, exceptions, and appeals that secure the innocent or helpless from oppression, and compel even the most reluc- tant to acknowledge the justice of condemnation. In all these centuries the Church applied this procedure to her own clerics in every land, and embodied it in the Canon Law that was the same the world over, as Roman law had been the same the world over. The justice of the barbarian was summary, violent, and productive of endless 192 CATffOLICJSM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, vendettas. The terrible German Faustrecht, the Vehmgerichte of the Middle Ages, like the work of OTir lynchmg committees, were a last relic of what was once universal. After the fall of the Koman power, there was no one but the Catholic Church to represent the social authority as such over against the wild and savage feelings of a multitude of barbarians, intoxicated with the glory of conquest and the riches of the degener- ate but luxurious world of Gaul and Italy. When Clovis, the founder of the French mon- archy, was distributing the booty after a great battle, he set aside for himself a tall and precious vase. Thereupon a great Frank stepped out of the ranks, and with his spear shattered the vase in pieces. " King, thou shalt have thy share," he cried, ^^ and no more ! " Clovis swal- lowed his wrath. The next year while reviewing his army, he passed before his bold contradictor, and noticing some negligence about his dress, bade him correct it. As the latter stooped to tie the string of his shoe, the king lifted his own huge spear and drove it through the neck of the soldier. Thus a victorious king admin- istered justice, and it is typical of what went on for centuries through Europe. It was the bishops of the Church who induced CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 193 the barbarians to temper their own laws and customs with the law of Rome. And whatever laws we study — those of France, or Germany, or Spain, or England, or Ireland — we shall find that when we come to the line where they emerge from barbarism or paganism, the transi- tion is effected by Catholic bishops and priests. Throughout the Middle Ages all law was looked on as coming from God, as holy, and therefore in a way subject to the approval and custody of the Church. It was the crown of the moral order, the basis of right conduct, and hence the royal chanceries of Europe were always governed by an ecclesiastic, whose duty it was to enlighten the king's conscience, and to see that neither the gospel nor the spirit of it were infringed. The hasty, vindictive quality of barbarian justice was long tempered by the Right of Asylum, which the churches and great mon- asteries afforded.' The greatest criminals could find shelter there, as in the Cities of Refuge of Israel, if not against punishment, at least against punishment without trial or defence. On the judge's bench one could often see the Catholic bishop, sometimes administering the law of the State by order of the king, sometimes the counsellor of a soldier or noble ignorant of 194 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, law and procedure, sometimes the defender of a town or city overburdened with taxes or tributes, sometimes the lawyer of the oppressed and the innocent. He is the real man of law, the real representative of order and justice, and for many long centuries the whole fabric of society depended on the succession of good and devoted men in the hierarchy of the Church throughout Europe. They kept alive the sanctity of oaths, without which there is no sure justice. The latter is based on the fear of God, and only the Catholic Church could emphasize that idea in those ages of bloodshed and violence. It was well that such men feared something — the anger of God, the wrath of the saints over whose relics they swore, the pains of hell — otherwise there would have been no bounds to the arbitrary excesses of a feudal aristocracy that despised all beneath it, and was ready to cut down with the sword any attempt to domi- nate it. Let any one read the private lives of some Merovingian and Caroling kings, or the annals that tell the story of Italy in the tenth century and again in the fourteenth, and he will see to what depths of impious blasphemy the mediaeval man could sink when he once lost his fear of the Catholic Church. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 195 It was the Catholic clergy who taught these barbarians how to administer society, who wrote out the formulas of government, the charters, the diplomas, the numerous documents needed to carry on the smallest community where there is any respect for property, office, personal rights and duties. From the registry of fields and houses to the correspondence between king and king, between emperor and pope, all the writing of the Middle Ages was long in the hands of the clergy. Thereby they saved to the commonwealths of Europe in their infancy no little remnant of old Roman habits of gov- ernment, traditions of economy, order, equity, that they had taken over from the hands of the laymen of Rome during the fifth century, when the empire was breaking up every year, like a ship upon cruel rocks in a night of storm and despair. In these centuries the frequent synods and councils of the bishops and priests were to the world of Europe what our Parliament and Con- gress are to-day. The brain and the heart of Europe was then the Catholic clergy. In their frequent meetings the barbarian could see how to conduct a public assembly, the distinction of rank and office, the uses of written records and 196 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. documents, the individual self-assertion, and tlie vote by majorities, the appeals to experience, to history, to past meetings, to the law of God in the Old and New Testament. He could see the stern and even justice dealt out by the ecclesi- astics to their own delinquent members — de- position, degradation, exile. He could see how these churchmen, when gathered together, feared no earthly power, and asserted the rights of the poor and the lowly against every oppression, however high placed. He could see how they feared no condition of men, and reproved popu- lar vices as well as royal lust and avarice. He could see how every order and estate in the Church had its right to representation in these synods and councils. The day will come in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when civil par- liaments will arise — the first germs of the great legislative bodies of our day — but their cradle will always remain the mediaeval meeting in which churchmen, and often the laymen with them, laid the first beams of constitutional government. X. When we say that the Catholic Church was the principal almost the only educator of the CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 197 Middle Ages, we assert a fact that to all histo- rians is as evident as sunlight. To begin with, all the schools were hers. Such schools as were saved here and there in Southern France and Northern Italy out of the wreck of the Roman State and Empire were saved by her. Her bish- ops, indeed, from the fifth to the eighth century were more bent on the defence of the weak and the poor than on aught else, on the conquest of the barbarian character, the quenching of its fires of avarice, luxury, lawlessness. Neverthe- less, many were patrons of learning, like St. Avitus of Yienne, from whose writings Milton did not disdain to borrow more than one beauty of his " Paradise Lost " ; St. Caesarius of Aries, a patron of learning whose relative, St. Csesaria, was one of the first to impose on the nuns of her community the copying and illumination of manuscripts ; St. Nicetius of Trier, St. Gregory of Tours, and many other similar men. But, generally, all such men considered that they were in a conflagration, in a storm ; the princi- pal education was that of their wild and fero- cious masters. Let any one read the pages of Gregory of Tours in his Ecclesiastical History of the Franks, or the charming volume of Augus- tine Thierry on the Merovingian kings and their 198 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, courts, and he will understand what a great and hard task lay before these Gallo-Roman bishops, who stood for law and order and civilization, as well as religion, against victorious barbarians whose veneer of refinement only hid the hottest fires of human passion. The schools which every Catholic bishop from the beginning necessarily conducted, in order to keep up an enlightened clergy, were never aban- doned. The archdeacon, in this savage time, looked after them. They are numerous in Gaul, in Italy, in Spain. The classics are studied in them, the history of the Christian Church, the laws of the Church and the State. Schoolmas- ters arose, lil^e Boethius, Cassiodorns, and later the saintly Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Al- cuin, not to speak of the multitude of Irish mas- ters. The manuals and teaching of these men lasted in many places fully one thousand years. It was not the highest standard of learning, but it was all that could be hoped for, and much more than the great majority wanted in a period of blood and iron, when society was a-forming again, and men could seriously ask themselves whether one hour of bestial enjoyment was not worth a century of study. Side by side with the numerous episcopal schools went the little CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 199 schools of the new monasteries, where the nov- ices of the Benedictines, the children of their peasants, those of the nobles who had any ideal- ism, could and did learn the principles and ele- ments of reading, writing, arithmetic, eloquence, music, geometry, and geography. The art of handwriting was kept up, and the skill of the ancients in decorating manuscripts was saved. Out of it, as out of a chrysalis, shall one day come a Ra]Dhael and a Michael Angelo. The bishops profited by the good dispositions of Charlemagne and other upright kings, like Al- fred of England, to inculcate a love of learning and to keep alive their schools and the supply of masters — no easy thing in the darkest days of the Middle Ages, when culture was timid and stay-at-home. Much refinement was kept alive within the peaceful precincts of the nunneries all over Europe. The noble pages of Count Montalembert on the Anglo-Saxon nuns ought to be read by all. The art of embroidery, of lace-working, of delicate handiwork in cloth and leather, the skill in illuminating and the cover- ing of books, the domestic art of cooking, the arts that, flourish in the immediate shadow of the altar, and those nameless graces of adorn- ment that woman bears everywhere with her as 200 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. an atmosphere — all flourished in these homes of virtue, calm and reserved amid the din of war, themselves an element of education in Christian eyes, since they upheld the great basic principles of our religion — self-restraint and self-denial. We shall leave to the Arabs of Spain th'e merit and the credit honestly due them for their refinement and their civilization at a time when Christendom was surely inferior in many ways. But the Christendom of the ninth and tenth centuries was necessarily armed to the teeth against these very Spanish Arabs, in whose blood the new tinge of Greek culture, caught from learned Jews and Oriental Christianity, was too weak surely to withstand the hot current of the desert that surged successfully within them. Christianity has what no other religion has — a divine power of reform, which is nothing else than an uplifting of the common heart to its Divine Founder, a cry of Peccavi, and an honest resolution to live again by His spirit and His principles. It cannot, therefore, sink beneath a certain level, cannot become utterly sensual, utterly barbarous and pagan. The Middle Ages had two schools, wherein the individual heart could always, at any and CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 201 every moment, rise to the highest level — the worship of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and the loving veneration of His Blessed Mother. The former was a perpetual spring of noble conceptions of life, a spur of godliness, an incentive to repentance, a live coal on every altar, whose perfume penetrated all who ap- proached, and attracted and consumed with the holiest of loves the very susceptible hearts of mediaeval men and women not yet " biases " with the deceptions of materialism, yet living in and by faith, yet believing in God, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. All the architecture and fine arts of the Middle Ages are there. They are thank-offerings, creations of love, and as such, stamped with an individual something, a per- sonal note that disappears when faith grows cold. In the "Lauda Sion Salvatorem," of St. Thomas, we hear the most majestic expression of the influence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacra- ment on the daily spiritual life of mediaeval Europe, just as the Duomo of Orvieto reflects His action upon the hearts of the artists of Italy, and the feast of Corpus Christi enshrines forever His plastic transforming power in the widening and deepening of the Christian liturgy. As to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Middle 202 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, Ages were solicited on all sides by the mystery and the beauty of this type. Only once did it enter the mind of man to imagine in one and the same woman the serenity of the noblest matron, the pathos of the most loving mother- hood, and the white splendor of stainless maiden- hood ! Only once did the heavens bend so close to the earth, and leave a human heart glorified as a pledge of their love, as an earnest of their value and their reality, as a souvenir of long- forgotten days of primal innocence and joy 1 With an unerring Greek sense of order and beauty, the earliest Christian artists seized on this new, transforming, moulding idea. They saw in it something sacramental, something that was at once a symbol and a force. Jesus had proclaimed that God was love, and His religion therefore a service of love. In the Maiden Mary that idea of love was tangible, immediate, eloquent, in our poor human way. True, there was the supreme beauty of the Godhead, of Jesus Christ ! But that was an original, flawless, essential beauty. It shone all too remotely, too sternly and solemnly ; the earthly element was there, indeed, but suffering, shot through with hideous streaks of sorrow and debasement. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 203 But here in this type of the Mother and Child that divine love which is the root and the crown of Christianity, its sap and support, is brought within human reach. We can handle its strong fires, as it were, without being scorched or wasted by them.^ Between the puissant Maker, 1 " Bugged and unlovely, indeed, was all that the outward aspect of religion at first presented to the world ; it was the contrast pre- sented by the dim and dreary Catacombs underground to the pure and brilliant Italian sky and the monuments of Roman wealth and magnificence above. But in that poor and mean society, which cared so little for the things of sense and sight, there were nourished §ind growing up — for, indeed, it was the Church of the God of all glory and all beauty, the chosen home of the Eternal Creating Spirit — thoughts of a perfect beauty above this world; of a light and a glory which the sun could never see; of types, in character and in form, of grace, of sweetness, of nobleness, of tenderness, of per- fection, which could find no home in time — which were the eter- nal and the unseen on which human life bordered, and which was to it, indeed, 'no foreign land.' There these Romans unlearned their old hardness and gained a new language and new faculties. Hardly and with difficulty, and with scanty success, did they at first strive to express what glowed with such magnificence to their inward eye, and kindled their souls within them. Their efforts were rude — rude in art, often hardly less rude in language. But that divine and manifold idea before them, they knew that it was a reality ; it should not escape them, though it still baffled them — they would not let it go. And so, step by step, age after age, as it continued to haunt their minds, it gradually grew into greater dis- tinctness and expression. From the rough attempts in the Cata- combs or the later mosaics, in all their roughness so instinct with the majesty and tenderness and severe sweetness of the thoughts which inspired them — from the emblems and types and figures, the trees and rivers of Paradise, the dove of peace, the palms of triumph, the Good Shepherd, the heart no longer ' desiring,' but at last tasting ' the waterbrooks,' from the faint and hesitating adumbrations of the most awful of human countenances — from all 204 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. the omniscient Judge, and our littleness there is interposed a thoroughly human figure of sym- pathy, pity, and tenderness all made up, herself the most lovely creation of the divine hands, and yet the most human of our kind. XI. I make only passing reference to the great universities of the Middle Ages. Every one knows that from Paris to Glasgow, from Bologna to Aberdeen, they are papal creations, living and thriving on the universal character and privileges they drew from the papal recognition. Only a universal world-power like the papacy could create schools of universal knowledge, and lend to their degrees a universal value. I hasten to bring out some less familiar views of the influences of Catholicism as an educational force. There are many kinds of education, and not all of it is gotten from books or under the shadow of the pedagogue's severe visage. these feeble but earnest attempts to body forth what the soul was full of, Christian art passed, with persistent undismayed advance, through the struggles of the Middle Ages to the inexpressible deli- cacy and beauty of Giotto and Fra Angelico, to the Last Supper of Leonardo, to the highest that the human mind ever imagined of tenderness and unearthly majesty, in the Mother and the Divine Son of the Madonna di San Sisto." — Dean Church in "Gifts of Civilization »» (1892), pp. 208-9. CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 205 It is true that the education given by the Catholip Church was very largely for ecclesiastics. Still, there was a great deal more of lay educa- tion than is usually admitted, especially in France and Italy. From the renaissance of the Roman law in the twelfth century, laymen had the most distinguished careers open to them, and as time went on they practically monopo- lized the great wealth that always follows the complication and intricacies of the law. How- ever, the churchmen used their education, on the whole, for the popular good. Every cathedral in Europe luas a seat of good governr)ient. There traditions of justice and equity were administered with an eye to the new needs of the times. There was learning with charity, affection for the multitudes with inherited practice of self- sacrifice. Often the only power to resist the excesses of feudalism and to insist on the com- mon rights of man was the bishop. In his immortal tale of the "Promessi Sposi," Alessandro Manzoni has drawn with a master-hand the portrait of a great bishop in conflict with a feudal master. That this bishop was really Federigo Borromeo, a near relative of St. Charles Borromeo, does not detract from the truth or interest of the portrayal. Every monastery was 206 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. a home of the peaceful arts, domestic and agricultural. The great educational virtues of order, economy, regularity, division of labor, foresight, and the like, were taught in each to- gether with other useful virtues,/ like patience, humility, submission — those elements of the poor man's philosophy that are as useful to-day when a Tolstoi preaches them, as they were when Christ gave the 'example that alone makes them practicable, and as they will be when the hot fevers of our changing conditions have burned out, and we settle down again to one of those long cycles of social immobility that have their function in the vast round of human life, as sleep has in the daily life of the individual. By its very nature, the details of the popular educa- tion of the Middle Ages escape us. There are no written annals for the poor and the lowly. Yet all over Europe there went on daily a profitable education of the masses as to their true origin and end, the nature value and uses of life, the nature and sanctity of duty, calling, estate. Every church was a forum of Christian politics, where the people were formed easily and regularly by thousands of devoted parish priests, whose names are written in the Book of Life, who walked this earth blamelessly, and who were CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 207 the true schoolmasters' of European mankind in the days of its infancy and first helpless youth. Let any one read " Ekkehard/' the noble historical romance of Victor Scheffel, and the still nobler poem of Weber, " Dreizehnlinden," and he will see, done by two. hands of genius, the process that is otherwise written in all the chronicles and laws of Europe, in all its institutions, and the great facts of its history as far as they affect the interests of the people. The countless churches, chapels, oratories, were like so many open museums and galleries, where the eye gained a sense of color and outline, the mind a wider range of historical information, and the heart many a consolation. They were the books of the people, fitted to their aptitudes, located where they were needed, forever open to the reaper in the field, the tired traveller on his way, the women and children of the village or hamlet. They were so many silent pulpits, out of which the loving Jesus looked down and taught men from His cross, from His tabernacle, the true education of equality, fraternity, patience — all healing virtues of His great heart. From Otranto to Drontheim, from the Hebrides and Greenland to the Black Sea, there went on this effective preaching, this largest possible edu- 208 CATHOLICISM liV THE MIDDLE AGES, cation for real life. In it whole peoples were the pupils, and the Catholic Church was the mistress. When it was done, out of semi- savages she had made polite and industrious nations ; out of ignorant and brutal warriors she had made Christian knights and soldiers; out of enemies of the fine arts and their rude destroyers she had made a new world of most cunning artificers and craftsmen; out of the scum and slime of humanity that the Roman beat down with his sword and the Greek drew back from with horror, she had made gentle- men like Bayard and ladies like Blanche of France and Isabel of Castile. In the history of mankind this was never seen before, and will, perhaps, never be seen again. How was the wonder accomplished that the Slav, dreamy and mystical, should feel and act like the fierce and violent Teuton; that the highly individual and romantic Keltic soul should suffer the yoke of Roman order and discipline? How came it about that all over Europe there was a common understanding as to the principles of life, of mutual human rela- tions, of the dealings of one society with an- other? How could it be that the word of an aged man at Rome should be borne with the CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 209 swiftness of the wind to every little church, to every castled crag, to every forgotten ham- let and remote valley of the Alps or the Pyre- nees^ and be listened to with reverence and submission? How was this absolute conquest, for conquest it was, of the human heart ac- complished ? Yery largely by the Liturgy of the Catholic Church. It was a conquest of prayer, the public prayer of the Catholic Church. This organized worship of God lies at the basis of all European civilization, and it is the just boast of Catholicism, that such as it is, it is her work. When we take up a Roman Missal, we take up the book that more than any other transformed the world of barbarism. In it lie the ordinary public worship of the Catholic Church, the service of the Mass, the gospels broken up into short paragraphs, the marrow of the life-wisdom of the Old Testament, the deposit of world-ex- perience that her great bishops and priests had gained, profound but true comments of the Church herself, hymns of astonishing beauty, tenderness, and rapture, prayers that are like ladders of light from the heart of man to the feet of his Maker. It is this public prayer that ensouled every church, from the wooden chapels 210 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. of Ireland or Norway to the high embossed roof of Westminster or Cologne. This prayer first inflamed the heart of the priest, and put into his mouth a tongue of irresistible conviction, and, therefore, of unction and eloquence. After allj it was nothing but the Scripture of the Old and the New Testament; but it was the Scripture announced, spoken, sung, preached ; the Scrip- ture appealing to the public heart with every art that man was capable of using to make it triumph. There was never a more profound historical error than to imagine that the Middle Ages were igno- rant of the Scriptures. Let any one who yet labors under the delusion read the (epoch-making book of two learned writers, Schwarz and Laib, on the Poor Man's Bible in the Middle Ages. So there grew up the concept of solidarity, of a Christian people bound together by ties holier and deeper than race, or tongue, or nationality, or human culture could create — a sense of mu- tual responsibility, a public conscience, and a public will. What is hioion as piihlic opinion is in reality a mediaeval product, for then first the world saw all mankind, of Europe at least, possessed of common views and conscious of their moral value and necessity. In so far as public opinion is an educational CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 211 force, it is the result of those frequent appeals that the clergy of the Middle Ages made to a higher law and a higher order of . ideas than hu- man ingenuity or force could command — it is the result of a thousand conflicts like those about royal marriages and divorces that at once rise to a supernatural level, of as many dead-locks like that between Henry IV. of Germany and Gregory VII., where the independence, the very existence, of the spiritual power was at stake. The only weapons of the Church were moral ones, popular * faith in her office and her rights, universal popu- lar respect for her tangible and visible services, popular affection for her as the mystical Bride of Christ, a popular conviction that she alone stood between armed rapacity and the incipient liberties of the people. XII. There is a very subtle and remarkable educa- tional influence of the Catholic Church that is not often appreciated at its full value — I mean her share in the preservation and formation of the great modern vernaculars^ such as English, German, Irish, the Slavonic tongues. Even languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, 212 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, the Eomance tongues, formed from the every- day or rustic Latin of the soldiers and the traders of Rome, her peasants and slaves, owe a great deal to the affection and solicitude of the Church. In all these tongues there was always a certain amount of instruction provided for the people. The missionaries had to learn them, to explain the great truths in them, and to deal day by day with the fierce German, the turbulent Slav, the high-spirited Kelt. It has always been the policy of the Catholic Church to respect the natural and traditional in every people so far as they have not gotten utterly corrupted. From Csedmon down, the earliest monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature are nearly all ecclesiastical, ancj all of it has been saved by ecclesiastics. The earliest extensive written monument of the German tongues is the famous Heliand or paraphrase of the gospel, all imbued with the high warlike spirit of the ancient Teutons. All that we have of the old Gothic tongue, the basis of German philology, has come down to us through the translation of the Bible by the good Bishop Ulfilas out of the Vulgate into Gothic, or from the solicitude of St. Colum- banus and his Irish companions to convert the Arian Goths of Lombardy. These languages CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 213 were once rude and coarse ; they got a high content, the thought of Greece and Rome, through the- Catholic churchman. They took on higher and newer grammatical forms in the same way. Spiritual ideas entered them, and a whole world of images and linguistic helps came from a knowledge of the Scriptures that were daily expounded in them. Through the Old Testament the history of the world entered these tongues as explained by Catholic priests. Their pagan coarseness and vulgarity were toned down or utterly destroyed. St. Patrick and his bishops and poets, we are told, exam- ined the Brehon Law of the Irish and blessed it, except what was against the gospel or the natural law. Then he bade the poet Dubtach put a thread of verse about it, that is, cast it into metrical form. The first Irish mission- aries in Germany, like St. Gall and St. Kilian, spoke to the people both in Latin and in Ger- man, and it is believed that the first German dictionary was their work, for the needs of preaching and intercourse. Some shadow of the majesty of Rome thus fell upon the modern tongues from the beginning, some infusion of the subtleness and delicacy of the Greek mind fell to their lot. The mental toil and victory 214 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. and glory of a thousand years were thus saved, at least in part. The Catholic Church was the bridge over which these great and desirable goods came down in a long night of confusion and disorder. The great epics of France and Germany, the Chansons de Geste, were saved in the monasteries or with the connivance of monks, to whom the wandering singers were very dear in spite of their satire and free tongues. The " Chanson de Eoland," the " Lied of the Nibelungs," the '' Lied of Gudrun," the great Sagas and Edda of the Northland, owe their preservation and no little of their content, color, and form, to the interest of monks and churchmen in the saving of old stories, old fables, and old genealogies, especially after the first period of national conversion had gone by. We have yet in Irish a lovely tale, the " Colloquy of Ossian with St. Patrick," in which the average sympathy of the Old Irish cleric for the relics of the past and his just sense of their spirit and meaning are brought out very vividly and picturesquely. It is in the Romance languages that the noble institution of chivalry that Leon Gau- tier has so perfectly described found its best expression -, that the roots of all modem poetry CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 215 that will live are now known to lie; that the introspective and meditative phases of the literary spirit first showed- themselves on a large scale ; that the intensely personal note of Christianity comes out quite free and natural, unattended by that distracting perfection of form that the classic Latin and Greek could not help offering ; that purely personal virtues like courage, honor, loyalty in man, fidelity, tenderness, gentleness, moral beauty in woman, are brought out as the highest natural goods of life, in contradiction to the Greek and Koman who looked on the great political vir- tues and the commonwealth, the State itself, as the only fit ideals of humanity. Thereby, to say the least, they excluded the weaker sex from its due share in all life and from public recognition of those excellencies by which alone it could hope to shine and excel. One day the labor of ages blossomed in a perfect and centen- nial flower, the '^ Divina Commedia " of Dante, that has ten thousand roots in the daily life, the common doctrine and discipline of the Catholic Church, and remains forever an unap- proachable document of the mediaeval genius, indeed, but also the immortal proof of how thoroughly the Catholic Church had educated 216 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. the popular mind and heart in all that was good, true, and worthy of imitation, in antiquity as well as in the history that then as now men were making from day to day. He was con- scious himself that heaven and earth had built up the poem in his great heart. Perhaps he was also conscious that God was making of him another Homer, another Vergil, out of whose glorious lines all future ages should, even de- spite themselves, drink a divine ichor — the spirit of Jesus Christ as exemplified in Cathol- icism. XIII. Under the aegis of this extraordinary power of the Church, there grew up a common mental cultu/re, based on religion and penetrated with its spirit. There was one language of scholarship and refinement — the Latin — that often rose to a height not unworthy of its original splendor. Something common and universal marked all the arts, and the workman of Italy or Germany might exercise his craft with ease and profit in England or Spain. Within the Catholic fold the freedom of association was unlimited, not only for religious purposes, but for all economic and artistic ones as well. Human energy es- CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 217 sayed every channel of endeavor, and in some, notably in architecture, has never soared so high in the centuries that followed. One result of this solidarity of thought and purpose was the creation of what we call the Westejii mind and spirit, a complex ideal view of life that differs from the past views of Greek and Roman, as it is in many respects opposed to the life-philosophy of the Eastern worjd. Human liberty and equality, hopefulness in progress, a spirit of advance, of self-reliance — an optimism, in other words — are among its connoting marks. All this is older and deeper than anything of the last three or four centuries. It was in the Catholic Italian Columbus, ventur- ing out upon the unknown ocean, and his Portu- guese predecessors, in the Conquistadori, in the endless attempts to penetrate China and the East from Marco Polo and the Franciscan mis- sionaries down, in the Crusaders, in the long and successful resistance of Hungary, Poland, and Austria to the advance of Islam. Here, indeed, the Western world owes a debt of gratitude to those who arrested the teachings and the spirit of the camel-driver of Mecca. No one saw bet- ter than the bishops of Rome that the world might not stand still ; that the eternal antithesis 218 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. of the East and West was on again; that the fierce impact of Islam breaking against the walls of Constantinople was nothing in comparison with its boglike encroachments at every point of con- tact with Europe. It is a pathetic tale — their tears, implorings, and objurgations. Something they accomplished. But if the Oriental problem is still quivering with life ; if \Yestern civiliza- tion, that is in all essentials Catholic civilization, has to go again at the mighty task — but this time from the setting sun instead of from Jeru- salem and St. Jean d'Acre — it is because one day, shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1452, the powers of Europe left the Bishop of Rome at Ancona call on them in vain to go out with the little pontifical fleet and retake from the unspeakable Turk the city of Constantino- ple. Pius II., not the kings of Europe, was the real statesman, as every succeeding decade shows. However, the popes estopped the fatalism and dry rot of Islam from the possession of the Danube; they loaned indirectly to the Grand Dukes of Muscovy the strength out of which they one day carved the office of Czar; their influence was felt in all the Balkan peninsula ; their city was the one spot where an intelligent and disinterested observation of events by the CATHOLICISM IJSf THE MIDDLE AGES. 219 Golden Horn went on. Better, after all, a thou- sand times, a Europe torn by domestic religious dissension, than a Europe, perhaps an America, caught in the deadly anaconda-folds of Islam, that never yet failed to smother all mental and civil progress, and has thereby declared itself the most immoral of all religious forces known to history ! XIY. Other phases there are of Catholicism as a plastic formative power in the life of the peoples of Europe, as the creator of their distinctive in- stitutions ; they may come up for brief notice at another time. Thus, the institution of chivalry, with its mystic* idealization of woman ; the ever- increasing authority and influence of woman herself; the honor of saintly character, essen- tially, like woman, unwarlike ; the function of the pilgrim, the monk, the papal envoy, as dis- seminators of general views and principles ; the publication of great papal documents, with their lengthy arguments ; the multitude of friars draw- ing their office and authority from a central source and upholding its prestige at every village cross; the history of the Church as related from ten thousand pulpits ; the genuine 220 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. influence of the great festivals, general and local ; the public penances ; the frequent strik- ing renunciation of high office and worldly com- forts ; the frequent reformation of manners ; the increasing use of objects of piety, of the fine arts, as a spur or a lever for devotion — all these and other agencies were everywhere and at once at work, and helped to give the mediaeval life that intense charm of motion, color, and variety that every student of history must always find in it. THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. AccoEDiNG to very venerable legends the gospel was preached in Southern India by the Apostle St. Thomas. The ancient Acts of St. Thomas relate in minute detail his journeys in farther India, and the critics Cunningham, Gutschmid, and Sallet have recognized in several of the royal names mentioned in these semi- Gnostic legends those of actual Indian rulers contemporary with the apostle. It is certain that previous to 535 a.d. the Christian traveller Cosmos Indicopleustes found Christian com- munities in three places in India — Ceylon, Meliapore, and Kaljani (north of Bombay). There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the claim of the Malabar Christians that they were first converted by St. Thomas. For centuries they have shown his great sepulchre on Mount St. Thomas, in the suburbs of Madras, though it is claimed by many that his body was eventually translated to Edessa, in Mesopotamia. He is said to have founded seven churches on the Malabar coast, and to have penetrated as far as 221 222 THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. Madras, where he converted Sagan, the king of the country. A column used to be shown at Quilon, on the Malabar coast, said to have been erected by St. Thomas. He died by the hand of a Brahmin, who pierced him with a lance as he was praying on the mountain which bears his name. Philostorgius relates that a certain Arian bishop, Theophilus, was sent about 340 A.D. to the ^^ innermost parts of India," and a local tradition of long standing on the Malabar coast places at this epoch (345 a.d.) the mission to India of the famous Mar Thomas Cama, or Cana, who is described by some as an Armenian merchant, by others as a Canaanite, or as a native of Jerusalem. It was precisely the period when Sapor II. persecuted most cruelly the Christians of Persia. ' The Christian communities of India are in any case of very ancient origin. Before the end of the second century Christianity was spread over the neighboring Persia or the ancient Parthia. At the same time the Christians had at Edessa a powerful and intelligent propaganda, which could not overlook the extreme Orient. The trade caravans going and coming, the Hellenic influences yet working since the death of Alexander, the ubiquitous Jewries, made the in- TBE CHRISTIANS OF ST: THOMAS. 223 troduction of Cliristianity into farther India a natural and easy undertaking. Whoever was the first apostle of the Malabar Christians, the churches of Syria and Persia carried on the work. They call themselves yet Suriani or Syrians. The Syriac tongue is their liturgical language ; they use the Syriac version of the Scriptures ; they follow the Syro-Chaldaic rite ; and they adopted the heresy of Nestorius from the fugitive Syrians and Persians of the fifth and following centuries. Besides the continuous tradition, local monuments confirm the antiquity of the Christian religion in India ; crosses, symbolic images of the Trinity, inscriptions in Pahlavi, whose contents are as old as the fifth century, bear witness to a once flourishing state of Christianity. Being outside of the Roman Empire, our ordinary authorities know little of them. Yet the mediasval Christians never for- got their existence. We learn from the Saxon Chronicle and other sources how AKred the Great sent presents to 'them about the end of the ninth century, and how Swithelm, Bishop of Sherburne, bearer of the royal alms, brought back to the king Oriental pearls and aromatic liquors. The early Italian missionaries of the fourteenth century were surprised to find Christian 224 THE CHEISTlAJSfS OF ST. THOMAS. communities in the Malabar cities regarded as socially equal to tlie Brahmins and holding high positions in the State. Marco Polo heard of them at the end of the thirteenth century, and mentions the little church of St. Thome, yet in existence in the town of the same name near Madras. Since the year 1500 the Portuguese have cultivated most intimate relations with this peculiar people. These early European discoverers were astonished to find Christian settlements at the end of the world, with pilgrimages, pious hymns, and, above all, an ecclesiastical architecture quite different from the pagoda style of the Indian temples. Their little churches, scattered here and there in the mountainous interior, have steep roofs, unknown elsewhere in India, ogee arches, buttresses, choirs ornamented with wooden sculptures, altars, and the like. They are fre- quently built of the indestructible teak wood, and remind one of the ancient wooden churches of Ireland, England, and Norway. It is clear that the models of these churches were not Indian, but Syro-Byzantine structures — just such buildings as those to which we owe the earliest dawnings of Gothic architecture. . The Christians of St. Thomas possessed only the sac- THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS, 225 raments of baptism, eucharist, and orders when they were discovered by the Portuguese. That of penance was unknown to them, but they venerated the relics of the saints, and had pilgrimages, especially to the grave of St. Thomas, the holiest spot in the remote Orient. They kept the Scriptures in the churches only, blessed holy water by dissolving in it some earth from the sepulchre of their apostle, made the sign of the cross from left to right, laid great stress on the blessings of their priests or Cassan- ars, and used no vestments save a long linen garment at the celebration of Mass, for which they employed cocoa wine and bread mixed with oil and salt. They had an intense veneration for the holy cross, which even yet plays a great part in their domestic and social lives, but did not venerate other images. Their priests were ignorant, simoniacal, and fanatically national and local in their views. During the sixteenth century many efforts were made to bring these interesting people into the Koman fold, to make them abandon their Nes- torian heresy and adopt the rites and language of the Western Church. A seeming success was obtained in 1599 at the Synod of Diamper, and the seventy-five parishes and two thousand 226 THE CHBISTIANS OF ST, THOMAS, churches were finally incorporated with the Catho- lic conununion. Since then their Catholic bishops are of the Latin rite, though the clergy is native. In the course of the seventeenth century national feeling, dislike of the Portuguese habits and juris- diction, the intrigues of Oriental schismatics and Dutch traders, aroused much bitterness in these venerable little communities. The Carmelites took charge of the mission about 1663, and did much to restore harmony and union with Rome, though they could not heal the great schism which had taken place ten years earlier, and which lasts to this day among the Jacobite Christians of the territory. The unhappy con- flicts between the popes and the Portuguese hierarchy of India in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and the grave troubles arising from the discussion of the Malabar cus- toms in the eighteenth, were not calculated to edify the Christians of St. Thomas, always more or less restless under a foreign and Western yoke. But the large freedom enjoyed by the Catholic missionaries since the British conquest of India has produced its results, and the influ- ence of the Roman Church is spreading once more among these most ancient of Christian communities. The diocese of Cranganore, estab- THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 227 lished in 1605 for their' spiritual direction, was suppressed in 1838 by Gregory XVI. This was one of the ' many griefs which brought about the schism of Goa. Since then they have been governed by vicars apostolic, not without inter- ference on the part of the Goan clergy. In 1887 Leo XIII. established two new vicariates for the Syro-Malabar Catholic population, which is now about 210,000, with nearly 400 native clergy and 340 churches and chapels. The vicars apostolic are bishops of the Latin rite, but each is bound to have a vicar general of the Syro-Malabar rite. There were lately 160,000 adhering to the Monophysite heresy, which they adopted in the seventeenth century in lieu of Nestorianism, and some 30,000 who cling to the Mellusian schism caused by the Vatican Council. The Christians of St. Thomas have preserved their unity and independence by a severe church discipline. The weapon of excommunication is seldom used in vain. They retain the most tender of ancient Christian customs — the Agape or Jove-feast. On great feasts and solemn occa- sions a simple banquet is eaten in the church by all the people, and the missionaries delight in describing the piety and recollection then 228 THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. exhibited. They perform public penance, as in the earlier days of the Church, give abundantly of their means to religion, practise evangelical charity, and, at least in the interior, maintain a great purity of manners. The young girls are always dowered either by the community or the church. Their government is that of a tribu- tary republic, or rather a theocratic democracy. Formerly they constituted a high caste. The jewellers, metal-workers, and carpenters appealed to them as their natural protectors. They alone shared with the Brahmins and Jews the privi- lege of travelling on elephants. They live by agriculture and fishery. Many are dealers in cocoa, spices, and the like. The Zamorin or ruler of the country esteems them highly for their bravery, intelligence, and sprightly char- acter. The very ancient Peramal dynasty of Malabar caused the privileges of the Christians of St. Thomas to be engraved on six bronze tablets, which were shown at the famous synod of Diamper. Later they were lost by fault of the Portuguese, only to be rediscovered in 1807 after the capture of Cochin. They are now kept at Cottayam, but copies of them are in the University Library of Cambridge. The sad but charming story of the Malabar THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 229 Christians is told in many books. The original documents may be found in Assemani's " Bibli- otheca Orientalis/' while the details of their later history are well related by the Carmelite Fathers Vincenzo Maria and Paulinus of St. Barthelemy, as well as by La Croze and Ger- mann, from a hostile view-point. Carl Ritter has collected a multitude of details in his great geographical work on Asia, and the missionary reviews and bulletins of our own century con- tain much that is of interest concerning a Chris- tian people whose unbroken lineage dates back to the time of Constantine the Great and the Council of Nice, if not to the apostolic age, when the sound of the fishermen's voices went out into every land. THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER.^ The Younger Pliny tells us that only an ar- tist may criticise the works of art, but all man- kind may pass judgment on the lives of men who are friends of humanity. Such lives, how- ever short, never melt into the general void, but shed forever a sweet aroma within the circle of their rememberers. And when such lives are prolonged beyond the patriarchal limit they serve as beacon lights, as finger posts, to all who must travel the same pathway in the future. As I listened to the eloquent gentlemen who have preceded me, and noted the gains which the cause of popular education has made within the present century, my mind, somehow, re- verted to a not dissimilar situation in the remote past, to the very dawn of our modern civiliza- tion. Then, as at the opening of this century, a world lay before the restorers of civilization; 1 Discourse delivered at Hartford, Conn., January 25, 1897, on the occasion of the celebration of the eighty-sixth anniversary of the birth of Dr. Henry Barnard, one of the founders of the common school system of the United States. 230 TEE MEDIEVAL TEACHER. 231 then a mass of civil and religious ruin was added to the obstacles of nature ; then the usual difficulties of State building were increased by the immensity of the debris and the utter raw- ness of the material for the foundation work. The pioneers of education in the United States found at hand Christian character, doctrines, dis- cipline of life, knowledge of good and evil, vir- tue and vice, an educated sense of justice and a respect of law, ancient and familiar models to imitate, and unity of race and language. But the pioneers of education in Europe found none of these — they were as men who go out upon a dark and pathless sea without chart or compass or light. Then, again, it struck me that if ever the law of continuity be true of institutions in particu- lar, it is especially so in the history of educa- tion, so that whatever institution has been enabled to reach the present, and to flourish with promise of future growth, must have its roots in its own remote past, and must keep in touch with the long-tried laws of its life-history, if it would hope for permanent efficacy. The present is ever the child of the past, in human institutions as in human conduct. It may not therefore be^ amiss to go back a few moments to 232 THE MEDIEVAL TEACHEB. the days when those European ancestors from whom we are all descended were laying the beams of State and Church, when they were emerging from their swamps and their marches, to take up the municipal life of the Roman provin- cials, and to transform the essential paganism of the Roman State into a system of politico-social life imbued with the pure and vital spirit of Christianity. Perhaps, too, in celebrating the history of a century of education it is not out of place that a Catholic priest should say some- thing of the incomparable educational merits of that institution which has seen the rise and fall of so many systems of education, and which alone on earth to-day can bear trustworthy per- sonal witness to the history of human hopes and ideals for nigh two thousand years. The Christian teacher of the Middle Ages! It is Boethius and Cassiodorus in Italy, men who collect with reverence the elements of classic science and the principles of human wis- dom, to hand them down to a time of wider peace and more varied opportunities — Roman men of the best classic type, from that Italy in which the lamp of scholarship never went utterly out, and in which the system of schools was never quite suspended. It is Isidore of THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER, 233 Seville in Spain, the great Bede and Alcuin in England, Colchu and Dicuil in Ireland. Their knowledge was what we now call encyclopaedic, and such, too, was their method. They affected the manual and the cultivation of the memory, — but we must remember that they were deal- ing with races young in culture, physically vig- orous, and strongly attracted to a manifold external activity ; also that they lived in an iron age of change and war, and that no mean of political stability had yet been reached around them. So they opened their little schools, sometimes in the palace of king or count, oftener in the cathedral-close or the cloister of the abbey. Municipal life and civil architecture were yet in embryo — peace, and books, and rewards, and a logical career were as yet furnished by the Church alone. Often, too, they were clerics, and they taught on feasts and holy days a divine learning, the complement and sanction of their rudiments of human science. On such occasions they had for scholars the rude lords of the soil and the slow tillers thereof, coarse men-at-arms, who were charmed with the teacher's high views of history and human society, his varied learning and his skill in speech. 234 THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER, Such a teacher knew Latin well, and some- times Greek. He was skilled in the chm-ch- song. And so he trained the little choristers and the youthful clerics in the history and litera- ture of the world's mightiest State, and he fitted them to hold the highest offices in the powerful ecclesiastical society that enclosed and protected on all sides the growing body of mediaeval States. His students w^ere legion, for progress and cul- ture were then synonymous with the churches and monasteries that were springing up in every Christian State of Europe. He taught arithmetic and geometry, which latter included the elements of mechanics and architecture, sculpture, and painting. Astronomy, too, was to be had in his school, and all such mathematical knowledge as was needed for ecclesiastical purposes. The study of grammar meant a liberal education in the classic texts used, for by grammar was meant an all-sided interpretation of them. With it went the study of music, no small element in th^ gradual softening of domestic manners; and the development of mediaeval art. Dialectic, or the art of correct thought, and rhetoric, or that of ornate and persuasive speech for the public good, were favorite studies — indeed, all these branches made up the seven liberal arts, THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER, 235 or the perfect cycle of education as the Middle Ages understood it, and loved to symbolize it in its miniatured manuscripts, on the sculptured portals of its cathedrals, or the carved bases of its pulpits. The inseparable text-book of the mediaeval teacher was Vergil, and his majestic Latin the highest scientific ideal. Yet by the devotion to Vergil he prepared the ground for the blossoming of the vernacular tongues, whose first great mas- ters had learned from the Latin classics the adorable art of correct* and pleasing speech. What a distance between the jabbering bar- barians whom St. Gall met at Constanz and the author of the " Nibelungen Lied " or the " Chan- son de Roland " ! In the five or six centuries of classic formation that intervenes, somebody has taught these men the highest architectonic of literature. It was the mediaeval teacher with his Vergil and his Bible, his childlike faith and his true artistic sense. If we could doubt it, the witness of Dante would be there to convince us, for to that crowning glory of mediaeval teaching Vergil is ever the " Maestro e Duca," the " dolce pedagogo " from whom he has taken " lo bello stile che m'ha f atto onore." Civil society was also the debtor of such a 236 THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER. teacher. It was he who preserved the text and the intelligence of the Civil Law of Rome, as confirmed in the Code of Justinian, and he helped to amalgamate with it the rude customs and precedents of the wandering tribes that had squatted on the imperial soil. He taught the fingers of Frank and Gothic soldiers how to form letters, and he taught their children how to draw up the necessary formulas for the con- duct of public and private interests — charters, laws, wills, contracts, privileges, and the like. Nor was he ashamed to handle the imple- ments of the fine arts, like a St. Eloi and a Bernward of Hildesheim, and to fashion count- less objects that translated into material form the ideal beauty which haunts forever, though forever unattained, the heart of man. Even the domestic arts — agriculture, fishery, road and canal making, irrigation — all the humble arts that bring men closer together, and develop the social instinct, and enable men to dominate the pitiless grinding forces of nature, were taught the people by these men, as endless references in the mediaeval annals show, from the Orkneys to the Black Sea. It is the glory of the Old Church that these teachers were her priests and her monks, and THE MEDIEVAL TEACHEB, 237 that in every land she cherished them by her councils and by her endowments. If she had nothing else to be proud of, that would be much indeed. It w^as said of Melanchthon, and before him of good old Jacob Wimpheling, that he was " Praeceptor Germanic." It might be said with greater truth and wider application that the Old Church was " Praeceptor totius Occidentis," the universal teacher of Europe from the Vistula to the Scheld, from Otranto to Drontheim. One might imagine that in those troublous times such men would be pardoned had they paid little attention to the philosophy of educa- tion, to methodology, and to general pedagogics. But the truth is far otherwise. We have in every century a number of pedagogical treatises of a general or specific character, on schools and teachings in general, on the formation of the nobles or the ecclesiastics, all of which breathe the most sincere devotion to the teacher'^ vocation. Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Sedulius of Liege, are but a few of these writers, and in the thirteenth century there is an entire galaxy of writers on pedagogics, whose treatises are far from despic- able and are indeed worthy of veneration when we recall the extent of their actual influence. On the eve of the Reformation appear the ad- 238 TBE MEDIEVAL TEACHER. mirable treatises of Silvio Antoniano and Jo- hannes Dominici, two cardinals, of Maphgeus Vegius, JEnesiS Sylvius (Pius II.), Erasmus, and Vives, while the teaching and the system of the Brothers of the Common Schools in the Nether- lands and along the Rhine are the admiration of all the historians of that time. At the same time the secondary education throughout North- ern Europe, notably in England and Scotland, had reached a high degree of development quite independent of the movement of the Renais- sance. But here we are at the end of the Mid- dle Ages; the vocation of its teachers, though not gone, has changed; the whole theory of education is about to pass over into other hands, and to be informed by a new spirit, born of the circumstances and needs that followed the great religious upheaval and the shattering of the Catholic unity. Still for a thousand years the mediaeval teachers had worked at the formation of the men and women of Europe. And if, in any art, one may turn with pride to the masterpieces as proofs of the skill and the training of the artist, we may do so in a special manner in the art which Gregory the Great called the art of arts — the government of souls. Great ecclesiastics TBE MEDIEVAL TEACHEB, 239 and prudent statesmen, saints and bishops and popes, princes and kings of high repute, came out of their schools, as well as a brave and patient people, artistically endowed, lovers of poetry and art and all the higher graces of the mind, dowered with strong faith, and accus- tomed to bear the crowding ills of this life by the contemplation of a better one. Names rush to one's lips, but I forbear to recite them — ■ I will only say that we cannot afford to forget or neglect any system of study by which the world was enriched with such philosophers and theolo- gians as St. Thomas and Duns Scotus, such his- torians as Otto of Freising and Froissart, such poets as Dante and Chaucer, such architects as Arnulf of Cambrai and Brunelleschi, such states- men as Suger and St. Louis. It is on such names, no less than on the fabric of Church and State strengthened and developed by them, that the imperishable reputation of the Mediaeval Teach- ers may be allowed to rest. THE BOOK OF A MEDIAEVAL MOTHER. In face of the incredible output of modern pedagogical literature, few reflect that the Mid- dle Ages had a respectable series of books on the education of children. From the works of good old Cassiodorus and Ennodius of Pavia in the sixth century down to the days of St. Thomas of Aquino and St. Bonaventure, there is quite a library of " Instructions," " Discourses,'* " Moni- tions," and the like ; sometimes addressed to the public in general, sometimes drawn up for the formation of royal youth. The Middle Ages heard less talk about methods of education ; were less accessible to the thousand whims and vagaries that get themselves accepted by igno- rant or careless municipalities, only to rouse in the end a sense of disgust and shame. They laid, and rightly, more stress on the ethical views of life — duty, calling, responsibility, right and wrong; and were unable to conceive any education that was not framed on the basic principles of immortality, revelation, and final 240 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 241 judgment. This world was God's footstool, and the generations of mankind were His beloved children journeying ever to a condition of end- less joy, of perfect and enduring love. So the Middle Ages educated first the heart of man. For this they had many pedagogical in- struments — the moulding power of personality and example instead of a feeble bureaucratic imperialism of text-books' and manuals, the chastening action of great penances and of sub- lime renouncements. They had, too, the assidu- ous reading of the Scriptures, at least in the venerable and familiar Latin of the Vulgate. They had the "Lives of the Saints" — -a celes- tial pedagogy for every class and calling. They had the rules of monastic orders and brother- hoods, the monuments that an all-transforming faith incessantly uplifted in every Christian land — churches, cathedrals, monasteries, with all the lovely handicraft that educated eye and hand, heart and brain. They had the educating con- troversies of the empire and the priesthood, with their extensive literature ; they had the wars of the Crusades with their expansive influences; the luxurious wild growth of the vernacular tongues ; the powerful compressive action of the Latin tongue beneficial to thought and expres- 242 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER, sion. Heresy, Islam, the missions, kept open and active the minds of the men of the West. We must not imagine that thinkers hke Albertns Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Raymund Luhus were so very rare merely because their names or their lucubrations have not reached us. " All literature," says Goethe, " is only a frag- ment of fragments." We know now that the Roman schools of Northern Italy and Southern France never quite interrupted their traditions of teaching, either in curriculum or method ; that the Irish teachers of the eighth and ninth centuries were the saving bridge of several secular sciences ; that the monasteries sheltered scholars, sciences, books — above all the spirit and passion of learning, the holy root from which knowledge springs eternal. Who created that positively new thing in education — the University — but the priests, students, abbots, and bishops of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies, quite in keeping with the Zeitgeist? One of the most curious pedagogical monu- ments of the Middle Ages is the " Liber Manua- lis," the work of a woman — Dodana, Duchess of Septimania (Southern France), in the ninth century. Not that the women of that century were unable to read and write — at least a THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTH^B. 243 number of the more distinguished in society, and all those who lived in the numerous monas- teries or were sent there for a better training. Whoever has read '^ Ekkehard," the beautiful historical romance of Scheffel, knows the wide field of woman's activity at this time. The genial and contemporary chronicler, Einhard, has left us a pen-picture of the education of the daughters of Charlemagne, that must have been true of many other women, noble and plebeian. It was long thought that Dodana was a daughter of Charlemagne ; but recent researches of Leopold Delisle, the eminent mediaevalist, leave little doubt of the falsity of this opinion. In any case, she was a lady of high birth ; for in 824 she was married, in the imperial palace at Aix-la-Chapelle, to Bernard, the young Duke of Aquitania and Septimania and Count of Barcelona, son of William of Gellone, one of the great warriors of Charlemagne — another Charles the Hammer, who cleared the Riviera of Arabs, fixed his standard in their city of Barce- lona, and died a Benedictine and a saint. He enjoys the additional later glory of a vast epic " Chanson de Geste," written in honor of '^ Guil- laume au court nez." From the union of his son Bernard and the 244 THE BOOK OF A MEBIJEVAL MOTREB, Lady Dodana was born another William, whom the fates of war and diplomacy kept a hostage at the court of Charles the Bald after the bloody battle of Fontanet (841), as a gage of the fidelity of his great Southern vassal. In the same year another son was born to Dodana, whom the father bore away to Barcelona, leaving the mother in charge of his city of Uzes. He had never treated her as a Christian husband; the charms of the beautiful and ambitious violinist Judith, second wife of Louis the Pious, had long drawn him to her side, until the oppressions and scandals of their government grew intolerable, and Bernard was compelled to fly to his Proven- gal strongholds, there to wait the outcome of the fratricidal struggle of the children of Louis, which opens and conditions the mediaeval life of France and Germany. It is to her eldest son, William, that Dodana writes, or rather dictates, by the hand of her scribe Vislabert, the little book just mentioned. Its composition occupied her for more than a year. It is exactly dated — a rare thing for mediaeval books; she began it on the Feast of St. Andrew, November 30, in 841, and ended it on the Feast of the Purification, February 2, in 843. We hear, therefore, in her pages the voice THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 245 of a Carlo vingian mother across one thousand years of history. The manuscript was known to Bakize, Pierre de Marca, D'Achery, and Mabil- lon, but has been fully published only in our own day.^ The young hostage at Aix-la-Chapelle had left a great void in the mother-heart of Dodana. With unusual courage she will ease the aching by writing a book to her dear son. And the writ- ing becomes a sweet daily task, a kind of journal intime, that acts as a strong searchlight over the manners and consciences of ninth-century Chris- tians of the class and type of Dodana. She writes : — " Men know many things that are foreign to me, and to other •women like me — but to me more than the others. Still, He is always present to me who can open the mouth of the dumb andmakeeloquent the tongue of childhood. . . . Therefore my son, I send you this discourse, or manual [sermo manualis] , that it may be like one of those splendid chess-boards that recreate young men ; or like one of those mirrors in which women love to gaze that they may compose their features and be pleasing to their husbands. Thus, my son, you shall use this book. It is a mirror in which you may see the image of your soul, not to please the world, but to please Him who created you out of noth- ing. Indeed, I am deeply concerned for you, O my son Will- iam ! My soul is forever consumed with the desire of your salvation. In that hope I write you these pages." 1 "L'Education Carlovingienne, le Manuel de Duodha," 6dit^ par E. Bondurand (Paris, Picard, 1887, 8vo, pp. 271). The name is variously spelled : Duodha, Dhuodana, Duodana, Dodana. 246 THE BOOK OF A MEDIAEVAL MOTHER. She might well be anxious ; for though saints like Arnulf of Metz and Wandrille of Fontanelle came out of the court, its atmosphere was cor- rupting. The battle-horse and gleaming sword, the rank of count and fair lands to govern, were the great prizes of service with the Karlings as elsewhere; but the earlier pages of Gregory of Tours and the annals of the time show that the passions of men were little, if any, different from those of earlier and later days. A pretty acros- tic that forms her own name opens the book into which she has breathed all her noble heart — it is an invocation to God that He may protect her son William, for whom her heart is torn with anguish. Then come seventy-three chapters, curiously short and long, like the broken cries of sorrow and the tender gossip of love — the out- pourings of the illimitable sea of a mother's affection. She converses with him on the love of God, the greatness of God, all the attributes of the Divinity; on the Trinity — a touch of those transitional ages in which there echoed yet some sounds of the great christological struggles. She recalls to him the virtues of faith, hope, and charity; the duty and manner of prayer; his obligations to his superiors, his neighbors, the priests and the teachers who THE BOOK OF A MEBIMVAL MOTHEB. 247 have charge of him. Had Ruskin known this little manual, he would surely have quoted from it in his "Pleasures of (Mediaeval) Eng- land." Conduct is based on faith ; hence the rest of the work is taken up with the moral duties of the young man : the trials of life and how to surmount them. Sorrow, persecution, disap- pointment, sickness, will come, and who will shelter his bruised and torn heart ? He must become a perfect man ; he must preserve himself spotless. Already the Christian ideas which gave rise to the character of the chevalier and the gentleman crop out even in the intimate communings of a saintly mother. The little book is full of unctuous prayers and ejaculations that she would have him utter often for his prince, the Church, his father, for the dead, for " the very good and the not very good " ; among other things, pro versis et litteris comjyositis tuis — "for your verses and literary compositions." Perhaps the young William already handled the lance and 'the " framea," or short sword of the Franks, with more skill than the " calamus " of the monk. From this noble mother the young page of kingly race, destined to inherit those corners of 248 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. France and Spain that have never long coalesced since their first disruption from the empire by the Visigoths, learned that there is a higher authority than man ; that riches and power are nothing in His eyes ; and that the saints of the family are the ones to imitate, not the turbulent warriors, — his grandfather the venerable Will- iam, rather than his father the worldly Bernard. Withal, she repeats often the lesson of love, re- spect, and loyalty to his father, who is always her good lord and spouse. " In all things obey him ; be the prop of his old age, if so be that he reach old age. Cause him no sorrow while he lives ; despise him not when you, too, become a great and powerful man." This " work of her weakness " — opusculum 2^ciTmtatis mem — is all one cry of tender affection ; willingly does Do- dana efface herself, and liken herself to the humble woman of Chanaan, seeking only the crumbs that fall from the table of wisdom, and seeking them for her beloved son. Charles the Bald was no great or amiable character. Yet Dodana would have her William be mindful of his own nobility — his magna utrinque nobilitas — and be no lip-server, but a man of heart, the king's stainless liegeman, in- capable of the intrigues that disgraced the family THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 249 of the Karlings since the death of the great emperor. The pages devoted to the Church and the priests are worthy of the faith of Dodana : — " The priests are the successors of the apostles, with power to loose and to bind. Their task is to ravish its prey from the unclean spirit, and to restore it purified to its heavenly destiny. They care and provide for the altar that stands hard by their dwelling. They are the guardians of the sacred vessels of God which we call souls. The lips of the priest are the repository of knowledge ; we seek the law from him, for he is the angel of the Lord. Like watchful doves, the priests direct their flight to the windows of heaven, and thus deserve the name of friends of God. Honor, therefore, all good priests ; listen to them ; and when you meet them kneel not alone before them, but before the angels who precede them. Receive often at your table the priests of God, together with the pilgrims and the poor. Let them be your advisers, the ministers of your bounty, which will be one day multiplied to you. . . . Confess often to them in se- cret, with sighs and tears ; for, as the doctors teach us, true confession freeth the soul from death. . . . Beseech them to pray for you, and to intercede with God who hath made them the intercessors of His people." More than once Dodana borrows from natural history comparisons that are apt and moving, even if the facts be as far-fetched as they are betimes in the pages of St. Francis of Sales or Rodriguez. The duty of mutual help Dodana deduces from the example of the deer that lean on one another, turn and turn about, when cross- ing broad and dangerous rivers. She would have William read often the choicest books of 250 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER, the Fathers; he will then be like those doves who have drunk from crystal waters, and thereby acquired a. sharpened vision against the hawk and the vulture. Cruel domestic experience and the mother- instinct tell her that the life of courts and pal- aces is a perpetual snare for youthful virtue. She knows only one remedy — prayer — the remedy of Christ and the saints. So the pages of her little book are made sweet with many unctuous prayers, most frequently taken from the public prayer of the Church, the canonical hours. Thus, unconsciously, she reveals to us a side of Catholic life that Dom Gueranger has so often admirably illustrated in his "Liturgical Year " — the powerful influence that the daily official services of Catholicism exercised on the whole society of the Middle Ages, creating vo- cabularies, literatures, poetry, arts, music ; in- terpenetrating and spiritualizing the whole mediaeval man. This admirable "Handbook" of a mother ends, like a last will and testament, in tears and benedictions, with recommendations of her many dear departed — a whole necrology such as is often met with in the contemporary "confraternities of prayers." In her blessings THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 251 it has been well said ^ that she is like an ancient priestess perforiAing with all solemnity the ritual of her domestic hearth — " My son, God give thee the dew of heaven and the fat of the earth. Amen. " May He vouchsafe thee abundance of oil, wine, and wheat. Amen. " May He be thy buckler against all enemies. Amen. "Be thou blessed in the town, in the country, at the court; blessed with thy father, blessed with thy brother ; blessed with the great, blessed with the little ; blessed with the chaste, blessed with the sober ; blessed be thy old age, blessed be thy youth, even to that day when, hero of many combats, thou shalt set foot in the kingdom of the soul. Amen." In a closing effusion she recommends her son, now sixteen years of age, to master this wise advice, and to break it betimes, like food, to her other dear son, whose name she does not know ; for the father had taken him away hastily before baptism. She feels that her days are drawing to an end. Lonely chatelaine on the terraces of Uzes ! She has much to do to cope with the creditors of her husband, among whom are some Jews. Grief and pain have reduced her bodily strength. She will not see the flourishing of youth in her second boy. In an acrostic that spells the name of her beloved William she reminds him that this journal — for such it is — 1 Mgr. Baunard, "ReUques d'Histoire" (Paris, 1899), p. 61. 252 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. was finished on his sixteenth birthday (Novem- bei: 30, 842), the Feast of St. Andrew, " near the time of the coming of the Word." In a codicil she comes back upon the " sweet- ness of her too great love, and the sorrow she has at not being able to gaze upon his beauty." She begs him to have pity upon her soul, and urges upon him, in terms of exquisite pathos and ten- derness, the duty of praying for her eternal weal. Finally, she beseeches him to put down her name on the family necrology, among the Guil- hems, the Cunegondas, the Withbergas, the Gaucelin^, the Heriberts, the Rodlindas, the Ger- bergas — noble dames and lords of her great family. For her tomb she dictates the epitaph to her scribe Yislabert — "that all who visit it may pray for the humble Dodana, whose body made of earth has returned to the same." Artless, broken in style, overlapping, without literary order or ornament, the Book of Dodana, nevertheless, appeals to every heart, especially to that multitude of men and women of a later day to whom the habit of introspection has become a second nature. This is the journal of a soul — but not of a soul that has cast its moorings, like Amiel, and gotten out on the turbulent sea of doubt, amid incessant storm THE BOOK OF A MEDIJEVAL MOTHEB. 253 and lightning, relieved only by depressing calms and mists. It is the joiu-nal of a saintly soul, the colloquy of a Christian mother with her son; of a woman fit to be the ancestress of the Blanches and the Elizabeths of another century; close spiritual kin to women like Madam Craven and Eugenie de Guerin. She knows the Scriptures and cites them with ease; some smattering of erudition graces her paragraphs ; her Latin, per- haps corrected by the scribe, is rude indeed, but terse, clear, and direct, with flashes of brilliancy. The sorrows of her race did not cease with her death. Bernard, her wayward husband and son of the saintly Guilhem, was beheaded for re- bellion in the year 844. We do not know that she survived him. Her beloved William, for whom alone this mediaeval Monica walked our valley of tears, was captured at the siege of Barcelona in 850 and put to death. The second son, baptized Bernard, lived only to take vengeance on Charles the Bald ; after fruitless attempts, he perished in a skirmish in 872. The strong lives of both are now forgotten, save by the toilsome chronicler of dates and names. But the pages of their moth- er's "Handbook," wet with her tears and aro- matic with her virtues, have drifted down from age to age, and are likely to edify in the centu- 254 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. ries to come many a similar heart, whether it beats upon a throne or beneath the roof of some humble cottage. Love is strong, and death is strong ; but a mother's love, like Rizpah, defies time and the elements, being a godlike thing. GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. The latter half of the fifteenth century was m many respects the acme of the intellectnal life of Germany. The native or acquired tenden- cies that had long found a manifold expression in architecture and the fine arts, in song and music and the drama, in the refinement of man- ners, seemed at this moment to flower into a newer and a higher life. The invention of printing, the discovery of the New World, the liberalizing influences of the Italian Renaissance, the fall of Constantinople, the creation of new universities, the rivalry of the new States now rising from the hopeless wreck of the mediaeval imperial idea, the ecclesiastical unity won back after long decades of disruption, incessant travel, the growth of the commercial spirit and system, contributed, each in its own measure, to that wondrous development of German culture, wealth, and enterprise which so excited the admiration of ^neas Sylvius,-^ and worthily crowned the first thousand years of German 1 De situ, moribus et conditione Germanise, Basilese, 1551. 255 256 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. Christianity. The spirit which cast out from Spain the Arab and the Jew, which worked the unification of all French interests in the hands of an absolute king, and opened up for Italy her first clear vista upon the long-gone, glorious days of universal empire, brought about in Germany a development of popular education such as had yet been witnessed in no European State. The flourishing condition of the univer- sities of Germany, notably of Cologne, Heidel- berg, Freiburg, Basel, TUbingen, Ingolstadt, and Vienna — the highest outgrowth of this movement — is a proof of its intensity and uni- versality. Nor was the thirst for learning con- fined to any particular class. The village schools were numerous and well-frequented ; the teachers were well paid, contented, and highly esteemed ; the discipline of youth was strict but loving; the homiletic teaching of the clergy attracted great numbers ; and the new-found art of print- ing spread abroad on all sides the elements of religious instruction — pictorial catechisms, hymn- books, manuals of confession and a holy death, expositions of the commandments, and brief com- mentaries on Holy Writ. But it was especially in secondary instruction that the best results of tke older and healthier, more Christian, human- GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 257 ism had been obtained. Throughout Germany, especially in Westphalia and the Rhenish lands, public secondary schools abounded. The city fathers multiplied them; beneficent citizens es- tablished new ones by will or aided by legacies those already in existence; dwelling houses under the care of devoted and experienced men were opened for the students ; libraries were built and increased — in a word, the unity of the ideals and interests of the Fatherland seemed to find nowhere a better background for its illustration than the cause of education. The Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, Zwolle, Louvain, Liege, and other places, showed the world for the first time a corporation of great scholars devoted solely to the holy art of teaching. Nor could any country boast of bet- ter specimens of the erudite and gentlemanly tutor or master than Alexander Hegius, John Cochloeus, Murmellius, and Jacob Wimpheling, the ^^ Educator of Germany." Such men were the trainers of those who conducted the numer- ous monastic, capitular, municipal, and private schools, and from them went out a generation of refined and skilful teachers, who made the schools of Germany famous throughout all Europe. Women like Charitas and Clara Pirk- 258 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. heimer illustrated by their pedagogical skill sucli centres of general culture as Niirnberg, and honored their sex and country by the practice of every virtue, while by the example of the most cultured and self-sacrificing womanhood they brought up the daughters of Germany in the admiration of whatever was pure, noble, and elevating.^ The Reformation fell like a thunderbolt upon this scholastic development. It shook to its 1 Cf. Janssen, " Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes beim Ausgang des Mittelalters" (Freiburg, 1887, 13th ed.), Vol. I., pp. 1-138. Sel- dom, if ever, have the details of an intellectual movement or condition been collected with greater pains or set forth with more art than here. The following pages summarize the treatment of the intel- lectual condition of Germany as given by Janssen and his literary heir and successor, Pastor, in the seventh volume of the same work (Herder, Freiburg, 1893), for the century intervening between the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War (1517-1618). It ought to be unnecessary to remind our readers of the method of Janssen. The numerous details for this particular study have been collected by him and by his successor, Pastor, from the public documents of Catholics and Protestants ; from the histories of education, univer- sities, colleges, and schools ; from the correspondence of teachers and the scholastic legislation ; from contemporary polemics and brochures ; from reports of nuncios and relations of ambassadors ; from the histories of cities and monasteries, orders, bishoprics, lit- eratures, and the arts ; from histories of heresies and morals — in a word, from almost countless public and private, edited and un- edited, sources. The domestic history of Germany, especially those pages Mrritten in the local historical reviews, annals, collections, studies, etc. , have furnished some rare materials, which have often been first made widely known through their incorporation into the structure of Janssen' s " History of the German People." GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 259 ancient foundments the principle of authority in Church, State, and society, and it was no wonder that the schools soon felt the reaction. Who- ever has watched the decay of university life in New Italy will have some faint idea of the dis- asters that overtook the German schools in the sixteenth century, and made their condition as pitiable as it had once been admirable and envi- able. Unprofitable and noisy polemics, religious bickerings, personal hates and persecutions, end- less territorial revolutions and rectifications of frontiers, the establishment of a governmental control, minutely absolute, in place of the an- cient self-regulation and constitutional indepen- dence — all these causes cooperated to interrupt the current of educational progress that had set in during the fifteenth century with the rise of a German-Christian humanism. None of them, however, exercised so baneful an influence on the schools as the new doctrine of justification by faith alone and the consequent depreciation of good works as beneficial for salvation. Self- ish avarice and love of luxury began to dispute for the control of that wealth which the wiser and more human-rational ancient faith had taught men to employ for the common good. New foundations ceased to be made, and the old 260 GEEMAN SCHOOLS IK XVI. CENTURY, ones were confiscated or wretchedly adminis- tered. The large and kindly love of Catholic Germans for the unborn generations, the gen- erous preparations for their physical and intel- lectual welfare, decreased with the spread of a narrower, harder belief ; and the contempt for the past increasing with the ignorance of its titles and its relations to the present, a great portion of the German people lost that noble trait of public generosity which is everywhere an outcome of intense Catholic belief. It shut itself up within the little circle of its own imme- diate personal interests, leaving to the State or to chance the care of those general wants for which individuals at one time provided so largely from wealth superfluous or no longer needful. Already, in 1524, Luther complained in a letter to the municipal authorities that with the old priesthood the ancient fame of the German schools was disappearing. "Under the popes," he says, "not a child could escape the devil's broad nets, barring a rare wonder, so many mon- asteries and schools were there, but now that the priests are gone good studies are packed off with them. . . . When I was a child there was a proverb that it was no less an evil to neglect a student than to mislead a virgin. . . . This GERMAIN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTURY, 261 was said to frighten the teachers." He reminds his readers that he has freed them from masses and indulgences, vigils and feasts and fasts, men- dicant monks, confraternities, etc., but in return the common man will do nothing for schools, and the princes are sunk in gluttony and de- bauchery.^ A year later he wrote to the Elector that there was now neither fear of God nor Christian discipline since the pope's power was broken. "The devil," said he, in a sermon of 1530, "has misled the people into the belief that schooling is useless since the exit of the monks, nuns, and priests. ... As long as the people were caught in the abominations of the papacy, every purse was open for churches and schools, and the doors of these latter were widespread for the free reception of children who could almost be forced to receive the expensive training given within their walls." The local histories and city chronicles of the time show the popular feeling that with the ancient Cath- olic clergy went one of their chief works and occupations, the teaching and control of the 1 For these and all following details, see in general, " Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters," von Johannes Janssen, erganzt und herausgegeben von Ludwig Pastor (Herder, Freiburg, 18G3), Vol. VII., pp. 1-211. 262 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. children. Henceforth reading and writing in German^ with some knowledge of figures, were to take the place of the classics, and technical training to supplant the liberal mental discipline of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences. Even in Catholic Germany the contempt of studies spread, and King Ferdinand felt forced to admit, in his reformation proposals to the Council of Trent, that in all the German universities there were not in 1562 as many students as in the good old times frequented a * single one. The official reports of the govern- ment VisitatoreUy specimens of school and church legislation, and the correspondence of the super- intendents show that the number of the common schools decreased steadily during the sixteenth century in the Electorate of Saxony, in Branden- burg, Weimar, Pomerania, Brunswick, Hesse, and other Lutheran lands ; that the instruction of females was greatly neglected, and the form- ation in the use of the native tongue insufficient and inferior in quality ; that the buildings were often unsuitable for school purposes ; that the nobles neglected their duties as patrons and supporters of the schools within their districts ; that the teachers were frequently common work- men, tailors, dyers, shoemakers ; that the church GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 263 sextons, who were in many cases the village teachers, gave great scandal by their miedifying lives, their magical and superstitious practices, treasure-hunting, etc. On the other hand, it is evident from other sources that the German village-teacher of the sixteenth century had long ceased to be the happy and prosperous pedagogue of the latter half of the fifteenth. His dwelling was usually poor, old, and neglected ; his pay small, and given frequently in kind, uncertain, and grudg- ingly accorded. We can, therefore, scarcely won- der that he was harsh and cruel in his treatment of the unfortunates committed to his care, and that corporal punishment was often carried so far as to permanently maim or lame the subject of it, while it was no uncommon thing to beat children heavily about the head, to scourge them until the blood ran freely, and generally to mal- treat them, especially if they were poor, or un- fortunate orphans, or otherwise abandoned or unprotected. The results of the absence of a healthful religious home formation naturally manifested themselves in "the conduct of the youth, a never-failing source of complaint on the part of the teachers of the last fifty years of the sixteenth century. "In this latter poi- 264 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, sonous and pestilential time/' wrote, in 1568, Johann Busleb, a teacher at Eglen, in the terri- tory of Magdeburgj " every one complains of the coarse, sensual, godless, shameless, old-Adamic life of youth, and that the complaints are just, may be known from any of those who treat daily with the young." In spite of all this, the sixteenth century was witness to the superhuman efforts made on the one hand by the leaders of the various Protestant confessions, and on the other by the Catholic Church, to elevate the standard of studies, to fire the youth of Germany with noble ideals, to stimulate in them habits of industry and a healthy spirit of rivalry. Among the Ee- formers, Melanchthon led the way. His text- books of Greek and Latin, his commentaries and translations, his academic discourses and extensive correspondence, above all, his personal influence over a multitude of disciples, won for him the title of " Preceptor of Germany," once worn with pride by Wimpheling. If the views of Melanchthon had prevailed, Greek and Hebrew, history and mathematics, would have had a fair share in the scholastic curriculum ; more homely notions obtained, and Latin became the chief subject of study. German was carefully ex- GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT. 265 eluded from the better schools as offensive to the literary taste, and a formal system of es- pionage established for the purpose of surpris- ing the scholars who forgot themselves so far as to speak their mother-tongue. At Ganders- heim, in 1571, three slips of this kind were set down as equal in heinousness to one blasphemy. In 1524, Luther wrote with much scorn concern- ing the schools in which he and his fellow- reformers had been brought up, but in 1582, Michael Toxites, professor at Tiibingen, and paedagogarch of the duchy of Wurtemburg, pronounced in sad and bitter words an equally hard sentence on the Latin instruction as given since the days of Melanchthon. The cause of morality was not helped by the use • of the "Colloquia" of Erasmus, a model, indeed, of exquisite Latin, but otherwise an irreverent, cynical, and immoral book, utterly unfitted for the formation of good habits, and which was equally condemned by Luther and St. Igna- tius. Ovid's " Art of Love," and the unexpur- gated works of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and other dissolute writers of antiquity were in common use in the schools. There is surely little reason for wondering that the morality of the scholars was very low, and that the hearts 266 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. of their teachers, when not themselves affected by the laxity of the times, sank within them at the sight of the dissipation and evil courses of their young charges. The schools of Pforta, Meissen, and Grimma in the Saxon Electorate, opened Hke most of the Protestant schools in former convents, and supported by Catholic funds, were much admired among the Evan- gelicals, and drew many students from the Re- formed lands. Nevertheless, the reports of the visitors and the school-ordinances show that the internal discipline was wretched. They contain complaints of the immodest, unseemly clothing of the scholars, of their richly embroidered wide mantles, with puffed sleeves, etc., so that they look " mehr reuberisch dann schlilerisch." Blas- phemy, thieving, gambling, unchaste conduct, drunkenness, and similar vices are set down to their account. They are forbidden to break in the wine-cellars of the neighborhood ; to break up the tables, chairs, and other furniture of the school ; to escape secretly by night from its pre- cincts ; to keep immoral books and pictures ; to visit dances and drinking bouts. Nor were such rules useless, or in terrorem^ for similar complaints come from distinguished teachers like Michael Neander at Ilfeld, Basilius Faber at Nordhausen GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUET. 267 and elsewhere, Camerarius and Eobanus Hessus at Niirnberg, Hieronymus Wolf at Augsburg, Johann Sturm at Strasburg, and others. " Would that I might talk with you about these things/' wrote Camerarius in 1536 to Luther, " they are by no means vain, unfounded complaints." In a letter to George Fabricius, Rector of Meissen, written in 1550, he says that the downfall of Germany is near, since religion, science, disci- pline and honorableness of life are perishing. " Education and life are far other to-day," wrote he in 1555, " than in my youth (circa 1500), when the hearts of the students were filled with zeal, studies flourished, and a joyous rivalry reigned in the pursuit of learning." Polemical enmities between the teachers and the preachers in the matters of Justification and Communion did much to increase the general disorder in the schools. Scarcely a prominent school of Protestant Germany was free from this evil. Even the minor Latin schools became the scenes of theological discussion in which, by question and answer, the students were made familiar with the theology of their teacher, and taught to anathematize his opponent, until such time as the religion was changed in the district, and a new set of doctrines introduced. The 268 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTUBY. salaries of the teachers were very low, because the old pious foundations had been squandered or were badly managed. Their dwellings were, in many cities, unsuitable, and their condition generally an unhappy one. They seldom stayed long in one place, which added greatly to the disorganization of the schools. Finally, the stream of pious generosity to which most of the German schools owed their existence had long since dried up, and little means were forth- coming to provide new or sustain the old. " Our beloved ancestors," exclaimed the superintendent, Christoph Fischer, of Smalkelden, in 1580, " provided for the schools by their last wills and by foundations. But now we see daily how the love of the poor and of needy students is grown cold, and the money spent on churches and schools is considered a waste." "In the dark- ness of the papacy," wrote Conrad Porta, of Eisleben, toward the end of the sixteenth century, " every one, from the highest to the lowest, even servants and day-laborers, contrib- uted to churches and schools, but now, in the clear light of the gospel, even the rich grow impatient if ever so little be asked, even for the repairing and maintenance of those on hand." Though contemporary and domestic evidences GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 269 show how unsatisfactory was the entu-e school system of Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century, there can be no doubt that for a portion of that time the schools of the Catholics suffered greatly from the consequences of the new religious revolutions. In 1541, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz confessed to Cardinal Contarini the superiority of the Protes- tant schools, and in 1550, the noble Bishop of Wiirzburg, Julius Pflug, wrote to Paul III., that while the Protestant schools were flourishing, the Catholic schools were in a condition of decay. Not the least merit of the Society of Jesus in Germany is its restoration during the latter half of the sixteenth century of the ancient fame of schools and academies which had reached the lowest step of degradation. In 1556, one of the city gymnasia of Cologne was confided to them, and in a brief space of time they had establishments in Munich (1559), Mainz (1561), Trier (1561), Heiligenstadt (1575), Coblenz (1582), Paderborn (1587), Miinster (1588), and in other large towns and cities like Ingolstadt, Dillingen, and Wiirzburg. Their enemies did not fail to recognize the skill and devotion of the new teachers. The superintendent, George Nigrinus, complained in 1582 that Protestant 270 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, parents of the upper and middle classes were wont to send their children to the Jesuits, and to praise their industry and their labors. There was a great personal charm in these men, often of high birth, trained from youth to self-denial and self-control, filled with the enthusiasm of Crusaders bent on recovering lost spiritual terri- tory, well-bred, and refined by travel and the cosmopolitan company of the novitiates and colleges. The example of their lives, divided between prayer and study, won the hearts of the youth intrusted to them, and filled the order it- self with the choicest vocations. Their programme of studies aimed chiefly at the training of men destined to live in the world ; hence the classic languages and profane science absorbed most of their attention. Nevertheless, the religious for- mation of the youth was carefully attended to. The daily mass, the frequent confessions and communions, the exercises of the special sodali- ties, the personal guidance of the tutors and instructors, the regularity of the daily life of the college, acted powerfully upon the mind and heart and imagination, especially in the earliest days of the movement, when the fine enthusiasm ■ of struggle was at its white heat, and one could almost see the fulness of victory in the rapidity GERMAN SCHOOLS IJST XVI. CENTUBY. 271 with whicli the tide of revolution was being rolled back. In these houses of study there was a thorough unity of spirit and authority. While the rector of each was absolute master of the internal and external life of the college, he was also responsible for each student, both for his bodily and mental development. The original programme of studies prescribed constant, but not overwhelming, work, provided for moderate recreation,, forbade the acceptance of gifts or presents from the students, and commanded the reception of children of every class. The teachers were instructed to plant securely the seeds of Catholic faith in the hearts of their scholars, and to remember that they were not mere grammarians or rhetoricians. The hope of dis- tinction and the fear of disgrace were proposed as powerful and natural motives of labor, and corporal punishment was to be rarely administered and then by a special official. Between these schools there existed close mutual relations, and the teachers and text-books of France or Italy often found their way to Germany, and vice versa. The teaching was in great measure gratuitous. The prestige of the order's religious and political successes was another element of strength, and the polished manners, the courtesy 272 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, and urbanity of its disciples a proof that it had found new sources of influence over the youth of Germany, and knew how to draw upon them for the perfection of youthful character. They withstood the heresies that were being quietly instilled in certain schools, like the ancient and renowned one of Dtisseldorf, where the catechism of John Monheim was ©verturning the founda- tions of the Catholic faith. The Jesuit schools of Miinster and Paderborn became in time famous nurseries of Westphalian Catholicism, and the memories of their period of renown still cling about these picturesque old towns like a dim but lovely halo. Munich, however, seems to have been the scene of the highest academical and social activ- ity of the Jesuit teachers of the sixteenth century. The rapid spread of the order, the numerous demands made upon its chiefs for the most varied services, religious and political, made it hard to keep up always with the needs of the age. As early as 1565 the superiors of the province of Higher Germany admitted that their professors were either men broken by long labors or young, unskilled novices. The memoir of Jacob Pontanus (1582) and the Epistola de scholasticorum nostrorum moribus of the general GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 273 Aquaviva (1611) show that no one was more conscious than themselves of the weaknesses that were growing within the order, and which it needed the general " Ratio Studiorum "of 1599 to correct or expel. Withal, their main object in this first century of their scholastic activity in Germany was an eloquens et sapiens j^^^ic^s, the production of pious and devoted Catholics, skilled in all the social arts, filled with the prac- tical wisdom of life, and bent on preserving or restoring the broken unity of the great Christian body. With the Renaissance there entered into the lives of Teutonic and Romance nations many elements and motives of the old classic peoples, for which they were prepared, indeed, but which contrasted, nevertheless, greatly with their own mediaeval philosophy. Very significant in this regard is the interest taken in the classic drama- tists. Already in the latter half of the fifteenth century, Terence and Plautus were put upon the stage. It was not without protest at the begin- ning, for if Erasmus encouraged the practice, Jacob Wimpheling was opposed to it. Melanch- thon and Luther, and the Reformers generally, favored it greatly, and in all their schools the plays of the dramatic philosophers of Roman 274 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT, antiquity were frequently rehearsed. At Stras- burg all the comedies of Plautus and Terence were, for a time, reproduced in the course of every six months, not excepting the most objec- tionable plays. The progress of the students, the delight of the parents, and the still vivid attachment to the mystery plays, were the im- mediate motives assignable . for the time and care given to the classic plays. Though the shrewd and practical life-wisdom of the ancient comedians delighted the burghers at Christmas and Easter, and though the students, in their frequent preparation, penetrated profoundly into the nature and structure of the Latin tongue, more than one teacher of youth deprecated the evils of the promiscuous reading and representa- tion of plays whose authors were pagan to the core and placed upon the public scene situations that were shocking to the Christian view of life, and principles that offended the basic laws of Chris- tian morality. Thus there arose a Christianized Terence, a Neo-Latin school-drama, whose sub- jects were often taken from the Bible, and treated in the most Terentian or Plautian style. Both Protestants and Catholics took a part in this work. Reuchlin, Schonaeus, Gnaphaeus, and Macropedius were its foremost champions. GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBY. 275 The "Asotus," "Josephus/' and " Hecastus," of the latter found a lasting popular welcome, as did the less praiseworthy works of Nicodemus Frischlin — his "Rebecca," "Susanna/' and " Julius Redivivus." In time even the Neo- Latin school-drama degenerated, and pieces like the " Studentes," the " Amantes Amentes/' and the "Cornelius Relegatus" drew more spec- tators than the biblical drama. The latter was very often treated in a manner offensive to Catholics, and no small share of the popular hate and ignorance must have come from this nominally religious theatre, in which the pope, the monks, and the " idolaters " played so large and so ridiculous a role. The peculiarities of the principles and meth- ods of the early Jesuits as teachers showed them- selves nowhere more strikingly than in their treatment of the school-drama. From the be- ginning their "Ratio Studiorum" made little or no place for Terence and Plautus, and when, later on, the latter obtained a hearing, great care was exercised to put upon the stage only such plays as did not offend the dictates of Christian moral- ity. If the Jesuits made way at all for the comedy, it was originally from pedagogical motives, the desire to train their students in the 276 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY . arts of oratory and extempore speaking, and to develop in them a certain natural ease and graceful self-possession which the mimic experi- ences of the stage go far to produce. The charms of virtue and the hateful ness of sin were the lines on which they built up their own thea- tre, and when, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch poet, Joost van den Vondel, defended the stage against the attacks of Calvin- ist writers, he could appeal to the public exam- ple of the Jesuits, whose edifying school-dramas did so much to confirm their scholars in the principles of morality. The subjects were gen- erally chosen from the Scriptures or the lives of the Saints, and often treated with great literary skill. Twice a year was the ordinary rule for their presentation, but what was lost in fre- quency was made up in magnificence. This splendid sumptuous character the Jesuit dramas took over from the great mystery-plays of the preceding century. Indeed, in every sense the school-drama of the Jesuits seems to be the heir and successor of these gorgeous '' mysteries " of an earlier day. Multitudes came from afar to the new plays, and the largest halls were un- equal to their accommodation. Sometimes they took several days in their execution, and they GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTUUY. 277 were often repeated by popular insistence. Who- ever has seen the ^'Passion Play "at Ober-Am- mergau, and recalls the emotions it awakens, will have some faint notion of what a magnificent school-drama given by the German Jesuits^, let us say of Munich, would be like. For it was at Munich that the Jesuit drama reached its acme. The princely, art-loving Wittelsbacher, always half Italian by their position and their ideals, were the patrons of the new school, and spared nothing to insure the noblest framing of its pro- ductions. In 1574 the tragedy of " Constan- tine," by the Pater Georg Agricola, was given during two days. The whole city was turned into a stage, over one thousand actors were in- troduced, and an enormous multitude streamed in from every side to behold, on one day, the gorgeous pomp of the triumphal procession of Constantine after the defeat of Maxentius, and, on the other, the solemn triumph of the Holy Cross, on which the sign of our salvation was borne aloft through the city, amid the jubilant acclamations of many thousand spectators. In Jacob Bidemann the Jesuits of the first quarter of the seventeenth century reached the acme of their dramatic reputation. His " Joannes Caly- bita/' " The Egyptian Joseph," '^ Belisarius/' 278 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. and " Cenodoxus, the Doctor of Paris," are said to be not unworthy of Calderon. " In general,'* says von Reinhardstottner, " the Jesuits did much great and durable work in the first century of their dramatic labors. While they infused poetry and art into the dry framework of the humanistic drama, they also awakened and pre- served throughout Bavaria, and especially in Munich, both taste and intelligence for the thea- tre and its useful services." The wars of religion and the weakening of the imperial and papal authority brought about a sad condition for the Catholic universities of Germany during the sixteenth century. They lost more and more their ancient character of great independent corporations, representative of the highest interests of the Church, elevated above party strife and private opinion, animated by a love of knowledge and existing only for its diffusion. Freiburg in Breisgau, once flourishing, degenerated almost totally. Ingolstadt, Cologne, and Erfurt were in the same category. The University of Vienna, which had risen so rapidly under the first Maximilian, sank steadily from the outbreak of the Reformation. Its numbers decreased, its revenues were ill-managed, its pro* lessors were obliged to combine other occupations GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 279 with tlieir teaching office, and its chairs were made centres for the dissemination of heresy. Endless proposals of reform were made, but not executed. The students were poor and wretched, often obliged to beg their bread, because the old "Bursen" colleges or dormitories were closed or in decay. In fact, it was the loss of these dwell- ing houses for the students, erected by the Catholic generosity of a preceding age and once carefully governed, that brought about the downfall of many universities. The private life of the academical youth was thenceforth utterly without control ; and immorality, idleness, duel- ling, and contentiousness gained daily the upper hand. The success of the Jesuits in secondary instruction suggested them, in this extraordinary situation, for the universities, and in the latter half of the sixteenth century the theological, philological, and philosophical teaching in Cath- olic lands of German tongue passed in great measure under their control, as at Ingolstadt, Dillingen, Wiirzburg, Cologne, and Trier. Their chairs attracted a multitude of students, while those of the university professors were often utterly neglected. Bitter recriminations arose on the part of the latter, especially at Ingolstadt^ which were paralleled in other university towns, 280 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, like Freiburg, "Wiirzburg, and Vienna. In tlie latter place the awarding of university honors by the Jesuits was long a source of painful dis- putes, the university demanding that all the scholars and studies of the Jesuits should be under the general supervision of the rector of the university, and King Ferdinand replying that he would do nothing against the interests of the order. During this period the civil and ecclesiastical powers looked upon the Jesuits as the most reliable and experienced teachers of youth, and least likely to mislead or be mis- led in the rapid and profound changes that were going on in the society of that day. The dis- cipline of Jesuit houses was excellent, while the once admirable administration of the " Bursen " was everywhere disrupted, chiefly because of the malversation of the funds, but not unfre- quently because, in the confusion of religious revolution,, the devotion to youth and the pro- found pedagogical philosophy of the fifteenth century had become cold or forgotten. The university professors were wretchedly paid, their position that of State servants, their orthodoxy suspected, and their authority over the stu- dents small. No class of men lost more by the Reformation than they, for whereas before it GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 281 they were esteemed members of a self-governing body, with ancient traditions and strong social authority, they were now little better than day- laborers, without prestige or power beyond their personal action, and obliged to assist at the transfer to youthful rivals of functions to which in the ordinary course of events they would have been the natural heirs. Of the Protestant universities, some, like Tubingen and Leipsic, had been violently re- formed; others were new creations, like Mar- burg, Konigsberg, Jena, and Helmstadt. In all of them the local civil authority reigned supreme, and the many changes from Lutheran to Cal- vinist dynasty, and vice versa, made the posi- tions of the professors uncertain and kept up a constant change. The needs of the petty German dynasts of the sixteenth century were many and great for wars and court, travel, bri- bery, and dissipation. The ancient funds of their universities were tempting, and their avarice was often the cause of the diminution or total disap- pearance of the scholastic wealth collected before the Reformation. The power of the emperor was now a bit of archaism, and that of the little duke or princelet was supreme. All hung upon his humor or temperament. Universities like 282 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. Rostock and Greifswald were made mendicant during the whole century. In all of them the salaries of the professors were meagre and often withheld. The court-fool and the fencing-master of the sovereign were far better off, and so low did they sink at times that the professors looked on it as a valuable privilege to possess the right of sale of wine and beer to their students. They added other occupations to piece out a sufficient revenue. They were frequently absent on their own business, and a supervision had often to be established over their lessons or their daily ap- pearance. As there was little dignity in their treatment from above, so in turn there was often small edification in the example of their lives. The public records are full of reproaches and specific accusations against the teachers. The same records abound in denunciations of the students for vanity in dress, neglect of study, violent uproarious conduct at night in the public streets, maltreatment of the townspeople, '' the worship of Bacchus and Venus," and general "Cy- clopean savagery." In 1537 Melanchthon com- plained of the absence of discipline at Wittenberg, and of the untamable self-will of the students. In 1565 it was not better. Two years previous the sons of the Duke of Pomerania left the town GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 283 because of the dissolute habits of the students. They had lodgings in the old Augustinian mon- astery, become the property of Luther, and where his son Martin kept a tavern. But they could not stay; for above them were seven rooms full of Frenchmen and Poles, Suabians and Fran- conians, whose disorderly life, day and night, caused them great inconvenience. Tubingen is described by contemporaries as the scene of the wildest dissipation. In 1577 the subsheriff of the town declared that no citizen dared longer to act as constable, and that the place was worse than Sodom and Gomorrha. The students resisted all attempts at punishment, and every night was made hideous with the shouts of revellers, cries of angry disputants, breaking of doors and win- dows, and an occasional murder of a watchman or a fellow-student. In general, academical discipline seems to have been to a great extent ruined, and the saying ran : — " Wer von Tiibingen kommt ohne Weib, Von Jena mit gesundem Leib, Von Helmstadt ohne Wunden, Von Jena ohne Schrunden. Von Marburg ungef alien, Hat nicht studirt auf alien." Unhappiest of all men was the new student, who had to go through a time of fagging. He 284 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTURY, was called '^Beanus'' (bec-jaune) or "Fox," and defined as a " wild animal whose horns had to be cut off to make him fit to assist at the public lectures of the university." Innocent enough iu its early pre-Reformation stages, this practice became a very cruel and inhuman ceremony in the sixteenth century, accompanied with heavy fines and whole nights of drunkenness. The new student had no longer the " Bursen " to go to for shelter, and was usually handed over for guid- ance to some older student from his own neigh- borhood. He became at once the " famulus " or slave of this " Herr " or " Patron," waited on him day and night, suffered from his fits of anger, gave him his money and his best clothing — in a word, was his chattel, until such time as his own turn came and he ceased to be a " Pen- naler" or weak-featkered thing, and became a " Schorist" or Shearer of those under him. Wolf- gang Heider, professor at Jena in 1667, has left us a pen-portrait of " a genuine Shearer," which is absolutely untranslatable, and must therefore be read in the original. Perhaps no better index could be given of the moral tone of many of these universities than is found in the " Song of the Drinker's Club " of Jena, a much-beloved " Lied " of the early part of the seventeenth century : — GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 285 "Lasst uns schlemmen und demmen bis morgenl Lasset uns frohlich sein ohne Sorgen ! Wer uns nicht bargen will, komme morgen ! Wir haben iiur kleine Zeit hier auf Erden, Drum muss sie uns kurz und lieb doch werden, Wer einmal stirbt, der liegt und bleibt liegen, Aus ist es mit Leben und mit Vergniigen. Wir haben nocli von Keinem vernommen : Er sei von der Holle zurUck gekommen, Und habe verkiindet wie dort es stiinde. Gute Gesellschaft treiben ist ja nicht Siinde, Sauf also dich voll und lege dich nieder ! Steh auf und sauf und besaufe dich wieder.'* BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. One of the most stupid calumnies on the manners of the Catholic Middle Ages is that bathing was forbidden, that it was seldom prac- tised, and the like. The authority of Michelet contributed greatly to confirm this untruthful statement, and within a few years Renan has repeated it in the last volume of his " Origins of Christianity." Under the aegis of these impartial patriarchs it may be expected to floiu-ish in spite of all solid reasons to the contrary. Would that we had many such precious volumes as the " Historical Blunders " of Father Bridgett, which treats with precision and finality a number of similar errors. The primitive Christians frequented the public baths, as may be easily deduced from the well- known anecdote of St. John and Cerinthus, which St. Irenaeus has handed down to us. Clement of Alexandria enumerates the reasons for which a Christian man or woman may visit the baths, and that chapter of the " Paedagogus '* 286 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 287 might be read yet with profit, so moderate and sensible is it. Tertullian, though inclined to diminish the frequency of bathing, is convinced of its necessity, and tells us in his " Apology " why and when he bathed. St. Augustine re- lates in his " Confessions " that among other ;iieans of allaying his sorrow at his mother's death, he was moved to go and bathe, since the Greek name of the bath signified its power to banish sorrow from the heart. The " Apostolic Constitutions," an old episco- pal manual originally compiled about the begin- ning of the third century of our era, look upon the use of the bath as quite a matter of course, and only provide against certain abuses. The ancient Christian cities of Syria were well pro- vided with baths, some of which are yet in ex- cellent preservation, and there is every reason to believe that the larger churches of the Orient had baths attached to them for the use of the clergy. Such baths existed at Naples in the early Christian ages, as one may see by the miniatures in the work of Paciaudi on the sacred baths of the Christians. Eusebius of Caesarea and St. Paulinus of Nola are guarantees that they were commonly attached to the greater churches in Syria and Italy. No doubt men 288 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. like St. Cyprian, St. Epiphanius, and St. Jerome were much opposed to the use of the common baths by Christians, but their objections were well founded. The public baths too often per- mitted the promiscuous bathing of both sexes, which was shocking to the Christian mind. Moreover, they were the resorts of all the loungers and gossipy people of the town. For- bidden amusements were connected with them, lewd women visited them, and these resorts encourag:ed the vice of female drunkenness, es- pecially abhorrent to the Graeco-Roman peoples. To visit such baths seemed to many against the decorum and gravity which should mark the professors of Christianity, not to speak of the uglier features of these establishments which no amount of imperial legislation could keep free from disreputable reproaches. Diadochus of Photice, a moderate master of the spiritual life, who flourished in the fifth century, expressly says that bathing is no sin, but that it is a sign of a virile soul and an act of temperance if one abstain from it. We may understand such teaching as applying not to bathing in general, but to the use of the luxurious public baths. At the same time we find Theodoret, the great bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, providing baths for BATES AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 289 the people and building aqueducts for their maintenance. A century earlier the Council of Laodicea, legislating concerning the use of baths, merely condemned the promiscuous bathing of both sexes. In fact, the necessity of bathing was felt by the ancient Christian peoples to be almost as great as that of eating and drinking, and to go about unbathed, in sackcloth and ashes, seemed to them the greatest of penances. Even the monks were allowed to bathe, and the antiquarian Chris tianus Lupus tells us that the bath was looked on as no less indispensable to every ancient monastery than its kitchen. The early Fathers, in general, had no objection to baths being used for cleanliness or health, and Gregory the Great was willing that they should be used on Sunday. The splendid baths of Rome were gradually closed after the middle of the fifth century, not through any action on the part of the popes, but because the barbarian Huns had cut the aque- ducts which fed these magnificent structures. The baths of Constantinople remained in use through the Middle Ages, and those of Alex- andria and Brusa in Bithynia were also well known and frequented. In the article on baths in the " Encyclopaedia 290 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES, Britannica," Dr. John Macpherson, author of " The Baths and Wells of Europe " declares that it is doubtful if the practice of bathing was ever disused to the extent that is usually represented. It is not only doubtful, but certain, that bathing was exceedingly common during the Middle Ages, as any one can convince himself who cares to read, I will not say the original chronicles and biographies of the time, but the numerous his- tories of the economy, luxury, architectiure, and popular habits of those days. In the Revue du Monde CatJiolique for March, 1866, M. Lecoy de la Marche has an interesting article, in which he examines the false statement of Michelet concerning the supposed ecclesiastical prohibition of baths in the Middle Ages. M. de la Marche shows the contrary from an extended examination of the lives of the saints, the chron- icles, the statutes of the caretakers of baths, the names of streets and the like. In the Archives for the Study of Austrian History for the year 1859 Zappert has treated at length the question of bathing in the Middle Ages and shown the fre- quency of the custom. The hot air and vapor baths of the Byzantine peoples were adopted by the Mohammedans, and later on made known to the peoples of Western Europe through the BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 291 Spanish Arabs and the Crusaders. They were in great demand as a cure of leprosy, and com- petent authorities state that after the beginning of the thirteenth century there were few large cities in Europe without them. Their statutes are well known to us. The Jews were allowed to visit them once a week. Lepers had separate baths. Men and women were not allowed to frequent the same bath. Mediaeval theologians like the authors of the " Summa Angelica" and the " Summa Aurea" dis- cuss the casuistry of the bath, and thus bear wit- ness to its general use. Before the Reformation we know from Erasmus that even heated baths were common in Belgium, Germany, France, and England, where they were called hothouses. It would seem that they were commonly adjoined to inns, and Montaigne speaks of them as exist- ing at Rome in the sixteenth century. In the first volume of Janssen's " History of the German People " there are many details concern- ing the popular use of baths in Germany during the Middle Ages. Men bathed several times each day ; some spent the whole day in or about their favorite springs. From the 20th of May to the 9th of June, 1511, Lucas Rem bathed one hundred and twenty-seven times, as we may see 292 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE CUDDLE AGES. by his diary. It was the custom to eat and drink in the bath. While the preachers thun- dered in the churches against the gay young men who sat in the baths, mocked holy things, and talked civil and religious heresies, this gilded youth made merry and sang all manner of songs and catches. " Aussig Wasser, innen Wein Lasst uns alle frohlich sein." Grave authors of the sixteenth century like Gothofredus and ZypaBus deplore the nude bath- ing of the soldiers in the neighborhood of the towns and oppose to it the ancient and more modest customs of the primitive Romans. Lest it should be thought that this frequency of bathing belongs only to the later Middle Ages, and is an outcome of the refinement consequent upon the Crusades, let us look a little more closely into the sentiments of the early Middle Ages concerning the bath. The Council of Trullo, held at Constantinople toward the end of the seventh century, forbids the promiscuous bathing of monks or laymen with persons of the other sex, which implies the existence and use of baths under certain conditions of natural mod- esty. The famous Gottschalk, a monk of the BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 293 ninth century, who suffered many scourgings and long imprisonment for his heretical stubbornness, was nevertheless allowed to bathe frequently, as his opponent, Hincmar of Rheims, testifies in a letter to the Archbishop of Sens. St. Gregory of Tours in the sixth century speaks of the baths attached to the monastery governed by St. Radegunda at Poitiers. We have already seen that Gregory the Great did not forbid Sunday bathing, and we fiind one of his suc- cessors, Nicholas I. (died 867), enunciating his views of bathing in the very remarkable and valuable document known as the '' Replies to the Bulgarians," where he states that bathing, when practised for sanitary purposes, has nothing objectionable. If Michelet and Renan had paid any attention' to the venerable ^^ Liber Pontificalis," they would never have committed the error in question. This ancient book, whose origin is obscure, but seems to be somewhere about the beginning of the sixth century, contains short lives of the popes, with a brief account of some of the events of each reign, from St. Peter to the end of the ninth century. The criteria for its practical use have been admirably set forth by the Abbe Duchesne, its learned editor. In this ancient 294 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. record of the papacy the use of baths at Rome is frequently mentioned. Constantine is said to have given three large bathing establishments to Pope Sylvester. The church of St. Mary Major's at Rome had baths attached to it in the middle of the fourth century by donation of Pope Liberius, and they seem to have been remodelled a century later by Pope Xystus II. Pope St. Damasus at the end of the fourth century gave baths to the new parish of St. Lawrence at Rome, and similar gifts are men- tioned as made by Popes Innocent and Hilary in the fifth century. Shortly after them Pope Symmachus gave baths to the church of St. Pancratius and opened new ones behind the church of St. Paul. We frequently meet these ecclesiastical baths in the succeeding centuries. Toward the end of the eighth the baths of St. John Later an and St. Peter's become famous in Europe. The popes of that time restore the ancient aqueducts to feed those baths, build approaches and staircases, line the halls with marble, and provide accommo- dations for the poor and strangers. Of one, Pope Hadrian (died 795), it is said that he built baths at St. Peter's, '^ where our brethren, the poor of Christ, are wont to bathe,'* and his successor, BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 295 Leo III. (died 816), improved greatly this same establishment. We may, therefore, conclude with the great scholar and canonist, Van Espen, that the cus- tom of bathing was never forbidden or discour- aged by the Church authorities. The Middle Ages were for a long time no better off than antiquity in the matter of bathing accommo- dations. The river, lake, or pool satisfied peo- ple accustomed to live in the open air, and as yet not parked off in monstrous cities, where the last remnant of individuality is menaced. But the Church never curtailed their natural freedom. A plehanus or rural parish priest of the time of Charlemagne would smile at such an ignorant assumption, though he would know that some abstained from bathing by a spirit of mortification, and that the Church condemned certain abominable bathing abuses. If you pressed him still further he would point to the mineral springs and baths of France and Ger- many, which had not to wait until our day to be discovered, and refer his interrogator to Kome, where the city baths and the church baths played so large a share in the daily life of the city of the Leos, the Stephens, and the Hadrians. Perhaps this good parish priest might 296 BATHS AND BATBING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. have heard from wandering Keltic missionaries of the famous English establishment of Bath, where the old Roman works were yet preserved, or even of the famous Holy Well of St. Wini- fred, in Wales, whither, it may be, both insular and continental pilgrims were already wont to journey for the purpose of bathing in this splen- did and beneficent spring. He would point to the universal practice of the good King Carl and his Franks and to the baths at Aachen, and wonder how this traveller from Altruria had got so mixed up in his notions of mediaeval culture as to imagine that the contemporaries of Alcuin and Einhardt were no better than Digger Indians. CLERGY AND PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. It is with great satisfaction that we see ap- pHed to the English Middle Ages the same an- alytico-critical methods that in the hands of a Taine have revolutionized the history of the French Revolution, in the hands of a Janssen that of the German people before and during the Reformation, and in those of a Pastor the beginnings of modern papal history. Among the ablest and most useful chapters of the first volume of Janssen is that which deals with ecclesiastical teaching and preaching in the generation that preceded the appearance of Luther. Eusebius-like, the great historian does scarcely more than link together the numerous contemporary and public evidences of official concern for the religious instruction of the people. Whoever peruses those pages must admit that, whatever else was wrong in Ger- man}^, there was then no dearth of religious instruction, either oral or printed. 297 298 CLERGY AND PEOPLE In his learned and timely book, " The Eve of the Reformation" (London, 1900), Dom Gas- quet comes back on the same subject, and de- molishes for England the same old calumny — viz. that the Catholic clergy were so sunk in vice and ignorance at the time of the Reforma- tion that the latter epoch may well be called a very sunburst of religious knowledge. In his '' Essays on the Reformation," Dr. Samuel Mait- land, himself an Anglican, had already shown what lack of veracity, what unprincipled lit- erary methods, one might suspect in all the earliest Protestant writers on the English Refor- mation, such as Strype, Fox, and Bishop Burnet. In a general way, Mr. James Brewer, the schol- arly editor of the papers of Henry YIII. and historian of his life, concludes as a result of documentary labors at first-hand that " the six- teenth century was not a mass of moral corrup- tion out of which life emerged by some process unknown to art or nature; it was not an addled egg cradling a living bird ; quite the reverse." In Germany, England, and the Northern Kingdoms, the Reformation was a work very largely of cupidity and avarice ; were it not for the fat revenues and the well-tilled lands of churches and abbeys, the old religion would not IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 299 have seen arrayed against it those kings and princes who made the fortune of the Luthers and the Cranmers. Nowhere, except in the Peasants' War — and that was a social rebellion — do we see any general voluntary upheaval of the people against the venerable figure of Ca- tholicism ; brute force, the treachery of its own agents, and a torrent of calumny were the chief weapons of the first memorable campaign against the authority of the Church. It was reserved for a later period to justify the vast rebellion by pleading, among other attenuating causes, the universal neglect of their pastoral duties by the Catholic clergy, secular as well as regular, in every land of Europe. If the accusation were true for England, it could only mean a general violation of the Eng- lish Church law as established in many synods and promulgated in numerous manuals of cleri- cal duty. Thus the Synod of Oxford in 1281 decreed : — " We order that every priest having charge of a flock do, four times in each year — that is, once each quarter, on one or more solemn feast-days — either himself or by some one else, instruct the people in the vulgar language, simply and without any fantastical admixture of subtle distinctions, in the articles of the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Evangelical Precepts, the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins with their off- shoots, the seven principal virtues, and the seven sacraments." 300 CLERGY AND PEOPLE This means that the whole cycle of Christian doctrine had to be expounded to the people every three months ; and, lest the parish priest be in doubt as to the character of the instruc- tion, the synod insists in considerable detail on each of the points mentioned. As late as 1466 a synod of the province of York reiterates this decree and its comment. These regular and homely talks were, of course, more efficient than formal discourses ; though the latter were not wanting, as may be seen by the numerous old volumes of mediaeval sermons yet preserved. Neglect to assist at these instructions was a matter of confession for the penitent, as the carelessness in delivering them was a reproach to the parish priest. "If you are a priest," says an old pre-Reformation manuscript in the (Oxford) Harleian Library, " be a true lantern to the people both in speaking and in living. . . . Read God's law and the expositions of the holy doctors, and study and learn and keep it ; and when thou knowest it, preach and teach it to those that are unlearned." So great was the concern for popular religious instruction that this duty was placed above that of hearing Mass. Richard Whitford, the Monk of Sion, writes in his " Work for Householders " IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 301 (1530) that ^' if there be a sermon any time of day let them be present, all that are not occu- pied in needful and lawful business. All other occupation laid aside, let them ever keep the preachings rather than the Mass, if perchance they may not hear both." That most popular of the fifteenth-century manuals of religious instruction, the ^^ Dives et Pauper," says that '^ by preaching folks are stirred to contrition and to forsake sin and the fiend, and to love God and goodness. ... By the Mass they are not so ; but if they come to Mass in sin they go away in sin, and shrews they come and shrews they wend awa}^ . . . Both are good, but the preaching of God's word ought to be more dis- charged and more desired than the hearing of Mass." Similar advice is found in such works as '^ The Interpretatyon and Sygnyfycacyon of the Masse," by Robert Wyer (1532) ; in " The Myr- rour of the Church ; " in Wynkyn de Worde's " Exornatorium Curatorum ; " and in the " Eng- lish Prymer," printed at Rouen in 1538. It has often been said and written, very falsety, that the Catholic clergy of the Middle Ages fostered ignorance and superstition in order that they might make pecuniary gain 302 CLERGY AND PEOPLE therefrom ; hence, for instance, their encourage- ment of the devotion to images, particularly to the crucifix. What better refutation could we ask than the apposite words of the blessed martyr, Sir Thomas More ? ^ " The flock of Christ is not so foolish as those heretics would make them to be ; for whereas there is no dog so mad that he does not know a real coney from a coney carved and painted, yet they would have it supposed that Christian people that have rea- son in their heads, and therefore the light of faith in their souls, would think that the image of Our Lady were Our Lady herself. Nay, they be not so mad, I trust, but that they do reverence to the image for the honor of the person whom it represents, as every man delights in the image and remembrance of his friend. And although every good Christian has a remembrance of Christ's Passion in his mind, and conceives by devout meditation a form and fashion thereof in his heart, yet there is no man, I ween, so good and so learned, nor so well accustomed to meditation, but that he finds himself more moved to pity and compassion by be- holding the holy crucifix than when he lacks it." How maliciously the first Reformers dealt with the common people is strikingly put in a discourse of Roger Edgeworth, a preacher of the reign of Queen Mary : — " Now at the dissolution of the monasteries and friars' houses, many images have been carried abroad and given to children to play with; and when the children have them in their hands, dancing them in their childish manner, the father or mother comes and says: 'What, Nase, what have you there?' The child answers (as she is taught) : ' I have here my idol.' Then 1 "Salem and Bizance," a dialogue betwixt two Englishmen, whereof one was called Salem and the other Bizance. London, Berthelet, 1533. IK MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 303 the father laughs and makes a g3,y game at it. So says the mother to another : ' Jagge or Tommy, where did you get that pretty idol ? ' — ' John, our parish clerk, gave it to me,' says the child ; and for that the clerk must have thanks and shall not lack good cheer. But if the folly were only in the insolent youth and in the fond, unlearned fathers and mothers, it might soon be redressed." In the very popular fifteenth-century religious manual already referred to, the "Dives et Pau- per/' the devotion to the crucifix, and especially the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday known as the " Creeping to the Cross," is ex- plained with admirable correctness and terseness. Few modern English books of devotion can boast a language so chaste and idiomatic, or so much clearness and conciseness of statement, or so much unction and pathos. And are not the following lines a noble paraphrase of the great mediaeval hymn to the dolors of Jesus Christ Crucified, notably the " Salve Caput Cruen- tatum " ? " When thou seest the image of the crucifix think of Him that died on the cross for thy sins and thy sake, and thank Him for His endless charity that He would suffer so much for thee. See in images how His head was crowned with a garland of thorns till the blood burst but on every side, to destroy the great sin of pride which is most manifested in the heads of men and women. Behold and make an end to thy pride. See in the image how His arms were spread abroad and drawn up on the tree till the veins and sinews cracked ; and how His hands were nailed to the cross and streamed with blood, to destroy the sin that Adam and 304 CLERGY AND PEOPLE Eve did with their hands when they took the apple against God's prohibition. Also He suffered to wash away the sin of the wicked deeds and the wicked works done by the hands of men and women. Behold and make an end of thy wicked works. See how His side was opened and His heart cloven in two by the sharp spear ; and how it shed blood and water to show that if He had more blood in His body, more He would have given for men's love. He shed His blood to ransom our souls and water to wash us from our sins." In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries man- uscript manuals of instruction abounded among the clergy, as the inventories and wills of the period show. Among these were the favorite '' Pars Oculi Sacerdotis," with its " Dextra " and " Sinistra Pars ; " also the " Pupilla Oculi Sacer- dotis/' of John de Burgo. Similar manuals are among the precious incunabula of the English press. In his valuable work on^, " The Old English Bible" (London, 1898), Dom Gasquet has gone over in detail many other evidences of popular religious instruction in pre-Reformation Eng- land. The written sources of religious edifica- tion were accessible not only to the common people of England, but also to those of Wales and Ireland. Vernacular prayer-books continued to be pub- lished in Welsh down to the end of Henry's reign ; even later, says the Rev. J. Fisher. ^ 1 "The Private Devotions of the Welsh" (London, 1898). For similar literature in Irish, see Douglas Hyde's "Literary History of IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 305 "It is rather a curious fact/' he adds, "that nearly all the Welsh manuals of devotion and instruction, of any size, published in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century were the productions of Welsh Roman Catholics and published on the Continent." The researches of Janssen and others have clearly shown that originally and for a consider- able time ecclesiastics considered the printing- press as a most desirable means of religious propaganda. Bibles, prayers, sermons, cate- chisms ; spiritual exhortations, examinations of conscience, reprints of popular hand-books of religion, woodcuts of saints, and religious art- works, issued in great numbers from the presses of Cologne, Paris, Venice, Eome, and other cities. Their titles may be seen in the repertories of Hain, Copinger, and Panzer. What modern journalism does for the artist of the twentieth century as bread-giver, that was done in the olden times by churchmen, who have ever looked on the illuminated page, the decorated book, the ecstasied saint, the patient martyr, as true " helps " to religion. King Ireland" (New York, Scribners, 1899) and the New Ireland Review, passim. 306 CLEBGT AND PEOPLE Ethelbert beheld and was touched by the picture of Christ that Augustine bore at the head of his procession of monks that famous day in Kent. And we are told that the rude Bulgarian chiefs were first moved by a picture of the Last Judg- ment. In the judicious words which follow, Dom Gasquet emphasizes for pre-Reformation England a similar spiritual preoccupation on the part of her clergy and a corresponding earnest- ness on the part of the Catholic laity. " In taking a general survey of the books issued by the English presses upon the introduction of the art of printing, the inquirer can hardly fail to be struck with the number of religious or quasi- religious works which formed the bulk of the early printed books. This fact alone is sufficient evidence that the invention which at this period worked a veritable revolution in the intellectual life of the world was welcomed by the ecclesiastical authorities as a valuable auxiliary in the work of instruction. In England the first presses were set up under the patronage of churchmen, and a very large proportion of the early books were actually works of instruction or volumes furnishing materials to the clergy for the familiar and simple discourses which they were accustomed to give four times a year to their people. Besides the large number of what may be regarded as professional books, chiefly intended for use by the ecclesiastical body, such as missals, manuals, bre- viaries, and horae, and the primers and other prayer-books used by the laity, there was an ample supply of religious literature published in the early part of the sixteenth century. "In fact, the bulk of the early printed English books were of a religious character; and as the publication of such volumes was evidently a matter of business on the part of the first English printers, it is obvious that this class of literature commanded a ready sale, and that the circulation of such books was fostered by those in authority at that period. Volumes of sermons, works IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 307 of instruction on the Creed and the Commandments, lives of the saints and popular expositions of Scripture-history, were not only produced, but passed through several editions in a short space of time. The evidence, consequently, of the productions of the first English printing-presses goes to show not only that religious books were in great demand, but also that, so far from discourag- ing the use of such works of instruction, the ecclesiastical authori- ties actively helped in their diffusion." In the Middle Ages the principles, spirit, ideals, and aims of the Church had so interpenetrated the popiTlar life that only the smallest part of her actual teaching was represented by the spoken and the written word. All the phenom- ena of social life were colored, transfigured, by the spirit of religion. The public square — no longer forum or agora — was like an enor- mous open-air vestibule to the cathedral, parish, or abbey church. On it the dramatic "mys- teries," processions, " penances," and other popu- lar forms of religious life were enacted with every recurring festival of high or low degree. To a great extent it was the church of the people, in which they executed, not without love and piety, the offices of their own rude and fantas- tic liturgy. Within the churches another free and large liturgical worship displayed its charms, more orderly and traditional, yet endlessly new and universally artistic; natural, too, like the flowering of a mountain side in spring. 308 CLERGY AND PEOPLE The churches themselves were huge folios in stone — "the books of the unlearned," easily read by people yet accessible to the old patris- tic mysticism that culminated in a St. Bernard, yet looking to the desert as a refuge from the cosmic sin and shame of life, and whose native sense for symbolism was undulled by the scholas- tic formalism of a later time. There was every- where a picturesque and plastic '' public prayer" under standed of all, whose multitudinous social influences Dom Gueranger and his Benedictine school have admirably illustrated for the last forty years. Painting and sculpture and music — all the Muses, in fact — began anew their ca- reers in the shadow of such great ministers as Strasburg, Freiburg, Rheims, Westminster, and Chartres. A hundred minor arts, the " Klein- kiinste," acted as ordinary skilled tutors to eye and hand and brain, potently and sweetly draw- ing forth every latent capacity of race or family or surroundings or traditions. Something holy and soulful they infused into every product of man's handiwork, something highly personal and unique, stifling in every raw material the coarse and deathly grossness of it, which else had led the Middle Ages, as all others, into idolatry. Let the Catholic reader, especially, IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 309 meditate deeply on what John Ruskin has writ- ten concerning the artistic life of mediseval Flor- ence and Venice. In these and many other ways the medigeval peoples enjoyed a religious teaching, at once living, pleasing, artistic, manifold ; the outcome of a deep and universal conviction that this world and life, though good, were transitory; that man had an immortal soul for which he was responsible to a beneficent but just Creator ; that society had its end in God, its saviour and ensample in Jesus, its nurse and guide in the Church. Folly and turbulence and grossness and ignorance there were, of course. But those peoples were not, like us, incapable of hearing or appreciating divine warnings. The passion of gigantic wealth was not in them ; they would not, if they could, turn the world into one work- shop and poison the pure air of heaven with the filth and the darkness of the breath of avarice. We may well look back to them as we meditate on the probable issue of the principles and forces that are idolized to-day — Plutus and Mammon and the minor gods that serve them. The mediaeval people, though violent and narrow, because 37oung, were not draped in a stoical self -righteousness nor sunk in a practical 310 CLERGY AND PEOPLE atheism; neither had they our Judaic stiffness of neck and hardness of heart. Sanabiles fecit nationes — it is possible to heal the fevers of life — they thought. But it could be done only by a divine Physician, working at the true roots of evil and misery — the mind's darkened eye and the heart's perverted inclinations. This is why they all held so firmly to the heavenly pedagogy of tears, contrition, compunction, satisfaction, and lifelong sorrow; why they produced those good works of art and charity whose splendor yet attracts and consoles us. All told, are we more moral and holy than the men of the age of St. Louis of France and St. Francis of Assisi ? THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDERS OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. If we observe ourselves and the multitudinous life about us, we shall all agree that most of what is typical, characteristic of our own gen- eration, perishes with us. Man is largely a thing of the present. Most of his time is spent in fighting off decay and death, that, neverthe- less, press on him with the slow and certain speed of the Alpine glacier. Of the popular daily life of the middle of the last century, only reminiscences remain ; and when those are gone whose hearts and minds still retain vivid im- pressions of the past, the tide of oblivion makes swifter haste, and soon obliterates all but the most striking landmarks, those great events and institutions that are the common property of a race or a nation. Even literature, though it is usually said to hold the most sacred experiences of every people, is only a fragment of fragments, retains but a tithe of the passions, the hopes, the struggles, the triumphs and glories, that made up the sum of life as it was actually lived 311 312 THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDEBS by men and women. As far as the past is con- cerned, we walk amid shadows and reflections, in an ever deepening twilight. This thought is of some importance when we look back over the thousand years of the Middle Ages for some great convincing illustration of the spirit and scope of Catholicism, something that shall be as strictly its own work as the Homeric chants or the marbles of the Parthenon are the work of the Greek soul, the great roads of Europe and the Code of Justinian the product of the genius of Rome. Catholic Christianity in that thousand years of the Middle Ages domi- nated fully and freely the life of European man- kind. What legacy has it left the human race, at once monumental and unique, useful and holy, worthy of its own claims, and comparable with those remains by which we judge other religions that lay, or once did lay, claim to universal acceptance ? Say what we will, make what appeal we will to the social benefits of a religion, its written documents of a literary character or value, its political uses, its success- ful moulding over of the common heart, its answers to the eternal questions of the soul, the common conscience, its upbuilding of the spirit- ual man, individually and collectively — develop OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 313 all these admirable arguments as we will, there remains the deep and just query : What monu- ments has it left behind ? The hand of man is very cunning, and tends very naturally to fashion in some public and permanent manner the ideals that the brain has conceived and the heart cherished. The most refined Greek ethnicism had its Acropolis at Athens, its Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Roman ethnicism had its Temple of Fortune at Prasneste, its Coliseum at Kome. Those philosophies of life that are as religions to the followers of Confucius and Buddha have each flowered in a peculiar art that may seem fan- tastic to us, but has yet an intimate relationship with the doctrines that it glorifies and perpetu- ates. General doctrines, that have got them- selves lived out, large and constant views of the meaning, uses, and end of human life, usually blossom out in great monuments, almost as natu- rally as the thought of the brain leaps to the tongue and clamors for expression. It was as a religion that Catholicism domi- nated the Middle Ages. The natural monu- ments of a religion are its temples. You may simplify a religion as you will, curtail its func- tions, reduce its influence — but so long as it 314 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDEBS pretends to bind man with his Maker, so long will it need places of meeting for its people, and so long will it set up therein some symbol or symbols of its creed. The refined paganism of Greece and Rome, with which Catholicism came into conflict, had such popular centres of worship — the temples and shrines of its gods. But paganism had noth- ing truly spiritual about it. It was all based on fear of its deities, was a religion solely of low and coarse propitiation, a mass of deceptive practices, a double religion — base superstition for the multitude, quasi-agnosticism for the ele- vated classes. It had no fixed doctrine to preach. It had no central fire of love to which all were bidden, no mystic banquet, no divine revelation to communicate. Hence, its temples were only abodes of the mysterious deity. He alone dwelt behind marble walls, within which, as a rule, only the priest went and the needed servants. Outside, on the temple-square, stood the multi- tudes, watching the evisceration of sheep and oxen, or the other mummeries of paganism, but utterly without any serious share in the act of religion that was entirely the affair of the priests and the magistrates, a State act. With the Christians, from the very beginning. OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 315 it was otherwise. They were one body with Jesus Christ, their mystic head. They had been all born again in Him, and the true death was to lose that new higher life. They were destined to union with Him in eternity. They had His history in four little books, and the letters of His first agents, the apostles. He had fixed a cer- tain form for their meetings, that were to be very frequent, and at which all who confessed His name should assist and partake of a divine ban- quet that was none other than His own body and blood. So the Christians needed a large, free space, where all could see one another, where all could hear, where access w*as easy to the eucharistic table or altar, around which the ministers of the banquet could serve the presiding officer and distribute to all the assistants, in an orderly way, the celestial food. The God of the Christians was no longer far away. He was with them day and night. He spoke to them all with equal love, and demanded from all an equal service. In other words, the doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament, of the Real Presence, de- manded at once and created all the essentials of a Christian church, such as they are found in the catacombs and such as they will exist as 316 THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDEES long as the religion itself — a table for the sac- rifice, a space for its ministers, an open space sufficient for the assistants, light for the per- formance of the mysteries in which all were sharers and, in a true but mysterious sense, actors, light also for the reading of the gospels, the Old Testament, the letters from distant brethren, the accounts of martyrdom. In time, the pagan had to be kept out, the novice ad- mitted slowly, the unfaithful excluded and chas- tised for a time, the goods, deposits, plate, records, of the little communities stored away. Thus vestibules, courts, and sacristies were added. Thus, too, arose, almost in the Cenacle, the first Christian Church', all whose essential elements are curiously enough foreshadowed in the Apocalypse — indeed, in the holy Temple of Jerusalem itself. It is a long and charming chapter in the his- tory of the fine arts how the typical Catholic Church grew up. There was the upper room in the residence of the principal Christian of the community; perhaps, too, they hired occasion- ally a public hall or reading-room. Then came the little chamber of some cemetery where an illustrious martyr lay. When freedom came, there was the little overground chapel, with its OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 317 triple apse and its roofless but enclosed court- yard, just over the martyr's resting-place ; then the vast Eoman halls of justice were abandoned to them. Sometimes the temples were trans- formed for Christian service. Soon they built their own — at Rome St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the " Great Church " at Carthage, the " New Church " at Antioch, at Tyre. Emperors paid for them, and crossed the world to assist at their dedication. They were often of the style of the Roman courts of justice known as basilicas; again they were octagonal or round. Every city, every village, had its own. But whatever their form or material, they were places of meet- ing for a community of men and women, there- fore roomy and lightsome. By reason of the great central act of the religion, they were decently ornamented, provided with an elevated altar, beneath which lay the body of some dis- tinguished martyr or confessor of Christ, whose death was the pledge of final victory over a bad and unjust society, a seal of hope, an assurance that with faith in Jesus Christ lay the only cer- tainty of eternal life. The first great Christian churches were owing to the constructive skill of Roman architects and builders. They embodied the best traditions of 318 THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDERS imperial architecture, such at least as had sur- vived into the fourth century. That they were not in absolute decay may be seen from the splendid ruins of the Palace of Diocletian at Salona. But, given the collapse of Roman power, the great building-arts could not long survive. Their traditions were easily lost for want of exercise. In the Christian Orient per- haps they lived on much longer, in Greek Con- stantinople, and the remnants of the Roman power that Islam did not absorb. But in the West a mysterious transformation took place. We quit the sixth century holding on to tradi- tions of classical forms and workmanship at Rome and Ravenna, but we emerge into the seventh, in possession no longer of what is known as Roman architecture, but of what the historians of art are agreed to call Romanesque. For five hundred years nearly all the churches of Europe are ranged in this category. We have no longer in their purity the solemn, long nave of the basilica, with its noble monolith pillars, tied by correct round arches, on which rests the main roof, while the altar is in the apse, that is solidly built up and holds on its own semicircle of brick its suitable roof. If side-naves are needed, they are added from with- OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 319 out, with their own columns, low roofs, arid en- closing walls. In place of such majestic build- ings that retained no little of the majesty of imperial Rome, and of which a specimen may yet be seen at Trier on the Moselle, or even in some Roman churches, we get smaller edifices. For the great monolith column there are low pillars, often made of separate stone drums. The arches are lower, more squatty, and depend on very thick walls for their support. The open upper roof of the old basilica gives way to a few narrow windows, mere apertures, but decorated with pretty colonnettes. An inside gallery, low and narrow, runs around the church just over the pillars. A low roof made of wooden beams gives an air of dimness and depression to the whole edifice. Where did the Christian architects of Northern Italy, in whose cities it surely arose, get the essentials of this style ? Did a school of genuine Roman architects and builders survive the down- fall of their State and culture? Did they live on Lake Como, and perpetuate there the skill and cunning in building of their Roman ances- tors ? Are they the real builders of the first Lombard churches, the originators of Roman- esque, that afterward was carried by them into 820 THE CArilEDUAL-BUILDKUS France, and Geniiany, and England, in which lands ono beauty, one utility after another, was added, until such glorious old churches as Worms, Speyer, and others of the Rhineland, were cre- ated, until St. Ambrose at Milan, St. Michael's ;it Pavia, and many others, were either rebuilt anew or made over after the prevaihng style? Or is \\\(\ Romanesques churcli the result of inh(MMied barbarian tastes and traditions strug- gliiiu; for (expression .-it the hands of men yet raw ill [\n\ history and forms of architecture? Is it the Greek architect of Constantinople, an exile, or a left-over from the ruinous exarchate at Ravenna., who himself executed, or gave the first inipiils(; to those curious buildings in which, all over Muropc;, the traditions of Old Rome are seen to underlie a number of new principles and suggestions ? Anyhow, Christian architecture from Roman became European by way of the Romanesque. Specimens of the latter soon arose in every land. The Roman architects and builders who followed St. Augustine to England, St. Boniface to Germany, built in tliat style. Those who crossed the Al|)s at tlir bid- ding of Charlemagne, and created the octagonal basilica of Aix-li-Cha-pelle for him, showed that they were masters of both Byzantine and Ro- OF MWHSLMVJLL EUM»PE. tSL mssoisss^^ni^ for itey Mit ;sM&t iih&m. w&ak.