deluge of ignorance and of feudal oppression-then Scholastic, that the human mind might be educated for a return to a sounder knowledge, and to primitive doctrine-then Protestant, that the soul might be emancipated from error, superstition, and spiritual despotism-then partially Reformed, in the very bosom of the papacy, lest that emancipation should hurry the whole of Christendom into precipitate change and lawless anarchy-and then at length Philosophical, to prove that as there are no depths of sin or misery to which the healing of the Gospel cannot reach, so there are no heights of speculation to which the wisdom of the Gospel cannot ascend. Believing thus in the perpetuity as well as on the catholicity of the Church, and judging that she is still the same in spirit throughout all ages, although, in her external developments, flexible to the varying necessities of all, we have ventured on some former occasions, and are again about, to assert for the pure and reformed branches" of it in England and in Scotland, an alliance with the heroes of the faith in remote times, and in less enlightened countries; esteeming that to be the best Protestantism, which, while it frankly condemns the errors of other Christian societies, yet claims fellowship with the piety, the wisdom, and the love, which, in the midst of those errors, have attested the divine original of them all. If, according to the advice which on some of those occasions we have presumed to offer to those who are studious of such subjects, there be among us any scholar meditating a Protestant history of the Monastic Orders, he will find materials for a curious chapter in this correspondence of the French Benedictines of the reign of Louis the XIV. In that fraternity light and darkness succeeded each other by a law the reverse of that which obtained in Europe at large. From the promulgation of their rule in the sixth century, their monasteries were comparatively illuminated amidst the general gloom of the dark ages. But when the sun arose on the outer world, its beams scarcely penetrated their cloisters; nor did they hail the returning dawn of literature and science until the day was glowing all around them in meridian splendor. Then, however, passing at one vault from the haze of twilight to the radiance of noon, they won the wreath of superior learning even in the times of Tillemont and Du Cange-though resigning the palm of genius to Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Pascal. Thus the three great epochs of their annals are denoted by the growth, the obscuration and the revival of their intellectual eminence. M. Valery's volumes illustrate the third and last stage of this progress, which cannot, however, be understood without a rapid glance at each of the two preceding stages. But why," it may be asked, "direct the eye at all to the mouldering records of monastic superstition, self-indulgence, and hypocrisy ?" Why indeed? From contemplating the mere debasement of any of the great families of man, no images can be gathered to delight the fancy, nor any examples to move or to invigorate the heart. And doubtless he who seeks for such knowledge, may find in the chronicles of the convent a fearful disclosure of the depths of sin and folly into which multitudes of our brethren have plunged, under the pretense of more than human sanctity. But the same legends will supply some better lessons, to him who reads books that he may learn to love, and to benefit his fellow men. They will teach him that, as in Judea, the temple, so, in Christendom, the monastery, was the ark, freighted during the deluge, with the destinies of the Church and of the worldthat there our own spiritual and intellectual ancestry found shelter amidst the tempestthat there were matured those powers of mind which gradually infused harmony and order into the warring elements of the European commonwealth-and that there many of the noblest ornaments of our common Christianity were trained, to instruct, to govern and to bless the nations of the West. Guided by the maxim "that whatever any one saint records of any other saint must be true," we glide easily over the enchanted land along which Domnus Johannes Mabillon conducts the readers of the earlier parts of his wondrous compilations receiving submissively the assurance that St. Benedict sang eucharistic hymns in his mother's womb raised a dead child to life-caused his pupil Maurus to tread the water dry-shod-untied by a word the notted cords with which an Arian Goth (Zalla by name) had bound an honest rustic-cast out of one monk a demon who had assumed the disguise of a farrierrendered visible to another a concealed dragon who was secretly tempting him to desertionand by laying a consecrated wafer on the bosom of a third, enabled him to repose in a grave which till then had continually cast him out; for all these facts the great annalist relates of his patriarch St. Benedict, on the authority of the pontiff (first of that name) St. Gregory. If, however, the record had contained no better things than these, the memorial of Benedict would have long since perished with him. the deep insight into the human heart by which he rendered myriads of men and women, during more than thirty successive generations, the spontaneous instruments of His authentic biography is comprised in a his purposes-these all unite to prove that very few words. He was born towards the profound genius, extensive knowledge, and end of the fifth century, at Nursia, in the earnest meditation, had raised him to the very duchy of Spoleto. His mother died in first rank of uninspired legislators. His discigiving him birth. He was sent to Rome for ples, indeed, find in his legislative wisdom a his education by his father, a member of the conclusive proof that he wrote and acted unAnician family, which Claudian has celebra-der a divine impulse. Even to those who reted; but was driven from the city by the ject this solution, it is still a phenomenon afinvasions of Odoacer and Theodoric to the fording ample exercise for a liberal curiosity. Mons Subiacus, where, while yet a beardless youth, he took up his abode as a hermit. Like Jerome, he was haunted in his solitude by the too vivid remembrance of a Roman lady; and subdued his voluptuous imagination by rolling his naked body among the thorns. The fame of such premature sanctity recommended him to the monks of the neighboring monastery as their abbot; but scarcely had he assumed the office when, disgusted by the rigors of his discipline, the electors attempted to get rid of him by poison. Returning to his hermitage, he soon found himself in the centre of several rude huts, erected in his vicinity by other fugitives from the world, who acknowledged him as the superior of this monastic village. But their misconduct compelled him to seek a new retirement, which he found at Monte Casino, on the frontiers of the Abbruzzi. There, attended by some of his pupils and former associates, he passed the remainder of his life-composing his rule, and establishing the order which, at the distance of thirteen centuries, still retains his name and acknowledges his authority. He died in the year 543, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. That the Benedictine statutes remain to this day a living code, written in the hearts of multitudes in every province of the Christian world, is chiefly perhaps to be ascribed to the inflexible rigor with which they annihilated the cares and responsibilities of freedom. To the baser sort, no yoke is so galling as that of self-control; no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many, the abdication of self-government is a willing sacrifice. is reserved for the nobler few to rise to the arduous virtues of using wisely the gifts which God bestows, and walking courageously, though responsibly, in the light which God vouchsafes. It And by the abject many, though often under the guidance of the nobler few, were peopled the cells of Monte Casino and her affiliated convents. Their gates were thrown open to men of every rank, in whom the abbot or prior of the house could discover the marks of a genuine vocation. To exclude any such candidate, though a pauper or a slave, would have been condemned by BeneTo the intercourse of Benedict with the dict, in the words and spirit of Augustine, refractory monks of Subiaco, may perhaps as grave delictum. In those sacred enbe traced the basis of his system. It closures, therefore, many poor and illiterate probably revealed to him the fact that Indo- brethren found a refuge. But they were lence, Self-will, and Selfishness are the three distinguished from the rest as conversi-that archdemons of the cloister; and suggested is, as persons destined neither for the priestthe inference that Industry, Obedience, and hood nor the tonsure, but bound to labor for Community of goods are the antagonist the society as husbandmen, shepherds, artipowers which ought to govern there. But sans, or domestic servants. the comprehensiveness of thought with which he so exhausted the science of monastic polity, that all subsequent rules have been nothing more than modifications of his ownthe prescience with which he reconciled conventual franchises with abbatial dominionthe skill with which he at once concentrated and diffused power among the different members of his order, according as the objects in view were general or local-and In the whirl and uproar of the handicrafts of our own day, it is difficult to imagine the noiseless spectacle which in those ages so often caught the eye, as it gazed on the secluded abbey and the adjacent grange. In black tunics, the mementoes of death, and in leathern girdles, the emblems of chastity, might then be seen carters silently yoking their bullocks to the team, and driving them in silence to the field-or shepherds inter changing some inevitable whispers while they watched their flocks--or vine-dressers pruning the fruit of which they might neither taste nor speak-or wheelwrights, carpenters, and masons plying their trades like the inmates of some deaf and dumb asylumand all pausing from their labors as the convent bell, sounding the hours of primes, or nones, or vespers, summoned them to join in spirit, even when they could not repair in person, to those sacred offices. Around the monastic workshop might be observed the belt of cultivated land continually encroaching on the adjacent forest; and the passerby might trace to the toils of these mute workmen the opening of roads, the draining of marshes, the herds grazing, and the harvests waving in security, under the shelter of ecclesiastical privileges which even the Vandal and the Ostrogoth regarded with respect. Our own annual agricultural meetings, with their implements and their prizes, their short horns and their long speeches, must carry back their economic genealogy to those husbandmen who, with dismal aspect, brawny arms, and compressed lips, first taught the conquerors of Rome the science in which Columella and Virgil had instructed the ancient Romans. A similar pedigree must be assigned to our academies of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. The fine arts are merely imitative in their infancy; though, as they become mature, they also become symbolical. And this maturity is first attained by the architect, because he ministers to a want more urgent than the rest-because, in the order of time, the edifice must precede the works designed for its embellishment-and because, finding in nature no models, except for the details of his performance, he must, from the first, be inventive in the composition of it. Thus the children of Benedict, when contemplating their lofty avenues sacred to meditation, and the mellowed lights streaming through the foliage, and the flowers clustering in the conventual garden, and the pendulous stalactites of the neighboring grottoes, conceived of a Christian temple in which objects resembling these, though hewn out of imperishable stone, and carved into enduring forms, might be combined and grouped together into one glorious whole. With a ritual addressed to the eye rather than to the ear-a sacred pantomime, of which the sacrifice of the mass was the action, the priests the actors, and the high altar the stage-nothing more was requisite to the solemn exhibition but the cathedral as its appropriate theatre. It arose, therefore, not the servile representation of any one natural object, but the majestic combination of the forms of many; and full of mystic significance, in the cruciform plan, the lofty arch, the oriel windows, the lateral chapels, and the central elevation. Not a groining, a mullion, or a tracery was there, in which the initiated eye did not read some masonic enigma, some ghostly counsel, or some inarticulate summons to confession, to penitence, or to prayer. Every niche without, and every shrine within these sanctuaries, was adorned with images of their tutelary saints; and especially of Her who is supreme among the demigods of this celestial hierarchy. But, instead of rising to the impersonation of holiness, beauty, or power in these human forms, the monkish sculptors were content to copy the indifferent models of humanity within their reach; and the statues, busts, and reliefs which, in subsequent times, fell beneath the blows of Protestant Iconoclasts, had little if any value but that which belonged to their peculiar locality and their accidental associations. In painting, also, whether encaustic, in fresco, or on wood, the performances of the early Benedictine artists were equally humble. In order to give out their visible poetry, the chisel and the pencil must be guided by minds conversant with the cares and the enjoyments of life; for it is by such minds only that the living soul which animates mute nature can ever be perceived, or can be expressed in the delineation of realities, whether animated or inanimate. In ecclesiastical and conventual architecture, and in that art alone, the monks exhausted their creative imagination; covering Europe with monuments of their science in statics and dynamics, and with monuments of that plastic genius which, from an infinity of elaborate, incongruous, and often worthless details, knew how to evoke one sublime and harmonious whole. In those august shrines, if any where on earth, the spirit of criticism is silenced by the belief that the adorations of men are mingling in blessed accord with the hallelujahs of heaven. To animate that belief, the Benedictine musicians produced those chants which, when long afterwards combined by Palestrina into the Mass of Pope Marcellus, were hailed with rapture by the Roman Conclave and the Fathers of Trent, as the golden links which bind together in an indissoluble union the supplications of the Militant Church and the thanksgivings of the Church Triumphant. "Lusts of the imagination!" exclaimed, | read, the Greek and Latin fathers, the and may yet exclaim, the indignant pulpits Church historians, the geographers and of Scotland and Geneva-"lusts as hostile grammarians whose works were then extant to the purity of the Christian faith as the and in repute, with various medical books, grosser lusts of the flesh or the emptiest for the assistance of those monks to whom vanities of life." Hard words these for our the care of the infirmary was confided. restorers of church architecture in mediæval Whoever will consult the "Historia Rei splendor! Let the Camden Society, the Literariæ Ordinis Sancti Benedicti," by their Lord of Wilton, and the benchers of the historiographer, Magnoaldus Zeigelbauer, Temple look to it; while we, all innocent of may rapidly accumulate the most conclusive any such sumptuous designs-her Majesty's proofs, that by their Order were either laid. Church Building Commissioners themselves or preserved the foundations of all the eminot more so-refer to these Benedictine nent schools of learning of Modern Europe. prodigies only as illustrating a memorable passage in Benedictine history. But art was regarded by the fathers of that order rather as the delight than as the serious occupation of their brotherhood. With a self-reliance as just as that of the great philosopher, if not as sublime, they took to themselves all knowledge as their proper province. Their rule assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and multiplication of valuable manuscripts. It taught the copyist of a holy book to think of himself as at once a pupil and a teacher; as a missionary while seated at his desk--using each finger as a tongueinflicting on the Spirit of Evil a deadly wound at each successive line--and as baffling, with the pen, the dread enemy, who smiles at the impotent hostility of every other weapon grasped by the hand of mortal man. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart for the discharge of this sacred office. In this Scriptorium some of the monks plied their pens assiduously, and in profound silence, to produce faultless transcripts of the best originals. To others was committed the care of revising the text of such works as were then held in the highest esteem. Charlemagne himself assigned to the Benedictine Alcuin the high office of preparing, from the various sources within his reach, a perfect Codex of the Holy Scriptures. For what remains to us of Pliny, Sallust, and Macrobius, and for the orations against Verres, we are indebted to their literary zeal. A tribute of writing materials at the commencement of each novitiate, and another of books at its close, with an annual import of manuscripts from the inferior houses, were continually augmenting the libraries of their greater convents. How extensive and how valuable such collections became, may be inferred from the directions given by the Benedictine Cassiodorus for the guidance of his brethren in their studies. He had collected, and he enjoins them to The greatness of the Benedictines did not, however, consist either in their agricultural skill, their prodigies of architecture, or their priceless libraries; but in their parentage of countless men and women, illustrious for active piety-for wisdom in the government. of mankind-for profound learning-and for that contemplative spirit which discovers within the soul itself things beyond the limits of the perceptible creation. Such, indeed, is the number of these worthies, that, if every page at our disposal were a volume, and every such volume as ponderous as our old acquaintance, Scapula, space would fail us to render justice to the achievements of the half of them. We cannot, however, pass by this goodly fellowship without a transient glance at one normal type, at the least, of each of these various forms of Benedictine heroism. For that purpose we need scarcely wander from the annals of our own land. In the Benedictine abbey of Nutsall, near Winchester, poetry, history, rhetoric, and the Holy Scriptures were taught, in the beginning of the eighth century, by a monk whom his fellow countrymen called Winfred, but whom the Church honors under the name of Boniface. He was born at Crediton, in Devonshire, of noble and wealthy parents, who had reluctantly yielded to his wish to embrace the monastic state. Hardly, however, had he reached middle life, when his associates at Nutsall discovered that he was dissatisfied with the pursuits by which their own thoughts were engrossed. As, in his evening meditations, he paced the long conventual avenue of lime trees, or as, in the night-watches, he knelt before the crucifix suspended in his cell, he was still conscious of a voice, audible though inarticulate, which repeated to him the divine injunction, "to go and preach the gospel to all nations." Then, in mental vision, was seen stretching out before him the land of his German ancestry; where beneath the veil of the customs described by Tacitus, was con- cealed an idolatry of which the historian had neither depicted, nor probably conjectured the abominations. To encounter Satan in this stronghold, became successively the daydream, the passion, and the fixed resolve of Boniface; until, at length, abandoning, for this holy war, the studious repose for which he had already abandoned the world, he appeared, in his thirty-sixth year, a solitary and unbefriended missionary, traversing the marshy sands and the primeval forests of Friesland. But Charles Martel was already there the leader in a far different contest; nor, while the Christian Mayor of the palace was striking down the Pagans with his battle-axe, could the pathetic entreaties of the Benedictine Monk induce them to bow down to the banner of the cross. He therefore returned to Nutsall, not with diminished zeal, but with increased knowledge. He had now learned that his success must depend on the conduct of the secular and spiritual rulers of mankind, and on his own connection with them. The chapter of his monastery chose him as their abbot; but, at his own request, the Bishop of Winchester annulled the election. Then, quitting for ever his native England, Boniface pursued his way to Rome, to solicit the aid of Pope Gregory the Second, in his efforts for the conversion of the German people. Armed with a papal commission, a papal blessing, and a good store of relics, Boniface again appeared in Friesland, where Charles Martel was now the undisputed master. Victory had rendered him devout, and he gladly countenanced the labors of the monk, to bring his new subjects within the fold of the Christian Church. So ardent, indeed, was his zeal for this great work, that the destined author of it was soon compelled to migrate into Saxony, as the only means of escaping the unwelcome command of the conqueror to fix his residence in Friesland, and there to assume the coadjutorship and succession to the Bishop of Utrecht. The missionary labors of Boniface, interrupted only by three short visits to Rome, were prolonged over a period of more than thirty-six years; and were extended over all the territories between the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Ocean. At Rome he sought and found all the support which papal authority, zeal, and wisdom could afford him. Gregory the Second consecrated him a bishop, though without a diocese. Gregory the Third raised him to be the Archbishop and Primate of all Germany, with power to estab | The same lish bishoprics at his discretion. pontiff afterwards nominated him Legate of the Holy See, in Germany and France. To these distinctions Pope Zachary added the Archbishopric of Mentz, then first constituted the metropolis of the German churches. Last of all was bestowed on him the singular privilege of appointing his own successor in his primacy. There have been churchmen to whom such a memento of the vanity of even the highest ecclesiastical dignities would have afforded but an equivocal satisfaction. To Boniface the remembrance of the shortness of life was not only familiar, but welcome. The treatise of Ambrose on the advantages of death was his constant companion. It had taught him to regard his successive promotions but as the means of preparing his mind for the joyful resignation of them all. His seventy-fourth year was now completed. For the spiritual care of his converts he had established seven new bishoprics, and had built and endowed many monasteries for the advancement of piety and learning among them. At last, abdicating his own mitre in favor of Lullus, a monk of Malmesbury, he solemnly devoted his remaining days to that office of a missionary, which he justly esteemed as far nobler than any symbolized by the crosier, the purple, or the tiara. Girding round him his black Benedictine habit, and depositing his Ambrose De Bono Mortis' in the folds of it, he once more travelled to Friesland; and, pitching his tent on the banks of a small rivulet, awaited there the arrival of a body of neophytes, whom he had summoned to receive at his hands the rite of confirmation. Ere long a multitude appeared in the distance, advancing towards the tent, not however with the lowly demeanor of Christian converts drawing near to their bishop, but carrying deadly weapons, and announcing by their cries and gestures that they were Pagans, sworn to avenge their injured deities against the arch-enemy of their worship. The servants of Boniface drew their swords in his defense; but calmly, and even cheerfully awaiting the approach of his enemies, and forbidding all resistance, he fell beneath their blows, a martyr to the faith which he had so long lived, and so bravely died to propagate. His copy of Ambrose, De Bono Mortis,' covered with his blood, was exhibited, during many succeeding centuries, at Fulda, as a relic. It was contemplated there by many who regarded as superstitious and heretical some of the tenets of Boniface. |