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LECTURE IX--THE MONK A CIVILIZER
Historians are often blamed for writing as if the History of Kings
and Princes were the whole history of the world. 'Why do you tell
us,' is said, 'of nothing but the marriages, successions, wars,
characters, of a few Royal Races? We want to know what the people,
and not the princes, were like. History ought to be the history of
the masses, and not of kings.'
The only answer to this complaint seems to be, that the defect is
unavoidable. The history of the masses cannot be written, while they
have no history; and none will they have, as long as they remain a
mass; ere their history begins, individuals, few at first, and more
and more numerous as they progress, must rise out of the mass, and
become persons, with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or
less different from their fellows, and thereby leavening and
elevating their fellows, that they too may become persons, and men
indeed. Then they will begin to have a common history, issuing out
of each man's struggle to assert his own personality and his own
convictions. Till that point is reached, the history of the masses
will be mere statistic concerning their physical well-being or ill-
being, which (for the early ages of our race) is unwritten, and
therefore undiscoverable.
The early history of the Teutonic race, therefore, is, and must
always remain, simply the history of a few great figures. Of the
many of the masses, nothing is said; because there was nothing to
say. They all ate, drank, married, tilled, fought, and died, not
altogether brutally, we will hope, but still in a dull monotony,
unbroken by any struggle of principles or ideas. We know that large
masses of human beings have so lived in every age, and are living so
now--the Tartar hordes, for instance, or the thriving negroes of
central Africa: comfortable folk, getting a tolerable living, son
after father, for many generations, but certainly not developed
enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.
I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very
well off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for
themselves. They lived in a rough way, certainly: but roughness is
not discomfort, where the taste has not been educated. A Red Indian
sleeps as well in a wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish
babies thrive as well among the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet.
Man is a very well constructed being, and can live and multiply
anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and get pure water and enough to
eat. Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have been comfortably off, or
they could not have multiplied as they did. Even though their
numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that howsoever
they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other, they rose
again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever. Again and again
you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and in
a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more
numerous and terrible than before. Never believe that a people
deprest by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered
Europe in the face of centuries of destructive war. Those very wars,
again, may have helped in the long run the increase of population,
and for a reason simple enough, though often overlooked. War throws
land out of cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers
find the land fallow, and more or less restored to its original
fertility; and so begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase.
In no other way can I explain the rate at which nations after the
most desolating wars spring up, young and strong again, like the
phoenix, from their own funeral pile. They begin afresh as the
tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too often with the ashes of burnt
homesteads, and the blood of the slain.
Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough
education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived,
while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we
should say now, was never overstocked. This is the case with our own
gipsies, and with many savage tribes--the Red Indians, for instance--
and accounts for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all
dead, in the first struggle for existence. But then these gipsies,
and the Red Indians, do not increase in numbers, but the contrary;
while our forefathers increased rapidly. On the other hand, we have,
at least throughout the middle ages, accounts of such swarms of
cripples, lepers, deformed, and other incapable persons, as to make
some men believe that there were more of them, in proportion to the
population, than there are now. And it may have been so. The
strongest and healthiest men always going off to be killed in war,
the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so an
unhealthy population might spring up. And again--and this is a
curious fact--as law and order enter a country, so will the
proportion of incapables, in body and mind, increase. In times of
war and anarchy, when every one is shifting for himself, only the
strongest and shrewdest can stand. Woe to those who cannot take care
of themselves. The fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are
killed, starved, neglected, or in other ways brought to grief. But
when law and order come, they protect those who cannot protect
themselves, and the fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are
supported at the public expense, and allowed to increase and multiply
as public burdens. I do not say that this is wrong, Heaven forbid!
I only state the fact. A government is quite right in defending all
alike from the brute competition of nature, whose motto is--Woe to
the weak. To the Church of the middle age is due the preaching and
the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society is bound
to protect the weak. So far the middle age saw: but no further.
For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine,
that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to
cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by
all and every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.
Science could not do that in the middle age. But if Science could
not do it, Religion would at least try to do the next best thing to
it. The monasteries were the refuges, whither the weak escaped from
the competition of the strong. Thither flocked the poor, the
crippled, the orphan, and the widow, all, in fact, who could not
fight for themselves. There they found something like justice,
order, pity, help. Even the fool and the coward, when they went to
the convent-door, were not turned away. The poor half-witted rascal,
who had not sense enough to serve the king, might still serve the
abbot. He would be set to drive, plough, or hew wood--possibly by
the side of a gentleman, a nobleman, or even a prince--and live under
equal law with them; and under, too, a discipline more strict than
that of any modern army; and if he would not hew the wood, or drive
the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him flogged
soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than
wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at
last.
The coward, too--the abbot could make him of use, even though the
king could not. There were, no doubt, in those days, though fewer in
number than now, men who could not face physical danger, and the
storm of the evil world,--delicate, nervous, imaginative, feminine
characters; who, when sent out to battle, would be very likely to run
away. Our forefathers, having no use for such persons, used to put
such into a bog-hole, and lay a hurdle over them, in the belief that
they would sink to the lowest pool of Hela for ever more. But the
abbot had great use for such. They could learn to read, write, sing,
think; they were often very clever; they might make great scholars;
at all events they might make saints. Whatever they could not do,
they could pray. And the united prayer of those monks, it was then
believed, could take heaven by storm, alter the course of the
elements, overcome Divine justice, avert from mankind the anger of an
offended God. Whether that belief were right or wrong, people held
it; and the man who could not fight with carnal weapons, regained his
self-respect, and therefore his virtue, when he found himself
fighting, as he held, with spiritual weapons against all the powers
of darkness {p214}. The first light in which I wish you to look at
the old monasteries, is as defences for the weak against the strong.
But what has this to do with what I said at first, as to the masses
having no history? This:- that through these monasteries the masses
began first to have a history; because through them they ceased to be
masses, and became first, persons and men, and then, gradually, a
people. That last the monasteries could not make them: but they
educated them for becoming a people; and in this way. They brought
out, in each man, the sense of individual responsibility. They
taught him, whether warrior or cripple, prince or beggar, that he had
an immortal soul, for which each must give like account to God.
Do you not see the effect of that new thought? Treated as slaves, as
things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as
things and animals. And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere
heap of inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in
itself as distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond,
uniting each to all. The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that
state, before the Revolution of 1793. The 'masses' of our
agricultural labourers,--the 'masses' of our manufacturing workmen,
were fast falling into that state in the days of our grandfathers.
Whether the French masses have risen out of it, remains to be seen.
The English masses, thanks to Almighty God, have risen out of it; and
by the very same factor by which the middle-age masses rose--by
Religion. The great Methodist movement of the last century did for
our masses, what the monks did for our forefathers in the middle age.
Wesley and Whitfield, and many another noble soul, said to Nailsea
colliers, Cornish miners, and all manner of drunken brutalized
fellows, living like the beasts that perish,--'Each of you--thou--and
thou--and thou--stand apart and alone before God. Each has an
immortal soul in him, which will be happy or miserable for ever,
according to the deeds done in the body. A whole eternity of shame
or of glory lies in you--and you are living like a beast.' And in
proportion as each man heard that word, and took it home to himself,
he became a new man, and a true man. The preachers may have mixed up
words with their message with which we may disagree, have appealed to
low hopes and fears which we should be ashamed to bring into our
calculations;--so did the monks: but they got their work done
somehow; and let us thank them, and the old Methodists, and any man
who will tell men, in whatever clumsy and rough fashion, that they
are not things, and pieces of a mass, but persons, with an
everlasting duty, an everlasting right and wrong, an everlasting God
in whose presence they stand, and who will judge them according to
their works. True, that is not all that men need to learn. After
they are taught, each apart, that he is a man, they must be taught,
how to be an united people: but the individual teaching must come
first; and before we hastily blame the individualizing tendencies of
the old Evangelical movement, or that of the middle-age monks, let us
remember, that if they had not laid the foundation, others could not
build thereon.
Besides, they built themselves, as well as they could, on their own
foundation. As soon as men begin to be really men, the desire of
corporate life springs up in them. They must unite; they must
organize themselves. If they possess duties, they must be duties to
their fellow-men; if they possess virtues and graces, they must mix
with their fellow-men in order to exercise them.
The solitaries of the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild
beasts, or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed
themselves into lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common
abbot or father. The evangelical converts of the last century formed
themselves into powerful and highly organized sects. The middle-age
monasteries organized themselves into highly artificial communities
round some sacred spot, generally under the supposed protection of
some saint or martyr, whose bones lay there. Each method was good,
though not the highest. None of them rises to the idea of a people,
having one national life, under one monarch, the representative to
each and all of that national life, and the dispenser and executor of
its laws. Indeed, the artificial organization, whether monastic or
sectarian, may become so strong as to interfere with national life,
and make men forget their real duty to their king and country, in
their self-imposed duty to the sect or order to which they belong.
The monastic organization indeed had to die, in many countries, in
order that national life might develop itself; and the dissolution of
the monasteries marks the birth of an united and powerful England.
They or Britain must have died. An imperium in imperio--much more
many separate imperia--was an element of national weakness, which
might be allowed in times of peace and safety, but not in times of
convulsion and of danger.
You may ask, however, how these monasteries became so powerful, if
they were merely refuges for the weak? Even if they were (and they
were) the homes of an equal justice and order, mercy and beneficence,
which had few or no standing-places outside their walls, still, how,
if governed by weak men, could they survive in the great battle of
life? The sheep would have but a poor life of it, if they set up
hurdles against the wolves, and agreed at all events not to eat each
other.
The answer is, that the monasteries were not altogether tenanted by
incapables. The same causes which brought the low-born into the
monasteries, brought the high-born, many of the very highest. The
same cause which brought the weak into the monasteries, brought the
strong, many of the very strongest.
The middle-age records give us a long list of kings, princes, nobles,
who having done (as they held) their work in the world outside, went
into those convents to try their hands at what seemed to them (and
often was) better work than the perpetual coil of war, intrigue, and
ambition, which was not the crime, but the necessary fate, of a ruler
in the middle ages. Tired of work, and tired of life; tired too, of
vain luxury and vain wealth, they fled to the convent, as to the only
place where a man could get a little peace, and think of God, and his
own soul; and recollected, as they worked with their own hands by the
side of the lowest-born of their subjects, that they had a human
flesh and blood, a human immortal soul, like those whom they had
ruled. Thank God that the great have other methods now of learning
that great truth; that the work of life, if but well done, will teach
it to them: but those were hard times, and wild times; and fighting
men could hardly learn, save in the convent, that there was a God
above who watched the widows' and the orphans' tears, and when he
made inquisition for blood, forgot not the cause of the poor.
Such men and women of rank brought into the convent, meanwhile, all
the prestige of their rank, all their superior knowledge of the
world; and became the patrons and protectors of the society; while
they submitted, generally with peculiar humility and devotion, to its
most severe and degrading rules. Their higher sensibilities, instead
of making them shrink from hardship, made them strong to endure self-
sacrifices, and often self-tortures, which seem to us all but
incredible; and the lives, or rather living deaths, of the noble and
princely penitents of the early middle age, are among the most
beautiful tragedies of humanity.
To these monasteries, too, came the men of the very highest
intellect, of whatsoever class. I say, of the very highest
intellect. Tolerably talented men might find it worth while to stay
in the world, and use their wits in struggling upward there. The
most talented of all would be the very men to see a better 'carriere
ouverte aux talens' than the world could give; to long for deeper and
loftier meditation than could be found in the court; for a more
divine life, a more blessed death, than could be found in the camp
and the battle-field.
And so it befals, that in the early middle age the cleverest men were
generally inside the convent, trying, by moral influence and superior
intellect, to keep those outside from tearing each other to pieces.
But these intellects could not remain locked up in the monasteries.
The daily routine of devotion, even of silent study and
contemplation, was not sufficient for them, as it was for the average
monk. There was still a reserve of force in them, which must be up
and doing; and which, in a man inspired by that Spirit which is the
Spirit of love to man as well as to God, must needs expand outwards
in all directions, to Christianize, to civilize, to colonize.
To colonize. When people talk loosely of founding an abbey for
superstitious uses, they cannot surely be aware of the state of the
countries in which those abbeys were founded; either primaeval
forest, hardly-tilled common, or to be described by that terrible
epithet of Domesday-book, 'wasta'--wasted by war. A knowledge of
that fact would lead them to guess that there were almost certainly
uses for the abbey which had nothing to do with superstition; which
were as thoroughly practical as those of a company for draining the
bog of Allen, or running a railroad through an American forest.
Such, at least, was the case, at least for the first seven centuries
after the fall of Rome; and to these missionary colonizers Europe
owes, I verily believe, among a hundred benefits, this which all
Englishmen will appreciate; that Roman agriculture not only revived
in the countries which were once the Empire, but spread from thence
eastward and northward, into the principal wilderness of the Teuton
and Sclavonic races.
I cannot, I think, shew you better what manner of men these monk-
colonizers were, and what sort of work they did, than by giving you
the biography of one of them; and out of many I have chosen that of
St. Sturmi, founder whilome of the great abbey of Fulda, which lies
on the central watershed of Germany, about equidistant, to speak
roughly, from Frankfort, Cassel, Gotha, and Coburg.
His life is matter of history, written by one Eigils (sainted like
himself), who was his disciple and his friend. Naturally told it is,
and lovingly; but if I recollect right, without a single miracle or
myth; the living contemporaneous picture of such a man, living in
such a state of society, as we shall never (and happily need never)
see again, but which is for that very reason worthy to be preserved,
for a token that wisdom is justified of all her children.
It stands at length in Pertz's admirable 'Monumenta Historica,' among
many another like biography, and if I tell it here somewhat at
length, readers must forgive me.
Every one has heard of little king Pepin, and many may have heard
also how he was a mighty man of valour, and cut off a lion's head at
one blow; and how he was a crafty statesman, and first consolidated
the temporal power of the Popes, and helped them in that detestable
crime of overthrowing the noble Lombard kingdom, which cost Italy
centuries of slavery and shame, and which has to be expiated even
yet, it would seem, by some fearful punishment.
But every one may not know that Pepin had great excuses--if not for
helping to destroy the Lombards--yet still for supporting the power
of the Popes. It seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only
practical method of uniting the German tribes into one common people,
and stopping the internecine wars by which they were tearing
themselves to pieces. It seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only
practical method for civilizing and Christianizing the still wild
tribes, Frisians, Saxons, and Sclaves, who pressed upon the German
marches, from the mouth of the Elbe to the very Alps. Be that as it
may, he began the work; and his son Charlemagne finished it; somewhat
well, and again somewhat ill--as most work, alas! is done on earth.
Now in the days of little king Pepin there was a nobleman of Bavaria,
and his wife, who had a son called Sturmi; and they brought him to
St. Boniface, that he might make him a priest. And the child loved
St. Boniface's noble English face, and went with him willingly, and
was to him as a son. And who was St. Boniface? That is a long
story. Suffice it that he was a man of Devon, brought up in a
cloister at Exeter; and that he had crossed over into Frankenland,
upon the lower Rhine, and become a missionary of the widest and
loftiest aims; not merely a preacher and winner of souls, though
that, it is said, in perfection; but a civilizer, a colonizer, a
statesman. He, and many another noble Englishman and Scot (whether
Irish or Caledonian) were working under the Frank kings to convert
the heathens of the marches, and carry the Cross into the far East.
They led lives of poverty and danger; they were martyred, half of
them, as St. Boniface was at last. But they did their work; and
doubtless they have their reward. They did their best, according to
their light. God grant that we, to whom so much more light has been
given, may do our best likewise. Under this great genius was young
Sturmi trained. Trained (as was perhaps needed for those who had to
do such work in such a time) to have neither wife, nor child, nor
home, nor penny in his purse; but to do all that he was bid, learn
all that he could, and work for his living with his own hands; a life
of bitter self-sacrifice. Such a life is not needed now. Possibly,
nevertheless, it was needed then.
So St. Boniface took Sturmi about with him in his travels, and at
last handed him over to Wigbert, the priest, to prepare him for the
ministry. 'Under whom,' says his old chronicler, 'the boy began to
know the Psalms thoroughly by heart; to understand the Holy
Scriptures of Christ with spiritual sense; took care to learn most
studiously the mysteries of the four Gospels, and to bury in his
heart, by assiduous reading, the treasures of the Old and New
Testament. For his meditation was in the Law of the Lord day and
night; profound in understanding, shrewd of thought, prudent of
speech, fair of face, sober of carriage, honourable in morals,
spotless in life, by sweetness, humility, and alacrity, he drew to
him the love of all.'
He grew to be a man; and in due time he was ordained priest, 'by the
will and consent of all;' and he 'began to preach the words of Christ
earnestly to the people;' and his preaching wrought wonders among
them.
Three years he preached in his Rhineland parish, winning love from
all. But in the third year 'a heavenly thought' came into his mind
that he would turn hermit and dwell in the wild forest. And why?
Who can tell? He may, likely enough, have found celibacy a fearful
temptation for a young and eloquent man, and longed to flee from the
sight of that which must not be his. And that, in his circumstances,
was not a foolish wish. He may have wished to escape, if but once,
from the noise and crowd of outward things, and be alone with God and
Christ, and his own soul. And that was not a foolish wish. John
Bunyan so longed, and found what he wanted in Bedford Jail, and set
it down and printed it in a Pilgrim's Progress, which will live as
long as man is man. George Fox longed for it, and made himself
clothes of leather which would not wear out, and lived in a hollow
tree, till he, too, set down the fruit of his solitude in a diary
which will live likewise as long as man is man. Perhaps, again,
young Sturmi longed to try for once in a way what he was worth upon
God's earth; how much he could endure; what power he had of helping
himself, what courage to live by his own wits, and God's mercy, on
roots and fruits, as wild things live. And surely that was not
altogether a foolish wish. At least, he longed to be a hermit; but
he kept his longing to himself, however, till St. Boniface, his
bishop, appeared; and then he told him all his heart.
And St. Boniface said: 'Go; in the name of God;' and gave him two
comrades, and sent him into 'the wilderness which is called Buchonia,
the Beech Forest, to find a place fit for the servants of the Lord to
dwell in. For the Lord is able to provide his people a home in the
desert.'
So those three went into the wild forest. And 'for three days they
saw nought but earth and sky and mighty trees. And they went on,
praying Christ that He would guide their feet into the way of peace.
And on the third day they came to the place which is called Hersfelt
(the hart's down?), and searched it round, and prayed that Christ
would bless the place for them to dwell in; and then they built
themselves little huts of beech-bark, and abode there many days,
serving God with holy fastings, and watchings, and prayers.'
Is it not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see
now;--so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet
it may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim
ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a
quarry. But the old monster was good in his place and time. God
made him and had need of him. It may be that God made those three
poor monks, and had need of them likewise.
As for their purposes being superstitious, we shall be better able to
judge of that when we have seen what they were--what sort of a house
they meant to build to God. As for their having self-interest in
view, no doubt they thought that they should benefit their own souls
in this life, and in the life to come. But one would hardly blame
them for that, surely?
One would not blame them as selfish and sordid if they had gone out
on a commercial speculation? Why, then, if on a religious one? The
merchant adventurer is often a noble type of man, and one to whom the
world owes much, though his hands are not always clean, nor his eye
single. The monk adventurer of the middle age is, perhaps, a still
nobler type of man, and one to whom the world owes more, though his
eye, too, was not always single, nor his hands clean.
As for selfishness, one must really bear in mind that men who walked
away into that doleful 'urwarld' had need to pray very literally
'that Christ would guide their feet into the way of peace;' and must
have cared as much for their wordly interests as those who march up
to the cannon's mouth. Their lives in that forest were not worth
twenty-four hours' purchase, and they knew it. It is an ugly thing
for an unarmed man, without a compass, to traverse the bush of
Australia or New Zealand, where there are no wild beasts. But it was
uglier still to start out under the dark roof of that primaeval wood.
Knights, when they rode it, went armed cap-a-pie, like Sintram
through the dark valley, trusting in God and their good sword.
Chapmen and merchants stole through it by a few tracks in great
companies, armed with bill and bow. Peasants ventured into it a few
miles, to cut timber, and find pannage for their swine, and whispered
wild legends of the ugly things therein--and sometimes, too, never
came home. Away it stretched from the fair Rhineland, wave after
wave of oak and alder, beech and pine, God alone knew how far, into
the land of night and wonder, and the infinite unknown; full of elk
and bison, bear and wolf, lynx and glutton, and perhaps of worse
beasts still. Worse beasts, certainly, Sturmi and his comrades would
have met, if they had met them in human form. For there were waifs
and strays of barbarism there, uglier far than any waif and stray of
civilization, border ruffian of the far west, buccaneer of the Tropic
keys, Cimaroon of the Panama forests; men verbiesterte, turned into
the likeness of beasts, wildfanger, huner, ogres, wehr-wolves, strong
thieves and outlaws, many of them possibly mere brutal maniacs;
naked, living in caves and coverts, knowing no law but their own
hunger, rage, and lust; feeding often on human flesh; and woe to the
woman or child or unarmed man who fell into their ruthless clutch.
Orson, and such like human brutes of the wilderness, serve now to
amuse children in fairy tales; they were then ugly facts of flesh and
blood. There were heathens there, too, in small colonies: heathen
Saxons, cruelest of all the tribes; who worshipped at the Irmensul,
and had an old blood-feud against the Franks; heathen Thuringer, who
had murdered St. Kilian the Irishman at Wurzburg; heathen Slaves, of
different tribes, who had introduced into Europe the custom of
impaling their captives: and woe to the Christian priest who fell
into any of their hands. To be knocked on the head before some ugly
idol was the gentlest death which they were like to have. They would
have called that martyrdom, and the gate of eternal bliss; but they
were none the less brave men for going out to face it.
And beside all these, and worse than all these, there were the
terrors of the unseen world; very real in those poor monks' eyes,
though not in ours. There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in
the caves, and Tannhauser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the
Christian man, and would lure him to his death. There were fair
swan-maidens and elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias
the dancer, with all their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to
sin, and having made him sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in
hell. There was Satan and all the devils, too, plotting to stop the
Christian man from building the house of the Lord, and preaching the
gospel to the heathen; ready to call up storms, and floods, and
forest fires; to hurl the crag down from the cliffs, or drop the
rotting tree on their defenceless heads--all real and terrible in
those poor monks' eyes, as they walked on, singing their psalms, and
reading their Gospels, and praying to God to save them, for they
could not save themselves; and to guide them, for they knew not, like
Abraham, whither they went; and to show them the place where they
should build the house of the Lord, and preach righteousness, peace,
and joy in the Holy Spirit to the heathen round. We talk still,
thank heaven, of heroes, and understand what that great word should
mean. But were not these poor monks heroes? Knights-errant of God,
doing his work as they best knew how. We have a purer gospel than
they: we understand our Bibles better. But if they had not done
what they did, where would have been now our gospel, and our Bible?
We cannot tell. It was a wise old saw of our forefathers--'Do not
speak ill of the bridge which carries you over.'
If Sturmi had had a 'holy longing' to get into the wild wood, now he
had a 'holy longing' to go back; and to find St. Boniface, and tell
him what a pleasant place Hersfelt was, and the quality of the soil,
and the direction of the watershed, and the meadows, and springs, and
so forth, in a very practical way. And St. Boniface answered, that
the place seemed good enough; but that he was afraid for them, on
account of the savage heathen Saxons. They must go deeper into the
forest, and then they would be safe. So he went back to his fellow-
hermits, and they made to themselves a canoe; and went paddling up
and down the Fulda stream, beneath the alder boughs, 'trying the
mouths of the mountain-streams, and landing to survey the hills and
ridges,'--pioneers of civilization none the less because they
pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and heaven: but they
found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface,
save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-
bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not.
So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray once more.
St. Boniface sent for Sturmi after awhile, probably to Maintz, to ask
of his success; and Sturmi threw himself on his face before him; and
Boniface raised him up, and kissed him, and made him sit by his side-
-which was a mighty honour; for St. Boniface, the penniless monk, was
at that moment one of the most powerful men of Europe; and he gave
Sturmi a good dinner, of which, no doubt, he stood in need; and bade
him keep up heart, and seek again for the place which God had surely
prepared, and would reveal in His good time.
And this time Sturmi, probably wiser from experience, determined to
go alone; but not on foot. So he took to him a trusty ass, and as
much food as he could pack on it; and, axe in hand, rode away into
the wild wood, singing his psalms. And every night, before he lay
down to sleep, he cut boughs, and stuck them up for a ring fence
round him and the ass, to the discomfiture of the wolves, which had,
and have still, a great hankering after asses' flesh. It is a quaint
picture, no doubt; but let us respect it, while we smile at it; if
we, too, be brave men.
Then one day he fell into a great peril. He came to the old road (a
Roman one, I presume; for the Teutons, whether in England or
elsewhere, never dreamed of making roads till three hundred years
ago, but used the old Roman ones), which led out of the Thuringen
land to Maintz. And at the ford over the Fulda he met a great
multitude bathing, of Sclavonian heathens, going to the fair at
Maintz. And they smelt so strong, the foul miscreants, that Sturmi's
donkey backed, and refused to face them; and Sturmi himself was much
of the donkey's mind, for they began to mock him (possibly he nearly
went over the donkey's head), and went about to hurt him.
'But,' says the chronicler, 'the power of the Lord held them back.'
Then he went on, right thankful at having escaped with his life, up
and down, round and round, exploring and surveying--for what purpose
we shall see hereafter. And at last he lost himself in the place
which is called Aihen-loh, 'the glade of oaks;' and at night-fall he
heard the plash of water, and knew not whether man or wild beast made
it. And not daring to call out, he tapped a tree-trunk with his axe
(some backwoodsman's sign of those days, we may presume), and he was
answered. And a forester came to him, leading his lord's horse; a
man from the Wetterau, who knew the woods far and wide, and told him
all that he wanted to know. And they slept side by side that night;
and in the morning they blest each other, and each went his way.
Yes, there were not merely kings and wars, popes and councils, in
those old days;--there were real human beings, just such as we might
meet by the wayside any hour, with human hearts and histories within
them. And we will be thankful if but one of them, now and then,
starts up out of the darkness of twelve hundred years, like that good
forester, and looks at us with human eyes, and goes his way again,
blessing, and not unblest.
And now Sturmi knew all that he needed to know; and after awhile,
following the counsel of the forester, he came to 'the blessed place,
long ago prepared of the Lord. And when he saw it, he was filled
with immense joy, and went on exulting; for he felt that by the
merits and prayers of the holy Bishop Boniface that place had been
revealed to him. And he went about it, and about it, half the day;
and the more he looked on it the more he gave God thanks;' and those
who know Fulda say, that Sturmi had reason to give God thanks, and
must have had a keen eye, moreover, for that which man needs for
wealth and prosperity, in soil and water, meadow and wood. So he
blessed the place, and signed it with the sign of the Cross (in token
that it belonged thenceforth neither to devils nor fairies, but to
his rightful Lord and Maker), and went back to his cell, and thence a
weary journey to St. Boniface, to tell him of the fair place which he
had found at last.
And St. Boniface went his weary way, either to Paris or to Aix, to
Pepin and Carloman, kings of the Franks; and begged of them a grant
of the Aihenloh, and all the land for four miles round, and had it.
And the nobles about gave up to him their rights of venison, and
vert, and pasture, and pannage of swine; and Sturmi and seven
brethren set out thither, 'in the year of our Lord 744, in the first
month (April, presumably), in the twelfth day of the month, unto the
place prepared of the Lord,' that they might do what?
That they might build an abbey. Yes; but the question is, what
building an abbey meant, not three hundred, nor five hundred, but
eleven hundred years ago--for centuries are long matters, and men and
their works change in them.
And then it meant this: Clearing the back woods for a Christian
settlement; an industrial colony, in which every man was expected to
spend his life in doing good--all and every good which he could for
his fellow-men. Whatever talent he had he threw into the common
stock; and worked, as he was found fit to work, at farming,
gardening, carpentering, writing, doctoring, teaching in the schools,
or preaching to the heathen round. In their common church they met
to worship God; but also to ask for grace and strength to do their
work, as Christianizers and civilizers of mankind. What Christianity
and civilization they knew (and they knew more than we are apt now to
believe) they taught it freely; and therefore they were loved, and
looked up to as superior beings, as modern missionaries, wherever
they do their work even decently well, are looked up to now.
So because the work could be done in that way, and (as far as men
then, or now, can see) in no other way, Pepin and Carloman gave
Boniface the glade of oaks, that they might clear the virgin forest,
and extend cultivation, and win fresh souls to Christ, instead of
fighting, like the kings of this world, for the land which was
already cleared, and the people who were already Christian.
In two months' time they had cut down much of the forest; and then
came St. Boniface himself to see them, and with him a great company
of workmen, and chose a place for a church. And St. Boniface went up
to the hill which is yet called Bishop's Mount, that he might read
his Bible in peace, away from kings and courts, and the noise of the
wicked world; and his workmen felled trees innumerable, and dug peat
to burn lime withal; and then all went back again, and left the
settlers to thrive and work.
And thrive and work they did, clearing more land, building their
church, ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more
heathen converts, more and more heathen school-children; and St.
Boniface came to see them from time to time, whenever he could get a
holiday, and spent happy days in prayer and study, with his pupil and
friend. And ten years after, when St. Boniface was martyred at last
by the Friesland heathens, and died, as he had lived, like an apostle
of God, then all the folk of Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home
to their town, because he had been Archbishop there. But he
'appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and said: "Why delay ye to
take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the wilderness which God bath
prepared for me?"'
So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,--unless the French Republican armies
dug up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier
things, to the winds of heaven. And all men came to worship at his
tomb, after the fashion of those days. And Fulda became a noble
abbey, with its dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads,
almshouses, and all the appanages of such a place, in the days when
monks were monks indeed. And Sturmi became a great man, and went
through many troubles and slanders, and conquered in them all,
because there was no fault found in him, as in Daniel of old; and
died in a good old age, bewept by thousands, who, but for him, would
have been heathens still. And the Aihen-loh became rich corn-land
and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough and a principality, where men
lived in peace under mild rule, while the feudal princes quarrelled
and fought outside; and a great literary centre, whose old records
are now precious to the diggers among the bones of bygone times; and
at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so developed themselves,
that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which I have seen is
this, bearing date about 1710:-
'The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda,
Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and
Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.' Developed, certainly:
and not altogether in the right direction. For instead of the small
beer, which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the
world, the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best
table too. Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the
Aihen-lob, and planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make
St. Sturmi hope that he had not read his Bible altogether in vain.
Surely such men as St. Sturmi were children of wisdom, put what sense
on the word you will. In a dark, confused, lawless, cut-throat age,
while everything was decided by the sword, they found that they could
do no good to themselves, or any man, by throwing their swords into
either scale. They would be men of peace, and see what could be done
so. Was that not wise? So they set to work. They feared God
exceedingly, and walked with God. Was not that wise? They wrought
righteousness, and were merciful and kind, while kings and nobles
were murdering around them; pure and temperate, while other men were
lustful and drunken; just and equal in all their ways, while other
men were unjust and capricious; serving God faithfully, according to
their light, while the people round them were half or wholly heathen;
content to do their work well on earth, and look for their reward in
heaven, while the kings and nobles, the holders of the land, were
full of insane ambition, every man trying to seize a scrap of ground
from his neighbour, as if that would make them happier. Was that not
wise? Which was the wiser, the chief killing human beings, to take
from them some few square miles which men had brought into
cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated land, and
going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the virgin
soil? Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again? And do not tell
me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious
ends. It is not so. I know well his fanaticism and his
superstition, and the depths of its ignorance and silliness: but he
had more in him than that. Had he not, he would have worked no
lasting work. He was not only the pioneer of civilization, but he
knew that he was such. He believed that all knowledge came from God,
even that which taught a man to clear the forest, and plant corn
instead; and he determined to spread such knowledge as he had
wherever he could. He was a wiser man than the heathen Saxons, even
than the Christian Franks, around him; a better scholar, a better
thinker, better handicraftsman, better farmer; and he did not keep
his knowledge to himself. He did not, as some tell you, keep the
Bible to himself. It is not so; and those who say so, in this
generation, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The monk knew his
Bible well himself, and he taught it. Those who learnt from him to
read, learnt to read their Bibles. Those who did not learn (of
course the vast majority, in days when there was no printing), he
taught by sermons, by pictures, afterward by mystery and miracle
plays. The Bible was not forbidden to the laity till centuries
afterwards--and forbidden then, why? Because the laity throughout
Europe knew too much about the Bible, and not too little. Because
the early monks had so ingrained the mind of the masses, throughout
Christendom, with Bible stories, Bible personages, the great facts,
and the great doctrines, of our Lord's life, that the masses knew too
much; that they could contrast too easily, and too freely, the fallen
and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries, with those Bible
examples, which the old monks of centuries before had taught their
forefathers. Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity, because
it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries before
they had taught them to love and know too well. In a word, the old
monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as
our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and
looked on as a superior being, as they are.
Of course he did not know how far civilization would extend. He
could not foretell railroads and electric telegraphs, any more than
he could political economy, or sanitary science. But the best that
he knew, he taught--and did also, working with his own hands. He was
faithful in a few things, and God made him ruler over many things.
For out of those monasteries sprang--what did not spring? They
restored again and again sound law and just government, when the good
old Teutonic laws, and the Roman law also, was trampled underfoot
amid the lawless strife of ambition and fury. Under their shadow
sprang up the towns with their corporate rights, their middle
classes, their artizan classes. They were the physicians, the alms-
givers, the relieving officers, the schoolmasters of the middle-age
world. They first taught us the great principle of the division of
labour, to which we owe, at this moment, that England is what she is,
instead of being covered with a horde of peasants, each making and
producing everything for himself, and starving each upon his rood of
ground. They transcribed or composed all the books of the then
world; many of them spent their lives in doing nothing but writing;
and the number of books, even of those to be found in single
monasteries, considering the tedious labour of copying, is altogether
astonishing. They preserved to us the treasures of classical
antiquity. They discovered for us the germs of all our modern
inventions. They brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and
while they taught men to know that they had a common humanity, a
common Father in heaven taught them also to profit by each other's
wisdom instead of remaining in isolated ignorance. They, too, were
the great witnesses against feudal caste. With them was neither
high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor: worth was their only test;
the meanest serf entering there might become the lord of knights and
vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men may talk of
democracy--those old monasteries were the most democratic
institutions the world had ever till then seen. 'A man's a man for
a' that,' was not only talked of in them, but carried out in
practice--only not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness:
but under those safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military
order, without which men may call themselves free, and yet be really
only slaves to their own passions. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem,
in those monasteries was preserved the sacred fire of modern liberty,
through those feudal centuries when all the outside world was doing
its best to trample it out. Remember, as a single instance, that in
the Abbot's lodging at Bury St. Edmunds, the Magna Charta was drawn
out, before being presented to John at Runymede. I know what they
became afterwards, better than most do here; too well to defile my
lips, or your ears, with tales too true. They had done their work,
and they went. Like all things born in time, they died; and decayed
in time; and the old order changed, giving place to the new; and God
fulfilled himself in many ways. But in them, too, he fulfilled
himself. They were the best things the world had seen; the only
method of Christianizing and civilizing semi-barbarous Europe. Like
all human plans and conceptions, they contained in themselves
original sin; idolatry, celibacy, inhuman fanaticism; these were
their three roots of bitterness; and when they bore the natural fruit
of immorality, the monasteries fell with a great and just
destruction. But had not those monasteries been good at first, and
noble at first; had not the men in them been better and more useful
men than the men outside, do you think they would have endured for
centuries? They would not even have established themselves at all.
They would soon, in those stormy times, have been swept off the face
of the earth. Ill used they often were, plundered and burnt down.
But men found that they were good. Their own plunderers found that
they could not do without them; and repented, and humbled themselves,
and built them up again, to be centres of justice and mercy and
peace, amid the wild weltering sea of war and misery. For all things
endure, even for a generation, only by virtue of the good which is in
them. By the Spirit of God in them they live, as do all created
things; and when he taketh away their breath they die, and return
again to their dust.
And what was the original sin of them? We can hardly say that it was
their superstitious and partially false creed: because that they
held in common with all Europe. It was rather that they had
identified themselves with, and tried to realize on earth, one of the
worst falsehoods of that creed--celibacy. Not being founded on the
true and only ground of all society, family life, they were merely
artificial and self-willed arrangements of man's invention, which
could not develop to any higher form. And when the sanctity of
marriage was revindicated at the Reformation, the monasteries, having
identified themselves with celibacy, naturally fell. They could not
partake in the Reformation movement, and rise with it into some
higher form of life, as the laity outside did. I say, they were
altogether artificial things. The Abbot might be called the Abba,
Father, of his monks: but he was not their father--just as when
young ladies now play at being nuns, they call their superior,
Mother: but all the calling in the world will not make that sacred
name a fact and a reality, as they too often find out.
And celibacy brought serious evils from the first. It induced an
excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the
best men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous,
visionary; at best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and
in raptures. You never get in their writings anything of that manly
calmness, which we so deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for
ourselves. They are bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking
virulence for strength, putting us in mind for ever of the
allocutions of the Popes. Read the writings of one of the best of
monks, and of men, who ever lived, the great St. Bernard, and you
will be painfully struck by this hysterical element. The fact is,
that their rule of life, from the earliest to the latest,--from that
of St. Benedict of Casino, 'father of all monks,' to that of Loyola
the Jesuit, was pitched not too low, but too high. It was an ideal
which, for good or for evil, could only be carried out by new
converts, by people in a state of high religious excitement, and
therefore the history of the monastic orders is just that of the
protestant sects. We hear of continual fallings off from their first
purity; of continual excitements, revivals, and startings of new
orders, which hoped to realize the perfection which the old orders
could not. You must bear this in mind, as you read mediaeval
history. You will be puzzled to know why continual new rules and new
orders sprung up. They were so many revivals, so many purist
attempts at new sects. You will see this very clearly in the three
great revivals which exercised such enormous influence on the history
of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,--I mean the rise first
of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the Jesuits, and lastly of
the Port Royalists. They each professed to restore monachism to what
it had been at first; to realize the unnatural and impossible ideal.
Another serious fault of these monasteries may be traced to their
artificial celibate system. I mean their avarice. Only one
generation after St. Sturmi, Charlemagne had to make indignant laws
against Abbots who tried to get into their hands the property of
everybody around them: but in vain. The Abbots became more and more
the great landholders, till their power was intolerable. The reasons
are simple enough. An abbey had no children between whom to divide
its wealth, and therefore more land was always flowing in and
concentrating, and never breaking up again; while almost every Abbot
left his personalities, all his private savings and purchases, to his
successor.
Then again, in an unhappy hour, they discovered that the easiest way
of getting rich was by persuading sinners, and weak persons, to
secure the safety of their souls by leaving land to the Church, in
return for the prayers and masses of monks; and that shameful mine of
wealth was worked by them for centuries, in spite of statutes of
mortmain, and other checks which the civil power laid on them, very
often by most detestable means. One is shocked to find good men
lending themselves to such base tricks: but we must recollect, that
there has always been among men a public and a private conscience,
and that these two, alas! have generally been very different. It is
an old saying, that 'committees have no consciences;' and it is too
true. A body of men acting in concert for a public purpose will do
things which they would shrink from with disgust, if the same trick
would merely put money into their private purses; and this is too
often the case when the public object is a good one. Then the end
seems to sanctify the means, to almost any amount of chicanery.
So it was with those old monks. An abbey had no conscience. An
order of monks had no conscience. A Benedictine, a Dominican, a
Franciscan, who had not himself a penny in the world, and never
intended to have one, would play tricks, lie, cheat, slander, forge,
for the honour and the wealth of his order; when for himself, and in
himself, he may have been an honest God-fearing man enough. So it
was; one more ugly fruit of an unnatural attempt to be not good men,
but something more than men; by trying to be more than men, they
ended by being less than men. That was their sin, and that sin, when
it had conceived, brought forth death.
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