Cornell University Library arV17747 Eras and characters of history, 3 1924 031 220 134 olin,anx Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031220134 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HI8TOET BY WILLIAM K. WILLIAMS NEW YORK EARPEK & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1882 3 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. All HghU reserved. CONTENTS. Page I. Neeo and Paul 1 II. The Empeeoh Titus and the Apostle John ... 21 III. Monastioism: 43 IV. Augustine and Chetsostom 69 V. Buddhism 90 VI. "WTCLiFrB, Satonaeola, and Husb 110 VII. Mahometanism 138 VIII. The Ceusades 160 IX. Luther and his Times 183 X. John Caltin 305 XI. John Knox 337 XII. The Pueitakt and the Mystic 353 INDEX 277 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTOEY. I. NERO AND PAUL. " I APPEAL unto Caesar." Such was the brief sentence ut- tered in Csesarea, a sea-coast town of Palestine. The words became the occasion for transporting the man who uttered them to the Eoraan metropolis, and placed the great Apostle of the Gentiles ultimately before that cruel despot who held for the time in his hands the destinies of the civilized world. Modern science sends its barks and its obseiTers, armed with their instruments, round the globe, to watch the transit of a planet over the disk of the sun. It might have seemed to haughty priest among the Jews, and to the Eoman governor of this Syrian province, a wild act of presumption for a preach- er of this despised faith of the Nazarene to demand thus the transfer of his cause to the Emperor's own hearing. If Gallio, one of the provincial rulers, scorned to soil his hands with these paltry questions of the Hebrew law, as he deemed them, would the sovereign Caesar himself have more patience when this 2 ^BAS AJfJ) CHAEACTEBS OF HISTOBT. setter -forth of a new doctrine presumed to ask heed to his complaints regarding a denial of justice in his own case, in one of the remote provinces of that broad empire ? If even vouchsafed an audience, Eoman scorn might have augured a speedy occultation of this Hebrew luminary under the savage brightness of a Nero's glance. But the moral may in its great- ness rival, or even outbulk, the hugest material interest. The judgment of later history is tliat, if there were eclipse here, it was the sovereign despot who underwent the occultation, as there stood before him the luminary of the New Faith that was to shine where Roman eagles had never flown — the mes- senger of the Christ whose final audit was to gather alike each Ramcses and Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander and Ca3sar of all the ages before his sovereign bar, there abiding his iiTevcrs- ible sentence. The name of Nero has become to us of later times the brief embodiment of all cruelty and vileness, unequalled ferocity and indescribable wickedness. But it should be remembered that it was not always such. The first year of his imperial sway had been adduced by his preceptor, Seneca, as an example of sovereignty showing all clemency. Long after, one of the worthier emperors, Trajan, had wished that his own, rule should equal in dignity the first five years of Nero — a term more than one-third of the fourteen years during which Nero wielded the imperial sceptre. He had in him the blood of that Julius Caesar, greatest of the name, who, as statesman, orator, soldier, and conqueror, had written himself among the fore- most names of the human race. Laying, by his victories and encroachments on the old republican liberties, the foundation of that imperial power which his kinsman Augustus first consoli NJSBO AND PAUL. 3 dated into a regular dynasty, he had shattered the Republic without himself perfecting and enjoying the despotism that was to succeed it. Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius had in turn occupied the throne that Augustus had established. Great as were their crimes, such was the magnificence and vast stretch of the power thus set up, and such the promise to the nations of order to be enjoyed under its shadow, that Caesar's name has become almost a synonyme for the rule that shall best shut out the anarchy and excesses of an uncurbed demo- cracy. . In our own times one of the later Napoleons essayed to write the life of the great Julius Cassar and the story of his services to Rome, the old but outworn Republic, with the intent to show to France, after so many centuries had gone by, that if she wished regularity and peace in her borders she must, like ancient Rome, welcome and cherish the Caesar who came to repair the shattered ruins and make the arts and commerce and literature all flourish. And there have been some Ameri- cans who, seeing how magnificently Caesars could adorn their capitals and hold down the proletariat, have whispered more or less audibly their wish that Order might thus glide into the saddle and slip over a docile nation the bridle of sternest re- pression upon Western shores. Indeed, some hold the name of the Czar of the Russias but a barbarous echo of the old Roman Cajsar, the absolutism that shelters in long security the homes and wottshops, the fields and cities, of a land. The im- mediate predecessor of Nero was Claudius, a man of feeble and dull character, but not without literary culture. Agrippina, the mother of Nero by an earlier marriage, was the niece of Claudius, and she aspired to become her uncle's fourth wife. The Roman people, accustomed to much moral recklessness, yet 4 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF EISTOBT. murmured in vain at the proposed unnatural union. Agrippina found Britannicus, the son of Claudius by his earlier wife, Messalina, tlie rightful heir and successor in expectancy of his father. But he was some three years younger than her own Nero, the step-son of her new husband. Nero she intended to bring in as the next occupant of the throne. Poison, ruthlessly administered in the guise of medicine, removed the husband. His death was kept a secret until means had been taken to present Nero to the populace as the true successor. Octavia, the sister of Britannicus, was given him as his wife, and the wise philosopher, Seneca, and Burrhus, an old, honest soldier, were given him as his guardians, while the more youth- ful Britannicus was held back. Though of the Caesar blood by the female side, Nero's family name was Domitius, and his father had from the color of his hair been called Copper-beard (Ahenobarbus). The name had adhered to his son, the young prince ; and been used in jeer by Britannicus, in that boyish altercation to which lads of their age are prone, and had been resented by his step- brother, the elder of the two. Instead of it was given him the new name, Nero, coming down from the old Sabines of the earliest days of Eoman history, and meaning, it is said. Strong. The name of the great city itself, Rome, meant strength ; and besides this, its daily and recognized designation, the metropolis had a secret name which it was regarded as treasonable to divulge. Many say that this mystic and hidden name was " Valentia." If so, it also dwelt upon and intensified the great thought of might or power, as the embodiment of Eoman dignity and the talisman of wide and enduring domination. The iron strength of the Roman State, " as iron that breaketh NMBO AND PAUL. 5 in pieces and subdueth all things," had been foreshadowed in the prophetic vision of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel, ii. 40), and explained in the divinely inspired comment of Daniel before the monarch upon that vision. Power, the power of Northern steel — compact, massive, and overwhelming — had been seem- ingly all concentred in the State, the metropolis, and the sover- eign. It was rugged Prowess. At the age of seventeen, with much of manly beauty, with tastes for art, aspiring and diversified, though not as successful as they were eager, Nero vaulted into the imperial throne about the time when Paul was, after writing his Epistles to the Thes- salonians, leaving Corinth, passing to Jerusalem, and thence to Ephesus. In giving him Seneca as the philosophic guide of his early age Agrippina had seemed to care for his wise train- ing. But when, by a poison administered to Britannicus — his young step-brother and the brother of his own consort, the young princess Octavia — at a banquet where the step-mother Agrippina and the sister Octavia were both present, Britanni- cus was flung down dead upon the pavement, the auguries were scant indeed that aught of right feeling or of just rale could be expected from a sovereign so commencing his reign. The death was reported as resulting from epilepsy ; the inter- ment was hastened, and the corpse was painted to hide the marks of the potent poison and its rapid action. A rain- storm that came down washed off this disguise, and revealed the true character of the sudden removal. The mother had shared, the sister dared not protest against, the murder. In his own wild fashion Nero loved his keen-eyed, fierce-souled, beautiful, but most ruthless and unscnapulous, mother. The watchword to his troops on one evening in the early stage of 1* 6 ERAS AND CHAHAVTMRS OF SISTOET. his reign had been: "Best of Mothers." Nero had a keen relish for sculpture and painting, and music and the dance, and the drama and even poetry. A line of verse said to be of his framing, and yet preserved, praises the shimmering hues that deck the pigeon's neck. If arts, as some suppose, necessarily reform and elevate, and win from the grovelling and the brutal, the young prince who found himself, with such artistic accom- plishments and aspirations, in the possession of absolute power, and with the resources and armies and fleets of a wide empire at his disposal, should have developed himself into a benefactor and a pattern to his myriads of subjects. Of Felix, one of his subordinate governors in Syria, before whom Paul had appeared and reasoned of righteousness, tem- perance, and judgment to come, it has been said by that mighty master of language, the Eoman historian Tacitus, " that in all savageness and profligacy he wielded the power of a king with the temper of a lackey." The sentence stands yet an incomparable picture of the servile become the despotic. But Felix had been a slave and was but a freedman, though now, like many frcedmen of the time, rising to vast influence and aflJuence. His brother Pallas, also a freedman, had become mighty with Claudius, and with Nero after him ; and the au- thority of Pallas, the brother, had shielded Felix at Eome when the complaints of the Jews followed him from Syria to the capital. Flunkeyism, to use a word that Charles Kingsley and Thackeray have made classical, is a fearful power when vaulting into the seat of sovereignty. It is to be feared that, though Nero had never been literally a slave, the tastes of the barber and the dancer, the flunkey comrades to whom his child- hood had been committed, had imbued the boy with the worst KERO AND PAUL. T traits of servile life. The philosophy that Seneca, his in- structor, afterward taught him was in some regards higher than that known to the Epicurean of the times of Horace or the Academe of Cicero. The name of Providence, unknown in the high and large sense to Cicero, that great moralist, ap- pears on the pages of Seneca, and the recognition also of the brotherhood of man. These have seemed to many to imply that, through the widely diffused activities and the adventurous inculcation of the Gospel on the part of its first converts, the lessons of Christian faith were beginning to win, by percola- tion and moral infiltration, their quiet way into many layers of the Roman Commonwealth where the evangelist and the apostle were as yet personally unknown. But, be that as it may, Seneca with all his philosophic reputation was the apolo- gist of some of Nero's earliest excesses. He could sneer in one of his smaller pieces at the professed reception among the gods of the Emperor Claudius, ridiculing ruthlessly his per- sonal infirmities of speech and aspect. Seneca's own brother, the Gallio before whom Paul had once appeared, and whom Seneca eulogizes as being, for his amiableness, universally and warmly loved, could also, like Seneca, jeer, when he must have known that the death of Claudius was a violent taking away on the part of a sanguinary, unprincipled wife, at the way in which the Emperor had been jerked up among the gods just as the bodies of malefactors in old Rome were tugged or dragged by hooks to be flung into the Tiber. The one brother, Seneca, could mock at the apotheosis of the old, unwieldy Em- peror, swollen as a pumpkin, terming it the purapkinization of the poor helpless imbecile ; and the other, Gallio, spite of his remarkable amiability, had a bitter laugh instead of sympathy 8 BEAS AND CMABACTMSS OF BISTOMY. for the new god -whoin Eome had so summarily won, in losing an old master, as a poison-tipped feather was thrust down his throat. It was scarce philosophy of this tone and hue that could meet and remedy the terrible evils of Eoman society. Impatient of his mother's control (for the wily, passionate Agrippina both threatened and plotted the displacement of the son whom she had exalted when he would not be controlled), she was first the object of a matricidal attempt on the part of her son to drown her. Escaping this, he sent emissaries to despatch her ; and it was accomplished with circumstances of revolting atrocity. While Paul was as yet at Csesarea this murderer of a mother accomplished his design. It must have been in the gossip of the barracks among the soldiers who had Paul in charge. His young wife, Octavia, was afterward a vic- tim, appealing vainly to her husband to spare her as a step- sister, if he did not regard her as a wife. This murder was probably after Paul had reached Eome, and when the apostle, yet detained in confinement in his own hired house, was writ- ing to the Christians at Colosse, Philippi, and Ephesus, as to his friend Philemon in behalf of Onesimus. The turpitudes of Nero's career cannot be stated fully in any Christian assembly. Murders, confiscations, profuse lar- gesses to the multitude, sustained by the murder of proprie- tors and the seizure of their estates and treasures, were soon his settled policy. Yet he had his friends and favorites, such as they were. Sabina Poppsea, a woman of reckless character but of great beauty, had been taken to his throne, and both Agrippina, his mother, and his step-sister wife, Octavia, had been sacrificed in her interest. But Poppaea, as was not un- common in that age of Eoman history, leaned to the faith and NEBO AND PATIL. 9 rites of the Eastern people ; and had at least some favor for Jewish usages, Josephns terming her a devout woman. Before Paul's arrival there were Christian converts in the household establishment of Csesar. His salutations in the epistle to the Roman Christians, addressed to the household of Narcissus, are supposed to refer to slaves in the family of Narcissus, one of the powerful and affluent freedmen attached to the imperial court. The funeral places, recently brought to light, of some of these retainers of Narcissus show their Christian hopes and convictions. If, in earlier times, when it was yet an age of political free- dom and of domestic purity in the old Roman State, it had been accounted true nobleness not to despair of the Republic, in days of deepest political darkness, when the welfare of the nation seemed on the verge of utter ruin from an overmaster- ing foreign invader, it certainly argued yet higher virtue, and it required more than human support, when there were found in the Roman Empire, so sodden with vice and so crushed by misrule and oppression, men and women, some of them but slaves, poorly housed, poorly fed, and hardly treated, who yet could hope for better days and, amid abounding and over- whelming social corruption, fear God and love their neigh- bor. They hoped, for they could pray to a Heaven ever open and always near; they could endure and overcome, be- cause they trusted in a Saviour who had become himself as a servant, and endured the contradiction of sinners, and as the Propitiatory Lamb made atonement for the sins of the world, and as the Advocate on high made evermore intercession for the transgressors who in penitence sought his grace. Seneca had been required, like multitudes of other victims, 10 SSAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. to commit suicide. Burrhus, the other guardian of Nero, had died peacefully. But the old soldier, seeing his master on the stage — which was, according to old Roman notions, a vast so- cial degradation — had been compelled by a regard for his own safety to applaud the imperial stage-player ; but tears streamed down the old soldier's cheeks as he applauded. When Nero visited Greece he contended as charioteer and in the other games of skill ; and was proud of the crowns which the Greeks were ready to lavish upon his assumed superiority — a superi- ority not very safely or eagerly to be contested. It was said to Ananias of Damascus, in the weeks of Paul's first conversion, that Saul as a chosen vessel must bear Christ's name before Gentile kings and the children of Israel.* It had been in a most strange fashion that this had been accomplished. With all manfulness Paul had gone down into the heart of Jerusalem and confronted its elders and its populace, announc- ing the Saviour at the peril of his own life and with the sacri- fice of all his secular prospects. They had attempted his im- mediate massacre. Failing in this, forty of them had banded together for a second attempt. The Roman captain had de- spatched him to CsBsarea under a military escort. He meets the Roman governor. But the Jewish rulers made interest for the prisoner's return to Jerusalem, intending to repeat more successfully the attempt to quench in blood this missionary torch of the Gospel. He was compelled to appeal to Caesar. To Gentile and to Jew he had with heroic persistence im- parted his testimony. Now, when in the very centre of Jew- ish influence they had concerted his death, and these bloody * Acts ix. 15. NERO AND PAUL. 11 fanatics had vowed to starve themselves till they succeeded, he, as a Eoman citizen and as a Christian ambassador, turned anew from Hebrew to pagan. Through what delay and wrecks he reaches his audience at the Eoman capital ! Melita must be evangelized by the way. When Judaism thus flung him forth, he was hurled by the vengeance of his countrymen, and by the wonder-working providence of his Blessed Master, to the foot of the imperial throne. The catapult which the nation had shot for his extermination but speeded him on his mission to the hated pagan. It was not to muster there a party against the rulers of the Jewish people — he made it his first busiuess in the capital to assemble his unbelieving countrymen there, and disavow such purpose — but there he must preach Christ in all fidelity. A man of mature years, and worn by profuse and incessant labors, he was to human judgment little adapted to confront and to attract the young sensualist, artist, and despot who filled the throne. Nero was but seventeen when he came to the purple; but thirty-one when he died; and probably somewhere about twenty-four years of age when Paul was ar- raigned at his tribunal. The New Testament makes no needless statement as to Paul's experience there. What power, with all its vast, incalculable resources ; what art, with all its splendor and bewitching attractiveness; what philosophy, with all its multiform speculations, from the atheism of Lucretius and the Epicureanism of Horace to the academic elegance of Cicero and the stoical principles of Seneca, could not secure of hope, of alleviation for present evils, of remedy for innermost dis- eases, of recovery for the lost, of regeneration — free, sure, and abiding — by the blood of the One Oblation, and by the Spirit of God freely given to the suppliant — peace beyond the grave, 12 EBAS AND CHARAQTMRS OF KISTORT. — brotherhood in sinless, endless blessedness before a throne compared to ■which Elysium was a mere show — all this the born Hebrew, Eoman freedman by birth, Greek scholar by culture, Pharisaic zealot by education, now as Christ's apostle proclaimed for a world-wide hearing and proffered as a free personal gift to each suppliant. In Paul's first hearing he seems to have been, kindly or con- temptuously, dismissed by Nero— delivered, as he phrases it, from the lion's mouth. His chronology is left by the silence of Scripture in some uncertainty. We suppose it the best sus- tained probability that he was liberated, and made the journey into Spain which he had long contemplated. We think of that land now as a distinct country from Italy. It was then pervaded by the Latin language, and formed a portion of the vast Roman Empire. The Seneca^ Nero's philosophic tutor, and the Gallio named in the Acts, the brother of Seneca, and Lucan, the young poet of the Pharsalia, nephew of Seneca and rival and victim of Nero, were all of this same Spain. During his absence from the capital, probably, occurred the great fire at Eome, when so many habitations were swept away, and which Nero surveyed, likening it to the fall of Troy. That conflagration, some say of his own kindling, Nero attributed to the Christians ; and then began a fierce persecution. The victims, wrapped in pitched cloths, and with a sharp stake under the chin to keep the face erect, were burnt as torches, while, by the lurid light of the terrible illumination, Nero, robed as a charioteer, mingled with the mob, or urged his steeds — a proud competitor for the applause of the rabble on his skilled driving. Paul was afterward, probably on some fresh complaint of the heathen enemy, sent to Rome ; and this NMliO AND PAUL. 13 time it was to die. But in his Epistles to Timothy and Titus it is the voice, as we read, of the brave and exultant champion nearing his goal, and eying his crown, " ready to be offered up," for the preceding Sacrifice on Calvary had taken from death its sting, and the true apostle was ready to go into the other world dauntlessly in the train of the Chief Apostle of his profession and of ours. Meanwhile, according to British tradition and the notices of Eoman history, Britain had been subdued. Caractacus, or Caradoc, had been brought captive to Eome ; but by the dig- nity of his bearing won the respect of his conquerors. Old tradition makes him the convert of the Gospel, with some of his family, in their Roman captivity. Scholars of no mean name have held the Claudia and Pudens of Paul's Epistles converts connected with that family and history. Boadicea afterward rebelled, and was subdued. But the Roman Plau- tlus, eminent in an earlier war against Britain, had a wife, Pomponia Grseoina, who, according to the notices of Roman history, seems to have been a convert to the Gospel. Vespa- sian served under Plautius, and in this British campaign ac- quired the elements of the experience that fitted him to subdue Palestine, and trained him to be one of the successors of Nero. From quarters so various was Providence calling the avenger. The people of the island, thus brought into connection with the Empire of Rome and the Gospel of Christ, wield now a dominion wider than that of any of the Csesars. When Paul came back to suffer, the people and city and fane that had so passionately repelled Paul's message and Master, and hurled the apostle away upon Rome, little knew Vespasian's destined mission and the recoil of Christ's rejected Gospel on their own 14 EBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. heads. If, as the chronology of Conybeare and Howson places it, Paul's second appearance at Rome, not this time before Nero himself, but probably before some of the assistant magistracy of the empire, was in the year 68 — such being Paul's date of death — in the same year, too, ended the earthly career of the monstrous Nero. lie had by largesses bribed populace and soldiery ; but his unspeakable excesses and gen- eral tyranny made treason and plotiing ever recurrent. They were soon successful. He would fain have resorted to suicide ; but shrunk, in craven terror, after trying the edge of two dag- gers. With a strange self-pity that would have been ludicrous if not so veretched, he compassionated the world for losing in himself so great an artist. He wished he might travel in Egypt or elsewhere, as artist; for an artist, as he said, could everywhere find bread and home. Nor, much as we may de- spise and abhor the man, can we well forget the magnificence of some of his constructions and the wide range of some oth- ers that he had in purpose, but never executed. His Baths and Golden Palace were, according to all accounts, of great splen- dor and beauty. The " Apollo Belvidere" and the " Dying Glad- iator" — statues which the world yet admires — came, it is said, from what seem to have been the ruins of Nero's edifices; and, if so, the eyes of the vile despot looked often on these masterpieces of sculpture. It had been his intention to dig a canal along the shore of Italy, where Paul landed — an ap- proach for commerce ; and still another canal would he have dug across the Isthmus of Corinth, where Paul long labored. Had his projects been accomplished, the Emperor would have left his traces thus on land and sea, unconscious of their vicinity to stages in the apostle's career of toil. The scrawl of the NEMO AND FAVL. 15 apostle's pen remains; the despot's plans ended in cogitation. But artist and despot, when death neared, was glad to seek shelter in the profEered home of a freedman some few miles from Eorae ; crept on all-fours into the humble apartment where he might best be sheltered ; and had the aid of a freed- man in giving himself the fatal stab, having meanwhile quoted verses of Homer on the sound of horses' feet, as he heard the tramp of tlie horsemen sent to seize him. They affected a wish to stanch his wounds. He said, " You come too late. Is this your fidelity?" and expired with horror staring from his eyes. Yet affection clung even to his name. It was long be- lieved that he might yet return ; and some of the early Chris- tians interpreted John's Apocalypse as presenting, in the anti- christ, the image of this dreaded and detested persecutor yet to return for a new lease of hatred and devastation. In his time lived a false Christ, such as the true Saviour warned his disciples against, in the ApoUonius of Tyanea, whom Gibbon, in a sentence of studied impiety, has endeav- ored to place on the plane of equality with the Saviour of the world. ApoUonius was a shrewd conjurer and trickster. His life, written long after, when despairing paganism would fain evoke a rival for the Christ, who was emptying its temples and subverting its most honored fanes, has been in recent times, in one of its translations, honored with an epistle said to have been composed by Voltaire's pupil, Frederick the Great of Prussia. The story is a very clumsy parody. He did not confront Nero as Paul did ; and the insipid utterances which his biographer records are never likely to replace the discourses of the man of Tarsus, or the Sermon on the Mount of the Man of Sorrows and the King of Glory. 16 MHAS AND CEABACTMES OF HISTORY. But the story may •well be recalled, to remind us how varied, on the one hand, were the forms of dominant evil with which a nascent Christianity, on the other hand, was called to con- tend — that evil intrenched in power, enshrined in art, com- mended by philosophy, and re-enforced by superstition and imposture. The Sufferer of Calvary assured his followers of an ultimate triumph; but he told frankly upon what terms of fullest self-sacrifice it was to come. The men whom he enlisted had neither the patronage of the empire, nor the blandishments of art, nor the honors of a varied philosophy. But contrast what they surrendered with what they achieved. See them everywhere hunted, maligned, persecuted, tortured, and sacrificed. Yet certainly Nero's death, and Seneca's death, and Agrippina's death, and Octavia's death were of another temper than that which the new faith of the Nazarene inspired in myriads on myriads of its converts, trophies of either sex, and of every age, and of most varied condition. Poor, homeless, and aged, in terms which he cites from his assailants, " in bodily presence weak, and in speech contemp- tible," what was, nevertheless, Paul's bearing? What is his present influence, widening with every Bible dropped from the polyglot presses? And where is Nero, and his art, and his influence? Is the conflict between error and truth yet terminated? Has the nineteenth Christian century escaped all need of farther toil? He would be a rash and untrustworthy guide who should pronounce the long conflict finally and fully settled. The glare and blare of the Judgment Day, the trump that opens all the graves of the generations, and the glory of the Judge descending to confront his re-assembled subjects NERO AND FAVL. lY of all the centuries — these only will bring the final arbitra- ment and solution. Meanwhile, man, as the fallible and the presumptuous and the wilful, will cavil, pervert, and rebel.. Each individual will win or lose his soul apart; and the' ancient tempter, who plotted in Eden, will be found having only the greater rage to mislead and instigate and marshal his dupes, in proportion as he finds the tether of his chain shortened, and the hour of his final exposure and overthrow impending. Un- der this skUful machination, the old heresies will yet pullulate in- new forms ; and the enmities, for the time abashed and renounced as unsatisfactory, will emerge from the entombment of centuries, and re-assert themselves under new banners and with novel watchwords. But our faith in God's oracles, and in the purposes of his blessed dominion long since announced by prophet and apostle, may well gather fresh confidence from all the struggles and costly victories of the past, and in pros- pect of all the recommencing battles of the future. They who follow Paul's Master have first in their behalf the eternity and indestructibility of truth. As, with regard to the material world, all the turmoil on the face of our whirling planet has not altered, will not in the long-drawn future alter, the truth as to the laws by which that ball revolves, and the influences that bind its atoms together, and hold its mass in its due orbit as to other worlds in the system. Man may ignore, forget, and distort as to his statements concerning this truth in regard to the laws of physical being. But the cavil stirs not the world's axis, and shifts not its goal. And equally sure, but far more august, are the principles of that spiritual and divine truth which is the outgush of the Divine Nature. Bards sing and sao-es laud the indestructible, unconquerable energy of truth. 18 MRAS AND CIIABAOTEBS OP HISTORT. And yet, apart from the life morally infused into the conscience, soul, and heart of its devout recipients, the truth itself, even as to religion and eternity, may become, as Pascal profoundly said, an idol. If dissevered from the love of the truth, creed and symbol, fought for in the neglect of God and in the hate of man, will but hurl the Pharisee into a deeper woe. The security of the Church and of the race is, where Paul finds it, in a personal and divine Saviour — himself the great theme of all the truth in Eevelation, and the omnipresent guardian and champion of the people who receive that truth in the love of it ; the channel of man's approach to God ; the great lesson which man, so approaching God, is patiently taught; and the ever-welling fountain of new holiness and power and might and love to his people — emphatically and eternally proving to be, as ho proclaimed himself, " the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Now, Christ, ascending from his own cross and tomb heav- enward, deserted not the earth that had rejected him, nor did he leave the Jewish nation or the Koman Empire out of the purview of his own sovereign enterprise for the subjugation of all nations to the obedience of his faith. In his personal pres- ence, with this Christ attending and defending him, Paul moved to his heroic martyrdom. Ask the apostle the warrant for his courage and unfaltering hopefulness, his reply is that this Mas- ter has assured him : " My grace is suflBcient for thee." And the churches, when energetic and aggressive and successful, in the ages since Paul's neck went under the headsman's sword, have been so by this " grace." Out of their own weakness and fewness, amid all their battling foes, and spite of all their own conscious and confessed insufficiency and even imbecility, NERO AND PAUL. 19 they have darted the grasp of their prayers, efforts, and plans toward this grace, free, exhaustless, and infinite as is the nature and life of God ; and it has upheld thera. God has not shift- ed with the shiftings of the secular centuries. " Grace and trutlt came by Jesus Christ." He is not elbow- ed out of his own universe by the last now dream of a super- cilious rationalism, or compressed into nothingness by the last screw and whirl given to the presses of an atheistic sci- ence. When he came to Bethlehem, though it was in lowli- ness and as an infant of days, and with only the anthem of the angels around him, the tramp of the centuries was heard be- hind him; and, as the prophet sublimely phrased it, this Prince of Peace was " the Father of Eternity." The Reformation took up the grace of God, as Paul in his Epistles proclaimed it ; and, in the force of that old unworn truth re-enforced by the Eternal and Omnipresent Spirit, the might of Papal Rome was shivered. The revivals and mis- sions of days nearer our own are but the new application of the old truth, and the fresh eflBuence of that grace. All met in the one Christ of God ; himself, though unseen, pervading all the ages of human history, and though unrecognized sway- ing the centuries of apostasy, as well as those of general, wide- spread worship. He awaits calmly the punctual accomplish- ment of every pledge, the overthrow, sure and irretrievable, of each foe, however inveterate and long dominant. The Christ foreran the antichrist, and in serenest supremacy expects the collision of the antagonist forces. When Paul went down, as to pagan magistrate and Jewish maligner it must have seemed, into defeat and silence, the Lord was, as the more dis- 20 IIHAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTOBY. cerning eyes of the apostle perceived,* the real out-gate of the struggle, but patting on his servant's brow "the crown of righteousness,'' and reserving the like recompense for "all them also who love his — the Master's — appearing." "We in- herit the conflict, and are invited to share the reward. TEE EMPMROB TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 21 II. THE EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. When Paul reviews Lis own struggles and sacrifices in the cause of the Gospel, he adverts to his having "fought with beasts in the guise of men at Ephesus."* Fellow -confessors •with him for Christ were in no distant day flung to the leopard and the tiger and other ravening brute beasts in the amphitheatre. He himself had not encountered thus the clasping paws of the bear or the claws and white teeth of the lion ; but pagan traders, maters and venders of idol shrines, fanatics alike for their creed and their greed, had shown a brutal ferocity as they clamored for hours, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ;" and this mob, unless restrained and soothed, had torn, limb from limb, the Hebrew apostle who preached fearlessly the one Holy Jehovah, emptying all the world's pantheons, and incarnate in the only Saviour, Christ, as the one light and hope of the race. Ephesus, the city of these deadly risks to Paul, had, far back as the days of Herodotus, been the point where the sea-borne travel and traffic of Europe touched land, as it took its course to the marts and capitals and schools and shrines and mines of the far East. Declined from its old power and splendor, the great seaport had, in the * 1 Corinthians xv. 32. 2 22 ERAS AND CHABAGTEBS OF HISTORT. days of Augustus, been restored to a share of its old influence, and was held the metropolis or mother city of five hundred in- ferior and dependent cities. Its great temple was, for mag- nificence and afiluence and resort, one of the wonders of the ancient world; and pilgrimages and gifts made it rich and famous throughout the civilized nations of heathendom. For three years the apostle had with tears, night and day, warned the converts there given him. When on his way to Jerusalem he sent for the elders of the church at Ephesus to meet him at Miletus, its outlying maritime dependency, some thirty miles away, and warned them of the " spiritual wolves " that should arise among themselves.* Some two years afterward at Eome, a prisoner, about the time when Nero had married Poppsea and sacrificed Octavia, Paul writes to his Ephesian converts, " an ambassador in bonds," wafting back their thoughts to the eternal grace, which before the foundation of the world had schemed their rescue, and then, with all pathos and tenderness, turning to the present time, their duties and their snares, and to the future time, and its prospects and retributions ; warning them against discouragement and bidding them take "the whole armor of God,"f he entreats them to remember in prayer him, their fellow-sufferer and fellow-combatant. Some thirty years and more (or the ordinary lifetime of a genera- tion) had gone by since Paul had been laid in his quiet grave, when to the same Ephesian church another apostle, the last survivor of the band, the aged John, when warning the seven churches of Asia, addressed these Ephesian disciples, in the front line of those seven churches, to congratulate them for having * Acts XX. 29. f Ephesians vi. 13. THE MMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 23 rejected false apostles, but to deplore the waning of their, first love, and to warn them in the Master's name that, unless they repented and returned to their first works, their candlestick should be removed from its place. It was from Patmos John wrote, thus reporting a distinct message of the Lord God — the Alpha and the Omega of all hope, all revelation, and all re- demption — a message heard with John's own ears from Christ's own lips, and written down by that wrinkled, aged hand at Christ's explicit command. When ApoUos and Paul had brought, to the fathers and more aged brethren of these con- temporary Ephesian Christians, the word of life, the magic arts and characters of Ephesus, which had long been famed through all the Eoman Empire, had been renounced by the newly won disciples ; and books of the class to the value of fifty thousand pieces of silver had been given to the flames, so mightily grew ' and prevailed the word of the one true Lord. Was not such warning as this, of danger lest the candlestick of the divine fdvor and ministrations should be dislodged from among them, a requirement of sacrifice as stern, to their own false and easy hopes, as had been exacted in the generation gone before? After sending from Patmos, his rocky place of exile, this sol- emn and startling message, John, the Beloved Disciple himself, when his banishment was ended, returned according to the old tradition to take up at Ephesus the charge from which death had removed Timothy. The Turkish name of the place — Ayasaluk, now a little village — is supposed to be a distorted' reminiscence of the Greek name given to the old and last sur- viving apostle, as the Saint Theologian ;* just as Stamboul, the * 6 ayioQ BeoKoyoc. 24 ERAS AND CHABACTMRS OF BISTOSY. modern Turkisli name of their seat of empire, is but an un- couth distortion of an old Greek phrase of the surrounding peasants when they talked of going " up to town."* A fisher- man by the lake of G-ennesaret when the Master first called him to become a fisher of men — surviving, by a singular ar- rangement of Divine Providence, the twelve Caesars, as they are called, and all the others beside himself of the twelve apos- tles — writing the last of the four gospels, and surviving to re- ceive and record, as we hold it, the last book of the New Testa- ment, the visions, portents, and warnings and glories of the Apocalypse, his career nearly filled up the first Christian cen- tury. But, reaching extreme age, his is not a name to be added to the poet's distich, as to the worthies who have outlived their fame and their faculties : " From Marlborough's eyes see tears of dotage flow, And Swift expire, a driveller and a show." The aged, he had been beloved in his early career of the Divine Master ; and now he is beloved of the churches in his closing days, and, when for weakness he cannot longer preach or write, he is borne into the assemblies of the disciples to say, " Little children, love one another." Among all the names of the emperors, who from Eome lorded it over the world throughout that first century, none shows, on the whole, a fairer and less blemished record than Titus. Men his contemporaries hailed him as the delight and darling of mankind. Far down in the Christian centuries critics and poets like Boileau have eulogized him in lines so * iiQ Tan TCoKiv ; toji, being the provincial corruption for rriv. THE EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 25 eloquent and musical, that Boileau's royal master, Louis XIV., not unacquainted with the adulation so rife in royal ears, re- quired the praises of this old Roman conqueror to be read three times over. And Racine, the tragedian, and Metastasio, the Italian dramatist, have lavished their poetic art on the same grateful theme, enhanced in the case of the last by some of the best music of Mozart. Titus wielded armies and reared monuments, as the fisherman apostle could never claim to do. Exile, prisoner, and in purpose and sufEering not only con- fessor, but, far as the might of his persecutor, the brother of Titus, Domitian, could effect it, a martyr also, John was, spite of all these disadvantages, blessed, and the channel of blessing to others. Human magnanimity, and beneficence, and generos- ity, and clemency, and self-control displayed their powers in the Emperor. The charity coming down from heaven, and guiding and winning other souls heavenward, had, at the bar of Caiaphas, at the foot of the Master's cross, in the porch of the Temple at Jerusalem, in the face of Herod and of Domi- tian, on the rocky shores of Patmos, and on the green slopes of Gennesaret, and within the hewn sides of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathsea, its exemplar in John. It may be not an ill use of time to ask which of these two contemporaries, the one a sovereign ruler and the other a mere subject, had the more heart-felt peace — which has left, for his fellows and all after ages, the more august and blessed memory ? Rank has, in worldly judgment, its rights of precedence. Let us begin with the Emperor. He had the reverence of Josephus, the Jewish historian ; and the friendship of Tacitus, whom he advanced and cherished. But the portion of the great Roman historian's work that portrays Tiberius and Nero 26 ERAB AND CffAEACTEBS OP SISTOMY. has survived ; that which described Titus has now perished, it is feared, irrevocably. When Nero, in the seventeenth year of his age, ascended the imperial throne, his step-brother, Britan- nicus, a lad of fourteen, as the son of Claudius really entitled to the throne from-which Agrippina had plotted to exclude him, was indulged with associates of like age. Titus, the young son of an oflBcer making his way to fame and power — Vespa- sian — then a lad of fifteen, one year older than Britannicns and two years younger than Nero, was brought up in the pal- ace, sharing the sports, studies, and meals of Britannicus. Even in that day of license some moderation was held decorous for youth, and in great imperial banquetings these youths were served at a side table on somewhat simpler fare, but in the presence of the guests, older, and more sumptuously served. The wines of the Eomans were often administered tepid or even hot. When the unhappy Britannicus was to be thrust into the grave by his cruel supplanter, Nero, the cup was pre- sented to Britannicus so warm that he refused it. The wine it contained was harmless ; but cold water was brought to tem- per it, and in that water was intermingled the fatal poison of most rapid operation. Titus, his comrade, is said to have, ac- cording to the usages of the day, shared in the cup of his young friend, Britannicus, and from the effect of the poison (though probably in his case more scantily partaken) his health long suffered. Of great gentleness and buoyancy of temperament, with a taste for study and poetry, in Greek as in Latin a ready, prompt orator, he was a general favorite. His proficiency in short- hand writing was also remarkable ; and in imitating the hands of others he was so dexterous that he once gayly said he could THE EMPEROli TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 21 become, if lie chose, the best counterfeiter in Rome. In an age when forged wills and signatures were not rare or un re- munerative, it was a perilous accomplishment. Amid the cor- ruption of that court the young Titus, though popular, was not unsullied. It was the wisdom of his father, Vespasian, serving at the time successfully abroad, to remove his young son from the blandishments of the capital, that he might share the exposures and hardships of the camp. He was a brave and skilful soldier, winning the affection of his comrades ; and campaigning in Eritain and Germany had made for him an early military reputation. When his father, Vespasian, was sent into Palestine, Titus accompanied him, and remained there to press the invasion and siege which his father could not per- sonally continue. It was there that he learned to inow the Berenice, sister of Agrippa, who is named in the Acts as one of the hearers before whom Paul stated his history and argued bis case. A woman of rare beauty, and of very great wealth, with that leaning to Greek culture and art which marked the Herodian family, Berenice fascinated the young Eoman prince, and, although some years his senior, wielded over him the pow- er which the Egyptian Cleopatra had swayed over an earlier soldier of Rome, Mark Antony. Titus pressed with energy and skill his measures against the Jews. With a fated ob- stinacy and fanaticism they continued their resistance, expect- ing from God a miraculous interposition for their deliverance, such as their fathers had found in earlier times, but which these rejecters of God's incarnate Son had no right to antici- pate. The horrors of tlie war and siege, as painted by a Jew- ish writer, Josephus, we need not essay to recall ; slaughter, conflagration, rapine, famine, and pestilence wasted the land 28 MS AS AND CHAliACTEBS OF HISTOBY. and its beleagured capital. Titus, against his own -wislies, saw the sanctuary given to the flames ; and Jerusalem, after having been made by intestine feuds a slaughter-pen of its inhabitants, was given over to the sword, firebrand, battering-ram, and pickaxe of the Eoman invader. The sister of him who had said to Paul, " Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," could not have been without some vague knowledge both of the old books of the prophets and of the new faith of the great Prophet of Nazareth. But, radiant and prosperous and fashion- able, she probably could little re-enforce what juster views of duty and life and destiny beyond the grave must at times have flashed on the mind of Titus. After the fall of Jerusalem Titus visited Egypt and presided at the installation of the sa- cred bull, Apis, there — a rather plain intimation that the influ- ence of his Hebrew acquaintances, Josephus, and Berenice, and Agrippa, had done little to shake his pagan habits. Popular and kindly, but loving pleasure, and the table, and the wine-cup as he did, discerning men had rather dreaded that, when Titus should acquire supreme power, he would prove but a good-natured Nero. But when, by the death of his father, brought to the throne he gloriously and quietly re- futed these auguries. Accessible to all, generous, self -con- trolled, wishing, as he said, no citizen to leave his Emperor's presence with sad visage or heart, he was magnanimous even to his enemies. Some young nobles who had plotted his death were spared, invited to his table, and a messenger was sent to the anxious mother of one of them, to warn her against dreading for the treason of her son his speedy death. Domi- tian, a most unworthy brother, plotted against him, and would fain spread the tale that the father, Vespasian, had by will left TSJH EMPEROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN: 29 hira, Domitian, a sharer in the empire. Most fraternally Titus expostulated with his false-hearted and unnatural kinsman, and besought Lis confidence and made him a sharer of his power. He completed the Coliseum, that great, massive monument which the strangers visiting Eome yet admire in its ruins; and he reared that Arch of Triumph for the conquest of Jeru- salem which yet preserves the image of Jewish candlestick and trumpets and table of shewbread, linking the eye of mod- ern gazer to images which Solomon, and which Moses before Solomon, had shaped by God's bidding. When a fire of three days had largely wasted Eome, of his own means Titus sought to repair the damages, not accepting the proffered aid of his people. He vowed never to stain his hands with blood of the senators, and kept, spite of provocation, his vow. Finding the marriage of a foreigner and Jewess unpopular, he dismissed Berenice, though himself loath to make the sacrifice, .and she as loath to be dismissed from the place of queen to which he would fain have raised her. He exclaimed one evening, "I have lost a day !" because on that day he had conferred no gift. Such were his traits that he was regarded in the language of the times as " the love and delight of the human race." True to the friendship of his boyhood, he raised in the palace a statue of gold, and another of ivory, to the young Britannicus, who had been poisoned at his side. But the calamities of that great eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii and Herculaneum darkened his reign. A son of that Felix and Drusilla named in the Acts, and that son's wife, were among its victims besides the elder Pliny. Its lava- clad relics tell yet a hideous tale of the corruptions of the age as prevalent in these outlying surburban towns, and much 2* 30 HIIAS AND CSABAGTEMS OF BISTORT. more as dominant in the metropolis, the fountain of their provincial fashions. A fearful pestilence followed in the train of the eruption. But the heart of the Emperor had woes be- sides of its own; and while presiding at a public entertain- ment he was seen bursting into tears. He sought retirement, but a fever which showed itself proved intractable. When the symptoms of death were becoming visible he opened the curtains of his litter, and looking heavenward complained that he did not deserve to die so early; and remarked that but of one act in all his life did he repent. What this one act could be the survivors had various judgments. A reign of but two years two months and twenty days was indeed deplorably brief, for one hailed as the darling of mankind ; but whatever the pagan might judge, there had been acts of his early career that were in the eyes of moralists not thus lightly to be dis- missed. Some charged his truculent and heartless brother, Domitian, with hastening his death by a snowbath or even by poison. Of beneficence and self-control learned in a high station, when it had been lacking in his more private years,' of generosity and ready sympathy, he was indeed, in his high post and with his rare temptations, a wondrous exhibition. Neither the avarice of his father, nor the sullen, malignant ferocity of his brother, Domitian, clung to him. And arch, and amphitheatre, and medal, and the page of history attest his. greatness. A poem that his brother, Domitian, wrote on the Fall of Jerusalem has disappeared. Let paganism have its exultant remembrance of him as hero and worthy of no vulgar mould. The Jew had a keen and vivid dislike of the conqueror of his race, the waster of the sanctuary, and the ravager of Pales- TSE EMPEROR TITUS AND TEE APOSTLE JOHN. 31 tine. It is one of the Talraudic fables that Titus, on occasion of a storm in the seas befalling him, challenged the Hebrew God, as powerful over the waters just as he had been in Pharaoh's times, but denied his ability to overthrow him on the land. God, the Hebrew legend asserts, sent a fly or gnat which, entering the Eoman's nostrils, fastened and fattened on his brain. For seven years,, say they, the pain grew keener. One day, Titus passing a foundery noticed that with the re- sounding blow of the foundery-hammers the insect his torment- or seemed cowed and lulled. He paid, says the story, a high price for hammering to be each day continued at his side, that thus he might be relieved. But the inner plague soon recov- ered from its fears and resumed its torturing. A Jew, whose name is given by the lying legend, said that after the death of Titus he sp,w the head opened, and the insect, grown to a swallow's size, with iron beak and brass claws, was of incredible weight. The strange fable illustrates only the deep hatred his conquests had bred in the Hebrew people, his victims. But yet, with culture, power, wealth, kindliness, popularity, and numberless allies, and the countless appliances of a mighty empire at his command, what were the Emperor's bestowments on the human family, compared with those which God wrought by the latest survivor of the apostolic band, in poverty, iso- lation, and the decrepitude of age ? The son of Zebedee, born beside the Galilean sea, John, was probably somewhat younger than our Lord. It is a tradition of one Father (Nicephorus) that he was the cousin of John the Baptist. There was apparently close acquaintance between the households. That his father's family was of some wealth may be inferred from the acquaintance he seems to have had 32 SRAS AND CSASAGTESS OF EISTQEY. ■with the High-priest's household at the time of the Master's apprehension. Called first, hy the teachings of Christ's fore- runner, to anticipate the claims and to behold the near ap- proach of the Messiah, he early renounced the care of his fa- ther's bark and nets, to become the self-denying attendant of the great Teacher. But though promised to be made a fisher of men, he seems not to have had anything of the lofty culture of some later converts like Paul and Apollos. When the Saviour yielded himself a meek victim to his foes, the faith and hope of the disciples seem to have been shut up in the tomb of the lost Master, though love, stronger than either, cherished the beloved memory, and sought, at the first rumor of a new appearance of the Lord, the sepulchre where he had been laid. John's mother, Salome, seems to have been a ■woman accustomed to the responsibilities of secular employ- ment. Left probably early a widow, she may have continued in conduct of the business that her sons had abandoned. But, true to their fancied interest, she intercedes to ask for them a high place in the Messiah's kingdom. Like the women of the same class in modern Holland, Scotland, and England, we may suppose her energetic, but, though rugged, not coarse. The fishermen's wives and mothers of Paris were a terror in the Great Eevolution of France ; but the women, some of them of the like class, who from Galilee attended the journey of Christ, were of other mould and temper. When fully confirmed in the truth, John, in that temple which had been the scene of Christ's disregarded teachings, met and taught the multitudes. With the splendor and pow- er of Pentecost upon him, he could and did defy the rage and might of the rulers; and "a great company of the priests" THE EMPEBOIi TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 33 became obedient to the faith. Intrusted by his Saviour on the cross with the charge of his widowed mother, some have seen in this an evidence that John was married, and have leaned, in consequence, to the tradition of some authors that he was the groom in the wedding -feast at Cana, and that Mary, our Lord's mother, was thus installed a most honored guest with the wife already mistress of his home. Be this as it may, when his own brother and fellow-apostle becomes a martyr, he is not disheartened. When the Gentiles are ad- mitted to the full, equal fellowship of church privileges, he is not averse. "When the omens that our Saviour had given of the approach of the desolation of Jerusalem and Palestine present themselves, he, with other Christians of the Hebrews, as Christ had charged them, flee from that metropolis to which the unbelieving and obdurate of their countrymen trooped as to a sure refuge, to find it only a prison and death-trap. Not for selfish ease, not in vengeful glee, go forth that band of true patriots. As Christians, everywhere bonds and imprisonments, tortures and death, awaited them. But a faith dearer by all these new dread attestations of its divine origin, a Master found to come nearer as the world drew far- ther apart from them — this faith and this Master cheered their exile, and gave energetic exultation even to their inartyrdom. In the latest visit of Paul to the Jewish metropolis and Temple, John was probably absent on his range of mission- ary testimony and travel. When God has not seen fit to re- cord in Scripture the statement, tradition has it that Parthia was the scene of his apostolate through many years. Peter died, and Paul, too, had gone; but in the after- appearances 34 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. of Jolin is no trace of wavering confidence or of growing en- feeblement. The tradition of early Christians has it that he was thrown by Domitian, the successor of Titus, into a cal- dron of boiling oil, but by miraculous interposition emerged unharmed. In advanced years lie is said, in one of his tours for evangelization, to have proselyted and baptized a young man of promise, whom he commended earnestly to the resi- dent Christian pastor. On revisiting the place the aged apos- tle learned that the youth, under evil associations, had become apostate and reckless, and was now heading, in the mountains, a band of robbers. Undaunted by years and toil and peril, the apostle went in quest of the prowler; was, at his sum- mons to that effect, led by the robbers capturing hira to their chief, whom he recognized as his backslidden convert. The youth, hardened and abashed, would have fled, but was so ten- derly and winningly pursued by the loving apostle that the appeals, under God's blessing, won back the stray soul. It is, say some, in allusion to this incident that John talks, in one of his epistles, of young men knowing the strength of Christ, as by him (the Christ) they have overcome the world. Of his zeal it is told that, when he found Cerinthus, one of the great leaders in the error against which his epistles and Paul's protest, was in the public bath which he had entered at Ephe- sus, the indignant apostle suddenly left it, exclaiming that he was afraid lest G-od should fling it down in ruins on the head of so flagrant an offender. The love which we habitually im- agine as too easy and indulgent to be severe was, in this son of thunder, a fervid and resolute zeal, alike firm in its con- clusions and stout in its protests, accepting no compromise, and resenting all perversions. TEM MMPEBOB TITUS AND THE AF08TLE JOHN. 35 But, with heresy already plaguing the professed Church, and with heathenism so coi'rupting society all around — with the memories of a Judaism so plagued by divine judgments, and yet so embittered in its continued rejection of the one Messiah — what was there, in the lot of the lonely, toil-worn apostle, to sustain this zeal and feed the flames of his holy courage with new fuel ? Only review his career and his work, and it will be seen how the soul of him who takes hold on God has the centuries and the destinies on his side. When he can no longer pursue his tours, long, and lonesome, and wearisome, the Spirit of God can guide the unskilled pen, and make the fisherman's hand, that was once moist with the net- ropes on the Galilean sea, and shining with the scales of the finny prey, his captures, now to wield the stylus which is to smite a false philosophy, and to carry its sentences of loving adjuration or of irresistible doom to the synod and the syna- gogue, the catacombs where a humted Christianity held its covert assemblies, as to the temples and judgment-seats where paganism still practised its sacrifices, conned its oracles, and uttered its death-bans. Like one of his early pupils and con- verts, Polycarp, he was joyous as the work grew harder and the end grew nearer. We suppose the evidence to be overweighing and unanswer- able that his was the latest of the gospels, and that yet later was Lis Apocalypse, received of the re-appearing Master's own lips, as that Son of Man, once so familiar, so accessible and so tenderly beloved, revealed himself with new majesty ; and even the beloved disciple fell fainting before the feet that glowed with the white heat of brass in the core of the blaz- ing furnace. It has, as Greek, its own idioms, and perhaps 36 ESAS AND CBABACTEBS OF SISTOEY. some of its grammatical turns may to parists seem question- able. But the first Napoleon wrote a hand often qnite un- decipherable except to experts; and -when read its spellings •were not found immaculate. But these defects, did they im- peach the force of the sentences or lumber the directness that, like a cannon-ball in its energy, sought its aim and reached what it sought ? And when the Carpenter's Son, as men sneeringly called him, chose the fisherman of the Gali- lean lake for his scribe, who shall refuse the oracle that has the world's Maker behind it ? Let us frame the supposition that, in the grace of God, the Emperor who as the lieutenant of his father, Vespasian, carried the Roman legions over the walls and into the most sacred shrine of the Jewish metropolis, had become himself a convert to the faith of the Nazarene ; and now sought to make his post and sway the means of speeding the Gospel over the nations. In what mode would he have probably sought to aid, in their work and influence, those of the apostles yet surviving, and the apostolic men, their converts and coadju- tors? Domitian, it is said, once summoned some of Christ's kindred by blood into his presence ; and finding their unam- bitious and unworldly character, dismissed them again, safely but quite scornfully. Conceive of his predecessor on the throne, his brother Titus, having met and learned to esteem and revere John ; in what fashion would the imperial neo- phyte have sought to advance the designs of the holy son of Zebedee? Would he have announced his purpose to send a rescript to every province and chief city, commanding that ofiicers, civil and military, open judgment-seats for preaching, and hire chaplains for each soldiers' barrack ? Would he have TSE EMPMBOE TITUS AND THE AFOSTLE JOHN: 37 proffered large drafts upon the treasury to reward conversions of important personages ; and indicated his settled purpose to give a full share of dignities and posts to the most promising and prompt among the new accessions to the Church ? Simon Magus, if still alive, would have bounded with delight into the field, anxious to renew the proffer that Peter had so indig- nantly repudiated. The arch trickster and magician, Apollo- nius of Tyansea, who claimed, in fact, to have instructed Ves- pasian and Titus, and to have predicted the exact death-hour of Domitian, would, under such new presentations of the path to worldly power, have intimated early his own willingness to accept an apostolate. But where — if such were their hire, their motives, and their commission — would the new Balaams, intent to bless the Church which the Caesar was thus fostering, would these mercenary emissaries be found, when results were scrutinized, as to the genuineness of the conversions they secured ; and where was the moral influence of the revolu- tions thus inaugurated by "Demases," as Paul described them, who " loved this present world 2" * The Divine Master, him- self a meek cross-bearer, summoned and would own only cross- bearing disciples, who loved not home or life in comparison with himself. This new evangelization would have erased these enlistment terms of the Great Captain of our Salvation ; and Lucifer and Mammon and Belial would have taken his place, and would have put the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life on creed and banner, as the motive powers of the great social change. The gates of Hell would have usurped the mercy -seat of redemption and the throne * 2 Timothy iv. 10. 38 ^EBAS AND CSAliACTSHS OF BISTOMT. of the final Judgment. If Caesar were really regenerate, he would feel that the weapons of the novel warfare were only spiritual ; and that his prayers to the Omnipresent Christ and the Omnipotent Paraclete were really more needed and more available than all his bannered legions and all his overbrimmed treasuries. John, as the self-denying apostle of a crucified Saviour, would teach others, as he had been taught himself, that " the world heareth not," willingly, any others than them who " are of the world;" and that the man who "knoweth God," en- lightened and renovated by his Spirit, " heareth us," recog- nizing aright the gospel and its heralds.* He paused not for the world's endorsement of his proclamation. He had re- ceived a more august commission, and moved to Parthia, if such his field of testimony, as some fathers say, as he had moved before through Palestine, and as in later years he traversed Asia Minor, eying only and ever a Divine Helper, and delivering a God-given message. Was Jerusalem, the sacred city of his fathers, laid in ruins, and was the Land of Promise casting out its plundered and harried inheritors into poverty and exile and contumely among the Gentiles — the old fane of Solomon razed to the dust, the lineage of Aaron lost, and the sacrifices of so many centuries interrupted, with no hope of resumption for either priesthood or victim ? The Master had forewarned of all ; and his tears, as he sat on Olivet and foretold this impending ruin, but enhanced the truth of his gospel, and showed the divine depths of his compassion. Early admonished, the Hebrew Christians had * 1 John iv. B, 6. THE MMPMROR TITUS AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 39 fled, Jotn probably among them ; but not to sullen silence and to grim despair. Over the -wreck of the Hebrew polity tow- ered the brighter hopes of the Gentiles. The world's Shiloh emerged from the shattered shell of Judaism. Men have en- deavored to show that Paul stood alone among the apostles in vfelcoming the aliens of the Gentiles, without requiring of them submission to Hebrew ritual before their admission into Chris- tian fellowship. But John's gospel, recording the words of John's Redeemer, represents him as saying : " Other sheep I have which are not of this fold : them also I must bring."* And when the Gentile churches, gathered by Paul and others, at Ephesus were decimated by persecution, and deprived of their old Hebrew teachers like Paul, John, without stint of sym- pathy and without hint of alienation, recognized their right to Christian ordinances and fullest equality of fraternization. He did not think it beneath him to build on these Gentile foun- dations of his brother -laborer Paul, the great apostle of the Gentiles. Peter, the ultimate coadjutor of John, who had with John waited in the high-priest's antechamber, and shared with John in the hurried visit to the vacated sepulchre, had been frankly withstood and censured by Paul, when wavering for a time, as to such free access and welcome to be accorded to the Gentiles. And now — when Peter, ere his own martyr death, had solemnly and with rare magnanimity endorsed the epistles of his be- loved censurer, Paul, as inspired and unquestionable ; and now that both Paul, the reprover, and Peter, the reproved, had sunk into one glorious martyr rest — Johb, the survivor, comes for- « John X. 16. 40 MBAS AND CSABACTEES OF HISTORY. ward, in all Asia, and for all after ages, proclaiming tlie founda- tions thus laid to have been those virtually planned by the eye of the Great Architect, who surveys all the churches and holds in his one right hand all the torches, the heaven - kindled " stars " of their true ministry and legitimate ordinances. It was a most gracious arrangement of the Divine Provi- dence thus to save, for the finalities of Revelation, the ripe age and wide experience of one who had been among the earliest proselytes of Christ, and who, as a favored disciple, had leaned on the Master's bosom just when the treason of Judas was on the eve of its explosion, and the sacrifice of the Propitiation was about to be consummated. The earliest was thus, in God's wisdom, made the latest apostolic proclaimer of the faith, world-wide in its gracious welcome, as it was world-wide in its solemn claims and stern alarms. His single personality runs through the earliest Christian century, and bolts together the entire fabric of the New Testament. Writing the last gospel, he also received from the revelations made in Patmos, the scene of his insular exile, the contents of the closing pages of Revelation. The tenderness that belonged to his character did not eliminate the features that made the Reader of all hearts denominate him, and his brother long since dead, as sons of thunder. The position has been questioned, but we think the balance of evidence overwhelming, that the true date of the Apocalypse was in the time of Domitian, and in the closing years of the first century. Behind, then, the receiver of the oracles we hear the voice of Him that shaped Eden and that shook Sinai, in the solemn words, the bolts shutting up the Book as final and unamendable : If any man add, God shall add to him every plague. If any man retrench TME EMPEItOR TITVH AND THE APOSTLE JOHN. 41 and take away, God shall take away that man's part of the blessings written anywhere and everywhere in the dread volume. The writer of that book declared he had once heard seven thunders utter their voices, during another stage of the fearful disclosures made to him. In these awesome sentences of the son of Zebedee we recognize the "son of thunder," and out of that human organ peal the tremendous accents of Him who blesseth and it is blessed, but who curseth and it is cursed, by an inevitable and irrepealable woe. Some have contrasted the portions contributed by Paul and by John to the divine oracles, and have enlarged on the diflS- culties and involutions of language and thought, as they be- lieve them, which make hard of comprehension and of exposi- tion the sentences of Paul. But within this very year the missionary of one of our American churches, laboring as Script* ure translator in Japan, sends back to the Christians of this city employing him the testimony, that the task of brirfging into adequate Japanese the sentences of Paul is far less, than that of giving like embodiment to the language and imagery of John. There is clearness and simplicity in the terms ; but the themes are so deep and so high, that the waters, limpid as they seem, become dark by their profundity. John is, as the older Christians called him, the Divine, the Saint Theolo- gian. It was his province to reveal the more extended and confidential discourses of our Lord, while yet in the body. He does it in perspicuous elementary terms, but the topics run into the bosom of the Infinite Jehovah; and the trembling seer lifts the mantle from over the bosom of the incarnate God, and shows the throbbing heart of a love, a wisdom, and a justice, all of them divine, and all, therefore, infinite. 42 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTOBT. In the purposes of Heaven, again, it seems also unspeakably fitting and kindly, that the closing lessons of this great apos- tle's testimony should be in the shape of prophecy. It is diflB- cult, but there is a special blessing to them who read and pon- der the difficult pages. Calvin, with his rare sMll and power, yet shrunk from continuing his commentary so as to include the Book of Eevelations. But Luther, who did an earlier and in some sense a braver work in the German Eeformation, fetched a part of his arms out of the arsenals of John to as- sail the towers and gates of antichrist. And a book' which has tasked and rewarded the study of minds like the Abbot Joachim of Florls, in the Middle Ages ; and Napier, the in- ventor of logarithms, in the days of the British Stuarts ; and Brightman, the oracle on this part of Scripture of so many of the Puritan fathers of New England ; and Mede, and Sir Isaac Nev?ton, and the great Bengel, and E. B. Elliott, in our own times, is certainly not undeserving note and devoutest heed. Men have calculated rashly, but the results of devout and lowly scrutiny have been good. The Church has been taught to look upon the future as her home, and to deem herself a child of the Day-spring, an heir of the Eternal Hope. She has been placed in the attitude of perpetual cheerfulness and vigilant ex- pectancy. The old world looked upon death as best imaged by the form of an angel with a lowered torch and extinct flame. Christ's new world is guarded by the form of an angel of the Resurrection and of the re-appearances, his torch uplifted and its flame upstreaming, for the "Lord cometh," and the crown is for them that await " his appearing." It is, again, one of the remarkable peculiarities of this book of God's sending and holding — none but he to enlarge it. THE EMPEROR TITUS AND TBM APOSTLE JOHN. 43 none but he to interpret it — that it lays simplest lessons and cheer for the day side by side with high promises for the ages that have not yet emerged, and the worlds that are to come be- yond the Judgment-day. Lessons that befit the mourner in the chamber of recent bereavement, and that stay the falling tears of some Sunday-school child recently orphaned, lie in rich profusion, intermingled with the clews to the later terrene and supramundane experiences of the Zion of God. The lore that may exhaust and reward the plodding studies of an aged Christian, continued through a lifetime, abuts on the simple consolations and admonitions that a child's heart may take up and apply. The simplicity of Him who took the little nurs- lings of Palestine into his arms, and caressed and blessed them, is, in this his final utterance, sweetly blended with the majesty and clouded profundity of his appeals and warnings, when shown as the Lord of the Universe and the occupant of the great white throne. He comes, rending graves, and recasting worlds, and allotting destinies, but the tear of an elder Brother drops on the King's sceptre ; and out of the gates ajar of his heavenly home come down snatches of melody, that show how earth's pilgrims may soon sit down — glad, jubilant, and safe — in the Father's house of many mansions ; " and whosoever will, may come and take of the water of life freely." You contrast the master of legions and the lowly subject whom, it is probable, he had never personally met. You heard from his lips the words, " If we say we have not sin- ned, we make him " (the God, the Christ) " a liar, and his word is not in us;" and then, when you hear the refrain, "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, tlie propitiation for the sins of the 44 :EJiAS AND CUAJtACTEBS OF SISTOSY. ■world," you turn to the poor Emperor's dying asseveration of faultlessness, and wisli that he had known this Advocate and this Propitiation. You feel that not around the palace, though a Titus tenants it, but around the lowly house of that fisherman lingers the light of the Mount of Transfiguration— " a light never seen on land or on sea," but revealed in the book and cross and face and throne of this one Christ — the Word, as John proclaimed him — the Maker, Redeemer, Sovereign, and Judge of the world. MONASTICISM. 45 III. MONASTICISM. For more than fifteen centuries, with various and flickering lustre, has monasticism claimed to be a power in Christendom, both in the Greek and Latin branches of the nominal Church, We suppose the word to describe men and women bound by voluntary and life-long vows to seek, apart from the rest of the nation and even of the Church, in seclusion and in isola- tion from their families, the cultivation of piety in themselves and the exercise of a religious influence over society at large. Its more intelligent and scholarly friends do not claim that it existed in the apostolic age, or that the New Testament has laid down laws for the establishment of such devout com- munities. The Bible has early taught us to think of vows as in certain cases admissible, but has very solemnly cautioned us by precept and history against their possible entanglements. The vows rashly made by wife and daughter might be can- celled by dissent of husband or father. Jephthah is praised in the Epistle to the Hebrews as an example of faith; but what the extent of the sacrifice he made, upon the vow of de- voting to God the first thing met on his reaching his own door, is yet matter of debate and most doubtful decision. If it involved the actual sacrifice of his child, it was rashly made; and the execution of it was even yet more unholy than the 3 46 EBAS AND GHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. making of it. The forty zealots, who had vowed Paul's death before they would themselves take bread or water, were guilty of perjury if they did not starve to death; and if they so starved themselves for lack of reaching their victim, they were suicides in fact, as in their purpose toward the great Apostle of the Gentiles they were murderers in heart. The Christ, who meant to bring his honored servant face to face with CsBsar, by crossing their ruthless purpose left the band of sanguinary ruffians to prove themselves false swearers or self- murderers in consequence of that lawless vow. The day — that day of final disclosure — will show on which horn of the dilemma the fanatics impaled themselves — whether breaking their oath or surrendering their lives. Either were crime enough. But their story lends no especial encouragement to the practice of rash pledges made before God. Every sen- tence of every epistle which that holy champion of the faith wrote in the years by which he survived those forty days is, to each of us its readers in this nineteenth century, a pledge how little the Jehovah — before whose eyes as solemnly in- voked they thus washed, far as intent could do it, their hands in their victim's blood — cared to provide for the maintenance of their vow and for its truculent efficacy. They covenanted with him to work the murder, but could not thus bribe him to become, by his favoring providence, their accomplice in the deed. It is a vow nailed on the pillory of Revelation as law- less and accursed; yet they, good haters, thought it a relig- ious vow that was commending their zeal as being like that of Jehu against Baal's priests. There was a body of religionists known as the Essenes liv- ing in the deserts between Palestine and Egypt far back as MOMAStTICISM. 47 Paul's age and earlier. Some Eationalists of modern times have wished to find in them the ancestors and teachers of John the Baptist and of our Saviour. They lived apart from the body of the nation, renouncing marriage, slavery, and war ; of austere character, and denouncing the Sadducees for their denial of the immortality of the soul. They disappeared from history, though both Josephus and Philo name them. It is not at all improbable, since peculiar usages and influences seem to haunt certain regions through successive generations and centuries, that, after the downfall of Jerusalem and the dis- persion of the Jewish people from Palestine, this o£E-lying set- tlement left in that whole country memories and traditions, out of which, in the close of the third Christian century, emerged first the Christian eremite, or solitary hermit, and then the embodied monks, who in cloistered communities gave themselves, in the renunciation of marriage and secular inter- ests, to the cultivation of what they supposed an ascetic piety. An Anthony is honored among these earlier recluses, and a Pa- chomius. The latter, a converted soldier, who died a.d. 348, is said to have left in the Egyptian Thebaid at his death no less than five thousand cenobites, or recluses, who regarded him as their head. A Simeon Stylites, on the other hand, a solitary, who ended his career little more than a century later, in A.D. 459, passed thirty-six years of his life on the summit of a column, increasing gradually its height. The last of these columns and the highest, being some sixty feet tall, he occu- pied for the last twenty years of his life. Anthony, in his far earlier career, had been assailed with all forms of evil and Satanic solicitation. So Simeon of the Column — ^for his exal- tation gave him fame and drew round him admiring crowds — 48 ERAS AND CHARACTMBS OF BISTORT. is said to have been solicited by Satan to step off into a char- iot, that, as the adversary said, would bear him heavenward. "When the self -tormenting anchorite was lifting one foot to leave his pillar and mount his chariot, the foot so outstretched was sprained in punishment of his self-confident fancy. Eec- ognizing the delusion, and escaping the deadly fall which Sa- tan had thus prepared him, he withdrew his foot and remained safe. On that column he was found dead at last. The Ro- man Catholic Church observes yet his festival on the 5th of January. The practices and the honors of hermit and monastical life spread. It brought distinction, and to some also ease and comparative escape, in the wilderness, from the terrors of heathen persecution. But the most honored of these recluses were not always free from heresy. Disorders sprung up among the smaller bodies and spread among some who adopted a roving life. It seemed expedient to gather them into settled societies, and to institute over them the authority of abbots, whose power needed to be sustained by closer restraints and heavier penalties upon the communities whom they ruled. In the fourth century appeared similar assemblies for women — apart also from their families — nuns under the abbess. As the communities augmented their powers and their pos- sessions, and spread into the West from the East, where they had begun, they became distinguished by various peculiarities of severer or less austere discipline. Fasting and maceration of various kinds attracted regard, and brought increased in- fluence and reverence. Simeon of the Pillar, for instance, is said to have taken but one meal a week, and during all the season of Lent to have foregone food entirely. When the MONASTICISM. 49 apostle had warned, ia his first letter to Timothy, of the peril- ous times when men should give heed to seducing spirits " for- bidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats," while some heeded it as a prophetic intimation against the current infatuation, others contrived to parry the allusion, as not meant for austerities so diflBcult to nature, and so wondrous in the eyes of the masses. Nor can we believe that there were not many true and ear- nest Christians among the bodies so associating and expanding themselves. Easil was for some time at the head of a monas- tery, and Chrysostom was for a time in the mountains of Syria an anchorite ; though each, after a time, exchanged the recluse life for the more active and public services of a bishop. The distinction soon became fixed between the clergy and prelates who officiated in outer life, and were called seculars, and the men drawn into the monastery and hermitage, and who were regarded as regular clergy from living under the fixed, rigid rule of the monastic establishment. And again the great body of the monts and nuns were but inferior members of a com- munity under the supervision and irresponsible control of their superior officers. Associated with these were respectively lay- brethren and lay-sisters, also partaking in the enclosure ; but the powers set over them were confessors, priors, and abbots or abbesses. The devotion of some, and the alarms of others, on their death-beds, out of the great mass of nominal Christians, induc- ing on their part large gifts to these stricter, severer confess- ors, rapidly enhanced the treasures and enlarged the territorial domains of some of these establishments. As the ages rolled on, and the Roman Empire went into severance, and ultimately 60 ERAS AND CHAMACTEES OF MISTORY. toward dissolution as following dismemberment, some of the monasteries established became missionary outposts, and sent forth fearless and fervent laborers for the diffusion of the Christian faith. That faith was mixed, indeed, with continually- augmented increments of tradition and superstition, an alloy often greatly obscuring the truth as first delivered. What the monks of Bangor did in Britain, and the Culdees of the Scot- tish isles, and the Anglo-Saxon saints for the evangelization of heathen Germany, for the preservation and the dissemina- tion of the Gospel, the candid student of ecclesiastical history would neither forget nor belittle. But the power given to the bishops of the secular clergy, and to the abbots and priors of the monastic votaries, went on rapidly floating them upward into the rank of, and into rivalry with, the rulers of provinces and the high civil magis- trates. And with augmented revenues came, in too many cases, but increased luxury, pride, and ostentation, and in their train oppression and in some cases profligacy. There were in the Middle Ages men like Benedict and like Bernard, of whom Luther is recorded, in that most quaint and pungent book, his " Table-talk," as saying : " St. Bernard was the best monk that ever was, whom I love beyond all the rest put together ; yet he dared to say it were a sign of damnation if a man quitted his monastery ;"* and of him Gibbon, too, speaks in admiration, wondering at the rare self-denial which enabled Bernard to walk beside the glorious Lake of Geneva, on whoso shores centuries after Gibbon himself lived, without raising his eyes to gaze on its enchanting scenery, an act of voluntary * Hazlitt, "Luther's Table-talk," p. 215. MONASTICISM. 61 self-abnegation for which we must judge the New Testament gives us no warrant, and which had it been enjoined by true piety would have required David also, to have abstained from gazing entranced on the glories of the heavens that some of his Psalms so pathetically extol. In later times, as the older and wealthier orders became com- paratively absorbed by the care of their revenues, and the ex- ercise of their great territorial and political influence, new bod- ies were constituted — some the mendicant orders professing to live on alms. The Franciscans and their founder, St. Francis of Assisi, showed an intense zeal, and as preachers wielded for their earlier years vast popular influence. Another great preach- ing order was the Dominican, whose founder, St. Dominic, was, in his zeal against heresy, permitted to establish the Inquisition that for so many centuries lorded it over Spain and Portugal, not unknown in Italy, but dreaded and checked in France. Under Torquemada its power was great, and was fearfully felt. Before the terrible crusade it wielded against the Albigenses, in Beziers in 1209, sixty thousand were massacred, and Catho- lics among them ; the zealot at the head commanding that the believers and the heretics should go to death indiscriminately, for God was able to select out of the dead his own. In still later days the Papal Church founded orders like the Jesuits, in part monastic but in other respects more secular, exempt from many of the old cloister restrictions, to give them scope and margin for the exercise of their influence as edu- cators, as converters of the heathen, and as antagonists of the nascent and widely prevalent Keformation. Eeceiving a mili- tary organization from their founder, Ignatius Loyola, they vowed an entire surrender of conscience and soul to their head, 52 MMAS AND CRAMACTERS OF MISTOBT. called, in the phrase of the camp, their " general," who made the body one vast engine informed by one will, and shedding out their unparalleled energies as under their captain-gener- al's single brain and will and conscience. Lord Bacon envied them in their first college successes for their skill as teachers, but in this respect their later have not equalled their former days. Their missions in the Old World and the New were many of them managed with a chivalrous devotedness; but others of them with a snbtilty of character and a duplicity of utterance more machiavellian than apostolic. And, as if by the sentence of divine retribution, their triumphs have been evermore but evanescent, and interrupted often by the most sudden and disastrous reverses. Their collision with Jansenism brought upon them, in the " Provincial Letters " of Pascal, and in the merciless dissection of their morality by Anthony Ar- nauld and others his fellows, exposures and infamy from the effect of which they can never recover themselves. The sisterhoods of Catholic Europe and America have, again, been new expansions of the monastic principle applied to outer works of benevolence and education, which have won them wide favor, reverence, and love. And the zealous Protestant — dreading and deprecating the character of the errors they have aided to spread as to the true nature and province of Christian piety ; reviewing the terrible record which some of these monastic orders have made in in- stigating or in sharing or in palliating massacres like that of St. Bartholomew's Day in France, and of Ireland, and of the Waldenses; looking into the complaints of governments and of fellow-Catholics against some monasteries; reading the ter- rible satire of Eeuchlin and Hutten in the " Epistolse Obscuro- MONASTIGISM. 53 rum Virorum," portraying with a coarse brush, but with a ter- rible force of humor and indignation, the awkwardness, brutal- ity, and stolidity of some members of the monastic orders — cannot believe that their extension is to be regarded with other than disfavor, strong and immitigable. " Be they as they are, or let them be no more," said the head of the Jesuit order when changes were proposed before their abolition by the Pon- tifE Ganganelli, Clement XIV. That abolition has been re- tracted ; the order has been re-established. But human nature being what it is, and the unity and infallibility of the Sovereign Pontiff being each century keyed up to a higher point of as- sertion and imputed right to reign, the great principle, not for Jesuitism alone, but for all the varied ramifications of monas- ticism, seems to be, as Ricci pronounced for his own Jesuit order, " Be as they were, or they cannot be." We would not forget that out of a monastery came the " Imitation of Christ," as it is called, a volume of disputed au- thorship ascribed more generally to Thomas k Kempis, though others make it the work of Gerson ; out of a monastery came the great Judgment hymn, the "Dies Irse," of Thomas de Celano ; ojat of a modern monastery the hymns of Frederick W. Faber, many of them so beautiful and devout, as out of earlier associations of the same class came so many Latin hymns of high, solemn beauty. We would not lose sight of Port Royal, though Rome denounced it, and Jesuitism by its use of a Bourbon sovereign demolished its structure and scat- tered the inmates. Sullen and narrow must be the heart that turns not reverently and lovingly to Angelique Arnauld, and Jacqueline Pascal, and others of those holy sisters. We would not forget the services of a Tillemont, the Jansenist, to Church 3* 64 IIBAS AND CHABACTEBS OF EISTOBT. history and pagan history, whose compilations, so exact and honest, extorted the praise as they aided the studies of the in- fidel Gibbon. We would not forget the Scripture version of a De Saci, or the comments on the New Testament of a Ques- nel. We would not forget the labors for patristic lore of the great Benedictine scholars, the folios, some sixty or more, in which the Bollandist Jesuit fathers of Belgium poured out such accumulation of legend, history, and tradition over the ages that have gone. We would not forget the erudition of a Petavius, and of a Baronius, and of a Calmet, whom Voltaire visited and flattered, and contrived slyly the while to use the knowledge extorted from his host to buttress his own sceptical cavils and mockeries. We would not forget the missionary toils of a Xavier, though their effects we suppose to have been greatly exaggerated, and in later times the efforts of a Jesuit father, Beschi, whose Tamil works, some of them, even Prot- estant missionaries now reprint and employ. We would not, in times nearer our own, overlook the powers and achievements of Lamennais, hailed for a time by a gratified Roman Catholic people as the last of the great fathers of the Church, though ultimately going over from the Church and faith he defended to negation and scepticism, and leaving behind him disciples that lamented their master but would not accompany him, like Montalembert and Lacordaire. But, against all these admissions, we set the fact that for Scripture verity, for national freedom, and for social order these monastic bodies have not accomplished what the less showy but more searching, and, we must hold it with the Bible open before us, the more spiritual labors of Protestant churches have accomplished for the well-being of the household, for the M0NA8TICISM. 55 cause of political enfranoMsement, for the extinction of slavery, and for the removal of paganism. See their old Congo mis- sions, what are they now ? See their old Paraguay missions, what are they now ? Marshall, a convert from Protestantism, has drawn a disparaging comparison of the Protestant and the Eoman Catholic laborers in the far field of missions. We must judge that, to a patient and thorough and dispassionate scrutiny, the results are just the opposite of what Marshall would represent them. On the standard of the Bible, and as ascertained by the Bible's statement of the fruits of the Gospel on the race as re- ceiving and obeying it, it seems to us that the system of exclu- sion from the world, of separation between the laic piety and the ecclesiastical religion which monasticism has cherished, is evidence against its being a plant of the Master's setting. See again, in the cause of political freedom, how little the monastic principle has given of aid, and how much it has inter- posed of hinderance and restriction. Its mitred leaders have been too often tyrannical, vindictive, and utterly unscrupulous. See the language in which Pontiffs' bulls have sometimes de- nounced the monasteries of a Roman Catholic land. Eemem- ber the Clements, and the Ravaillacs, and the Garnets who have ministered or quietly aided assassination and conspiracy. Take, in days not so far removed from modern times — at the going out of the fifteenth century — a French ecclesiastic, William d'Estouteville, who died in 1483 at Rome, at the age of eighty. It was the year of Luther's birth, D'Estouteville's death-year. At this very time Columbus, sick of heart, was seeking vainly opportunity to make his exploration of West- ern seas, and not until nine years afterward turned his prow 56 SBAS AND CHABACTEIiS OF HISTORY. toward our continent. That D'Estouteville was not without honor and confidence at the centre of the Roman Church appears from, his dying as the dean or head of the College of Cardinals. He was, in France, Archbishop of Eouen, and had beside this six other bishops' sees in France and Italy. He had also, as head of monastic establishments, in addition to these episcopal and archiepiscopal mitres, four posts as abbot and three places as grand prior. He was of the Ben- edictines, one of the best of the monastic orders. He was, besides, chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church. In 1452 the Roman Court and See had used him as legate. He reg- ulated at one time the University of Paris. His revenues were vast, but it is said he used them in decorating churches, and in relieving the poor. So prompt and stern was he, however, in asserting ecclesiastical rights, though thus violating canon laws in the number of his own rich pluralities, that when a civil oflScer, having in his hands the warrant for an execution, had compelled a poor priest to act as the executioner, this William d'Estouteville, abbot of four monasteries, grand prior of three, bishop of six sees, and archbishop of another, though canon law forbids ecclesiastics to shed blood — he, to avenge the insult done to the priest, caused the civil officer who had thus turned priest into hangman to be hung, this civil ofiend- er, from the archbishop's own window. Now, when a man so high in position and favor at the Holy Court itself, intrusted with important embassies between his native France and the Roman Court, had, with all this clustering mass of monastic honors upon his single head, leisure thus to turn executioner, was the monastic system that he represented one that Paul would have commended to the admiration of Timothy ? Was MOMASTIOISM. 57 it in the temper of Paul's Master? D'Estouteville was a growth of that great excrescence on the New Testament sys- tem which assumed to conserve and to isolate and to inten- sify the sanctity of Christian men and especially of Christian priests. " By their fruits shall ye know them." What are the great lessons that emerge from this history of man's fervid activity in the form of new and powerful communities, essaying under close and life-long vows to give Christianity a deeper hold on the hearts of the race ? They are to us simply two. The first of the lessons seems but this, that man is not safe in undertaking to amend the methods of God. The second, a great elementary truth, but needing to be perpetually recalled to the memory of the churches, is like to the first : it is that there is no wisdom in slighting the hints of Christ. Out of the cell, and from the pillow wet with tears, and from hair-shirt and scourge crusted with blood, from abbeys and monastic libraries and confessionals, from the rack, dungeons, and autos-da-fe of the Inquisition, from the path of the crusader, from the royal council chambers where Jesuits hold the conscience of sovereigns and shape the policy of empires, as from the Indian hut where they train the sav- age neophyte patiently won to the use of rosary and chrism, from bells, from processions, from litanies comes back distinct and sweet the old unspent rule : Eespect Jehovah's methods ; heed the hints of the incarnate Emmanuel. Moses virtually proclaimed it, when long centuries before the advent he bade that the Israel of God " hear the prophet " like unto him — Moses — whom God should yet send. It was uttered under yet more solemn accompaniments when, on the Mount of Trans- figuration, the apostles heard from the Father's own voice the 68 EBAS AND CHABACTEBS OF EISTOBT. charge, " This is my beloved Son, hear ye him ;" and Moses and Elias swept past, but Christ stayed behind. The leader of the Exodus in the arrangement of the Tabernacle, and after him David and Solomon in the structure of the Temple, were to follow the pattern shown by the Infallible Architect. And ■when a new dispensation took the place of the old, its Founder bade his apostles expect that his Spirit should bring to re- membrance all that he had taught them as to that spiritual temple, his own Church, which, based on himself, his work, his truth, and his grace, and which as informed by his Spirit •was to inherit the wide earth, and against which, though hell should be permitted to exert its craft and to expend its rage, the gates of hell should never prevail in the ultimate result. As the Alpha, Christ was never to be anticipated; as the Omega, he is as little to be abrogated or superseded. Now, when God placed our race upon the earth, which had been furnished and ordered for their habitation and culture, he set man in families. He made the household earlier than all human governments, laws, and institutions. Woman, as man's friend, companion, and helper, occupied the Eden when its green alleys were as yet unforfeited. The Fall, that wrench- ed them apart by their dread temerity from their old relations of loyalty and favor with their Maker, did not, terrible as were its other moral divulsions, break up the household compact. Under the shadow of the curse exiling them from Eden, Eve moved forth upon the outer lands, sad, yet loving, the one wife of our first father, and the one mother of our race. Polygamy and all forms of license, violence, and wrong made their terrible innovations upon the primeval arrangement, but the original method of God retained singly its rightfulness ; not to be war- MONASTICISM. 59 rantably replaced by any improvements as man deemed, or as Satan prompted them. With their distinct traits of character the sexes resembled each the other; but each had its peculiar province and adaptation. For man, the outer field and the axe and plough for its tillage; for Vfoman, the roof-tree and the hearth. With her beauty and grace, her keen and readier per- ceptions, her warm affection : to her, God expressly assigned the charge of the cradle, and the nurturing, fostering guardian- ship of the death-bed. To man, with his more rugged strength, his larger enterprise, and his more prolonged and deliberate judgment, the common Father on high assigned the provision for the household needs and the defence of the home from outer aggression. The infant, for whom both cared, toiled, and prayed, was to bear their name, influence, and hopes into the generation which should act when they had gone down into the grave. Lax divorce, and concubinage, and riot, and false religion broke down the old institutions, but the changes were not improvements. Christ's harbinger was to turn the hearts of fathers to children and of children to fathers, renewing and deepening the old channels of human society. Our Lord him- self, when illustrating the indispensable need of family concord, said that Satan's empire even must go down, without some principle of the kind. " A house divided against itself cannot stand." And Satan at feud with Satan would explode even the empire of Beelzebub. But it is a singillar fact in the annals of human inventive- ness and presumptuousness, that philosophers, and sovereigns, and men of fashion, and founders of new Utopias, and coiners of new religions, have fretted against this old method of God's devising and commending — the single and life-long union form- 60 ERAS AND CHAEACTERS OF BISTORT. ed by free and wise affection between husband and wife — God's putting together, which denied and practically defied man's right — a right, however, perpetually and most petulantly claimed ■ — man's right of putting asunder. Plato's imaginary Republic ignored this old rule and method of the Maker and Parent. So, in Mohammed's new revelation and law for the nations, the harem, with its discord, bondage, and debasement, took the place of the household of Eden. And so, in the communities of the Socialist, in the schemes of Fourier, and St. Simon, and Cabet, the Icarian immigrant to our own shores, in the arrangements of Shakers, and all the crudities and atrocities of the Mormons, how eager and frantic and obstinate have been the endeavors to amend the methods of God, and make over the household at the bidding of caprice, and with what hideous results, orgies, and slaughter ! Now, as to the Christian Church it seemed unaccountable, and yet at the close of the third century men began to think that holiness was attainable by the disruption of family bonds. First, the hermit, dwelling lonely and apart ; then came the monk, herded with his fellow -celibates, but the ties of house- hold life forsworn in the interests of Christian sanctity by the entire community in their monastery. Then women, in abjur- ing the old duties of the daughter, the sister, the wife, and the mother, formed their nunneries. Did it for either sex bring in a grade of sanctity and a measure of Christian consistency and usefulness, as upon the outlying and pagan world, that made the new method a betterment upon the Christian household, as Timothy had found it in the nurturing care of his mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois ; as Paul had known it in the hospitable and Christian home of Ac[uila and Priscilla ; as John MONASTICISM. 61 Lad seen it -when the mother of our Lord became in her wid- owhood the inmate of his home ; or as Peter when his wife's mother, healed by the Saviour -guest, rose to minister to the apostle troop and their divine Master ? No ; history is one pro- longed and emphatic attestation, that the disruption of the household was not the enhancement but the debasement of the early Christian Church. The scandals, the rivalries, the grow- ing heresies, and the waning of Christian graces, and the incur- sions of pagan contamination and corruption, left the Church spiritually poorer, the world less susceptible of true evangeliza- tion and less patient of the pure word of Scripture, as the sa- cred monastery looked out of countenance the old Christian household. There are improvements to be made by man's scrutiny and invention in the outer processes of material nature. But man's limits are narrower than he sometimes deems them. The Flat- head Indian, as his mother carefully shapes and cases him, re- ceives a wedge-like skull in place of that with which the God of nature framed the infant. Is this new roof, or the brain sheltered under its penthouse, more beautiful or more brill- iant than the original skull and brain as the palm of Jehovah shaped both? The aristocratic daughters of China have for many centuries bestowed effort and endured pain, to convert into a mere knob the foot God gave them, and look down upon the maid and wife of their country worker, not so crib- bed and remodelled, as essentially and indisputably low-bred, vulgar, and unfashionable, for the free step and full - grown foot which mark them. So the mandarin of the same Celes- tial Empire cherishes the growth of finger-nails, preserved in cases from harm or retrenchment, as a proof of noble rank. 62 ^MAS AND CSARACTSBS OF HISTOMT. When the proud King of Chaldea recovered from his madness, his re-asserting reason readily consented to the retrenchment of tresses that had grown long as eagles' plumes, and nails that had stretched out to be like birds' claws. According to Chi- nese fashion, each added inch to the length of his finger-tal- ons, instead of auguring madness, proved rank and growth of dignity. And the Socialism, however it sheltered itself under names of progress and science and freedom, is in the State but like the old monasticism in the Church, essaying to amend the handiwork of God. To get rid of the household is not to make man better, wiser, or happier. It is the Flat-head In- dian's improvement of forehead and skull, and the Chinese lady's betterment of ankle and instep. God's work was more beauteous and safe and useful before such rash intermeddling. Does modern license, in the interests of what it calls liberty, claim the release of the old bonds, and proclaim it a return to the simplicity of nature? Take the South Sea Islands, where similar shamelessness and heartlessness had ruled, and is the result peace, reverence, or strength ? No ; it is for a race what Nebuchadnezzar's descent from the throne to the forest was for the individual — the prince driven to herd with the beasts ; the being with immortality, and conscience, and the glimpse of the Judgment-seat, and the possibilities of heaven, bidden to forego and to forget them all, and grovel where the ox browses and the adder glides, uncombed, unclothed, unwashed, lower than the beasts, because he is by his own act and choice an embruted man, and from the rank of one, and the charge and kinsmanship of angels, he flings himself, far as he can ef- fect it, to herd with the satyr, and be lower than the brute in MONASTIOISM. 63 the degradation that inevitably follows from the height of the elevation from which he has causelessly plunged. We said that the story of these efforts to procure, by new and human modes, an enhancement of the hopes and powers of the Christian Church, was suggestive of another lesson. It is that there is no wisdom in our slighting Christ's hints. It was said by an admiring scholar of later times, with regard to one of the great theologians of the English Established Church, that the very dust and filings of Pearson were gold ; in other words, that his lighter utterances and lesser tractates breathed a power of thought and showed a fulness of scholar- ship that made them eminently worthy of study. Without disputing the justice of this commendation of that distinguish- ed divine, it is a thought in which every Christian believer will unite fully and emphatically, that our blessed Lord is well worth heeding in those expressions of his that seem uttered but by-the-way, and in reference to perils that were compara- tively vague and remote at the time when he first spoke. Be- fore his own removal, and long in advance of the time of the universal diffusion of his Gospel, he bade his followers be- ware of the false Christs, and of those who should come with " great signs and wonders," so plausible that, " were it possi- ble," the elect would be deceived.* And how grave was the intimation that amid such significant alarms dropped the cau- tion, " Wherefore if they shall say unto you. Behold, he is in the desert ; go not forth : behold, he is in the secret cham- bers ; believe it not."f The hermit, who was the precursor of the monk, took his name from the desert. He was, in the * Matt. xxiv. 24. f Ibid. 26. 64 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF EISTOST. old English, as in the old Greek, an " eremite," a man of the desert. Who is there, weary of the world's bewildering tumults and dazing pageants, who has not at times honestly yearned for the poet's refuge — " Oh for a lodge ia some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade ?" Thus may we blur for a time the din, and cloud for a season the glare, that are so treacherous and so irksome. Nor did the great Master himself peremptorily forbid an occasional resort thither. He himself was before sending out his apostles all night in prayer on a mountain ; and at another time he himself led the apostles to a desert place to rest awhile. But to culti- vate habitually and for the lifetime an uninhabited solitude was not his rule for others or his wont for his own ministry. In the wilderness the Spirit had led him to be with beasts and " to be tempted of the devil." The very story of our Exem- plar shows how even he, the sinless, in whom Satan had no foothold, no vested right, yet in lonely hours encountered the sorest and closest besetraent from his and our unseen foes. He was, however, to go up and down preaching everywhere, in village and synagogue, and on hill-side, and in Temple portico, the Gospel of the Kingdom ; and as to his emissaries, when he had achieved his earthly work and laid the basis of the apostolic message, he bade them carry that message with an earth-broad commission into all nations, seeking out the speak- ers of the many tongues heard on Pentecost, into every mart and province where each such tongue was the home ver- nacular. The candle was not for the bushel, as its lair and MONASTICISM. 65 guardian, but for the candlestick, sliooting its beams over all the house. So, as to devotion, he taught the necessity of retirement at frequent seasons from kindred and church associates into tho lonely closet, with its door shut upon the isolated occupant. But the closet was not the perpetual and exclusive abode of the disciple, more than the pantry and kitchen are to be the sole life-thought of the householder. The strength gained by occasional resort to the one place is to spread its healthful ac- tivity over every acre of the outer fields, and amid the chafEer- ings of the market and the throngs of the noisy metropolis. When, then, the herald of the false Christ said, " Behold he — the long-looked-for Christ — behold he is in the secret cham- bers," the teacher dropped the brief ■warning, heavy and hot, brief and stern, as the thunder-bolt of the dooming-day : " Be- lieve it not." Discredit utterly all such false locations of the disciple's duty — all such unwarranted defiances of the Master's anticipatory disclosures. Well had it been for the Christians of the third and all succeeding centuries had they, in the light of our Redeemer's pregnant hints, thought it wise to be incredulous and unbe- lieving as to these endeavors to surprise the Jesus of the old world-wide Gospel into a furtive tenancy of the mysterious and silent inner chambers, where drowsy litany was intoned but by a select few to an immured community, where one entire sex was with jealousy excluded ; and the Church, despairing of the salvation of the nation, was to offer its iteration of orisons for the conservation of the order, and the security of the little band of the faithful. Why, even in the catacombs, where the early Christians, with numbers but lately decimated by the 66 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. beasts of the amphitheatre, met for prayer, their intercessions went up for the conversion of the Caesar who had murdered their brethren — went up as under his very feet, and out of the gloom and the cave rose also the hymn to the Christ himself, the crucified, who was yet to rule the nations now ferociously pagan. As the divine sufferer had on the cross prayed for his murderers, so these his disciples had then and there com- passion and hope and intercession for the praetors who had set the informers on their own track, and whose officers might be at the instant revealed out of the dark galleries to seize these worshippers as fresh victims. The roots of a divine life took hold on the world as their appointed field. The Joseph plant- ed as a fruitful vine had his branches hurt by the archers when those offshoots of the vine ran over the wall — the wall of iso- lation, the wall of estrangement. But, as the prophet father Jacob foretold, if Midianite merchants and Egyptian masters, and truculent, fratricidal brethren all pointed the array of their archery against this fruitful plant, its root was in the well of the divine faithfulness and omnipotence and truthfulness. The assailed, like his archer pursuers, had his defence ; and the bow of the assailed abode in strength, being made strong by the mighty God of Jacob. Publicity was, in one sense, the light and life-blood and the preservative principle of the Church, assailed, maligned, and martyred. To forsake this, and to choose the secret chamber, whether abbot prescribed it as the law of safety and peace for the brother monks, or the mystic preached it as the one condition of a true communion with God, had, as we have said, all one reply, cogent and clear in the hint of the far-seeing and all-wielding Redeemer — "Be- lieve it not." MONASTICISM. 67 Jonah evaded the irksome and thankless mission for pagan Nineveh, and found himself in the maw of the sea-monster. Elijah wished for death, when hunted with the murderous threats of the fierce Jezehel, mad for loss of her false prophets. But the angel, with sad, kind chidings, sends the disheartened prophet to meet in Horeb, Mount of God, as Moses long cen- turies before had found it, the searching inquiry of the God of Moses and Elijah : " What doest thou here, Elijah ?" And so the Christ in the first century had sent on his new Elijahs, of this greater dispensation, to confront a Sanhedrim in Jerusalem and an Emperor in Eome. And be this Emperor Nero " of the Copper-beard," whom Paul faced, or the Domitian, false and heartless brother of Titus, the " Bald-headed Nero," as his subjects nicknamed him, whom John faced some thirty years after Paul's occultation by the earlier Caesar, the Master promised both, for the encounter, a mouth and wisdom which all their adversaries could not gainsay or resist. The Christian student turning wistfully the pages of this blessed volume fails to find on any page of any book in -the record the first intimation that the word of this Christ, or one jot or one tittle of that word, has lost, by lapse of years and growth of human science, its earlier validity and intrinsic reality. He finds no trace of any indication the most remote that the Lord, Creator of the ends of the earth, " fainteth, and is weary." There is no wisdom in slighting the hints, of just the opposite tenor, which this the Messiah has given, that the seclusion of solitary and monastic worshippers is not the plan of the cam- paign, for the subdual of the world to the obedience of the faith, as that plan has been sketched by the great Captain of our Salvation with a fnll foresight on his part of all the needs 68 ERAS A2fD CHABACTEBS OF SISTOBT. of the centuries, and a perfect readiness in his grace to supple- ment, out of his own all-sufficiency, their deficiencies, if lowli- ness confess them, and if faith urge them. " The little flock " is not to cower, bleat, and hide ; but is charged, on the con- trary, to "fear not," for the Christ (is not in the future to vanquish, but has in the past) — has overcome the world. Mo- nasticism proposes to amend God's methods by splitting up the family, to purify the Church and perfect it, and slight Christ's hints by dodging the world which the Emmanuel proclaims himself as " overcoming." AUQUSTINE AND CBRTSOSTOM. 60 IV. AUGUSTINE AND CHRY808T0M. It was once said by Luther, in allusion to the Exodus of Israel at the time when the tribes were crossing the Bed Sea : " The rod of Moses was worth more than a thousand spears of Pharaoh." The truth of that was soon felt in every rank of the Egyptian host, and in every crashing axle and rending wheel of all their many chariots. Behind that simple rod, waved in the prophet's hand, was the potent benediction. The staff upraised bared the ocean-bed, and, waved again, it brought back the returning waters, and strategy and valor went down before it into inevitable defeat and wide-weltering ruin. Speaking of another instrumentality of God's, equally in- significant in man's eyes with this staff of Moses, an instru- mentality used for the later emergencies of God's people, an apostle has said : " It has pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe."* Faith, the channel of the saving ; the cross of redemption, the secret of salvation ; and preaching, the instrument by which men were taught to exercise that faith, and trust that cross, and inherit that sal- vation. But preaching was itself disparaged; rated by the world's sages as foolishness and resisted by the princes of the * 1 Corinthians i. 21. 4 10 MRA8 AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. nations as preposterous treason against Caesar, and as silly blasphemy against Csesar's old hereditary gods. The world's Kedeemer and Judge sent out his apostles to preach everywhere. Their proclamation of the Word, as Christ's heralds, was the rod which they were to wield. Stand- ing, as the Christian pulpit did, in place of revenues and armies and fleets and schools and libraries and tribunals, the world hooted long and loudly at so utterly senseless an instrument, addressing itself to so vast an enterprise as the conversion of the nations. But look at results, and the world's mockery may well be hushed. Let us select two great preachers of this Gospel, born in the fourth and dying in the fifth Christian century — the one the most renowned of the preachers of the Latin, and the other of the Greek branch of Christendom — and let us dwell on their influence, not only as exercised on their contemporaries, but as wielded, after the lapse of more than fourteen centuries, over the Christians of our own times widely scattered over the round globe. Under Constantine the Great the Christian faith had received not only toleration but a public recognition. But the Gospel had already, in too many cases, in order to render its reception easier, become intermingled with errors and usages that were heathen in origin, and whose presence in the nominal Church weakened and perverted it. Many evils were left, for the sake of precipitating an external conformity, not merely uncorrected, but to a certain degree sheltered under new and holy names. A religion thus organized needed sore trials for its defecation and recovery. And soon after the nominal adoption of the new faith by the old Roman Empire, the hostile influences AUGUSTINE AND CHltYSOSTOM. 71 appeared which were commissioned by Divine Providence to punish what would not be corrected. The true date of Chrysostom's birth is yet matter of some uncertainty. Some make it the year 347, others 345, or even 344 A.D. As Constantine the Great died in 337, these vari- ous dates would represent him (Chrysostom) as born seven or eight or, at most, ten years after that Emperor's death. He saw the light of this world in Antioch, then one of the four great cities of the empire, and a metropolis of some two hun- dred thousand inhabitants. Augustine, born in 354, was, by some seven or niuff or ten years, the junior of Chrysostom ; and when his cradle was first rocked in the Numidian city Ta- gasta, on the North African coast, Constantine the Great had been some seventeen years in his grave. These two young worthies, Antiochian and African, were long contemporaries ; but the Greek completed his career when somewhere between sixty and sixty-three years of age, in the year 407 a.d. The greater Latin father lived seventy-six years, and survived his great contemporary of Constantinople, Chrysostom, some twen- ty-three years, dying at Hippo in 430 a.d. During their earlier years Julian the Apostate made his en- deavor to re-instate paganism, but died, thirty-two years old, in 363 A.D., when Chrysostom was (according to these various estimates of his birth-year) a lad of some sixteen to nineteen years of age, and when the young Augustine was but a boy of nine years. In the year before his own death Julian, with malign intent to write a practical refutation and contradiction upon Christ's prediction of the irretrievable overthrow of Je- rusalem, had given the Jews permission and help to rebuild their fane and city. This was in 362, Augustine then a boy 72 ERAS AND CHAMACTEBS OF HISTORY. of some eight years of age, and Chrysostom's age from fifteen to eighteen. The miraculous interruption of the endeavor un- der Julian for the restoration of the Hebrew Temple has been questioned, but Warburton's arguments for its historical truth we hold unanswered and unanswerable. Philosophy had yet among the learned heathen its able and eager advocates. Libanius, the friend of Julian and the in- structor of Chrysostom, was one of these ; as an orator and scholar, of high distinction, and in his adhesion to heathen- ism fixed and zealous. The churches had their heresies and controversies, their schisms and their scandals. The outlying provinces of the great Roman Empire had, many of them, their old idolatries but imperfectly reached by the zeal of Christian missionaries. Paganism in its many forms, — and Ju- daism, fierce amid its losses and exiles, and disappointments, — and Philosophies, some wildly fanciful, and others coarsely materialistic, were yet all, in various portions of the nominal empire, presenting themselves to counteract the faith of the Nazarene. Gibbon has undertaken to write the history of the empire in its decline and fall, with what seems a covert pur- pose to trace that declension and ultimate ruin of the imperial power, to the influence, in part, of Christianity. Others have written the history of the Church as arising amid the dying struggles of the secular government, as that old pagan impe- rialism flung out convulsively its waning strength. Allies, a convert with John Henry Newman from the English Estab- lished to the Koman Catholic Church, has written eloquently, but, as to a Protestant it must seem, scarce with the requisite fulness and thoroughness, the " Formation of Christendom," or the emergence of new Christiain peoples and rules out of AUGUSTINE AND CRRTSOSTOM. 73 the crash and dispersion of the elder pagan unity. A French jurist and scholar, Conite de Champagny, has with great abil- ity portrayed the gradual interpenetration of Eoman law and society by Christian principles. Several French scholars, and some German, have written of the fall of heathenism ; but the ground remains yet not incapable of being afresh made to sus- tain, after the labors of Beugnot, Broglie, and Tzschirner, a new presentation of the way in which the Gospel became par- tially paganized, and heathenism, in turn, partially Christian- ized ; and over the soil thus cumbered and littered, barbarism came^down to avenge God's betrayed cause, and yet, in God's great goodness, to receive new lights and helps from Christ's Gospel ; and how, on the other side, a refined but effete and paralyzed and empoisoned civilization was made to undergo its terrible discipline and chastisement, and yet was permitted to bequeath some shattered and scattered elements of art and knowledge and faith amid its deep woes, and spite of its fear- ful guiltiness. The number of distinguished writers and preachers of the Christian faith in the time of Chrysostom and Augustine was very great. It was an evidence of the intrinsic power of Christ's truth and oracles that when Roman power, and wealth, and art, and philosophy were so far misemployed or faithless in their trust, the book and churches and servants of Christ were yet able, in the face of great social disadvantages, to breed so many men and women of high excellence. It would be wearisome to recount the great names of Christian witnesses who lived when the great Greet preacher was labor- ing at Antioch, his native city, or at Constantinople, the Eastern metropolis — afterward his residence — or who spoke or corre- V4 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF BISTORT. sponded with or leaned upon Augustine in his field of Christian labor in the northern provinces of Africa. The old Carthage, the scene of deadliest hostility to old republican Rome, had become now a possession of the Latin people. In its territory Angustine was born, and though teaching for a time in Italy at Milan, he returned to his native land, and the African city and see of Hippo he made the scene of his literary and religious activities. The one of these great preachers used the Greet tongue, and with a fulness, variety and power, and rhythm of utter- ance, that recalled the memory of the old orators and philoso- phers of pagan times, who had made that tongue the language of culture and fashion for the civilized world. The other employed the Latin tongue, knowing Greek but scantily ; and though a student of Cicero, his own Latin was in many re- spects provincial, but it yet developed in his use of it an energy and richness and flexibility that showed alike the ca- pabilities of the tongue for its new Christian uses, and the powers of the speaker and writer who so made it tributary to Christ. Jerome, another Latin father among his contempora- ries, knew more of the Scriptures critically and of the original tongues of the Old and New Testaments, but in mastery of the Bible theology, and in ability to commend its truths to the learner, and to defend them against the errorist, he was not -the equal and peer of Augustine. Using thus, in the two great languages, Greek and Latin, their ministry, the one in the East, and the other in the western and African portion of the same empire, these great preachers seem never to have met ; but we find Augustine warmly commending the character and merits of his Greek fellow-laborer, John of the Golden Mouth. Born to rank and wealth, his father an officer of military AUGUSTINE AND CHBYSOSTOM. 15 position, but who died, leaving to his young widow the care of their son, Chrysostom was the object of his mother's most faithful and tender solicitude. The heathen teacher to whom, for instruction in oratory and philosophy, he was brought, when told the story of the mother's self-denying assiduities for her son, is said to have exclaimed, in admiration of her worth, pagan as he was: "What women these Christians have !" Though Libanius is not named, it is supposed that he was the utterer of the words, for he was in the higher learning Chrysostom's instructor. Bigoted and keen -eyed pagan as Libanius was, the testimony has new force, if he were its utterer, as to the dignity and excellence of some Christian mothers amid the luxury and riot that so widely pervaded the higher circles of the empire. Intended for the Bar, which had then its open path to afBuence and political power, Chrysostom displayed a pious zeal that brought the eyes of his Christian friends upon him as a fitting candidate for the bishop's place. He evaded their choice, and had Basil, his friend, equally modest and reluctant with himself, substi- tuted. Out of this flight and substitution sprung the treatise " On the Priesthood," which has been the most generally read and reproduced of all his works. But, though breathing high zeal and consecration, it has views of ministerial power and of the virtue of Christian rites that show already a departure from the simplicity of the New Testament. From the mo- nastic seclusion into which Chrysostom long withdrew himself he was ultimately brought out, and his powers and success as a preacher made him at Antioch a name throughout the em- pire. After ten years' labor there he was chosen Archbishop of Constantinople by the Emperor Arcadius, in 398. 16 ^SAS AND CBASACTMBS OF MISTORT. He made himself admired and feared by the populace, and by the court as -well. The Empress Eudocia, displeased at some of his teachings, procured his exile. But the popular indignation, and the occurrence of an earthquake, which was interpreted as Heaven's own token of displeasure, procured his early recall. New umbrage was taken. Ecclesiastical rivals, envious of him, or angered at his faithfulness, wrought for his deposition, and by the orders of the Empress he was banished to a far and savage portion of the empire, his way, notwith- standing his age and infirmities, being so hurried that the journey proved fatal, and ere reaching the final term of the journey he ended his life and work. Such was the memory he had left behind, however, that, twenty-seven years after his death, his remains were brought back to the capital, the peo- ple in boats with torches going out to meet and honor the relics. His name, the Golden Mouth, was not belonging to him, but conferred by popular consent upon the great preach- er for copiousness and power. Surrounded by applause, often in the sanctuary, when his hearers, by clapping of hands, com- mended, as if in a theatre, he publicly reproved and checked the tumult, and inhibited the unseemly practice. Suidas speaks of his fluency as being like the Cataracts of the Nile. Later scholars have called him the Homer of the pulpit, and described hiin as uniting the energy of Demosthenes with the abundant flow and grace of Cicero. As a commentator on Scripture he is thought by many to have, in the soberness of his judgment, and closeness of his pursuit of the thoughts of the inspired writers, greatly transcended Augustine. Bishop Eilicott, a living authority, himself distinguished as a commen- tator on the New Testament, says of Chrysostora, " whom of AUGUSTINE AND CHBTSOSTOM. 11 all commentators I most honor and revere." But Luther, on the other hand, in his gruff fashion, finds Chrysostom to be fall of digressions, and says that, -when himself commenting on the Epistle to the Hebrews, he could find in Chrysostom "nothing to the purpose." His works have been, in their huge extent, often reproduced ; and as a preacher he is held to this day, in fancy and vivacity, the equal of Jeremy Tay- lor, as in judgment and sobriety his superior. As a theolo- gian his walk has seemed to be more on the nature of the Godhead and incarnation ; and the mind of a Christian Greek is seen in him, as cultured by the old Greek and Oriental phi- losophy, and bringing both to the exposition of scriptural statements. Neander held him to be the reproduction of the Apostle John, as the same great historian held Augustine to be more the type of Paul ; and that the man of Antioch and Constantinople was the embodiment of Christian love, like the great and last surviving apostle ; just as to Neander Augustine seemed the champion of truth and sound doctrine, like the man who withstood Peter and perished at the hands of Nero. We fail to see the justice of the parallel ; but all can perceive and confess how Augustine's mind, instead of breathing, like Chrysostom's, the spirit of Greek philosophy in its culture, seemed to show the reminiscences of Eoman law in its com- pactness and energy and symmetry. Augustine had" been early entangled in the snares of the Manichean heresy ; but the prayers of his devout mother, and the influence of God's grace and good providence, effected his entire deliverance. At first a teacher of rhetoric, he was drawn, as against his purposes and wishes, into the ministry. In faithful and unremitting energy he discharged the duties 4* ^8 ERAS AND CSABAGTERS OP BISTORT. of his post. In withstanding Donatism, all may not accord in the applause some of his friends lavish upon him. Their pro- test against some of the corruptions of the Church was well founded ; and to the severe measures of the imperial govern- ment in repressing the Donatists, Augustine, though at first condemning them, gave too ready an adhesion at the last. As a preacher he was popular, and familiar, and untiring. As a commentator he has been very variously estimated. Archdeacon Hare held that, in this regard — as an expositor — Luther surpassed Augustine ; but the great WyclifEe valued Augustine next to the Bible. Bossuet was fond of his works. The elder Calamy, a Non-conformist of Baxter's day, had read all Augustine five times over. Jansenius, after whom the Jan- senist body are called, had read all his voluminous works ten times over, and then compiled his own folio volume, "Augus- tinus," presenting Augustine's views on the doctrine of grace in a form that for the time impressed France not only, but all Europe. Eeiser, a German, compiled another folio, of eqnal size with that of Jansenius, to show how Augustine's teach- ings favored Protestantism. As if to keep up the moral kins- manship between the two great contemporary preachers of Hippo and Constantinople, Dom Massuet, one of the learned Benedictine scholars, compiled a folio volume out of Chrysos- tom, to show how he, equally with Augustine, was a support- er of the doctrine of grace. Great as was Massuet's reputa- tion for erudition, the manuscript never reached the press. It was probably dreaded by the dominant powers in the French Church as unduly aiding Jansenism. The manuscript has probably perished in the storms of the great French Revolu- tion. AUGUSTINE AND GHUrSOSTOM. 1Q Of the vast compass of Augustine's mind it is a striking testimony that St. Beuve, himself unhappily sceptical, but a man of large reading and singular refinement and felicity of judgment, has said, as some great empires could be ruled by no single man, successor of the first framer of the empire, but needed partition in order to be cared for; so it would take a " dismembered Augustine," to use his striking phrase, to make up Bossuet and Fenelon, St. Cyran, the great Jansenist, and Malebranche, the great metaphysician. Cunningham, a recent worthy of the Free Scotch Church, has said of Augustine that to him, more than to any man, in the long interval from the days of the New Testament to the age of the Reformation, was given of God the glory of being the defender of this doctrine of grace. Steere, a clergyman of the English Estab- lished Church, pronounces him to have swayed opinion more than ever did any earthly potentate; and Merivale, another member of the same Establishment and a distinguished histo- rian, remarks upon the high moral influence which Augustine exercised over Puritanism in England, and the Jansenism of France, and the national history of Holland, and Scotland, and Geneva, and our own New England. His piety was ardent, and in this respect we fail to go with the estimate relatively pronounced by the most excellent Ne- ander that Chrysostom best represented John. In the fervor and depth of his religious piety the Bishop of Hippo must, we think, be held more nearly to approximate that high stand- ard. He was frank as Eichard Baxter, and, like that Puritan worthy, Augustine had written his book of retractions, to recall, soften, or cancel what seemed on farther thought ex- ceptionable to himself in his earlier works. He wrote out of 80 EMAS AND CHAJtACTEES OF BISTOHT. a full heart his " Confessions," a book which has produced on the Church an impression greater than any book of its class. Much of it a conference with God, it has earnest honesty and devoutest humility throbbing through all its sentences. It has been compared most unhappily with the diseased and leprous " Confessions " of Eousseau. It might be as well collated with Franklin's calm, cold autobiography, or the minute dis- section of his doubts and fears by the acute and holy Haly- burton, or the glorious " Grace Abounding " of the man who wrote the "Pilgrim's Progress." It shows a human heart, and as poured from a full heart has wakened sympathy and contrition and hope in thousands of readers. When pagans cavilled because Divine Providence did not shield from reverses and chastisements a Roman Empire nom- inally converted to the new faith, and the Vandals were in- vading and ravaging Africa, and besieging his own residence and diocese, Augustine prepared his " City of God," to show how the Most High really cares for the Church, his true city. As a philosophy of history it stands high, many devout Ro- manists say unapproached. We vould not forget or disparage its merits. The book, as Allies has said, was the manual of the great Englishman, King Alfred, and of Charlemagne, and of the devout, brave, and wise King, St. Louis of France. It has instructed philosophers and Christians and statesmen and great rulers. It has done so because, as the Lord Jehovah in- terpreted his own misread providence to the weary and mis- judging Job, and vindicated to his servant the Master's and the Father's better wisdom, so here out of God's oracles men are taught some of the grand elements of the divine govern- ment of the nations. There, in what Augustine so beautifully AUGUSTINE AND CMUrSOSTOM. 81 calls the " severe mercy "—the " severe mercy" of God— it is seen that for communities, as for households and as for the solitary sufferer, " whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth," and the day's work cannot be measured aright until the day's end. When Augustine, full of days and toils and infirmity, was nearing his end, which he reached in his seventy-sixth year, the Vandal was investing the land and city of his habitation. But the errorist and the barbarian came to better by chasten- ing the great imperial people they humbled and plagued ; and in the bosom of the cloud that so begirt his home lurked the future evangelization of Europe, and the colonization by Europe of this our own America, then darkly, hopelessly pa- gan, at that time veiled, from the Old World civilization and travel. More than any man's works those of Augustine contributed to the Keformation. In Britain, Gerniany, France, and Switz- erland he, the old father of African Hippo, had his task to accomplish. His influence is not yet speqt. Bendeman, one of the latest German biographers of Au- gustine, in a work which took its author twenty-five years to accomplish, dwells on the fact that Augustine's death -day (August 28, 430) was the same month and day of the month with the birthday of Goethe (August 28, 1749), some thirteen hundred and nineteen years after, and fancies that there were mental resemblances between the two men. One not a Ger- man may be forgiven if he hesitate to accept the coincidence as an omen. Augustine was Christ's, and with every fibre of his soul in his later years he was consecrated to that master's glory. Blessed they who accept the yoke, and who look up- ward in humble hope to a possession and welcome in the city 82 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. on tigt, whose earthly polity Augustine defended, whose heav- enly rest he is, we doubt not, now sharing. In the monastic system, which both of these great preach- ers, Augustine and Chrysostom, favored, and whose seclusion each of them had employed in the earlier stages of their Christian career, but which both virtually deserted when en- tering on their wider and more public career of usefulness, both yet remained indebted to an earlier institution that had been in reality the first cradle of their Christian graces; we mean the Christian family. The great Greek preacher at An- tioeh and at Constantinople had been virtually formed by the influence of his widowed mother, Anthusia, left at the early age of twenty in charge of her fatherless John, afterward to be known as John of the Golden Mouth, filling the whole Roman Empire with the echo of his fearless warnings and his faithful instructions out of God's Book. And long as Augus- tine's memory is cherished, it is inextricably interwound with the history of his mother, Monica, so long tearfully and al- most hopelessly planning and praying for the conversion to God's truth of her wayward and misguided son. Whatever either of these great men owed to the hermitage or the mon- astery, they owed yet more to the Christian home ; and yet such homes and households much of their heedless utterance represented as less sacred and less safe for Christ's servant than the desert and the monk's cell. And if woman, severed from her rightful place, and denied her Heaven -given influ- ence in the participation of the good work of the difiusion of Christ's Gospel, as in the apostolic age — a Phebe and a Lois and a Eunice and a Persis and a Priscilla and a Lydia had shared it — were tempted to think her memorial passed over AUGUSTINE AND CSBTSOSTOM. 83 in the eyes of her God, when Christian parents and teachers like Augustine and Chrysostona seemed ignoring it, the very graces of the forgetful sons established ultimately, in their conversion and consecration, how great were the legitimate claims of their saintly mothers. Adown the stream of time comes the history of either doctor — him of Hippo and him of Constantinople — an embodied illumination of the might and the right of Christian woman, to aid in training Christ's most honored and most effective servitors. Their prayers, over cradle and in closet, speak out of the pages of their gifted sons. When paganism was yet employing the strength of its ebb- ing life in corrupting the Christian faith which it could no longer bar out, the powers that most effectually curbed this heathenism were not always those heard in the sacred desk or read in the written page, as some great teacher's hand had in- scribed that page. Back of all this was the mightier power of prayer. And, though little noted of the outer world, and overlooked too often even by the Christian Church, yet in the purpose and schemes of the Almighty Worker what human contribution weighed more, or was accorded a larger approval, than this same prayer of the nursery and closet and smaller Christian assembly, where holy women waited upon God ? If the widow's mite told in the treasury as Christ watched it, the widow's vow told in the study, the pastorate, and the mission-field, as Christ watched them. When Mary, the hu- man mother of our Lord, hid in her heart the truths learned concerning him — when an earlier mother, Hannah, who, in the dark days of Eli's dotage, and of the apostasy of Hophni and Phinehas, remembered her infant Samuel in her lonely, remote 84 ESA8 AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. seclusion — was there not for that believing woman a share in the after exploits of her prophet son, as for the other and later in the work of our Lord? And so prayer, the simplest expression of the human dependence, and the most energetic invocation of the Divine Omnipotence — prayer was the root of the true piety that flamed in the pulpit, or that bore its meek, heroic appeal np to the stake, or that even petulantly overlooked its own infant indebtedness amid the austerities of the convent or hermitage. It was so assuredly in the ages long past. It remains so in our own times. Moses, with arras stretched heavenward, and those arms held up by his attendants, Aaron and Hur, was lighting Araalek as really as did the forces, equipped with spear and axe, engaged on the plain below. And the sex last at the cross and first at the tomb have yet their large part, though little remembered and scantily requited, in the prayer that attracts the might of Heaven, and wins the only real and sure triumphs for God's truth. When Joshua's sword was wasting the routed Canaanites, five of their kings had, as separated from their dispersed and disheartened retainers, taken refuge in the cave of Makkedah. A rock was rolled to its mouth, till the flight was successfully pursued as against the body of the combatants. Meanwhile, in the gloom and isolation of the cavern, what were the prospects and resources of the King of Jerusalem and his four brother chieftains of heathen Canaan ? When the sword had wasted without, the time came when the rock was rolled away from the cavern's mouth and the foot of Israel was on the captives' necks, and soon the fatal halter swung the victims into death from the land which their crimes had forfeited, as a possession AUGUSTINE AND CHRYSOSTOM. 85 for themselves or for their people. And is not such the pro- spective outlook of adverse forces that, in lands not Christian, and in the irreligious and infidel protests of nominal Christen- dom, resist and deride the faith of Christ? The sword of truth has hewn down the paganism of former ages, and is not fruitlessly assailing the idolatries and false faiths of this nine- teenth century. Shut in the cave of Matkedah, what is the attitude of those who see the tide of missionary enterprise and missionary success daily broadening its triumphs in the portion of our globe heretofore unevangelized ? Prayer many of these thinkers utterly reject; prison Jehovah in the vise of unalter- able law ; muzzle Christ's Church into mute, prayerless apathy. In their agnosticism they know no God to whom prayer may be addressed, and believe that to offer it were time and hope absurdly and idly employed. But the word of God is on its mission, meanwhile and never- theless. Bibles and missions and prayer-meetings are beyond dispute spreading that word of God, and unless our missionary laborers utterly mistake and misrepresent, the field of ignorance and error is each year growing narrower, and the welcome of the Gospel is cordial and eager in lands long bound in error or swathed in dark hopelessness. Contrast with the prayerless gloom of the cave of Makkedah the lot of the first Christian disciples and preachers, in the days when the book of the Acts was not yet written, but was in the process of being acted. The sword of Herod has smitten James. Herod's soldiers and prisons have charge of Peter, and safe they will keep him. Behind the power and edge of Herod's glistening, thirsting sword is brandished the more tremendous sword of Caesar. Few and poor and discredited, the disciples at Jerusalem are 86 EH-iS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. shut up in the house of Mart's mother. Desolation abroad and darkness within, has not this become a true cave of Mak- kedah, where the remnant, as yet surviving the slaughter in the high places of judicature, are but awaiting their turn to be brought out? No; within this guarded seclusion all is not gloom ; it is not the muttering of despair, but it is the voice of prayer that is heard in the feeble band. Is there a sob in the supplication? It is interrupted because Peter himself knocks at the door to tell that, shackles loosed and gates of his dun- geon flung open, he is free, and God, the Christ, is yet the Al- mighty : let Herod and Herod's master, Csesar, plan their wisest schemes, and do ruthlessly to the worst of their unholy pur- poses, and to the uttermost of their capacities and opportuni- ties. There was no prayer, except perchance to Baal or Mo- loch, in the old cave of Makkedah. There was in the house of Mark's mother, where cowered the disciples, prayer to Je- hovah; and he was then, and means to remain for evermore, the one ruler of all lands. The centuries are notched by the plans of our Christ, as but the dates for the timely develop- ment of his faithfulness. And the Christian men and the Christian women that in this prayer of faith cast their work, their pulpits, their missions, and their martyrdoms on the arm of the Omnipotent, and on the bosom of our Elder Broth- er, king of the nations and king of saints, shall find that the lapse of ages has not bedimraed the clearness of his presaging vision, nor has the raging of the people made the Son of thfe Father to become disinherited of the old engagement, that this Father is to give the uttermost parts of the earth for his, the Christ's, possession. Now, in such prayer, persistent, simple, tireless, earnest, and lowly, is either sex, in the great framework AU9V8TINE AND CERYSOISTOM. 87 of society, is every age, from childhood to hoary eld, is every homestead, invited to do its share ; and so the barriers that old paganism or modern infidelity deemed to be very caves of Makkedah turn out, instead, like the habitation where in the days of the first martyrdoms the first disciples made supplica- tion. The intercession that is in its first utterance burdened with sobs breaks into triumphant exultations at its close, when at the door is heard the announcement that God has responded soon as his people have begun to intercede. A godless, prayer- less despair and a godless, self-reliant pride have each of them but their caverns dark and forlorn of Makkedah, and they are found in need the most wretched of refuges. A Christian, prayerful hope may have its trials and reverses, but when bow- ed over the grave of its dead martyrs, it has the God of those martyrs, the ever-living — and what can it need more? The apostles, in the days when their enterprise loomed in all its vastness, before their daily perception of their own weakness of influence and smallness of number, lingered in this work of supplication, regarding it as one never to be slighted. They cast on others the charge of the poor and of the church reve- nues ; but said they, " We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word." Apostles divinely furnished yet resorted to incessant prayer. That prayer, in which each disciple has his and her respon- sibility, remains to this day the condition of growth for the Church, the indispensable element of her power. Multiform and incessant as were the activities of Augustine, he had in his last days inscribed upon the walls of his chamber, and in full sight from his death-bed, seven of the Psalms of David ; and over these he pondered and interceded. The barba- 88 EBAS AND CHAEACTEUS OF MISTOBT. rian pressing the siege of the city without ; the cares of the churches far abroad coming upon him for advice and conso- lation ; the complaints of the heathen that the empire, its old pagan gods renounced, was no longer safe ; and the in- firmities of his own many years heavy upon him — it was in the words of old prayers and of ancient promises kept thus before him that he kept up hope and heart, and was able to speak of his inextinguishable longing after the vision of the Lord as with dying breath. " Glory be to God for all things ! Amen !" was, in exile and weariness, the dying utterance of his old fellow-combatant, Chrysostom. Prayer, that thus con- tinually approached the Infinite and the Omnipotent One, was thus the reliance and employ of these great champions. And now as to their work. The pulpit is, to some minds, on the verge of its term ; its lease of the nations, as these objectors judge, is nearly expired. The press, say they, re- places, and must supersede, the pulpit; but, as Milton and others have taught, freedom is indispensable to the full range of power for the press. Whence came this freedom of the press, if not from the testimonies and incarcerations and mar- tyrdoms of Christian confessors, themselves in life and death preachers? And at this very hour how many tongues, once destitute of alphabets and books, owe the contributions of the press toward their education and enfranchisement to Christ's preaching messengers 1 But for the Gospel, civilization had, in this nineteenth century, given these poor heathen but bran- dy and muskets, and all the worst vices of a corrupt and ef- fete culture, and left them, thus furnished, to kill themselves o£E the soil. The missionary interposed between this ruin and the savage; and primer and Bible and hymn and free AUGUSTINE AND CHBYS08T0M. 89 laws have to many a far tribe come in the train of Christian evangelization. Thus, and thus only. And take away the evangelical churches of our time, and how soon would Index and Syllabus write that a free press was but a curse and a snare, and shut down the lids of God's own volume as a per- ilous book for the laity. A free press needs the pulpit as the condition for its own existence ; and the God who meant the nations for his own incarnate Son gave the pledge, that the knowledge of the glory of that Son should flood the earth. In what other way, according to his own showing, but by many running to and fro — messengers of his sending and of his owning? Till he recalls that pledge, we must believe that, by the foolishness of preaching, he will subdue all nations to the obedience of the faith. Perchance he knew the destinies of the peoples and the ages, the future of his own handiwork, and the goal of his own path adown the eternities. The rejected Christ, a stone of stumbling evermore to his foes, is yet the corner- stone of God's successful architecture. And what man has rated as the foolishness of preaching has been selected and blessed as the enginery of a Divine Wisdom, to make truth ultimately the one law of the universe. "The truth," said the Christ, " shall make you free." 90 EMAS AND VEABAVTEBS OF HISTORY. V. JBUDDHISU. It is recorded of himself by one of the eminent scholars of our time, John Henry Newman, how much he felt, when it was quoted to him, the force of the saying, " Securus judicat orbis." For those who have forgotten the Latin of their school-boy days this old adage may be rendered in English phrase, " The world when agreed can scarcely judge wrongly." The show of power that lies behind a vast majority when dic- tating an opinion, or when swaying an action, is not to be denied. And yet that this power is also a right — that the might carries the equity and the truth with its strength of numbers and force of influence — may •well be questioned. Our Eevolutionary fathers, a paltry minority as against the rest of the British empire, disputed the right of the over- whelming majority in the mother country to make their Colo- nial laws and to give away from the founders of these new Western plantations their hereditary Saxon liberties. The argument, patiently continued from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, has been thought to settle, that, here at least, the maxim of authority as inhering in mere numbers did not hold good. Still less can it be maintained, that, in matters of religious faith, the thronging multitude of adherents who accept a creed or a deity must be allowed to vote down all dissent, and to render, when the count is completed, the mass who constitute BUDDHISM. 91 the overwhelming majority the supreme arbiters as to what should become the common faith. When, in consequence of the wide sweep of heresy, the old and scriptural views as to the nature of the Godhead and Eedeemer seemed likely to be abandoned, an Athanasius standing "against the world" has been regarded by Christians of later times as occupying a post which was alike that of Christian fidelity and of high moral heroism. Truth — the verity as God gave it and as the Church of God is bound to hold it — is something more than a calcula- tion made by the census -taker, as to the relative population behind a dogma. A scholar, but unhappily somewhat bigoted when the evan- gelical faith was in question, the late Eowland Williams, has called "Buddhism the greatest of all historical difficulties which Christian advocates have to deal with."* The religious system known as Buddhism has, according to the statistic esti- mates ordinarily current, a large preponderance over any other form of faith in the millions of our race who receive it. By a very rough and crude mode of reckoning, indeed, as it must be allowed, the Buddhists are made to include four hundred and seventy or five hundred millions, out of the one thousand two hundred and fifty millions of mankind now tenanting our planet, or more than one-third of the living men of the hour. All forms of Christianity, it is estimated, gather in but little more than one-fourth of tfie world's present occupants. Now, it is to be observed that, in casting the four hundred or more millions of the Chinese empire into the mass of the Buddhist believers, there is involved a very grievous uncertainty * Life and Letters, i. 244. 92 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. and a very questionable assumption. China has, as her profes- sional and political faith, Confucianism — a system of ethics merely for the present life, and mainly that as seen on its po- litical side, and which some would hold atheistic or at best agnostic. Then, besides, Buddhism, the populous empire has Taaoism, which is but a system of idols many. And the recep- tion of these three distinct faiths is found through that dense- ly peopled empire in no distinct layers, and with no marked lines of severance. To attach the whole population of the em- pire to Buddhism is, then, a very wild confusion of epithets ; and a moral spiritual census much more precise than the gov- ernment at home or travellers from abroad have ever begun is needed to ascertain the true contribution of the Flowery Land, as the Chinese call their country, to the old faith of Buddha, Were the strict Buddhists found but a third of the Chinese people, then the total mass of Buddhists in the world would not overpass that of the adherents nominally of the Christian faith. Some have proposed to write a history of religions com- paratively, as the result of progress and the last flowering of civilization. Paul spoke of " the world as by wisdom knowing not God." But to us it sadly seems as if some of these new theorists had actually read it, that the " world by wisdom made God." No Fall, according to them, needed a new message from the skies to recall from its estrangement the race thus burled from loyalty and truth. But man, by culture and phi- losophy has, on this assumption, slowly excogitated a God — a Deity that need not be ashamed of himself ; and who might well be expected to be grateful to the sages and legists, who had mined, refined, minted, and stamped him, and sent him BUDDHISM. 93 forth with their sovereign imprint for general currency and reverence. It is, we would say, in passing, not the Jehovah of our Bible and of our fathers ; his comment on such processes long ago was, " Who hath required this at your hand 1" But for Buddhism it is said that not only does it commend itself by the number of its adherents, but, for the gravity of its moral precepts, and for its kindliness, not merely to man but to the lower animals as well, it may be placed beside the Gos- pel. Let us look to its history and its founder. The believer in the Scriptures of the Old and New Tes- tament watches with profound interest the method in which God seems to have made certain great eras in the history of the nations memorable by great changes. Change by growth has not dispensed, in the divine rule, with change by convul- sions. As in the earthquake of Lisbon, that carried such deso- lation to the shores of Portugal, the shuddering of the earth was felt on our own continent also, on this side of the broad Atlantic and at the root of our Alleghanies, so the moral re- sults of the lesson were profound and far-spread. It caused Voltaire, in the beginning of his sceptical career, to indite a poem questioning and blaspheming Providence ; and it led the English Howard to a voyage of benevolence, interrupted in which, by what seems to us a strange oversight of Divine Provi- dence, he fell into the power of a French privateer, and was carried prisoner to Brest. There he knew the terrors and hor- rors of a prison life, and this it was which gave occasion to his ministry of mercy to the dungeons of Europe and their in- mates — beginning at Bedford jail, but flashing its monition over the civilized world. Perhaps Providence was as little really oblivious of mercy and equity, in permitting an incarcer- 5 94 UMAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. ation of Howard that was to be so blessed in quickening bis Christian sympathies, as it was beforehand in arranging the earthquake, and in allowing silently the mocking comments of the arch-scorner of France upon the way in which God ruled his planet. An era, indeed, not of terrene upheaval, but of political earth- quakes, accompanied the arrival to earth of Buddha. The chronology is so unsettled, and the conflict as to Buddha's birth-time so fierce, that a great Sanscrit scholar, Wilson, rather doubted ■whether Buddha himself were not a myth. But the great body of investigators regard his career as in substance a group of historical facts. Some place the year of Buddha's birth in 598 B.C., which was the year also of Nebuchadnezzar's taking Jerusalem. Buddha's death is placed by most about 543 B.C., or somewhere about the time when Cyrus, the great King of Persia, and the friend of the Jews in their rebuilding of that Temple which Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed, was over- throwing the kingdoms of Media and Lydia. Long before Greece fought the battle of Marathon, or the Tarquins were expelled from Eome, this Indian prince, Gautama Siddhatha or Sakya Mouni, the sage of the Sakyas, the tribe to which he belonged, was born in the family of a prince reigning in a re- gion north of Benares. The name of Buddha, the Enlightened or Wise, was one afterward given to him. Bred in princely ease and luxury, a husband and a father, he is said in one of his rides to have observed an old man, withered, bent, and stag- gering ; in another ride, a sick and blind man ; and in still a third, a corpse carried to the burial — sights all before kept by the luxurious isolation of his training entirely apart from his view. He inquired, and found that age, sickness, and death BUDDHISM. 95 were the lot of all men. Suddenly and secretly he left wife and child, quitting his princess and babe as they lay asleep. Leaving parents and home, he consorted at first with austere Bramins, undergoing all privations and dwelling in the forest, a recluse and self-mortified penitent musing on the wretched- ness and uncertainty of this life. Discontented with Braminic usages and the result of his penances, be sought in seclusion, by a system of his own of solitary discipline and meditation, to school himself and to train others for some correction of the miseries of human life. At Benares, the sacred city, he found his first five disciples. Sought in vain by his royal relations, foregoing ease and home, he became, by self-denial, humility, and kindliness, the centre soon of a crowd of disciples and fel- low-penitents. It was recognized afterward, though not yet known to him- self, that he was the incarnation of a god, but he had in the in- terval to undergo great struggles, not only with the dominant Braminic priesthood opposed to his views of seeking good, but from Mara, the spirit of evil, appearing to him from the sky, and promising him after seven days a universal empire ov«r the four continents, if he would abandon his enterprise. Had one hurtful, malignant, or angry thought been stirred in Gautama's mind, the tempter would have succeeded in crossing Gautama's purpose. But the evil one failed. Cutting off his long hair and sending back his royal ornaments home, the penitent became a homeless and mendicant wanderer. For six years, with his faithful five disciples, he persevered in austeri- ties till worn to a shadow. Dissatisfied with the result, he turned to seek peace in seclusion, study, and self-denial. Un- der a fig-tree, the shoots of which are yet shown (planted in 96 ERAS AND CHAHACTEBS OF MISTORT. Ceylon), Lis old temptations came back ; but after a time his doubts cleared away — he had become Buddha, or Enlightened. The mystery of sorrow, and its causes and cure, had become known to him. Meditation and love to others was the true remedy of this inward and corroding grief. He proposed to turn the wheel of the law, founding a new kingdom of right- eousness, or a universal monarchy of -truth. After finding under the fig-tree this intellectual change, his disciples, now sixty, were summoned and sent out to teach. He and his emissaries travelled, and preached, and begged their bread, amid jeers and insults, but not without winning many converts. In his mendicant peregrinations he reached the homo of his father. There his wife and son became proselytes, as had his brothers before them. When that father dies, at the age of ninety-seven, Gautama returns to oversee the burning of the body, and resumes his work. Ladies of the royal family ask to become female mendicants and recluses, and are allowed. When dying he told his weeping disciples that the parts of men must be dissolved ; and his last words were a charge to ■work out their own salvation with diligence. He had not fully relinquished Braminism, but his system of merit differed from it. Asoka, an Indian prince, reigning about 250 B.C., living some two hundred years after Buddha, did for Buddhism what Constantine did for Christianity — ^he established it. But Braminism rose up against this new and reformed shape of Braminism, and by bitter persecution, continued through sev- eral centuries, extirpated it from Hindostan. Buddhism proper did not recognize a soul or a Creator; did not give up the old Braminic faith of transmigration ; held that a stern fate made BUDDHISM. 97 sorrow follow transgression in these several changes of lot from being to being ; these brought at last Nirvana or Nigban, as the Burman calls it. Of this many hold it impossible to be dis- tinguished from extinction, others think it a passionless, unex- cited state, to be followed by no new births into other beings. , Asolsa, in a great synod held about the time when Eome finished the first Panic War, sent missionaries to proclaim the Buddhist faith in remote lands, east and west, north and south. It had its monastic institutions and schools, and for many centuries maintained its war against Braminism, which it sought to reform. But, somewhere about the year 1100 of our era, it was well-nigh extirpated from Hindostan, its native country, by the fierceness and persecution of Braminism. But in Ceylon, which it early won, it has continued to our own times; and so in Thibet; and it penetrated into Siberia. Into China it is said to have found its way before the end of the first Christian century, not far from the days when Paul was on his way to Eome to witness for Christ before Nero. But in Thibet it had to accept great modifications. The Lamaism of that country recognizes a new Buddha incarnate in their Chief Priest or Grand Lama, who is worshipped. A British Governor-general of India is said to have sent to congratulate this heathen divinity on his " accession," as the English office- holder termed the passage of the new incumbent to the throne of Deity. And while, in its original form and in its native country, Buddhism had made meditation the great secret of self-control, wisdom, and virtue, and had ignored God and prayer, in Thibet they not only pray, but do it by machinery, attaching written petitions to the arms of a wheel. As these revolve the request is supposed to be with each turn presented 98 ERAS AND CHABACTUBS OF BISTORT. anew to the powers above. Mendicancy, and monastic estab- lishments, and the yellow robe distinguishing the Buddhist priests from all others, and strings of beads to mark the num- ber of prayers ofEered, all are strange assimilations to the Ko- man Catholic usages. But, both of Thibet and of China, trav- ellers have brought the like statements, as to the evil results of an errant mendicant life, and of seclusion in a monastery, that have been rife as to similar institutions in Europe. To a leper and to a slave Buddha denied admission into his community. In this respect the vaunted charity of the order did not, like that of the Gospel, reach the outcast and the per- ishing. It claims to be especially tender of animal life, and insists on the merits of large alms-giving. But it failed to stand up ultimately against Braminism, and the polytheism, and cruelty, and foulness of that system — succumbing in India at the close of the unequal struggle. It has been believed by some, even the late Dean Mansel among them, that some of the Buddhist missionaries from the great synod of Asoka reached Egypt two hundred years be- fore our Saviour's birth, and that their influence, won in the land of the Nile, left behind the Therapeutse and the Essen es who are spoken of as hermits and monastic recluses, before the time when our Lord's forerunner, John the Baptist, commenced his mission. As a story of the self-denial of the Buddha, it is said that once, when in the form of a hare, he gave his own body and life for a hungry tigress who had failed to get food for her young ; and that the Hindoo god, who had in disguise set before Buddha the trial, rewarded and commended him by painting the image of the hare on the face of the moon. And BUBDEISM. 99 the rude outline that Anglo-Saxon and German fable calls the Man in the Moon is to the Thibetian the Hare in the Moon, the record to this day of the self-denial with which Buddha was willing to give up his own life, to stay hunger even in what he thought but a beast. Some of these Thibetian legends of the Buddha have caused Buddha himself, it is said by many scholars, to pass into the Boman Calendar under the name of St. Josaphat, whose dis- courses with Barlaam, a favorite mediaeval book, are but the recasting of the devout parables and stories of Thibetians who worship Buddha. Eecurring, then, to the wide diffusion of the histories and legends of Gautama, does the world's wide reception, con- sciously or unconsciously, of some of these narratives give any indication that, for the Saltya Mouni, the Gautama of the old Eajput tribe of India, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, of Solon, and of Cyrus, and of Daniel, there remains such wide diffusion as the story and prophecies of Daniel have now secured with their readers beside the Hudson, and the Mis- sissippi, and the St. Lawrence, and the Amazon, and the Thames, and the Rhine, and the Danube, and the Nile, and the Ganges? The relative force of the influences that Christianity and Buddhism bring into conflict with each other may well be considered in forming our judgment, as to the one which is most likely to win the ultimate and universal sway. As to the religious books of the two, the competitor from the far ancient East moves into the field with an unwieldy baggage of literature to be reproduced and distributed by the teachers, and to be studied by the- patient proselyte. Hardy, an Eng- 100 EBAS AND CHAHACTEBS OP mSTOBY. lisli missionary wlio has labored among the votaries of this faith in the island of Ceylon, and translated more than one of the Buddhist volumes, estimates the scriptures of the Buddh- ists in the Pali languages to be more than eight times the size of the English Bible, and with the commentaries in re- pute they are more than ten times the mass of our Scriptures. Another writer makes the proportion yet greater : the Buddh- ist scriptures are, According to liim, as measured against the English, twelve times the size.* Beale holds that the Sanscrit sacred books of the Buddhists translated into Chinese would make a bulk seven hundred times that of the New Testament. If in God's good providence our Bibles for household and school were at once expanded into a decade or seven decades of volumes, where now we bear about but one, it is seen how the labors of collator and student, and the gifts of charity largely bestowing the guide upon the needy, must be fearfully enhanced as to the draught then made upon the student's time and upon the purSe of the beneficent : and the book, now lying on the invalid's stand or borne in the travelling wallet, must be relegated to library shelves, perchance to pass ultimately to the dust and oblivion of the lumber-room. Moses, and Isaiah, and David, and Paul, and John would, thus overlaid with the huge mass of their accompaniments, be banished from the closet where they cheered and instructed of old the solitary worshipper, and from the pulpit whence in earlier times their tones resounded over the throngs in pew and aisle of the sanct- uary ; to be, instead, unconsulted tenants of the lonely wilder- ness for whom no man inquired. Buddhism, in the collision, * " Sagas from Far East," p. 333. BUDDHISM. 101 perishes by the weight of her surphis incumbrances. She is lost in the forest of her own authorities. But a more grave deficiency of Buddhism is that, while morality is her chief strength, that very morality is dismem- bered and inexcusably defective. The system of duty as taught in both the New Testament and the Old, its precursor, placed in the front rank of obligations not only what Buddh- ism recognized, man's obligations to his fellow -mortal, but those also, earlier and vaster and more searching, which bind the man to his Maker, his Kansomer, and his Judge. But in the case of the Eastern rival, it must be said that the Moses of this Oriental Buddhistic dispensation, in descending to in- struct his charge, has dropped the first of the two tables of the law by the way, and presents himself to his neophytes with but the second and inferior part of the code. Man lives with his neighbor and in some sense for his neighbor; but not mainly even, much less exclusively, for the sake of his brother-mortal and brother-sinner. Destitute of a God and a heaven, he will soon be reft from his earthly brother's side ; and over whose cradle or whose grave, as he draws his dying breath, in his farewell, he can then do no more, going the way of all the earth, unreturning and unremembering. And here comes in the grand deficiency of this and each other human religion as a system of morality. Grant that the code of ethics were perfect as a scheme and system, they would yet, as meeting man in his existing necessities and imperfec- tions, be deficient, long as they failed to present the adequate motives and the supernal powers, that should spur him from his apathy and his guiltiness to seek recovery from his old wrong-doings, and to desire effectually the accomplishment of 102 ERAS AND CHABAGTEBS OF EISTOBT. each, duly revealed to him. No moral system can bless man that lacks sanctions and motives and remedial energies. The best of portraitures, while awakening cold, transitory admira- tion, would lack eflBciency if it did not inspire and stimulate to the desire after like virtue and holiness. The morals of earth and its legislators are but cut flowers, however rich their bloom and fragrance. Their stem is rootless, and their per- fume is seedless. They have no term of perpetuity, and no power of producing, out of the blight of autumn, the renewed buds of spring. The religion of the Nazarene, and the love of the incarnate and crucified Redeemer, has its roots and its indestructible seeds. It lends new and higher motives to the heart, else condemned and despairing. Its bidding is, that the self-condemned mourner see and welcome a full, present, and enduring pardon in the Atonement ; and it undertakes to effect a new creation in the regenerate soul, by the influence of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. Its flowers are not cut specimens that show for a night in the vase, and on the mantel, and as the garland. They are flowers of the garden, set in the soil and under the sunbeam and the shower of heaven, and even under the ripening frosts of the winter they retain their vital- ity, and re-assert their power in the vernal seasons of after years. Give to man, as Christ's Gospel gives him, a divine pardon and a divine pattern, genuine repentance and inner renewal — a God in the Incarnation come near to sympathize, and in the Judgment coming down again to inquire and to adjudicate and to recompense — and the morals of the mortal thus brought home to God have a force and freshness, an in- destructibility which no other system can hope to rival. Other systems show models. This melts the soul in 'gratitude, and BUDDHISM. 103 then casts it into the mould of sound doctrine and divine assimilation. And it is, in the study of the past history of Buddhism, its code, its missions, and its various adaptations to the usages and errors of the idolatries which it has partially cultivated, an evident and glaring want, that it has not adequately met the needs of the individual soul. Growing out of a system of transmigration in the older and more systematic Braminisra, which taught men to expect migrations to mineral, plant, bird, beast, reptile, man, and minor deity to the number of 8,400,000,* hundreds of times as many as the years during which our planet has stood, it destroys virtually man's person- ality, the first element of his greatness, and of his responsibil- ity, and of his happiness, and of his worth. This present life is to him the re-appearance of one and of many that went before, and which he has utterly forgotten. It is to be re- placed by a new life, which will leave no lingering remem- brance of this present one. With merit, and with the good- will of a blind fate (to which he has no right to pray, however), he may become a god ; and if meditating profoundly and pas- sionately, he may pass into the Nirvana or Nigban of uncon- scious, unintelligent apathy : Extinction, as most read it ; a blessedness without thought, feeling, or act, or word, as others read it. Where is the person — the I — through all these vari- ous flittings and filterings that range from world to world, and from heaven to heaven, and from hell to hell ? — for the Indian Buddhist has his hells and heavens in large variety, though not eternal. • Monier Williams, p. 51. 104 :eras and characters of history. What is there in all this, — if you make it quiet as sleep, and lasting as eternity, and voiceless as the grave, — that shall once enter into comparison with those scenes of eternal gladness and holy repose which the followers of Christ expect in the presence of their blessed Kedeeraer ? What, in Nirvana, can in majesty or in attractiveness match the palms and anthems and golden crowns and holy fellowship of the New Jerusalem ? "My flesh crieth out for the living God," said the Psalmist. It is the desire, God-bred, that shall also by the grace of the Enkindler be God-filled. Nature and conscience, and Provi- dence and history, as well as Eevelation, pant with an inextin- guishable, inexpressible earnestness after the society, the favor, the fatherly smile, the fraternal welcome, the saintly consola- tion of the Jehovah, Father in his benignity, Brother in his interposition, and the Comforter in his sovereign and timely refreshings. And from man's nature, if we pass to the character of man's Maker, as he has cast aside, in the oracles of his own inditing, the veil that our weakness and our sin had flung over his countenance, if we carry up the argument from the nature of man to the nature of God, we must draw the inference, as we judge in all scientific rigor, that the Creator has not despised his own handiwork; and will from the moral necessities of his own relation to us carry forward the indestructible cravings of the soul he fashioned, the partial intimations of his Providence, and the explicit pledges of his Eevelation, to an issue solemn, perfect, and final. Not only has the Bible bidden us to pray, but man's needs and woes, and hopes and fears have alike ex- torted prayer. Buddhism in its pure and original form ignored prayer. It taught only meditation. Concentrated in BVDDSISM. 105 himself, his eyes diverted inwardly, from nature and society, from all that could stir and provote and amuse, to passionless, aimless musing, it froze prayer out of the soul ; if a heing denied true personality and looking to virtual extinction as his highest goal could be called, in any right sense, a soul. Peti- tion thus nullified and banned, the life of the soul would go out as a mouse perishes breathless in an exhausted receiver. A Creator ignored — for pure Buddhism did not recognize creation — and no being left to hear prayer, and man with no right or capacity for prayer, the Buddhist doctrine laid, as a system of morals, its swaddling bands as a stifler over the lips of infant and helpless humanity. Over the cradle bent no Celestial nurse, and Gautama choked the cry of the helpless. A contemporary poet describes man's forlornness — "With no language but a cry." The ancient and vaunted system of the East binds over the nursling with the stern monition, man is born "With no right e'en to a cry." Prayerless, personless, hopeless, let him migrate. But who knows whither his migration floats him ? Now, judging the past progress of the race as affording some omens for its prospects in the future, we ask, is it likely that God will abandon the nations that have had a Christian literature, a Christian legislation, a Christian history. Chris- tian libraries and schools and missions, to such a forlorn issue as the last outgate? Is it, as the young princely Gautama saw it, in the foul, sad experience of his drives — misery in age, in blindness, in sickness, and in death — a bad state, to be lessened and evaded, far as may be, with asceticism and 106 HBAS AND CHARAGTEBS OF HISTORY. monastic seclusion, and then, at the end, as the final goal and last dim solace, Nirvana? No. The Christ who has made so many repeated indications of his interest in the race in the centuries past — who has fulfilled the pledges of the incarna- tion, and the crucifixion, and the resurrection, of the descend- ing Spirit in Pentecost, of the overthrow of impenitent Juda- ism, of the wars and ruins of old Tyre and Babylon, of the decay of the pagan Roman Empire — will he grow weary as to the pledges that yet await their accomplishment? History has run too faithfully into the grooves of ancient prophecy, to make such unbelieving suppositions at all a probability. The experience, again, not of the races and masses, not of famous cities and venerable governments, attests the Christ as still vig- ilant and untiring in his activities. The experience of each individual disciple, however ignorant, obscure, and aflflicted, who has known Christ in his nearness to the solitary worship- per, is to him a verification of the record. His personality — a personality so glorious in its rights, but which the transmi- grations and Nirvana of Buddhism deny and would annihilate — this personality, in its illumination and renovation, is a viv- id and near and home-felt endorsement upon the rolls of prophecy. For centuries travellers have attested, by their names scrawled or carved, that they had seen with their own eyes the Pyramids, so old, solemn, and silent. Back to West- ern forests and Saxon-speaking hearth-circles they carried the personal memory of this personal sight. And the regenerate soul has seen, has known the risen Christ. If he be no reali- ty, your constitutions and exchanges and news -boards and libraries are no realities. The conscience, calmed by Christ's blood, the heart renewed by his Spirit's grace, are his war- BUDDHISM. 107 ranty that every prediction, in its own fit Lour, shall meet its punctual and exact accomplishment. The earth waits her Lord, and each year and hour hurries down his sure ar- rival. To thinkers and scholars and writers of the powers shown by Schopenhauer we would accord all due honor. But cer- tainly they are not entitled, in the endeavor to rehabilitate the Buddhism and the Nirvana of the ancient East, to sever summarily the connection, which the old Buddhist teacher made between transmigration and Nirvana. No man — ting, sage, or peasant — had a right to expect Nirvana at the hour of quitting earth, except at the end of numberless transmigra- tions, and as the culminant final reward of a god-like career of Buddha-like perfection. It came, perhaps, after ages had elapsed, but only to the excellent and passionless, freed from sins and stains. To drop the migrations, and precipitate, at the end of your single life, the full Nirvana, is to travesty and wrong the old Buddhism of India and China. The crown is, according to the Eastern faith, for the meek and patient suf- ferance, perchance, after traversing the twenty-one purgatorial but torturing hells of Hindooism, or the one hundred and thirty -six hells of Buddhism,* and knowing personally the eight million and four hundred thousand migrations, some of them to the fly, and some to the viper, and some to the dog, and some to the shark. Is this the refuge — a labyrinth with- myriads of windings through myriads of ages — to which men, in shunning the Man of Sorrows, and King of Glory, and Elder Brother born for our adversity, shall betake themselves, * Monier Williams, pp. 61, 66, IS. 108 ERAS AND CEAUACTEBS OF HISTORY. if the Buddhist or Brainin alternative prescribed them, as something beyond the Gospel and better than Paradise! But there remains beyond this the sad, stern fact that Buddhism has not contented the masses. They have supple- mented and compounded it. They have found magic, and the worship of demons, and sacrifices, as by the Karens to the spirits called "Nats," necessary to solace their daily woes. True Buddhism denied prayer, but the Buddhism of Thibet has its prayers written on strips of paper and attached to little or gigantic mills, and each turn of the wheel is a repetition of the prayer and a bid for the favor of the powers above. A mis- sionary in China recently, Edkins, found the prayer-mill sus- pended from the roof of a Buddhist building, so that it might turn with the vapor from the spout of the teapot that was to sate the traveller's thirst. Other fanes have their one hundred and thirty prayer -mills, and each turns a new supplication. Grotesque and even brutish as are these revolving supplica- tions, turned some by hand, and some by water, and some by the roving wind, they cry out against the men of Christian nurseries and schools, who refuse a prayer-hearing Jehovah and a mediator Christ who ever liveth to intercede for his believing suppliants. The German thinker Schopenhauer, who has been so strange- ly and strongly fascinated by the Nirvana of Buddhism as to sever it from its original connection and precedent prepara- tions, has also seemed to know sympathy in the shock with which Buddha or Gautama discovered, in sickness, blindness, age, and death, the miseries of our earthly life ; and, general- izing as the Eastern recluse never did, he makes — this German teacher — the great thread running through all our existence to BUDDHISM. 109 be the principle that we turn from wretched to more wretched, from bad to worse, in a train of growing and culminant influ- ences that stretch in just the opposite course from the opti- mism which Leibnitz painted and which Voltaire mocked ; and that pessimism — the worst intensified and darkened and poi- soned into the very worst, or worstest, were the double su- perlative allowed — is the goal of our being. When Latimer, old but glad, cheered Kidley at the stake with the hope of a candle lighting all England, was not torture, was not shame, was not death glorified by Christ's grace into a boon, a joy, a benediction 3 The Christian has a home and a father's house, and a brother waiting with his welcome. The government of that sovereign father is not pessimism. The wrath of man shall praise him, reluctantly but assuredly. 110 ERAS AND CHASACTERS OP MISTORT. VI. WYCLIFFE, SA VONAROLA, AND HUSS. In the vast tLrong who watched as the three friends of Dan- iel were flung into the burning fiery furnace, bound in their coats and hose and so hustled into the flames, because they re- fused to bow down to the image of the King set up in the plain of Dura, we may imagine was more than one Hebrew youth, by ties of kindred or friendship especially attached to some one of the victims, and who gazed appalled as the flame darted forth from the furnace mouth and his friend fell in, while the very soldiers charged with the hurling of the victims into the flames were blasted into sudden death by the fiery surge. It was the glance of loving despair which such youthful Hebrew would send after his disappearing friend, never to be seen again. Dut when the cry came, and the very monarch re-echoed it, that the three walked unharmed, their bonds loosed, and a form like the Son of God as the fourth stood at their side, in the white core of the burning ; with what changed feelings would the watcher recognize his friend when he had emerged, in the unsinged garments which had upon them not even the smell of fire ! The face of his recov- ered martyr would, in his eyes, we may well believe, oft, as met again in some Hebrew home or scene of quiet worship, recall evermore the thought of that form of awe and power which WTCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. HI had stood beside the sufEerer ; and which had so impressively taught Nebuchadnezzar that there was, unseen but omnipresent, a sovereign mightier than himself, before whom the elements were loyally submissive. And if that young Hebrew survived to old age, and then accompanied the restored captives from Babylon to Jerusalem, we may well conceive that the last look of the aged Hebrew returning from his long exile, as he left the land and capital of the stranger for the land of his fathers, would rest, not on the majestic palaces and towers of Babylon, but on that crumbled furnace — perhaps a very paltry structure — where the God of Israel had so wondrously attested his power, and enabled his servants to do — what Nebuchadnezzar's bold- est captains and "chief estates"* never ventured to attempt — enabled them " to change the word of a king." Had these Hebrew confessors died unrescued, their fidelity would have, though less wondrous in its miraculous attestation, yet not been less noteworthy, when it made conscience tri- umph over interest, and caused truth to assert its rights against an incensed and uncontrollable despotism. The Christian Churches have their many worthies who have thus bravely borne and overcome, and who are worthy of perpetual and grateful remembrance. We group together three from the his- tory of Europe, whose lot was cast at the going out of the Middle Ages, and who ventured to change the word of one claiming to wield a mightier power than any earthly king — be he Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, or Nero — and who went to the burning because they so ventured. We place them not in the strict order of chronology, for Savonarola was later in time * Mark, vi. 21. 112 EUAS AND CEABAVTEBS OF HISTOMT. than Huss ; but there were peculiar influences at work, that might have been expected to counterwork the sacrifice of Huss, that did not exist in the case of the others, and these peculiar in- fluences may better be discussed by considering them apart from the case of the other two sufferers of England and of Italy; and such separate consideration will be more intelligible if re- served to the close. Such arrangement will have the merit of comprehensiveness also, as showing how nations of Europe, dwelling far apart, and using distinct dialects, mutually unin- telligible, but nations united in one great ecclesiastical polity and assembled in its oecumenical councils, acknowledged, each apart and upon its own soil, the need of reform. But when for such reform these sufferers personally contended they were struck down, and the attempt was made to consign them to perpetual execration and infamy. We know that theirs are — like many other eminent names in the history of the Churches and of the nations — names that are battle-fields around which contending schools yet wage their eager warfare. It is so, in British history, with a Becket, a Mary Queen of Scots, a Strafford, a Cromwell, and a William of Orange. The exist- ence of the dissonance is no cause for silence, but rather argument for honest and thorough discussion. Influence, po- tent and undeniable, went out with each name, and haunts each several grave. The three worthies of Lutterworth, Florence, and Prague applied heroically their best powers to right the wrong as antichrist had introduced it, and to assert and es- tablish the truth as Christ had delivered it. The vastness of the odds against which they contended, and their resolute en- durance amid peril and obloquy, and death even, commend their memory to the regard and gratitude of the race. That WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 113 they died is no more proof that they failed than Nelson's fall at Trafalgar proved the defeat of England's policy, or left any way weakened the lesson of his signal hoisted for that battle, that England expected every man to do his duty. A greater Commander has, by the rugged and blood-clotted engine of the cross, ransomed the world ; and has left it in charge that only those hating their own lives for his, the Christ's, sake are truly worthy of sharing his kingdom and entering his heavenly rest. A heathen poet could talk rather unfeelingly of the pleasure of watching a storm at sea from some safe height of land, and beholding the wreck wrought by the tempest, which for our- selves we were not called to encounter. But Christian sympa- thy binds us who love the truth to encounter our share of reproach, in acknowledging that sympathy, even at this remote date and region, with the men who have borne the brunt of the common conflict, and commended the common faith in darker times and in far lands across the sea. More than a century separated the birthdays of WyclifEe, the Englishman, and Savonarola, the Italian. Wycliffe was born in 1324, A.D., and Savonarola in 1462, a.d., thus parted by an in- terval of one hundred and twenty-eight years. The English- man after a long career died in 1384, and the Italian in 1498, the Briton sixty at least, the Florentine worthy but forty-six, and the two dying thus one hundred and fourteen years apart. But, after sleeping quietly in the chancel of his parish church forty-four years, Wycliffe's corpse was dug up by orders from the Pontiff for the funeral pyre in 1428. His lifeless remains burnt thus but some seventy years before Savonarola's living frame was stifled and consumed at Florence. Huss had a somewhat briefer career than even Savonarola. Born in 1373, 114 ERAS AND CHABAGTEBS OF HISTORY. A.D., lie died at the state in 1418, when but forty-five. He, Huss, was but a lad of eleven when WyclifEe died; and he sealed his faith with his blood thirty-four years before Savona- rola was born, and ten years before the vengeance of Eome succeeded in disturbing WyclifEe's tomb and incinerating his corpse. The fourteenth century had but begun as Wycliffe commenced his mortal career ; the fifteenth was well-nigh com- pleted when the worthy of Florence ended his course. The career of Huss clasped together the closing decades of the one century and the opening decades of the next. WyclifEe, as well as being the earliest, was also by far, of the three, the most infiuential on the course of opinion, not only in his native Britain, but over the whole continent of Europe. Born in Yorkshire, not far from the town of Eichmond, in the family residence of the WyclifEes, a mansion that has been since, down to our own day, a home for Roman Catholics, he studied in Oxford, and became early distinguished as a scholar, and especially as a logician. In a time when it was the fashion to designate great instructors and thinters by some one epithet that was thought to present their marking trait, he was known as the Gospel Doctor, or the Evangelical Doctor, from his mas- tery of Scripture no less than of the general knowledge of the time — even his enemies acknowledging him as an "incompar- able schoolman," in their own phrase, and all the contempo- rary enmity failing even to impeach his moral character. After the victories of Cr6cy and Poitiers had made the English arms famous, not only in France but throughout Europe, much of the love of the natives clung to the Black Prince, son of Ed- ward ni., conqueror in the latter field. The son of this popu- lar favorite, the Black Prince, was John, Duke of Lancaster, W7CLIFFJS, SAVONASOLA, AND SUSS. 115 and he became the patron of Wycliffe in his collisions with opponents. WycliflEe early and earnestly denounced the abuses of the Mendicant orders and the usurpations of the Eomish Church. But he was in such esteem for ability and principle, that he was employed as an ambassador abroad as well as the head of a college at home. As a teacher he awakened great enthusiasm in his pupils, and seems early and fearlessly to have directed them to the study of the Scriptures. Cited be- fore the bishops, he was shielded by the power of the duke, his royal patron ; but when the House of Lancaster, turning, after the death of Edward III. and the accession of the young and feeble Kichard II., into enterprises whose aim was to ef- fect the deposition of Kichard, and to secure for their own heir the throne, made terms with the bishops and higher clergy for the repressal of all heresy by violent methods and by the new punishment of burning, Wycliffe, left thus shorn of that former defence, and deprived of his university post, did not abandon hope or work because courts frowned and martyrdom impended. He retired to his parish of Lutter- worth, in Leicestershire, a humble town of but some few thou- sand inhabitants, no great distance from that Rugby which Arnold's name has made so famous in our own times. Here he labored assiduously in the spirit of Chaucer's good parson, and sent abroad his "poor priests," as he called them, men who, plainly clad in long russet gowns, should traverse the country in the spirit, in far later times, of the fellow-laborers of Whitefield and the Wesleys. He denounced the high claims of power for bishops, and seems to have regarded as scriptural and primitive only presbyters and deacons. A cutting fear- lessly down to first principles, and to the foundations of prim- 116 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. itive Christianity, seems to have been a marked peculiarity of his mind. Using the language of the people, his expressions were perhaps often misunderstood, and certainly at times -wil- fully perverted. It was a favorite misrepresentation, current then and in later times, against him that he said " God should serve the Devil," a principle which, blasphemous as it is, con- tradicts the whole tenor of his numerous writings. It was probably the new and alien sense foisted on some pithy sar- casm, when he would represent his opponents, the bigoted, avaricious, and corrupt priesthood and prelacy, as mating the interests of the God of truth to subserve and wait upon their own selfish interests, as what he would regard as really the service on their part of the evil one. When men would per- suade or, menace him into suppressal of the truth, because it impinged on their carnal and corrupt interests, he might with his characteristic shrewdness (and in this trait Yorkshiremen were never held deficient) ask them if they did not mean to have Jehovah don the livery and wait upon the pleasure of Beelzebub? And what he thus ironically condensed they would report him as commending, and quote his sarcasm on their practice as the law of his own. But his grand labor was the rendering of the Bible into the language of the people, founded on the Latin Vulgate and intelligible to tiller and artisan. As printing was not then known, the manuscript of the Scriptures was a bulky and costly volume. Many cop- ies of his version were destroyed by the persecutors. In- deed, there were long periods when the ownership and pe- rusal of the volume would bring a man to the prison and the stake. But, spite of costliness and peril, so many cop- ies of the volume have continued, written at that time, but WYGLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND MUSS. 117 preserved to our days, that it attests the great influence which the Bible thus unfettered won on the national heart. He was once lying in Oxford sick, after having been cited by his op- posers to attend a synod at Lambeth. In his illness four doc- tors and friars were sent by the antagonist party to wait on the infirm and, as it seemed, the dying man, hoping in his ill- ness to extort a recantation before his death. Beckoning to his servants to raise him in the bed, he fixed intently his eyes on the visitors, and said, in the language of one of David's psalms, " I shall not die, but live" — but, with the keen incisive- ness of his nature, he varied the psalmist's words, and where the verse stands, " I shall not die, but live to declare the works of the Lord," he, to the confusion of his cowled visitants, ex- claimed, " Not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the friars." That be did not contemplate either retractation or speedy departure was but too evident to his guests, who took, confused, their own departure, little comforted with the expla- nation that in Wycliffe's eyes "to declare the works of the Lord," whom he faithfully and fearlessly served, would re- quire his denouncing also the evil and noisome practices of their Mendicant orders. He did survive, and to resume his work. In the later years he published his "Wycket," or gate, directed against the popular doctrine of transubstantiation, and directing the inquirers simply to Christ's grace and cross rath- er than to outer and corporeal emblems. The Providence, which works so strangely by methods most opposed to human judgment, made the last six years of the great man's life coincident with the breaking out of the great Schism of the West, as it is called, and which endured for forty years ; the Roman Church being divided by the claims of two 6 118 ERAS AND CHARACTEMS OF BISTORT. adverse popes, Urban VI. at Eome and Clement VII. at Avig- non. France and some other nations clung to the Pope on their own soil ; England, to the Urban in the Italian capital. Against the ill -won and ill-used power of the papal see WycliflEe hesitated not to protest, assailing it as antichrist, and arguing that if John the Baptist were not worthy to loose the latchets of the Saviour's shoes, the antichrist was still less worthy to impede the freedom this Saviour had bought for his people.* Of course, the papal delegates and the Pope's friends were full of fretting and plotting against him. But the Roman court found it not convenient to dispense, in that day of divided allegiance, with support among the English peo- ple ; and Wycliffe and his Bible had too much hold on the national heart to make it safe for papal sympathizers or agents to seize and sacrifice him. In Rome, Urban VI., embittered by opposition and cabal, having seized six of his own cardinals, members of his own party, on the accusation of having plotted against him, is said to have watched the process of their sub- jection to torture on this charge while he devoutly read his missal. And then, sewing up in sacks five of them as guilty, he ordered their being flung into the sea. If in that day of slow intelligence such tidings reached Britain and the remote parish of Lutterworth, it is little likely that the effect would be to convince the good old reformer that Christ's Church de- pended on pontiffs, or that the pontiff so avouching his mis- sion and his temper could not be antichrist. He died, being struck with palsy in his Sunday services, and was buried among his flock. The Queen of England, a Bohemian princess, long 'V — — ' —' ' ' ♦ "Vaughan," 3d ed.,p.393. W7CLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 119 from her virtues and piety known among the people as " the good Queen," was fond of reading the English Bible ; and, by means of members of her household or visitants from her na- tive land, the works of Wycliffe reached Bohemia, and were there eagerly read, copied, and circulated. When the Council of Constance met, a numerous and au- gust body, it professed to examine the various writings of this eminent thinker, and to find in them some savor of he- retical errors. It condemned these writings, as found in Bo- hemia, to be burnt; and two hundred volumes, some quite costly in their style of transcription and binding, went to the flames. It gave farther command that the remains of Wyc- liffe, which had been long quietly mouldering, should be dug up, as not fit to associate, even in death, with Christian men, and be consumed by fire. The English Bishop of Lincoln, a see that long before had been graced by Grosseteste, a holy and faithful teacher, not unlike, in many of his views, to WyclifEe, now proceeded to execute the grim charge. Placed in the chancel of his church, the reformer's corpse was easily discovered, and was burnt; and then the remains of the holocaust were flung to the little stream, the Swift, running through the parish. That, as honest Thomas Fuller, the Church historian, pithily said long after, carried them to the Avon, and the Avon to the sea — a type not unfit of the wide influence that the memory and doctrines of the good man were to attain and spread abroad, let synods and pontiffs say what they might. It was in 1428, or forty -four years after his death, that Kome, failing to succeed in her efforts to apprehend and burn the living man, did what seemed next worthy to stand for the 120 ERAS AND CSABACTMSS OF SISTORY. living victim, by sating its enmity and writing its curse on his coffin and bones. Now many of the Eitualists and High -churchmen of our own time are slow to acknowledge the full services of Wyc- liffe to truth. They do not sympathize with his view of the Lord's Supper, or of the episcopal order, or of the authority of men and their traditions. The Lollards, who came after him, were, many of them, true Christians. Lord Cobham, or Sir John Oldcastle, was himself a witness to the death. Ac- cused, we think unjustly, of political plots, he was seized and condemned to be burnt alive; and, to make his end more painful, his body was suspended lengthwise, face downward, over the flames, to be slowly stifled and consumed. It is a blot on Shakspeare's memory that one of his plays misrepre- sents and satirizes this confessor of Christ — a hero, as even his enemies allowed. But the popular indignation seems to have compelled Shakspeare to the change of substituting Sir John Falstaff, as he now stands, for this old Lollard or Wyc- liffian sufEerer. Suppressed, as for several reigns Lollardism was, it germinated afresh in the Reformation. Jerome or Girolamo Savonarola would have earnestly dis- claimed all fraternization probably with the English errorist of a former century, Wyclifie. But this Dominican father was a most earnest and devout Christian, and earnestly exposed and denounced some of the prevalent corruptions of his time and land. Of the Bible he seems to have been an earnest student, there remaining to this time no less than four copies of the Bible in various libraries of Florence, each with manu- script comments from his hand. He was patriot as well as Christian teacher, and resisted the covert but effectual usurpa- WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 121 tions of the Medicean family on the old republican institutions of Florence. Originally not popular as a preacher, Savonarola cultivated voice and style and methods of speaking until he became the most popular of the preachers of his city, crowds hanging on his lips and clinging to his utterances. In his ear- nest enthusiasm he relied on explications of prophecy, and is said to have claimed, from study of the Scriptures and of cur- rent and recent history, to have the power of forecasting the course of national events. Looking to France and her interven- tion for the recovery of Florentine freedom, and rejoicing in the temporary overthrow and banishment of the Medicis, he in- culcated a wide reform of manners. His friends provided for the public burning of books and pictures and works of art that he thought inconsistent with Christian purity. But he never took the high ground of doctrinal reformation that WyclifEe and that Huss, his disciple, had assumed. But Florence reverenced his sincerity and saintliness. The with- drawal of the French allies, who came with little intent to be the enfranchisers he had expected them to prove, and the fickle- ness of the populace, and the enmity of the rival order of the Franciscans, all gathered darkly around him. He offered by one of his monks to undergo the ordeal of fire, each partisan passing through a large conflagration. But when his Domini- can was to take the host, a consecrated wafer, with him, this was denounced as a profanation, and the ordeal was not held. The evil Pontiff, Alexander VL, one of the worst of many bad wearers of the tiara, endeavored to procure his deportation to Rome, to sacrifice Savonarola there. This he refused, and claimed the right to appeal from the Pontiff. Measures were contrived by emissaries from Rome and his foes at home to 122 ERAS AND CSABACTESS OF HISTOBT. indict and convict him as a heretic. They removed his sacer- dotal robes and badges, as emblem of his degradation. The bishop officiating declared that he thus removed him from the Church militant and also from the Church triumphant. Savo- narola replied, " From the Church militant you may, but to sever me from the Church triumphant is beyond your power." Two of his order, faithful to the last to their loved and saintly guide, went to the stake with him. He gave them advice, that, like the Master Christ, who went as a lamb dumbly into the hands of his murderers, they should endure in silence. And he and they so passed. The Unitarian, Boscoe, a man ■who, amid the cares of a large mercantile business at Liverpool, cultivated letters most assiduously and successfully, and of whose subsequent reverses and the dispersion of his magnifi- cent library our own Washinton Irving has written with his characteristic tenderness and gracefulness, was a most intense admirer of the Medici family. Of Lorenzo and of Leo, the Pontiff, he has written biographies which are current and in- fluential. He is severe and by no means, as we think, just in his estimate of Savonarola. But McCrie, the learned and exact historian, who recovered for John Knox the national and Eu- ropean fame of which malignity and oblivion seemed ready to strip him, has, in his valuable -work on the suppression of the Eeformation in Italy, taken a much higher and, we think, far more equitable measure of the powers and worth of the Italian confessor. In matters of theology and ecclesiastical lore his judgment far preponderates in weight over that of Eoscoe. Nicholas Lenau, the German poet, has written a beautiful work on the character and story of Savonarola; and the English lady, Marion Evans, or Mrs. Lewes, who under the name of WTCLIFFE, SAVONAMOLA, AND BUSS. 123 "George Eliot," has written herself for Britain the equal in prose of what Mme. du Devant, or " George Sand," has been in France, has made Savonarola a prominent figure in her novel of " Eomola." In Florence itself his memory is cherished and re- vered. His portrait, as drawn by the celebrated painter of the same Dominican order, is adorned with the halo of Eomisb saintship ; and to an American scholar, the prior of St. Mark, in Florence, spoke, in 1841, of Savonarola as an enlightened preacher of repentance and a martyr for a reform on ortho- dox principles. He is said to have known the Bible almost by heart, and to have stated often that to it he owed all his light and peace. Luther, a lad of fifteen, and Melancthon, a babe but one year old at the time of Savonarola's death, when their Eeformation career began, seem to have approved his hon- esty and his piety. Of Alexander VI. Savonarola spoke as be- ing but an atheist. The Dominican order, to which the mar- tyr of Florence belonged, have repeatedly and even recently moved to have him recognized by beatification and even by canonization. His record is on high ; and we think, though his works show no such appreciation of the great way of salva- tion as Augustine and as Martin Luther present it, they yet prove him a man of real and fervent piety. But the reform that he sought within the Church failed in his hands, and must, we think, meet the like result in its renewal on his principles within the Church and by the Church itself. Diotrephes and the Church which he had bewitched could scarcely be trusted, even in the age when John, an imprisoned apostle, yet survived, to have wrought out their own purification. The meek de- parture of the champion of truth from the propagandists of error and the traders in corruption is not schism. It is the 124 JSSAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. loyal and indispensable condition of attachment to ' Christ's pristine truth ; and in its very severings comes the best hope of repentance for the body thus renounced and the leaders thus denounced and disfellowshipped. John Huss had become, as a student and a preacher, distin- guished in his native Bohemia, and in its great University of Prague, when the works of Wycliffe came under his notice, lie recognized much of the truth they taught, but not all. When the works of the Englishman were, in Bohemia, com- mitted, with ringing of the ohurch-bells and the singing of the " Te Deum," to the flames, notwithstanding the protest of the University, Huss was among the defenders of the English- man's memory. Hence, put under the ban, he was called, when the sea-pirate Balthazar Cossa was chosen Pope, under the name of John XXIH., to Italy to answer. The Bohemian King interposed, and friends went instead of the intended vic- tim. When the ban was renewed, and an interdict threatened against any place sheltering him, Huss appealed from the Ko- man court to the only just judge, Christ. Eequired by the King to leave Prague, Huss did so. Believing, like WyclifEe, in a Church invisible, much more select and sacred than the visible Church, Huss did not go all lengths with the views of WyclifEe, but sought rather a reform in practice than in doc- trine. In other words, he would sew the new cloth on the rents of the old garment — a process which we have the high- est and final authority for esteeming as neither economical, nor seemly, nor safe. The Emperor Sigismund prevailed on John XXIH. to summon a General Council at Constance, one of the largest in the number of its attendants, as in their dig- nity and rank, that had been ever convened. Sigismund gave, WYCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 125 as Emperor, his solemn pledge of safe-conduct that, if Huss, leaving his retirement, would attend the Council, he should be heard in security, and dismissed safe and unharmed. He came and made his defence. When the illustrious prisoner alluded to the safe-conduct the Emperor blushed visibly. It was held distinctly by this large, venerable body, "representing" — or giving, in delegates and authorized representatives, a legislative embodiment of the Church universal — that " no faith should be kept with heretics." He was flung into confinement. He asked to be allowed the services of a legal advocate. He was denied the privilege. " I will," said he, with simple dignity, "make Christ my advocate; and soon will he judge you." He wrote in his confinement on the Decalogue and on the Lord's Prayer, and on other religious themes. At a later ses- sion, denied the permission to make his defence, he fell on his knees, and there and then commended his case and made his appeal to Christ. He implored God's forgiveness of his ene- mies and persecutors. When stripped of priestly garb a cap painted with devils was set on his head, and with the title " Heresiarch " inscribed upon it ; while the bishop exclaimed, "Now we give thy soul to the devil." "But I," cried he, " commend it to thy hands, Christ, who hast redeemed it !" He smiled as, on passing out at the church door, he saw his books burnt. At the place of execution on his knees he re- cited certain of the Psalms, and prayed that by the help of Christ and the Father he might patiently endure. Alluding to his doctrine, he said, " Therefore am I ready with glad heart to die." Eepeating then the prayer that Christ would receive his soul, till the smoke and flame driven in his face ob- structed farther speech, his lips were still seen moving. Eras- 6* 126 SBAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTOBT. mus said truly, " JoLn Huss was bumf, but convicted he was not." Now, councils are expected, if anybody on earth should, to reform and amend and rule and guide the Church. At this very council the presiding spirit was the great theologian and Christian of the French nation, and of their University of Paris, at whose head he had long been, John Gerson. So de- vout a man was he that France long claimed for him what Europe outside of France has not allowed, the authorship of the " Imitation of Christ," that most popular work, more gen- erally attributed to the Fleming, Thomas a Eempis. This same Gerson, a very able and a very good man, was yet stren- uous in urging the condemnation and death of Huss. Now, if councils may claim to represent the collective Church, and in that capacity to legislate — a claim which Jansenism made, and which Gerson made at this early date, and which Trent made, and which the recent Vatican Council of our own times has repeated — where were the reforms that this council should have given to the Church of Christ ? If, again, mystic theology, which has had its very excellent and venerable names, and to which the Churches^we many holy and stirring volumes, be all that its friends claim for it as a cleansing and recuperative power, when could'There have been a fairer occasion for the display of its remedial and heal- ing energies than on such an occasion ? Gerson had gone over from scholasticism to the mystic school of religious thinkers. He was a great, a brave, a pious man. But the blood of John Huss is in part on his robes. The council removed the nefari- ous and shameless John XXIII. from the papacy ; but they left him in the possession of revenues and ecclesiastical power, and WYCLIFFE, SAVONABOLA, AND HUSS. 127 a cardinal not only, but a Bishop of Tusculum, and Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, to his death. If this be reform, what was the contiguous act of the same august and potent body — the perfidious betrayal and sacrifice of John Huss — but foulest murder ? The Bohemian people were stirred. Wars sprung up, bitter and long. Among the leaders was the one-eyed Zisca, brave but stern, and a terror to the imperial and pontifical armies. When he died he is said, trusting in the terror his very name now inspired in the ranks of the oppressors, to have command- ed his followers to leave to the beasts and birds his flesh and bones, and to flay oS and tan his skin and spread it on a drum- bead, that thus Zisca might still — carried in the van of their march — appall their foes. It is said that the grim charge was obeyed. But, whatever of savagery was shown on either side, the fate of Huss might well stir indignation. Out of the Bo- hemian brethren thus roused to incensed resistance came ulti- mately in later times the Moravians, who over so many fields of heathenism have written so heroic a record, the Ziscas of faith and prayer and charity. Of the worthies whose story has thus engaged us, it is ap- parent, moving, as they did, Europe at three points — insular Britain, lettered, commercial, artistic, and republican Florence, and the Slavonian people of Bohemia — ^the greatest, and the most abiding, and the most beneficent influence was that which came from the endeavor by Wycliffe to reform, not under and within the Church, but in the line afterward followed by the Protestant Eeformation in Britain, Germany, France, Holland, and Scotland, apart from the Church. And in all the .three worthies the great instrumentality of God in enlightening, 128 JEJBAS AND CHABACTEES OF EISTOBY. enfranchising, and impelling men came from the Scriptures. Huss translated, but Savonarola, though loving his Bible, seems not to have made it vernacular, the possession of the nation. In the four portly volumes in which English scholars have from many manuscripts reproduced the labors of Wyc- lifEe himself, and the revised version of his associate and sur- vivor, Purvey, we see how fully the old Lutterworth pastor found time to redeem his pledge to make the oracles of God's word the heritage of the common believer. And in the victo- ries of English valor, and of Scottish adventure and heroism, in the arts and trades and schools and missions of the British islands and the British empire, now girdling the globe, and in the reflex and rival influence of their colonists upon our own continent, has it been in sympathy with the Gersons, however good — much less with the Innocent III. or the Leo X. or the Alexander VI. or the John XXIII — or has it been in the track of the victims and martyrs — that the English-speaking people have reached their present post of freedom, power, and in- fluence ? What constitutes success? Arnold von Winkelreid, when he went down gathering into his single breast a whole sheaf of spears, and thus breaking the enemy's ranks, was no failure. Switzerland exults in his memory. Juggernaut, frowning for centuries from his high car on the myriads of worshippers through so many generations tugging at his ropes, and at inter- vals lying down to be crushed under his red wheels, is, after all, no success. Without conscience, without freedom, with- out God's truth known, and God's grace felt as revealed in the ransoming Christ, and as witnessed by the renewing Spirit, life is but a failure, and death an insufficient refuge. WTOLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 129 And while man remains, individually, what he is, imperfect in this earthly life, and feeble and fallible in his best estate, there will be seeming reverses even in the career of a militant Gospel, and in the fruits of Heaven's sowing in some professed disciples of a true creed. Judas plotted in the train and household of the very Saviour. The apostolic epistles bewail an early and wide growth of errors, in and among the first nurseries of the doctrine that was to bless all nations. But the drawbacks were not the confutation of the message. There is an apparent and external unity that but misguides and destroys. Eevelation warns us against the endeavor to cry "Peace" where under the Scriptures and Spirit of God there is no peace ; and the Redeemer himself. Prince of Peace, as in the highest sense he was and ever is, yet declared that, from the very vastness and stubbornness of the evils which he came to denounce and to explode, it was his mission " to send a sword on the earth." When, then, the complaint is made against the self-denying advocates of righteousness, that they disturb society's old investments in wrong, and the venerable rustings and incrustings of misrule, and oppression, and fraud, and falsehood, the meek response of those who know the truth, and follow the Master to the bitter end, is that he has made it the ancient wont of bis blessed cause to awaken resistance and dissent, but that he has also taught his people to believe that his word is found, after many delays and even many difiScul- ties, to assert victoriously its right to a general hearing and a final and universal acceptance. Why disturb the Church with novelties and witness - bearing ? Because the very best men in the ages gone have borne their lamenting testimony that the Church needed disturbing ; else she became the prey 130 EBA8 AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. of Satan, and the shrine of Jehovah was converted into a mere mart of money-changers and a haunt of revellers. It was not the Protestant Keformers, so called, who first coined the term " Reform," and described it as the crying need of the Christian Church. Men like Claude of Turin, and Bernard and Grosse- teste and Bradwardine and Gerson had declared its needful- ness; and some of them had written treatises on the indis- pensable exigency of such measures. But why not, it was then asked — why not do all this within the Church, and by the Church authorities, and by the pontiffs; and if these pontiffs will not heed, then by councils, dictating to such unworthy office- bearers, vacating their seats and appointing worthier successors, let the Church authorities efiect these amendments in the quiet of their own body ? But this, too, had been attempted, and with what fruit ? The best Roman Catholic authorities unite to deplore and condemn John XXIIL, the contemporary of Huss. But when, in Savonarola's time, the holy see was in the keep- ing of Alexander VI., or Roderic Borgia, as was his family name, was the cause of virtue or religion in safer, cleaner hands than in the days even of John XXIII. ? The contemporary pasquinades of the Italian city described him, and grave histo- rians like Guiccardini and Machiavel have sustained the popular cry, as the " Alexander who sold altars and the Saviour, And Alexander (said they) has a right to sell ; For has he not bought them ?" What was his son, Caesar Borgia, but a very embodiment of all truculence and treachery, upon whom, as upon his living model, Machiavel, his contemporary, is thought to have gravely shaped his "Prince," the compend which teaches how faith- WYVLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 131 lessness and murder, all fraud, perjury, and violence may be indulged in a ruler, if thus he secure his power? When in- iquity was thus, by one of the world's great sages in statecraft (for such Machiavel was), made into a law, and pontifical house- holds and papal precedents furnished the patterns and " work- ing-drawings " — to use the factory phrase — of the terrible structure of deceit and oppression, were men, in the name of peace, to be charged to keep silence ? The Son of God told of emergencies when the very stones would cry out, if men renounced their right of free speech for God. «Go down to later times and trace the development of art in the hands of the Medicean family, who had sapped the liberties of the old commercial republic of Florence, and then, given John de Medici as tenant of the Roman See under the name of Leo X., to carry the effect of elegant letters and culture into the cap- ital of Christendom, is all done that conscience and God de- mand? Savonarola had protested against the usurpations of an earlier Medici on the ancestral liberties of Florence, and denied absolution to the dying merchant prince unless he re- stored them. Was all the glory of the refinement that the Medicis brought in, an adequate substitute for the pure Gospel and the ancient freedom ? lie, the later pontifical Medici, built the Cathedral of St. Peter, the wonder yet of the traveller ; but he did it by the aid of Tetzel selling the indulgences to the besotted peasants, who believed that in exchange for their coin they received the pardon of all sin, and the security of the sinning soul. When a man looks round upon the sym- metry and costly magnificence and riches and splendor of the fane, but remembers that it is both possible and probable that souls, by myriads, went down to eternal despair under the 132 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. false hopes thus peddled out to them, may he not well ex- pect, in the indignant language of the Hebrew prophet, that the stone out of the wall and the beam out of the timber* should accuse architect and pontifiE and philosopher when they accept such miracles of art, bought by such wages of delusion, as a substitute for the one hope, the one truth, the one light of the world — the Christ, who scourged traders in doves from the old Temple, and may be expected to disown such trading in souls and salvation, as the rent-roll of any edifice that he accepts as truly his sanctuary ? And when that Medicean in- fluence travelled, as it did, out of Florence and out of Eome, and Catharine de Medici, a daughter of the house, in the Court of France, plotted the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew's- day, in which not only Coligny was basely murdered, but sev- enty thousand Protestants beside ; when, in that school which the French Court under Catharine de Medici furnished, was formed the youthful character of Mary Queen of Scots, beau- tiful but unprincipled, in adulterous union rewarding her Both- -well, the murderer of her husband, trying vainly her witchery on the stalwart, resolute, and saintly Knox, and perishing on a scaffold that, ghastly as it was, was but too well earned — must not history declare that piety and freedom had neither in Florence, nor in Eome, nor in Paris, nor in Edinburgh reason to cherish any peculiar gratitude for the Medicean influence, though it did build St. Peter's ? Its Tetzels were worthy of the patronage, and the patron was in unison with the peddler, who cheated souls in German market towns, and with the as- sassins who went through the streets and homes of French * Habakkuk ii. 11. WTCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 133 towns massacring, for the honor of the Virgin Mary, men, women, and children with all brutal atrocity. No. All honor to the martyrs who said : We have bought the truth at Christ's feet, and as his charge and teaching. He earned our souls by the blood of the incarnation and cru- cifixion, and his free grace has made us participants and cham- pions of a liberty that must be asserted. Traditions, and in- dulgences, and purgatories, and masses, and absolutions, and confessionals, and inquisitions — they are not his ; and we dis- own and renounce and withstand them. And all the order of a Puritan and a Covenanter household, which even Burns, little submissive as he was to its full teachings, could yet so beauti- fully depict in the " Cotter's Saturday Night," was traceable to this Christ-given freedom for which old Reformers testified and faithful martyrs bled. The rust of their chains, the ashes of their stakes, the halters of the gibbets on which they swung, all are traceable by the discerning eye as the precedent con- ditions — the prerequisite and pnrchase-money of Puritan in- dependence and sobriety and integrity. We live by the ben- efit of these old martyr memories. Smithfield laid the basis for Bunker Hill. Look again at the influence of God's Bible, as translated and diffused through the toil and sacrifice and deaths of these brave, holy forerunners. Lechler, a German biographer of Wycliffe, declares that the English of Wycliffe's time had the Scripture in their own tongue more freely than any other contemporary European people. Founded on the Vulgate, his version did not, like Tyndale's, founded on the original Greek and Hebrew, embed itself so thoroughly on the national litera- ture, and character, and history. But Tyndale died a martyr 134 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF MISTORT. at the stake, and Rogers, the protomartyr under Mary's reign, and Cranmer, all had their share in various issues and revisions of our existing English Bible. Of its force and beauty even Frederick W. Faber^ a convert to Romanism, speaks most ad- miringly even after his perversion to Romanism. Now, is it possible to forget that the book, so widely diffused, so cheaply attained — pondered by the sable freedman of the South in his hut, worn by the fingers of the Sunday-school child, stained by the tears of the grandmother as, having dimmed the glasses through which she looks, they drop on the well-thumbed page which she loves so well — all this book, so widely spread, and so vividly working, is but the outcome of so many layers of con- secutive martyrdom ? The men its first translators, its first venders, its first readers and possessors even, died the death for it. But if the human bearers went, chained at the stake, into white ashes for its sake, it — the book itself — lives — lives with an imperishable vitality, and it spreads itself with an indefinite fertility on every wave of advancing colonization, and with ev- ery current of the enterprise and commerce and travel of this nineteenth Christian century. Burn the volume-bearers, but the volume is itself the inextinguishable torch of God's lighting, the incombustible asbestos into which the providence of God has shot the purposes of Omnipotence and the glories of the one unchangeable Christ. He, the living, personal, incarnate Word ; it, the transcribed, inspired, Christ-telling and Christ- guarded word, as written by pen of the missionary and type of the printer. To make this record popular, accessible, and sovereign, the fathers have braved all forms of persecution, interdict, and in- quisition. They have, adopting the phrase of the Old Testa- WTCLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND HUSS. 135 ment as to Daniel's worthy compeers, Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, dared to " change " not the " word of a king," but something that deemed itself more dread and deadly, the word of a sovereign pontiff, with the authority of a Christ as he claimed behind hira, and with the terrors of eternal perdition poised in his sovereign hand to smite the heretic and dissident. And yet this martyr Bible is in the shop and in the library and the nursery-stand, in spite of all adverse efforts, and it is in its place to stay. Why? Because the liberty of the English- speaking nations, their practical genius for civilization, and invention, and discovery are embedded between the asbestos pages of this indestructible record ? No ; for a far higher rea- son. Because He who built the worlds with a word, and can roll them into flame by a glance, has said that, though this heaven and earth at his bidding pass away, not one jot or one tittle of his word can pass unaccomplished ; and has com- manded the search into the Scriptures. The verification of this pledge insures the perpetuity of the book. Its memory, if not its text, will travel over into the remotest eternities that may lie beyond the Judgment -day. When speaking of his care for his earthly followers, however lowly, illiterate, obscure, and few, he deigned to say, " Where two or three are gathered together in my name there will I be" — the unseen but the omnipresent Christ The believers plead this often as a word merely of the future, in their quiet and unnoticed gatherings ; but is it not also as well a word of the past, no less than of the far future ? Does it not come from the lips of him, the very Son of God, who in the furnace on the plain of Dura made the fourth in the fire with the three Hebrews, to complete the group? The sympathies of the Christ are retrospective as 136 JEUAS AND CSABACTBES OF EISTOHY. ■well as prospective. All his Icindliness at the rustic table of Emmaus, and all his wondrous majesty when attending and defending the victims of Nebuchadnezzar, come back in the just interpretation of his promise that he will cheer his waiting assemblies. That grace which brought Hebrew martyrs out of the fire, but which was not less grace when it left later mar- tyrs like Huss and Savonarola in the fire, swathes the book with the true elements of indestructibility. That presence, in its one sovereign Spirit, shed forth by the Christ, and conform- ing to the Christ all his loyal train of followers, is the true secret of the unity, and indefeasibility, and final universality of Christ's genuine Church. Travellers read around the rim of the magnificent dome of St. Peter's at Kome, " On this rock will I build my Church." We hold no edifice of mason's rearing and sculptor's adorning, or bearing the name of any mere apostle, to represent aright the essential foundation of the Church of the Living God. It was the Christ whom Peter, at the time of his Lord's speaking the words, had confessed upon whom, as the chief corner-stone, all the edifice of true Christianity reposes. It had done so from the beginning ; it will remain there only built, there only sustained, " till the uttermost bounds of the everlasting hills," if we may adopt the language of the patriarch Jacob, dying amid the idol fanes of Egypt, but looking beyond the shores of the Nile and heights of his old Lebanon to some better limit, to describe the refuge and repose of his own departing spirit, and the destiny of his well-beloved Joseph. Christ is the basis of true faith ; and his eternity is her necessary ap- panage. The martyrs looked for this eternity beyond; and so overcame this present world. We thank and bless their WYOLIFFE, SAVONAROLA, AND SUSS. 137 memory for the lesson ; and the powers, hostile and malign, which martyred, and prisoned, and tortured, and consumed them, only made their memory the dearer, and the heritage ■which they sealed a more glorious and imperishable one. Their ashes, as if unworthy to rest on earth, and flung to the waters of the Avon, the Arno, and the Khine, were, better than their foes intended it, the omen of the knowledge of the mar- tyrs' God covering the earth as do the waters the great deep. "I will set," said the Psalmist, prophesying of the Messiah, " his (the Christ's) hand in the rivers." The pierced hand of the Crucified grasped the streams of Europe by those martyr ashes. He will, peacefully or by like martyr sacrifices, do as much for all the streams of the Africa, and America, and Asia, and far Australia yet to be evangelized. 138 BUAS AND CMABACTEBS OF MISTOST. VII. MAHOMIITAmSM. One of the strangest figures seen flitting across the thronged stage of the great French Revolution was that of the Baron (Prussian by birth, but French in his education, and in his adopted domicile) Anacharsis Clootz. The real name of his childhood had been Jean Baptiste Clootz. But shedding the appellation given to his infancy at the font, as a relic of the Christianity that he abjured, he adopted in its stead the name of Anacharsis, the Scythian, who in the old classic days of Greece had relinquished his native barbarianism for the school- ings of Athenian philosophy ; and presenting himself as the "Orator of the Human Race," to use his own magniloquent dialect, the offering which he tendered to the " Goddess of Reason," whom the scepticism of the day was installing on the old altars of a discredited Christianity — the liege gift which he proffered, as the expression of his loyal adherence and true fealty to the new dynasty — was a treatise that he had published in Paris, and which he called " The Certainty of the Evidences of Mahometanism." Few readers have, perhaps, ever seen the book. The copies that remain moulder, unconsulted and for- gotten, on the murky and dusty shelves of libraries. And yet the volume is not without its own perverse ingenuity ; and, in its author's fond estimate, had adroitness and power. It was an attack in flank on the old Gospel, aiming to show that the MAMOMETANISM. 139 faith of the crucified Nazarene had not more to sustain it than had the Koran of the prophet of Mecca ; the certitude in both cases was but shadowy and unreal, the merest cloud-land. The new deity, whom he and his fellow -atheists proposed to enthrone, showed little of the calmness and gravity that her title, the "Goddess of Eeason," would bespeak; and judging from the speedy outbreaks of her votaries, and the influence on society and freedom of the age thus proclaimed, instead of a sober and queenly reason, the power that ruled had the con- tortions and the frenzies of a Sibyl, or the ferocity of a female energumen, foul as a harpy and truculent as the old child- slaying Medea. In two years after the solemnity of the en- thronization the head of the poor orator, without any loud or wide regrets from the race whose spokesman he had become, rolled into the basket of the guillotine. Frederick the Great, as he was called, ruler of that Prussian land where Clootz had been born, but which the baron had left in his early boyhood, had died but a few years before this pompous spectacle, which the Parisian atheists had framed for the inaugurating of this their new goddess; and that crowned scofEer's representation to his confidential friends had been, that Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet were, each and all, but impostors. Little did baron or monarch forecast the course of the literatures, German and French ; of the national movements, European and transatlan- tic ; and of the influence on homes and governments, and marts and shrines, of the flerce tides whose wild rush they witnessed, but whose ultimate driftings and deposits they had both of them grievously miscalculated. Eousseau in their day, and Kenan in our own times, sceptics though both of them, but each a man of higher endowments 140 ERAS AND CHABAGTERS OP BISTORT. and more power of language in graving their opinions on the mind of after ages, have bequeathed alike their admiring testi- mony as to the lofty character and the glorious end of Jesus of Nazareth, as presenting the highest embodiment of human excellence. But the tendency in our own times has been, in the interest' of quiet and general repose, to devise some method by which each of these old faiths may be kept in mutual tolerance, even if that quietude lapse into wide and utter apathy or stagnate finally into a world-wide scepticism ; leaving the race in its ultimate results without an oracle^ without a prophet, without a creed, without a shrine, and without a God ; no conscience in the bosom, no hope irradiating the death-bed, and no outlook into eternity. Far back as the days of Servetus, whose name is so unhap- pily blended with that of Calvin, we find that Arian physician, familiar with the Jew and with the Moor, then both in Spain, meditating a reconciliation of the adverse and warring faiths by relinquishing the deity of our Lord. When in the days of the later Stuarts in Britain an ambassador from the Sultan visited London, we find from the works of Bunyan and the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys what attention it awakened. And elsewhere we learn that English Unitarians applied then to the Turkish ambassador, on the ground of an approximation in their views and those of the Mahometans as to the nature of our Lord. This was afterward denied ; but in a later day Charles Leslie, " the reasoner," as Johnson said tersely, " not to be reasoned against," established incontrovertibly the fact of the application. So eminent and able an essayist in our own times as Kichard H. Hutton has spoken of Mahomet as MAHOMETANISM. 141 a true prophet; and an English clergyman, Bosworth Smith, in a volume reprinted here, has gone farther, and claimed for Ma- homet that he was not only a true prophet, but the greatest of prophets next after our Lord Christ. Douglass of Cavers, a sounder thinker and a riper scholar than either, has drawn a just distinction that there are two periods in the career of the prophet of Mecca. In the first he was an eai'nest witness of the divine unity ; but in the latter he was a forger and a false prophet. There was much to win admiration in some of the personal traits of Mahomet — his simple habits, his accessibility and affability, his perseverance, his generosity, and his close attach- ment to early friends ; and, looking at these, modern writers have been loath to recognize the base alloy found in some of his dealings and principles. Even our own Irving, in his view of the prophet, would lean to the more kindly judgment. Yet Scripture and common-sense alike remind us that, in the same individual, may be unhappily blended traits most dissonant; the worse of which come out only in peculiar temptations, and at certain periods and stages in the career. Benedict Arnold had in his early days as a patriot high and rare valor. It did not render impossible or incredible, much less innocent, the treason of later days. That Judas had been selected by the Master, who knew all men, to be an apostle, did not forbid his lapsing into apostasy and treason and attempted Deicide. And so, in the older pages of the Bible, the magnificent and inspired predictions of Balaam did not forbid his aiding idolatries of Baal-Peor that would fain counterwork in Israel the blessings of the God of Israel, and did not save him from perishing in the just vengeance that overtook the sin which he aided in provoking. 7 142 EBAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTOBT. The complex character of the Arab seer is to be steadily regarded, if we would form a just estimate of his purposes and his after influence, as compared with the nature and the results of the Jewish and Christian systems. It is a singular and unimpeachable verification of a very ancient prophecy that, under the tent of the one Abraham, of the seed of Shem, there were gathered together the ancestors of the Moses, the great law-giver of the Exodus and of Sinai ; of that Messiah of the tribe of Judah whom we of the Christian Church hold the one Hope and Saviour and Judge of the race ; and also, wheth- er we take the race of Ishmael or that of the sons of Keturah as that of Mahomet's nearest ancestry, the progenitors of the man and people who first transcribed and received the Koran, the book of the Moslem. Far back as the days of the Deluge it had been announced that the seed of Japheth should dwell in the tents of Shem. Taking the influence of the Law, the Gospel, and the Koran on Europe and far eastern Asia over the widely dispersed and variously trained progeny of Ja- pheth, how wondrously and numerously have the seed of Ja- pheth thus clustered in the shadow of the tent - curtains of Shem. The early writers in the Christian Church have been charged, as Prideaux and Maracci, with painting too darkly the motives and career of Mahomet; and for many years their statement that he was afflicted with epilepsy, and that he took advantage of the ecstasies thus induced to affect su- pernatural inspiration, has been contradicted. Yet so modern a writer as Kenan, with no Christian proclivities, speaks of Mahomet as from childhood epileptic, and declares that it " made his fortune." Left early an orphan, he had the guar- MAHOMETANISM. 143 diansliip of a generous uncle, but knew the disadvantages of poverty. By his fidelity to her business interests he attracted the favor and won the affection and hand of Khadijah, a wid- ow, much older than himself, but to whom he was a kind and devoted husband, cherishing after her death her memory with a grateful and loyal fidelity. Bnt in the excitement of grow- ing ease and afiiuence he was not at ease in his heart. He needed and affected solitude. And in some of these seasons of prolonged meditation and prayer his sadness so grew that he meditated suicide, but was restrained, as he supposed, by the angel Gabriel. There may have lingered yet, in certain nooks of Arabian and Syrian society, some of that patriarchal religion which shone forth so beautifully in the character of Job, the patri- arch of Uz, and that had in Melchizedek, the sheik of Salem, so glowed and blessed s\\ around, that Abraham himself ac- cepted gratefully and reverently the benediction of this lonely and devout seer. In the age of Mahomet's birth both Jews and Christians had become greatly perverted by idolatry and by superstitious traditions and practices. The idolatrous shrine of the Caaba, where Mahomet's ancestry had worshipped, was, as some suppose, the construction of Jewish exiles of the tribe of Simeon, who had, in their Arabian isolation, gradually been swayed to paganism. The solitary musings of the young trad- er and recluse may — in the close study of his own heart, in the protests of a conscience often burdened and seriously ponder- ing, and in the monitions of that Divine Spirit who, as the Bi- ble assures us, is not far from any one of us — have drawn Ma- homet toward influences that would, duly cherished and obey- ed, have won him heavenward, and rekindled somewhat in his 144 ERAS AND CRABAGTJSRS OF HISTORY. lonely spirit of the graces of an Enocli and a Melchizedek. If such the impulses on one side, they were not the only feelings that struggled for domination within him. Mahometan tra- dition represents him as having in early youth had his side opened, and an angel, removing the heart, squeezed from it the black blood, the focus and centre of evil influences, and then replaced it, after it had been thus cleansed, within the youth's bosom. From ambition and self -consciousness and spiritual pride that heart was certainly not cleansed. The possibilities of great good soliciting on the one side, and the temptations to great error and misguidance alluring on the other, may be indicated in the imagery of the ninth chapter of the book of the Apocalypse, which for so many centuries the Christian Church has held as rightfully applied to the career and influence of this religious guide. A star is seen falling from heaven : some read this plunge of the fall- en luminary as applicable to the times of his entrance on the world rather than to himself. They say it describes the growth of saints' worship, and idolatry, and worldliness, and corruption in the Christian Church. But others read in it the imagery in which God presents the aspirations to truth and righteousness which his Spirit had enkindled in this young recluse, as contrasted, with the unhappy deflection from that upward career — a deflection to which earth and Satan allured him, in his ambition and pride and sensualism. The great changes of society proceed not always from the noble and the mighty, but from quarters often given over to obscurity and neglect and despair. The miner's son, Martin Luther, could little suggest to the school-mates and teachers and patrons who early knew the lad the possibilities of his MAHOMETANISM. 145 future career. Guttenberg and Columbus were of ordinary mould, as men judged them ; but how much did Providence propose for them and achieve by them ! It was the magnifi- cent purpose of the world's true Deliverer, to begin his great work for the evangelization and enfranchisement and elevation of our race, not only among but by the classes whom the des- pots of old counted but as mortar, to be trodden down ruth- lessly under their coursers' hoofs and the tires of their chariot- wheels. It was the same ignoble class at whom infidels of later days have scofEed, as being but like the slugs in their gardens, little worthy of remembrance, much less protection. Man's gracious Maker has quite other standards of reckoning. " To the poor " was distinctively and eminently the preaching of his Gospel. By fishermen and tent-makers he moved upon the camps, the schools, the marts, and the thrones of the na- tions. Thus would he upheave the society which philosophers could dazzle and which sovereigns could subdue, but which nei- ther philosopher nor sovereign could reform from their vices or calm in their sorrows. He chose the poor to teach and to free and to exalt all layers in the entire mass of mankind. But Mahomet, even with the advantages of so wondrous a lesson spread out before him, was too dull and too earthly- minded to think of treading the same path. His work of re- form was by the sword. The steeds of his native Arabia were to supply the cavalry that in the early age of Saracen prosely- tism and conquest played so dread a part in gathering in the Moslem harvest. The Koran went out, and its messenger was a rider and a sword-bearer ; death or Islam was the stern alter- native for the races approached. Of old the Christ had said : " He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." So 146 :ebas and chaeactebs of history. does it by the purpose of Lim, the world's Euler, remain a principle embedded in the nature and the destiny of man that the military power which first by the sword propagated this false creed shall one day, when crossed by a stronger sword, fail to retain the territory thus won. In blood of battle and victory it first came ; in blood of battle and defeat it will finally wane and go out. There were elements of moral truth and even of divine right on the side of the Arabic innovator. He denounced, loudly and fiercely, the image-worship and the saints-worship of the apostate Churches, both the Greek and the Eoman. They had quietly adopted, as by a Christian sanction, much of the old paganism. And the God, who will not give his glory to another, gave his commission to this military fanatic to be the plague of the communities nominally Christian, which had so fearfully and widely paganized themselves. The Mahom- etanism that once threatened the rest of Europe from Spain, and that was checked by Charles Martel; that in later days assailed Europe in the siege of Vienna, and was rolled back by John Sobieski ; that had appropriated Palestine and Constanti- nople ; and that so long and so recently, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, by a bold piracy defied and plundered the commerce of Christendon, and that has, in Persia and the Mo- gul empire of India, been once so menacing and so gorgeous — had in a certain sense its impulse of vengeance and devastation from Him who will not overlook forever the worship of human saints, of graven and painted images, and the coinage of legends and devotions that wear his name and never once had his warrant. This false system had another dread element of power in its MAHOMETANISM. 147 steadfast recognition of a divine, overruling Providence. When one of their great warriors and rulers held up the torn treaty which a Christian sovereign had made with him, and which that Christian potentate had faithlessly violated, and appealed to the God of truth to vindicate the right and to punish the wrong-doer, it was but a putting forth of the omnipotent equi- ty, that the defeat was in that battle for the nominal Chris- tianity that had been perfidious. Along with much of its foul- est error, Mahometanism has clung tenaciously to the great fact of divine predestination and sovereignty. Against the idol and the relic and the legend, this belief in an all-swaying destiny was no futile or contemptible antagonist. And the individual or the community who persistently hold this great truth is like- ly to develop a consistency and a persistency that must be felt. But, on the other hand, how little did the Arabian seer un- derstand the right or the worth of the household. Our Saviour, in his early protest against the facility of divorce among the Hebrews of his own time, said plainly that Moses had permit- ted to the hardness of the Jewish heart what had not been the law of creation. So Samuel, when warning his people from envying and adopting the regal government of their pagan neighbors, foretold that, beside the conscription of military ser- vice, they would find concubinage and polygamy among the paraphernalia of royalty. It was on man's part human wilful- ness, forewarned, but then indulged ; and punished in the suc- cess with which it sought to better on God's arrangements ; as in the Saviour's parable the younger son had his heritage and his travel, and was left among swine and husks as the goal of his freedom and the fruit of his riot. Christ, as the greater Master whom Moses predicted and Samuel served, tracked back 148 EMAS AND CHARACTBBH OF EISTOBY. the law of marriage and the household past the intervening perversions to the original platform as God made it and meant it. When, in the age that had uttered and that recorded the vrords and deeds of the New Testament, Paul's Master found a divorced wife, Herodias, on a Galilean throne, and Paul found a divorced Agrippina on an imperial throne, the rank of the offenders did not modify, in the apostle or the apostle's Mas- ter, the stern simplicity of the law of the home as God gave it and as man must obey it. And yet, after all this emphasis of legislation in that Christ whose divine mission he professed to revere, Mahomet went into all license and shamelessness, and forgetting the memory of his own generous and loyal Khadijah, the patroness of his youth and poverty, he made the thronged harem the privilege of himself as prophet, and represented the houris as part of the glory of the Paradise awaiting all true be- lievers. What God had put together in the sanctity of house- hold life this self-constituted seer ventures to put asunder. The guarded and orderly family constitute the primary atom, in all true reform for the nation and for the race. The Moslem system virtually disintegrates and rots this first constituent element — this primary atom. When God formed our first parents he taught that even the parental claim, early and holy as it was, should in the derivative households fall behind the conjugal right, and a man should ev.en leave father and mother if thus only he could cleave to his wife. The Koran, in its re- casting God's primitive law of marriage, usurps on God ; and God's Providence is bound to set aside the usurper and his usurpation. The delays of retribution do not leave the wrong to outlaw, by mere lapse of time, the banished right. There is no real laches in Heaven. MAHOMETANISM. 149 The false religion and its myriads of fanatical adherents may have a terrible errand as against a corrupt Christianity. Two great nominal sections of Christendom — the Greek and the Boman, one on the Bosphorus and the other on the Tiber — had each gone far apart from the pristine simplicity and spirit- uality, and become largely antichristian. In their secular pow- er they were mutually envious and hostile. And it was, in a good degree, the profound hatred of the religious body seated on the ruins of the pagan empire at Rome toward the rival re- ligious body, seated on the site of the Eastern Roman empire at Constantinople, which left the latter capital, unrelieved by the crusades and by the pontiff, to fall before the Turk. The Ori- ental had little share in the sympathies of the Occidental ; and the antichristian divergencies of both, from the first law and spirit of Christ, swept them into bitterest alienation from each other as well. As against the falsehoods and corruptions of both, Mahometanism was, in its own way, an instrument of divine vengeance. But this commission from on high to waste was not an endorsement of the creed of the commis- sioned waster, any more than Jehovah's call of Nebuchadnez- zar to chasten the surcharged guiltiness of throne and dese- crated fane at Jerusalem was, by any just implication, an en- dorsement and consecration of the golden image reared in the plain of Dura, and for which the Chaldean King required the ■worship that Shadrach and his fellows righteously and heroic- ally refused. The flagrant vices which, in our later ages, have been fos- tered in the very bosom of a dominant Mahometanism are among the tokens that its term of vindictive, avenging punish- ment against a corrupt and effete Christianity nears its end. 7* 150 EBAS AND CHAEACTERS OF EISTOHY. Like Belshazzar's riot, preceding the Median occupancy of the Chaldean city, the unchecked revel of guilt seems calling for an overthrow, sudden, and as final as sudden. At such a time the project of some thinkers to effect for Christianity an accommodation — a mutual compact of toler- ance, nay, even fraternity — is a league absurd in its principles, irreverent to the Heaven and the Emmanuel who must be in- voked to protect it, and sure of an accursed fruitage could it be once established. When the startled apostles on the mount of transfiguration suggested the rearing of booths for the two old prophets, they yet loyally proposed that the first should be for their Master, the recognized Christ, recognizing his divine priority even amid their bewildered fantasy. But a scheme to bring the Koran of Mahomet into copartnership with the Old Testament and the New, and to place the sword of subju- gation and massacre on the shield of the new league, athwart the Cross of divine self-sacrifice, as kindred emblems, is pre- posterous to the utmost verge of irreverent impiety. It would be to the full as wise, and it would not be as grossly undevout, to propose that Enoch, who " was not, for God took him," should be brought down from Paradise to make peace with Judas, by dividing the thirty pieces betwixt the patriarch and the deicide, and by rearing on the field of Aceldama a two- faced monument of peace and accord. As a record of better feeling, each of the twain having " gone to his own place," the one side of the monument should bear a chariot, emblem of the ascended, and the other side a halter, emblem of the descend- ed. The men of a later liberalism, who would blend Tophet and the New Jerusalem into one common pledge of good-fel- lowship, are like the builders on the plains of Shinar of the old MAHOMETAIflSM. 151 tower of Babel, and are sure to thrive as well in their tower- ing project as did the old-world schemers. If any be faint-hearted in viewing the long duration and the wide diffusion of false forms of religion, let us remember, in the collision between Mahometanism and Christianity, above all other advantages, the unspeakable, the unapproachable su- periority that belongs to the Bible, as weighed against the Koran in its own contents and spirit. The high poetic style of the Arabian volume is, in the esteem of its writer, Mahomet, and of its admiring Moslem students, the standing miracle — standing by their confession alone — but in its singleness suf- ficient and unanswerable to prove its divine origin. But, as they confess, it is untranslatable from its Arabic original into other of the earth's dialects, with any adequate retention of its peerless felicities of expression. Now, the Bible, its rival, suf- fers no such drawbacks, from its adaptation to the lips and ears of another tribe, in the far West, or in the frozen North, who know nothing of the deserts where Mahomet received his mission and his message, and who know as little of the Egypt or Palestine where the prophets and evangelists were inspired to record their testimony. It, beyond all comparison with its Moslem competitor, can talk with the Brahmin, the Bengalee, and the Esquimaux or the red Indian of our own continent, and retain in all these new dialects its simplicity and majesty and picturesque variety and touching naturalness. No candid, dispassionate reader of the Koran can overcome the sense of its general tameness, its monotony, and its repetitions. Where are its parables, like those in the four Gospels — where its psalms — where its idyls of pastoral beauty like the book of Euth or the story of Joseph — where its terrible portraitures of battle 152 E^AS AND CHABICTEBS OF BISTOBT. and devastation, of deliverance and victory — vpliere its bigh dis- coursing on gravest, loftiest doctrines — where its earnest and simple and daylight statements of in-door and out-door ethics — where, above all, its loftiest prophecy of the coming fates of the nations, and its clear, pure, and vivid presentation of the life beyond the tomb and the resurrection morn ? See, again, the terrible voids and shadows as of tangible gloom and pathless despair that rest upon the pages of Ma- homet's book, when you carry thither the grand question. How shall man be justified and renewed? "How shall man be just with God?" It has no propitiatory victim, no blood of the sprinkling of the great Passover Sacrifice, that bans the visit of the destroying angel, and speaks security and seals sal- vation, by the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world. The Christ of the Bible said to his foes, " When I am lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." How lofty the promise in its vastness of scope ; and yet, to mere human judgment, how impossible its fulfilment. Yet when Greek art and culture, in Plerod; and Hebrew tradition, in chief priest and Sanhedrim; and when Eoman law, by' the reluctant hand of the protesting Pilate ; all turned their spears against the meek and unresist- ing victim, as they hung him up between earth and heaven, the unresisting and interceding oblation — even though Heaven too seemed deserting its gift and its representative, and he cried, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken rae ?" the spears of all human doom and the clouds of all celestial desertion but spoke the singleness and the solitariness of the combat on the sufferer's part. And when the gloom burst, and the cry came, " It is finished," it was no longer a dubious result be- tween good and evil — a drawn battle : leaving the conflict in- MAHOMETANISM. 153 definitely postponed. The single propitiation had a divine ef- ficiency, and shed forth an eternal virtue. The lifting up, so met by the victim, was itself the precursor, apt and sure, of the resurrection of the Victor, soon to follow — of the ascension, and of that divine enthronement and of that universal empire. The sufEering Lamb had put on again the full Godhead, and out of the cross and tomb and ascension looked down on an enfranchised earth and a ransomed race ; the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Captain of our eternal salvation, and the winner of a grace that made hell quail, and that cast wide open the gates of a restored Paradise. Then put, as against the victories that Mahomet won by the sword, the triumphs more spiritual and permanent that Christ bequeaths to his people, as the witnessing, sufiEering, and mar- tyred but indestructible Church. See what the world would have lost had the fate of Jesus been what Mahomet made it — a bodily escape for the Prophet of Nazareth, and the substitution in his place of Judas, the arch-traitor caught in his own toils. Would his craven and poisoned blood cancel sin in the peni- tent, and seal grace to the waiting disciples in their assemblies and their ordinances? The Resurrection, then, would have been a mocking delusion, with no reality in history and no virtue in morals. "Touch me," said the true Christ to the doubting Thomas, and " probe hands and side." If Mahomet were to be trusted, the only side torn and the only hands transfixed were the ribs and heart of the felon who sold for thirty pieces of silver his Master, and the only palms actually wounded that Thomas was to manipulate and grasp were those into which the Sanhedrim, while scorning the poor miscreant, had dropped with ill-veiled disgust their paltriest bribe. These the hands 154 EBAS AND CMARAOTERS OF HISTORY. to sway the sceptre of a universal dominion. This the being to wield all power in heaven and in earth. A sad outlook for the race and for the universe, if so very a caitifE as this Iscar- iot Jndas, with Satan entered into his heart and thirty dirty coins in his gabardine, were all our dependence, and the Church of all after times were bidden to look upon the wretch and say, " This is all our desire," and Thomas were but bewitched as he cried, " My Lord and my God !" to so base a counterfeit of the world's one hope and Eedeemer. But, again, though Mahomet himself disclaimed prophecy as being part of his prerogative, the traditions of Persian Ma- hometanism at least represent Mahomet, in his journey to heaven, as receiving the prophecy that the Christ was to re- turn in years yet future to our world, to remain here some forty years, or, as other versions of the prediction have it, but some twenty-four years, and then to encounter and overcome the antichrist, and also to rout the forces of Gog and Magog, which in such Mahometan tradition play hereafter so impor- tant a part in the world's history, as they do in the predictions of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse in Patmos. Now, according to Mahometan tradition, after these forty or twenty-four years of a renewed earthly career, the Christ is to become a Mahometan, and to receive at Mahometan hands a burial, with the Mahome- tan prayers for the dead over his, the converted Christ's, grave. Where, in the wildest romances of the "Arabian Nights," are there stories so degrading, so intrinsically improbable, and so flagrantly preposterous as this predicted descent of Jesus, to accept, after some forty years of terrene conflict, a Mahometan conversion and a Moslem entombment ? If Mahomet gave such expectations to his followers, and presented them as oracles MAROMETANISM. 155 received by him, the favored prophet of Mecca, in his night's journey to the highest heavens — beyond, as he claimed, the heavens tenanted by Christ himself — ^he, the utterer of such a fable, betrayed the invention and authorship of Satan, in legends so loftily impious and so astounding in their prepos- terous inconsistency. But remember that, beside the Book and the Master of the kingdom, who is the theme as well of that book, the world and the Church have his, the Master's, promise of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit leading his people into truth and ministering spir- itual illumination and strength, and all holy desires and all blessed and divine principles. The Church has through successive ages pleaded this great prediction ; and has she, upon earnestness and obedience, ever lacked new verifications of the old warranty ? Pentecost, and the Reformation, and modern missions, and modern revivals, and all abiding national reforms and upheavals, have come di- rectly in the train, or indirectly in the remote wake, of such prayer for the Spirit. And when Christ, as if to guard as with special majesty and sanctity the theme and hope so momentous, has warned that all sin might be forgiven to the penitent, sin against Father, and sin against Son, but not sin against this Holy Spirit, how fearful and lurid is the light cast from this context of Scripture upon the pretences of the Meccan prophet, when he and his followers claim to make a change in the vow- els of the Greek word, using " Periclyte " for Paraclete — the " Glorious " for the " Counsellor, Comforter, and Advocate " — and when the Arabian seer and his followers, thus perverting the genuine and original Greek term, find the equivalent and redu- plicate of Mahomet's own Arabic name, " The Illustrious ;" and 156 :E!RAS and CKA.BACTEBS OF HISTOBT. when they presume thus to confound him, the polygamist and the assassin, and the truculent butcher of the seven hundred Jews that would not accept him — to confound him, steeped in lies, and blood, and sensuality, with the sinless and divine Spirit of God, is there not, on the part of the pretender making such claims, a perilous acceptance of the sin which is pronounced by the Christ himself to be irremissible, for whose blackness there is no cancelment, and against whose venom Heaven itself yields no hope of balm in this world or the world to come ? When, then, we see, in the light of the atonement by the Cross and the regeneration by the Holy Ghost, the only charter of hope for the race, according to New Testament oracles, we may not accord the name of divine to the Koran, which lacks these holy influences so utterly, and which travesties these great boons so hideously. And when essayists like Hutton and when lecturers like Bosworth Smith claim for Mahomet the honors of a true prophet, and the latter (Bosworth Smith) places him as the greatest of prophets next after Christ, leav- ing Abraham and Moses and David and Elijah all his inferiors, can we, with any loyalty to the great Teacher himself, thus ac- cord rank to one who, like the seer of Mecca, makes our own Emmanuel's death a mere dodge, entrapping Judas and leaving for the race no blood on the cross but that of the wretched Iscariot ? What are the prospects, with the wide currency that Ma- hometanism has won, that it can be subverted ? Or can it be taken away without bloodshed? The probabilities are, from the past history of the race, that what was sown in violence will perish by like methods over large portions of the field. " He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." And MA.HOMETANISM. 157 yet, by methods which we cannot forecast, God may so pre- cipitate great social changes as to make the transition from error to truth more quiet and more rapid than we now im- agine. But tlie age, it may be said, is absorbed in great questions of. merely material and physical well-being; and the predomi- nance of infidel theories in lands nominally Christian, it may be said, forebodes no strength for the Church of Christ in the impending collision. We read not the auguries of Providence thus, if the histories of the past furnish any safe parallel for the anticipations of the future. God has allowed great inroads of error, often only to exhibit more impressively the truth of the Bible statements as to human perverseness and ingratitude ; and then, when secular allies and helps all failed, the Church looked up in prayer, and the Spirit came down from the Head of the Church in might and speed to answer the prayer and meet the emergency.* And now, as of old, God allows the offerings and schemes of his own true servants to incur loug delays in success, and to meet what seems widespread and irreparable disaster. When Elijah, standing alone, carried his solitary appeal on Carmel, against the hundreds of Baal's servitors, to the old Jehovah of the Exodus and of Sinai, the prophet, to show that no human art or collusion was on his side, drenched profusely with water the sacrifice and the altar where it lay. When the fire came down on the wood water- soaked and the victim dripping from the floods poured over * And ITiibelief, as when Elisha predicted the plenty following the siege and the famine, is crushed in the gate where she stands cavilling, by the rush of the sudden deliverance. 158 ERAS AND CSASACTEMS OF MISTOBY. it, the multitude cried, "The Lord he is God." The God of Elijah pursues at times in modern days the policy of his old loyal servant on Carmel. He allows the craft and enmity of earth and hell to shed down not only doubt in its damp fogs, but agnosticism or materialism in its fierce down-pour, to come alike on oracle and creed and offering. On the heart of Eu- ropean Christendom there came down the rain thick and fast of a mocking deism or a truculent atheism. But a Robe- spierre even soon found it necessary to recognize again a Su- preme Being, and a Napoleon to exclaim, as he pointed the doubters to the starry sky, "Who, gentlemen, made all these?" On Germany, nominally Protestant, came down torrents of Ra- tionalism, in her colleges and her pulpits and her synods. But the Spirit of God came down in the season of national distress and invasion, and Prussia soon felt that she needed the God of her fathers. And so, in Christian Britain and Chris- tian America, should an irreligious monsoon set in, we can look up, believing that the God of our fathers can enkindle the fire again on the altars from his own dwelling-place, high beyond and above all these renewed and violent tempests. The Bible Societies, and translations, and the missions and tracts and Sunday-schools of our age, go to a power like that which sent fire into the soaked and thrice-drenched offerings of Carmel. Ask a Herodian or a Pharisee, in some wealthy mansion of Jerusalem, on the night of the Advent, the auguries for good, and he would have told you that the principles of the intelligent and aflluent classes in the Hebrew city left then little or no reason to expect any great changes, as impending or as even remotely possible. But such respondent, though familiar with the counsels and policy of Herod and the Sanhe- MAHOMMTANISM. 159 drim, might find perchance that he was not equally conversant ■with the methods and policy of Him who sitteth on high to pour contempt on princes, and to turn the wisdom of earth, vaunting, self-reliant, and God-defiant, into a sudden and thorough conviction of its own nothingness. The most heedless survey of the state of the world two centuries back, as compared with its present condition, shows a vast change as to the relative power of the Moslem people and faith. God has not relaxed in his patronage of the Bible- reading and Bible-giving nations of the world. They it is who lead the world's commerce, its colonization, its freedom, and, to a large extent, its literature and its science. .The Chris- tian sovereign of the British isles is this day ruler over a larger Moslem population than can be claimed for the Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, or the Khedive of Egypt. If the Christians of the English-speaking lands have but faith, and the prayers of faith ascend from closet and sanctuary to an unforgetting Christ and to the untiring Paraclete, the result is neither dubious nor distant. Because the Emmanuel of God is "the Truth," and his omnipresence and alraightiness floods the entire scene of present collision, and as well also, perchance, of future conflict, it is as sure as the return of day and the revolutions of the seasons, that the errors which have advent- ured to impugn and to counterwork that Truth must go down. 160 EBAS AND CHABACTEBS OF MISTOBT. VIII. THE CRUSADES. Few sentences have been more praised and cited, in the whole range of English literature, than those of Johns&n when reciting his visit to the Hebrides: "Whence," as he says, "savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion. . . . Far from me, and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may con- duct ns indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of lona." A contemporary of Johnson, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, fond alike of good cheer and exact science, and less likely to be overcome by mere sentiment, was yet, on first reading these lines of the great critic's journal, so moved that he clasped his hands to- gether, and for some time remained in the attitude of silent and admiring sympathy. And the sharer and guide of John- son's visit to the scenes hallowed by the prayers and toils of St. Columba, the Boswell to whom we owe one of the most be- witching volumes of biography, speaks of leaving quietly his Hebridean host and his illustrious friend and stealing back for a solitary meditation amid the ruins of St. Columba's eathe- TRE CRUSADES. 161 dral ; and adds, with a simplicity that is touching, " I hoped that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should main- tain an exemplary conduct."* That the ruins of the island guarded effectually Boswell, in after times, from the pleasures of the table and the bottle, and made him discreet and blame- less, does not very distinctly appear. But if scenes made im- pressive with the sacrifices of scholars and saints, there toiling and dying, as early evangelists of Northern Europe, touch pro- foundly, how much more of divinest energy and what incom- parable power must linger around fields traversed by the feet of our Saviour himself; the hill -sides, lakes, mountains, and cities where taught the incarnate God, and where yet brood over the landscape memories of the Redeemer who bought us ; of the tomb whence emerged the Resun-ection and the Life ; and the bill -tops whence ascended to his native sties the Brother who is to re-appear as Judge of the quick and the dead. Could mere local associations waken effectually, and renew us permanently, the scenes of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Olivet, and Calvary would breed intensest devotion. The Master himself seems to have guarded ns against such expectations, as in themselves delusive. When, in passionate admiration, a hearer exclaimed over the privileges, as enviable and unrivalled, of an association near and prolonged with the great Teacher, such as had been the lot of his earthly mother — to that hearer's cry of blessedness for the parent that bare him, and the breasts that nursed him — he responded, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it."t The spiritual tie of the truth by him propounded, and * Croker's Boswell, v. 76 : London, 1839. \ Luke, xi. 27, 28. 162 EBAS AND CHAUACTEBS OF HISTOBT. by the believer received, is the bond of a truer eflBciency and the pledge of a raore lasting blessedness. It is the gen- eral sentiment of Christian theologians that the appearances, or theophanies, of the Old Testament, made in human form to the fathers, were by the Son, and not by the Father or the Paraclete. When Jacob, the great ancestor of the favored tribes, wrestled in the darkness with the Angel of the Covenant, and came out of the dread interview at Peniel halting for life, and, in memory of the mystic conflict, his posterity never after- ward partook, in the animals that were served on their tables, of the sinew that shrunk in their father's limb, it was God the Son who then, in closest stragglings, deigned to wrestle with the patriarch, till the Jacob emerged with the new title of Israel — the prince who Lad prevailed with God. If mere re- membrances of hallowed scenes were to become God's method of regenerating the souls of his worshippers, it would have seemed natural that our Lord, in his journeyings through Pal- estine, should have guided the twelve to the spot where this colloquy so many centuries before had occurred. How would it have told on the reverence of the apostles and their conver- sion to have heard from the Master that on that space he, centuries before the Advent at Bethlehem, had come near to their wayfaring parent. The Gospels give no hint of such loca- tion by our Lord in any of his journeys of the ancient visit, and such fixing the ejtact site of that memorable theophany. And, even after the wonders of the Kesurrection, when Thomas — yet doubting while others believed and adored — fixed, as the crucial test of his faith, a probing with his own hands of the wound-prints received on the Cross, the Saviour, though indulg- ing the weakness of his apostle, censured it by commending THE CBUSADES. 163 rather those who had not seen and yet believed.* The word of our Maker and Eansomer, duly endorsed, is a better and more blessed basis of our trust than the mere visible and palpa- ble manifestation which may please eye and palm, but fail to reach the heart and sway and regenerate the soul. But myriads have dwelt upon this local association with the region occupied and traversed by our Lord, as giving to devo- tion its surest supports. To stand on Olivet, to pace the en- closure of Gethsemane, to cross the brook Cedron, to visit the grotto of the Nativity or the Holy Sepulchre, would seem to them methods unfailing in their power to produce sympathy the most lively, and to leave behind impressions that should follow the pilgrim to his death-day, and be carried back to his native land, however remote, in images never to be effaced. The crusades mark a period of some two hundred years — stretching from the last decade of the eleventh century, or about 1090, to the last decade of the thirteenth century, or about 1290; spanning the lifetime of some six or seven suc- cessive generations in the population of Northern and Western Europe, when large portions of their population, severed from their native layers, precipitated themselves in successive ava- lanches, lite the rocky and icy sides of some lofty Alpine mountains, rolling down with what seemed an irresistible force and impulse on the East, and more especially on the land of Palestine — memorable to the Christian and the Hebrew world as the scene of the narratives and the home of the personages described in the Old and New Testaments. To the Christian, especially, as the place of the teachings, miracles, and Passion * John XX. 29. 164 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. of the Saviour, that land had its unparalleled attractions and sacredness. After the fall of the impenitent Jerusalem before the arms of the pagan Titus, its most venerable associations had been profaned and dishallowed by the pagan imperial power. But when Christianity had been established as the re- ligion of the empire, many of its sacred spots had received a new, perhaps a superstitious and imaginary consecration. When Mahometanism under the Saracens, its first champions, had con- quered the land, the pilgrimages of the Christians from oth- er lands had been tolerated. But when, in their stead, came the second and more barbarous proselytes of Mahometanism, the Turks, the treatment of the Christians seeking the scenes of the Nativity and Passion became cruel and ferocious. A false interpretation of the Apocalypse — a book intended to minister perpetual vigilance, but liable to recurrent misap- plication on the part of the presumptuous and headstrong — had become prevalent throughout Christendom in the begin- ning of the eleventh century, that, with the completion of the one thousand years on the Christian calendar, the end of the world was at hand. Men held with a loose hand their prop- erties, and looked wistfully to that far Eastern land of prophe- cy and revelation, where the second coming of the Lord was waited for as the signal of the last judgment. A general in- dignation was aroused that a region hallowed by his forerun- ners, the Hebrew prophets, and by himself and his apostles, should be given over to the savagery and brutal domination of the misbelieving Moslem. An earlier pontiff, Gregory VII. — the Hildebrand who, in his vigor and directness, had done so much to consolidate and elevate the pontifical power; — had spoken of the desirableness of a Christian recovery of THE CRUSADES. 165 the Holy Land. Bnt it was under a later Pope, Urban II., that the first movement occurred. So tumultuous and widely spread, so rapid and irregular, were these great popular move- ments, that the exact number of the Crusades is yet a matter of debate among high authorities. Some reckon six, others seven, and yet others eight ; and, extending the appellation to kindred agitations which took the name and rose from the upheaval, the number would exceed even the highest of those already recounted. Peter the Hermit, a recluse of simplest hab- its and venerable aspect, proclaimed the insults of the misbe- lieving Moslems, and the sufferings of the Christian residents or visitors of the scenes of the Incarnation and Passion. A companion of his — equally destitute of worldly resources and backers, and known as Walter the Penniless, commended, as both of them were, by their poverty and self-denial, to the sympathy of the masses — led the earliest expedition. The cry of the multitudes that thronged to hear their passionate appeal was, " God wills it." Strong in the persuasion that a divine patronage was over them, and invincible, seemingly, in their rapid accessions, they assumed a cross on the dress as the emblem of their pledge to go in person for the recovery of the Holy Land from the infidels. Church councils, summoned to hear the appeal, sanctioned the enterprise ; no pontiffs with- held their solemn and eager benediction. It seemed for a time as if Christendom, loosed from its European basis, was hurling itself, in one huge embodiment of zeal and vengeance, upon the ancient and misbelieving East. But there was ignorance, inexperience, and brutality in the masses thus conducted. The task of supplying the commissariat, and ordering march and voyage and transportation, soon outgrew the expertness and 8 166 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. the powers of those who had roused the multitude, but could not discipline, order, harmonize, or safely direct it. When on the scene of their Eastern collision with the enemies to be re- pelled and dispossessed, Peter himself lost all true heart, and would have covertly •withdrawn from a movement he could no longer control ; but he was pursued and forced to return. Myriads perished by hardship, hunger, and the incursions of the people whose lands and cities they were ravaging and in- festing. One of the crusades — from the large number of the youth, yet adolescent but not adult, gathered into its indiscriminate groupings, and torn from home, parents, and masters — was called the Crusade of the Children. Homeless, lawless, and rectless as the "hoodlums" of our own Pacific Coast, they perished in groups with fearful rapidity ; and of the remnant of them hundreds were betrayed into the hands of their ene- mies and sold as slaves. Godfrey of Bouillon (or Boulogne) and Tancred, so eminent in the poetic and romantic annals of the movement, were among the noble leaders. With vast expense of life, but with lavish displays of heroism, the crusaders persisted. Jerusalem was won, but with an indiscriminate slaughter of its Mahome- tan defenders, seventy thousand of the Moslems being put to the sword ; and these avengers of Christ wading in blood to the sacred places of the Lord's passion and entombment. Tasso, in his great Italian epic of " Jerusalem Delivered," has pictured their successes and their precedent sacrifices. There was much in the character of Godfrey, hailed as the first ruler of the new Christian kingdom, to deserve respect. But he soon died. Many of the crusaders, the sacred city won, turned their THE CRUSADES. 167 faces again to their homes in Europe. New military orders, in part religious and in part secular, were instituted to guard the Holy City and the Holy Sepulchre. The one, the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, afterward, from more recent removal and in later ages nearer our own, known as the Knights of Malta ; others, from their first station in the Temple, the Knights Templars, so famous in the after history of both France and England, and going down, after a desperate strug- gle, under the denunciation of pontifE and Christian mon- archs; and lastly, of German origin and nationality, the Teu- tonic Knights. But the Mahometans of Syria and Egypt recovered strength, and made the condition of the Christian powers un- easy and perilous. A second crusade was preached under the overwhelming influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in many re- gards the greatest man of his age, its oracle for wisdom, piety, and eloquence, and believed to be a worker of miracles. Em- perors and kings enlisted in the renewed movement. But passing along, as with a whirlwind of popular favor and super- stitious confidence, the terrible reverses came so soon and were so large, that the favor even of a St. Bernard was imperilled, and what he himself called " the season of his disgrace " set in. He threw, and perhaps but too justly, the blame of the failure on the sins of the crusaders themselves. But there was, in the views of religion that even ho received and incul- cated, much that made it unfitting that the Christ of the Gos- pels, and the Saviour as Paul preached hira, should lend his sanction to errors so perverse and abuses so vast. The Greek emperor, nominally Christian, and almost as far gone from the purity of primitive Christianity as the Eomish Church which 168 ERAS AND CHARACTEBS OF HISTORY. furnished the crusades and canonized Bernard, dreaded and betrayed and counterworked the Latin invaders, whom he feigned to treat as allies, but dreaded as subverters of his own power. In the third crusade was enlisted against the heroic Saladin, who mustered Saracen and Turk, among others the heroic Eichard the Lion-hearted, the English king, of name so terri- ble to the Mahometan foes that, sixty years afterward, a Christian visiting the Holy Land found Eichard's name used by the Mahometan women to silence their children. If a Mahometan rider found his horse shy, he was wont to ex- claim, "Dost think Eichard behind the bush?" But Sala- din had captured Jerusalem, and with no such indiscriminate slaughter of its Christian occupants as Godfrey had inflicted on its Mahometan residents when taking it from them. Eichard saw the city from a hill, veiled his face, and cried in- dignantly at the failing strength of his forces, " Those unwill- ing to rescue are unworthy to see the Sepulchre of Christ." He retired as from an unequal conflict in a truce for three years, three months, three weeks, and three days. The Chris- tian pilgrims were to have leave to visit the Sepulchre ; and the English hero returned, to find on his homeward way captivity at the hands of a treacherous German confederate in the orig- inal campaign. Though released from this prison, and reach- ing England, Eichard died at the siege of a petty provincial castle. Saladin died at Damascus, honored for valor and virtue even of his Christian foemen, and bidding in death his wind- ing sheet at the end of a spear to be borne through the streets of the city with the herald's cry, " This is all that remains to the mighty Saladin, the conqueror of the East." THE CRUSADES. 169 In point of policy and influence no wearer of the tiara has surpassed the great pontiff, Innocent III. He proclaimed a fourth crusade, but it turned aside to capture Constantinople. A fifth assailed Egypt. The last great crusades, on Syrian and African soil — by some called the sixth and seventh, and by others counted the seventh and eighth — were led, at inter- vals of twenty years, by one of the greatest and best of the kings of France, Louis IX., called Saint Louis, and in his per- sonal character (as portrayed in the pages of his faithful Join- ville), in his independent bearing toward the Roman see, and in his management of his own France, proving himself not unworthy of the title. But bis first crusade left him a pris- oner in Egypt, honored and revered even by his captors, The walls of Cairo were girt with the heads of Christian victims. Eeleased on a large ransom, and by surrendering Damietta, he returned to France. After a wise and honored reign at home, he resumed his endeavor in a final crusade; and Edward of England-T— then a prince, the son of the reigning King, Hen^ ry III. — with many English knights, accompanied him. The Christian fleet sailed for Tunis. The plague broke out in the besiegers' camp. Louis, seized by it, ordered himself to be l?iid on a bed of ashes, and died with the words of the Psalmist ou his lips : " I will enter into thy house, O Lord ; I will worship toward thy holy temple." We doubt not he entered then and thus the realm of higher light, where so much needs to be un- learned even by the best of these earthly militants. His son, successor to the French crown, abandoned the ill-fated enter- prise, and returned to his dominions in Europe. The Mameluke power had grown up in Egypt. They had taken Antiocb, slaying seventeen thousand of its inhabitants, 170 ESAS AND CHABACTEBS OF BISTORT. and selling one hundred thousand as slaves. In 1291 Acre, last of the Christian strongholds, passed also into their hands. It was described, even by Christians, as the most dissolute of cities; and of its sixty thousand captives death or bondage was the natural, perchance the legitimate, lot. This was in 1291, rounding the thirteenth century. To those who study the tracks of Providence across the plains of secular history by the lights of the old Bible this failure may seem not inexplicable. The crusaders were them- selves largely pervaded by superstition and grossest corruption. St. Louis had complained in confidence to his own good Join- ville of the evils that he was compelled to see in his own train, and as in the shadow of his own tents. The Templar Order, great as were the exploits and valor of some of its members, labored long and widely under the imputation of infidelity and grievous profligacy. The Knights of Malta, in later times — the old order of Hospitallers of St. John — great as were their heroic achievements against Mahometan sieges, were, as Coleridge saw their later members in his Mediterra- nean experiences, not patterns of virtue in their bearing and social influence, but the very opposite. He who sees how, in the Old Testament, God raised up Jeroboam, with a divine commission to punish the idolatries and apostasies of the line of David, kings as they were from a holy ancestor, and then afterward gave Jehu, through Elijah, the terrible charge against the house of Ahab, recollects how the Jeroboam and the Jehu were guilty of worshipping molten calves, and in the forbidden high places. Such a student of the dealings of God with man can well believe that Mahometan ism was, both Saracen and Turkish, an implement, in the hands of the righteous and sov- a:KE CRUSADES. 171 ereign God, to punish the perverseness and apostasy of those who, as the nominal Christendom, abusing great privileges and neglecting true oracles, were the more flagrantly and inexcusa- bly guilty before his high and equitable chancery. And the Protestant Christian, blessing God for an open Bi- ble and a free Press, can rejoice that in its light he reads the substitution of saints for the Saviour, and of outer forms for an inner and spiritual renovation, as being to many but a wor- ship of devils, that the Most High and the Most Holy will most sorely and most surely avenge. The Mahometan proph- et, wicted and malign as were his forgeries, as a witness for the Divine Unity against the idolatries of Mariolatry and the invocation of graven images and crucifixes, might, like Jehu, be worthy of little honest applause when, like Jehu, he called the nations to see "his zeal for the Lord." But Mahometan- ism was a rod which the true and one Jehovah might m^s^r righteously employ against the perverters of his Scwptures, and the Kehoboams and the Jehorams of the^Jaouse of Ahab, who might wear mitres and tiaras, but whti certainly could lit- tle claim, in their edicts, in their councils, in their traditions, in their indulgences, in their crusades, to bear on the front of tbeir banners " Holiness to the Lord," the old motto of ancient Israel in the days of her devout fealty. For besides their crusades on Eastern territory and against the minaret and the Koran, the papal power proclaimed its crusades against the Albigenses in Southern France, and its crusades, on a smaller scale but of the like ferocity, against the Stedingers of Holstein and Northern Flanders. And with the crusades the pontifical power built itself up into greater despotism as against the temporal rulers of Christian Europe. 172 EMAS AND CHARACTMRS OF HISTORY. It sent its legates ■with some of these expeditions, and the legatine power became afterward a formidable implement for consolidating and broadening papal aggressions. That Pontifical power sought eagerly the overthrow of the Christian Greek Empire of Constantinople, for it was, though a Christian patriarchate, a rival of the power set up at Kome, and that Italian sovereign assuming more and more to be the Catholic and exclusive head of the Church. Nobles and even tings were ready to mortgage and relinquish their possessions and revenues in equipping the crusades. The dead hand of the Church, to use the expressive phrase of the old law, was a corpse hand, whose gripe once fixed was not to be relaxed, set and stiffened in death. There would have been much, in a patriarchate at Jerusalem, where James had taught and suf- fered in the days of the first apostles, that to the common mind would (had the crusades attached it to the ruler on the Tiber) have given Kome a more gorgeous aspect of pristine sacred- ness than could belong to an episcopate and a patriarchate built on the site only of Paul's tomb and of Peter's. The story of Syria is a peculiar one. From Hermon and Lebanon on the north, to the Dead Sea on the south, from Damascus to the river of Egypt, how long ago was it sealed to Abraham; yet through how many centuries were the promised seed to await full occupancy of the Promised Land. Egypt and the Exodus through weary years tried their faith. The sins of the Canaanities had not filled the measure ; and God, the ever just, waited till the brim was reached. When the Chaldeans, and the Antiochus, and the Eomans came, each had a lease, as the avengers ; but the fee awaited a final resto- ration to the exiled owners. They returned. The consummate TME CRUSADES. l73 sin of the rejection and butchery of their fathers' Messiah called down a new, a direr, a broader expatriation. But through how many centuries have successive rulers and races had their lease of avenging occupancy — the Jew a wanderer and an un- believer and an exile still. The French Jansenists, and the English and American Protestants, have believed that, as God's Word announced an actual expatriation which has been verified, so with equal dis- tinctness it predicts a literal restoration. Isaiah and Ezekiel go ofE the stage, as it were, announcing such return of the long- banished people. If, as many exegetes suppose, the Jewish people return in their impenitence to the land long leased and mortgaged to their various foemen races, but one day to come again into their occupancy and tillage, it will be the scene of a new invasion from the formidable Gog and Magog of proph^ ecy, as both the older and the newer portions of. the divine oracles portray them. " God is in one mind, and none can turn him." Moses, in Midian, could afford to wait the longT protracted delays in the fulfilment of the pledge that to Abraham should the chosen land go. It went. In his own wise and absolute care of the thrones and races of our planet, God may have summoned the Moslem to do his own work, as blindly as of old Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus and Abasuerus and Pompey and Titus did that same work in that same land. And Israel, awakened from long obduracy, shall yet again know the Messiah whom their race for so many generations have pierced by fresh provocations; bat whom they cannot worry out of the fulness of his omniscient prescience, and out of the truthfulness of liis immutable oracles. The blood of Calvary is not soaked out of the sight of Him who has 8* 174 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. pledged to his Son that the Christ shall "see the travail of his soul." The Koman Church and the Greek Church are responsible to the unbelieving Jew and the misbelieving Moslem for the continuous scandal of the Sacred Fire, as it is called — that ex- hibition of fanatical frenzy and of sheer fraud, renewed within the walls of what is called the Holy Sepulchre year by year. The brass that Moses by divine order framed into a serpent figure, and elevated it to give healing to the camp bitten by the fiery serpents, the good Hezekiah ordered to be destroyed, as a new Nehushtan, when it became the object of idolatrous reverence. The Nehushtan of this annual scandal has no claim to any divine origin. It is the sheerest pretext and the baldest imposture. And the Turkish soldier, employed to keep the belligerent Greeks and Latins from mutual slaughter over the enkindling and distributing of the flame, may, in the Judgment-day, lay the guilt of his continued impenitence, as before the Bible, and his continued adhesion to the Koran, in some dread measure at least, upon the bodies nominally Chris- tian, but really and so far forth antichristian, who tolerated and repeated so utter a mockery and impiety over the tomb, as they call it, of the Christ who is the very " Truth." It is an evidence of the longing that a devout Komanist, spite of the failure of the crusades, yet feels toward the land of Christ's earthly manifestations, that, two centuries after the failure of the great crusades, so called, Columbus, the great Genoese, who to Castile and Leon gave a new world, has in his last will, as it is called, the expression of a desire to recover the Holy Land. And so, when the early Jesuit founders were in the incipient stages of their great enterprise, they spent, in THE CRUSADES. \1& the middle of the century after the death of Columbus, one year on the shores of the Mediterranean, contemplating a pur- pose which they had then formed to devote themselves to work in the Holy Land and to the conversion of the Mahom- etans. Earlier than that, in the close of the crusades, were formed the great mendicant bodies, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The latter were the order of Preachers, and soon had the Inquisition as their charge, and the emblem of their founder, Dominic — a dog with a flaming torch — as the picture of their activities. Loyola, in a later time, had from his military training given to his order a spirit of blind, military obedience that gave them immense power. And when the conscience with a thorough surrender was given to the conscience and will of their General, by each individual member of the order, it created a new element of unity and compactness and invin- cibility in the new confraternity. But the Holy Land, over which crusaders for two hundred years vainly expended such blood and treasures, to which a dying Columbus turned wist- fully his eyes, and for which a living Loyola, in the commence- ment of his enterprise, sighed as a field he would fain enter, is, if we read aright the intimations of the Book, reserved for a Jewish occupancy, to become ultimately the scene of Jewish conversion and regeneration. It is the calculation of some scholars that the lives sacrificed in the old crusades were five millions. Late German scholars raise the estimate to nine millions. But the Book in whose pages lies the history of that land's old occupancy and forfeiture, and in whose pages, not yet fully deciphered, lies too the pledge of its ultimate re- covery and evangelization, is a book that appeals, not to a sur- rendered conscience, given blindly into a fellow-mortal's keep- 116 JSSAS AND C3AJSACTERS OF BISTORT. ing, but to the individual conscience, in its own free prayers, and with its own free powers, imploring and receiving and obeying the free impulses of the Holy Spirit. The missions and the churches that use this volume conscientiously and freely, under the guidance of this unerring and exhanstless Spirit, will see, in God's good time, Emmanuel's land again loyally and universally his. It is encouraging, again, as a sign of our times, that Judaism in the person of the late lamented Neander gave to the Chris- tian Church and its history a convert of transparent piety, and whose vast erudition alike Protestant and Eomanist learned to trust and to revere ; that in Montefiore, a brother-in-law of the elder Eothschild, an English visitor, still an adherent to the faith of the synagogue, Palestine has received but lately hos- pitals of large cost and liberal endowment ; that to a statesman of Hebrew blood, though Christian in his present attachments, the British Empire — never in its colonies more widely extended than at this very day — has committed for a time the helm of national afEairs ; that to a convert from Judaism, Alexander, the British Christians and the German intrusted the Bishopric of Jerusalem, a see recognized and endowed by the joint action of these two Protestant peoples ; that it was to the establish- ment of such see, under conjoint influence of German Lu- therans and British Episcopalians, that the more advanced lead- ers of the Oxford Tract movement took exception, and this was to several of them the direct occasion of their renouncing Prot- estantism and going over to frank Catholicism ; that railroads and canals, in the interests of modern commerce, are seeking to turn the waters and territories of Egypt, Palestine, and old Chaldea into the new pathways of the nineteenth century, for THE CHUSADES. Ill a more general intercourse among the nations. In the con- verging light of these facts is it not evident that the land called Holy has yet in reserve prospects and destinies which merely unaided human sagacity is little able to forecast? Let us remember, again, how even the bigotry and ferocity of the old crusaders accomplished much, in the wise overrul- ings of God's providence, which pontiffs and councils and pil- grims and Knights Hospitaller and Templar never imagined. Much as the West lavished for what seemed vanity, it received in reflex influence from the ancient East more really than it- self either designed or expected. The despotic power of the old feudalism was, in large portions of Europe, lessened or thor- oughly undermined. The larger nobles lost, but the common- alty gained. The great trading cities of the Mediterranean and the Baltic became wealthier, and more populous, and more free. The peasantry, once largely serfs, became fugitives to and freemen of the growing towns. The liberties of Britain had, Montesquieu said, their first origin in the solitude of the old German forests. But an intermediate step in the develop- ment of freedom, not only for Britain, but for the Netherlands and for Italy and for France and for Spain, was in the growth of power in the larger towns, centres of manufacture and trade. And the baron, gone, by large and lavish mortgagings and sac- rifices, with his kindred and retainers, to the Sacred War, oft never lived to return ; or, returning, he found freedmen where he had left on his departure but retainei-s in villenage. So, too, from Arab masters and versions, 'many of the schol- ars and colleges of the West learned to know the treasures of old Greece. Aristotle came into honor, and was the revered master of many who, from Saracen instructors, had learned to I'? 8 BBAS AND CHARACTERS OP SISTORY. heed him, as philosopher and naturalist and logician and meta- physician. So, too, the arts and conveniences and luxuries of the East were remembered by the returning palmers and war- riors. The shallots of Western gardens fetched their name from the Ascalon of Syrian coasts, where the crusaders learned to relish and whence they transplanted them, with the plum, and the sugar-cane, and the maize, or Turkish corn, as they called it, brought from their far wanderings. Gothic architect- ure, too, though many seem loath to admit it, with its inter- lacing arches and its grouped columns, so generally and widely and simultaneously introduced into the sacred structures of the West, had its origin in Eastern types, and, perhaps, in the shadow of palm-groves or of the widely-arching banyan-tree of India. The men who were forced to forego feudalism took up chivalry, and its coats of arms, and its science of heraldry, and its tournaments. Medicine, and geography, and navigation, all were greatly affected by the new light won in Eastern travel. War adopted new engines and methods after the formidable Greek fire had made its terrible energy known ; and this led probably to the invention in Europe, or to the transfer from far China, of the gunpowder and cannon that so recast the ter- rible artillery of mutual devastation and slaughter. New fig- ures, the Arabic, took in accounts the place of the old and cumbrous Latin letters of the Eoman alphabet. They saw, too, new diseases. The terrible leprosy travelled on the skirts of their decimated and often defeated armies. The lazar-houses, once so numerously dotting Continental Eu- rope, gave a terrible significancy to the imagery of Scripture ; and the force and worth of the Saviour's miracles, as the evangelists describad them, took on new credit, when men saw THE CBUSADES. 179 in their own homes and kindred the hideous corrosions of the malady that their skill could so little relieve. Their very lan- guage had its new phrases, and words that we use with little glimpse, it may be, of their first meaning, came into the West- ern vocabulary, as the memorial of recent observations and of the travellers' wide experiences. The false prophet Mahomet was often in England called Maumet; figured with Satan in the mysteries or rude dramas of the age ; and from his name thus used some derive the word " mummery," now applied to idle and worthless shows. One of the strongest terms of dispar- agement for the utterly reckless and worthless is " miscreant." In the old French, and so passing over to the English, their Norman kin, it meant merely at first "a misbeliever," and eminently a believer in the false prophet of Mecca. And as men who had returned listless and penniless from their far Eastern pilgrimage and warfare talked often of the "Holy Land," the Sainte Terre, from which they had come, it went over into popular use as " saunterer," a man without a busi- ness, and often without a home. The Holy Land, idly sought and cravenly left, had made him a vague rambler, loath to put hand to the plough or the flail, and ready to withdraw his shoulder from each honest but heavy burden. The ages of chivalry have been painted in colors too vivid by many of more recent times. As presented in their own chronicles they retained much of bigotry, of profligacy, of ignorance, and of oppression. " Ages of faith " they were, as too flattering and partial scholars would paint them. But Baronius, a more erudite student, and one all whose preju- dices would lead him to shield the Church from needless dis- paragement, has described these times and the pontiffs often 180 ERAS AND CBARACTERH OF BISTORT. ■who then held the see of St. Peter, as it was called, in the most odious and repulsive light. The celibacy of the monas- tic and military orders, and the breaking up of homes and households in the West, when husband and father precipitated themselves on the ancient East and its allurements and its vices, was a process that augured as ill for the camp thus peo- pled, and the alien cities thus stormed, as for the hearth-stones and old sanctuaries that it had deserted to the care of stew- ards, flatterers, and varlets. A scepticism was often, and on authority that cannot al- ways be disputed, attributed to some of the returning cru- saders, who, ignorant of the Bible, and seeing often in the misbelieving Moslem a truthfulness and integrity, or even gen- erosity, that could not be despised, had become careless of all religion. They were represented as indulging in an occasional temerity of profane utterance and impious opinions that must, in men of their energy and position, have borne its baleful fruits on society around, in the families they bred, and in the retainers whom they led. There was, in God's overruling goodness, a residue of simple, often mute, trust in his grace and faithfulness, that, in less con- spicuous portions of the community, averted the full measure of divine wrath from a society nominally Christian but largely paganized. The Cross of Christ, as Paul preached it, and as the apostle exemplified it, was a spiritual power, working within the heart, ruling the life, and so blazing out upon the world ; " crucify- ing its confessor to the world, and the world unto him." The cross on the shoulder, and on the banner, and on the fane all varnished with superstitions, and over the camp all teeming THS CRUSADES. 181 with carnage and outrage, was not the talisman to ■which God had annexed the power of his own resistless and invincible Spirit. The descending energies of Pentecost flamed upon a Church thus cross-bearing ; and to the people of God, however few, poor, obscure, and ignorant, that truly rely on the Emman- uel and vividly and simply invoke and abide the descending Paraclete, are reserved the ultimate conquest of all nations, and the final overthrow of all adverse powers, however old, proud, and defiant. " The travail of Christ's soul," the crucified, has the universe for its assured and seasonable recompense. Such an agony only could earn such a diadem ; and what it has earned it can in no event forego. 182 ERAS AND CMABACTUBS OF HISTORY. IX. LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. One of the keenest witticisms which even Swift, that master of grave sarcasm, uttered was when he translated the motto of his Queen. Its Latin, " Semper eadem,'' meant literally " Ever the same," and so claimed for the sovereign and her character changeless consistency. The humorist gave as its English equivalent, " Worse and worse." And here the duplication of the one unchanged word meant, instead of unity of purpose, and an inflexible sameness and singleness of aim, an ever-grow- ing deterioration, a worsening, that grew darker with every day that went over the regal wearer of the title. It was a gibe rather than a judgment. Anne had not deserved it. But it may afford an illustration how lack of change may slope easily toward declension and ruin. All human institutions and socie- ties need perpetual vigilance and anxious revision and minute supervision, to hold them in a course of real growth and health- fulness. It was the Divine witness of old against Moab that the nation had settled upon its lees. Eest may become rottea- ness. Time itself, as Bacon has said, is one of the greatest of innovators, and the changes thus invisibly and incessantly com- ing upon man, and upon his works and upon his customs, are often parasitical growths that must be retrenched as mouldi- ness and fungous excrescence, if the original excellence is to be sustained or the true life maintained. The promise of the LVTHEB AND MIS TIMES. 183 Divine Husbandman, in the new dispensation, as to the con- tinued energy and fertility of the vine of his own planting, was that he would purge and prune it, that it might bring forth more fruit. Else its sap would run but into leaf and wood, and its free riot of foliage and branch would be barren- ness. It needed to be "cut down" closely, that its clusters might be redundant and its purple grapes gladden the vine- dresser. So the human face that, in its anxiety to preserve its pristine traits and symmetry, forswears all recourse to the foun- tain, the ewer, or the napkin, is likely, from the inevitable ac- cretions and the hourly deposits of grime, to incur not only in- crustations of dirt, but the first instalments of disease in its strange aspirations after a mistaken unchangeableness. In the old economy we know who blamed Eli because, when his sons made themselves vile, and he, though not sharing their corrup- tions, had yet " restrained them not ;" and how the same Di- vine Arbiter honored Josiah because he had dared, spite of the slow accretion of abuse and crime which came as his heritage from the past, to reform it back again to its original and God- given models, lopping down with a keen pruning-knife what had grown rank and large under the name of prescription and hoar antiquity. An era in the religious history of Europe known as the Eef- ormation has, however, by some admirers of the past, even in Protestant England and among the clergy of her Established Church, been petulantly called within a few years " the Defor- mation." Such cavillers must have read carelessly the history of the corruptions of the Middle Ages, and must have blinked very unaccountably some confessions, by very learned and un- impeachable authorities of the Roman communion, as to the 184 ERAS AND CEARACTEBS OF EISTOEY. enormities and atrocities that were found even in the court of the Pontificate and among wearers of the papal tiara. The preachers, the founders of the religious orders, the councils held in those dark ages, all hewail and denounce the ahoundings of superstition and oppression that cried aloud for a change, Enemies and friends hare agreed in acknowledging the great power and boldness of Martin Luther, in bringing about signal and wide-spread change in the age where God's providence as- signed his lot. He was no discoverer, no leader of a military host, no inheritor of treasures, no statesman haunting princely courts, no child of the purple and the palace fated to wear rank and wield influence from his birth. But poor, and the son of a miner, he stood up in an era when the discovery of America had added to the world's wealth ; when the printing-press gave knowledge wider currency and thought a vast range of domi- nation ; when the revival of letters brought the stores of old Greek and Roman literature before the schools of all Christen- dom ; when the papacy was at the culmination of its grandeur and sway ; when Spain, in the control of the Emperor Charles v., was, in arms and political power and affluence of resources, the leading nation of the world, by its soldiers, and its colonies East and West, its mines, its hold on the Peninsula, on Ger- many, on the Netherlands, and during one period, by the mar- riage of Philip II., the son of Charles, to Mary of England, and in after times by his, Philip's, kinsmanship to Mary Queen of Scots, affecting powerfully the policy of both England and Scotland, then distinct kingdoms. And this son of a miner, with but a stout heart and a clear brain, and an open Bible, and a trust in God and his Word, foiled the craft and the might of the empire, and smote the Pontifical see blows from the ef- LVTHER AND HIS TIMES. 185 feet of which it has never recovered. As said French Catholic scholars some thirty years ago, the Abb6 Glaire and the Vi- cointe Walsh, in the " Encyclopedic Catholique," a work of eighteen folio volumes, issued under ecclesiastical sanction : "There is not, perhaps, in history a guiltier name than that of Martin Luther, the patriarch of Protestantism. For fifteen centuries the Church of Christ has seen many heretics assail her, many rebellious children turn against her; but never a sect, never a heresy, never a persecution, presented traits so grave, and principles so dangerous, as the revolt of the six- teenth century raised and disguised under the delusive banner of Eeform."* Who, the Protestant reader, after reading such a denuncia- tion may well inquire, was the stalwart foe that swung so heavy a mace, and dealt such shattering desolation ? In 1483 Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, a town in Thnringia ; his father a poor miner, whose forges in Mansfield brought him scanty profits. In that year Michael Angelo, the great sculptor, architect, and painter, was yet but a lad of nine, and Copernicus, the astronomer, a boy of ten. Four years be- fore, in 1479, Ferdinand and Isabella had united the two king- doms of Castile and Aragon, and set up, with paternal care, the Inquisition in their dominions. Nine years after the German boy's birth, Columbus, with the funds and patronage of the same Ferdinand and Isabella, had discovered the islands of His- paniola and Cuba. And when Martin was eleven years of age, or two years after, the continent of America was discovered, to become afterward the scene of our ancestral Colonies and our * "Enoycl. Cath.,"xiv. p. 66: Paris, 1 847. 186 EBAS AND VBABACTERS OP BISTORT. Kevoliition. As a poor singer-boy, when at the colleges of Magdeburg and Eisenach, he asked alms and sung hymns at the door of the charitable. A pious matron, wife of Cotta, Burgo- master of Eisenach, noticed the poor singer-boy and took hira into her house ; and his studies were thus easier. At eigh- teen he left for the University of Erfurt. He had been two years a student at Eisenach before seeing an entire Bible, and he determined to study Ilebrew and Greek, its original lan- guages. His first university studies had been of philosophy and law, for the latter of which professions, as the more gain- ful, his father had intended him. Losing a friend by assassina- tion, and a thunder-bolt falling to the earth at his side, he gave up the secular studies of Lis original choice and retired, against his father's wish and protest, to a convent of Augustinian monks in Erfurt, the same city where was the university. The attempt to commend himself to God by austerities but sad- dened him. Staupitz, vicar-general of the order which he had joined, said to him that true repentance began in the love of God, and bade him love the Saviour who had first loved him. The books of the great father Augnstine, from whom the order had its name, interested, but the books of Tauler, a pious mys- tic of the Dominicans of the fourteenth century, and an anony- mous work, " Theologia Germanica," of the same century, es- pecially touched and profited him. He was ordained priest, and appointed Professor of Philosophy in the University of Wittenberg, giving lectures on the Bible which drew students rapidly from the other parts of Germany. His own Au- gustinian order sent him in 1511, when he was twenty-eight years of age, to represent their cause in some question as to the government of the order. "The just shall live by faith" was LUTHER AND SIS TIMES. 187 the Scripture saying with which he began at Wittenberg his exposition of the Bible. At Rome, where the violent and mar- tial Julius II. was pontiff, and impiety was blatant and rampant in ecclesiastical circles, he was startled. When climbing, on his knees, the reputed staircase of Pilate shown in the Eternal City, that saying, " The just shall live by faith," sounded as in his ears. " For 100,000 florins I would not have missed see- ing Rome," he often afterward said. He came back a, de- vouter man, and resumed his biblical teaching, but to attack the scholastic philosophy of Aristotle, then dominant. Christ's death was the theme of his lectures in the professor's chair and of his sermons; and in 1516 he accepted the place of vicar-general of his order. The next year, 1517, Leo X., a new pope, strong in the culture and artistic elegance and wealth of his Medicean family, sent through the Catholic world indul- gences to be sold. Tetzel, of the Dominican order, was, for Saxony, Luther's country, one of the most glib and bold and successful of the venders of these indulgences. Now, Hume and other sceptics have tried to trace all of Luther's zeal to the fact that the order, the Augustinian, of which he was one, had not been chosen, but the Dominican, to peddle in Saxony these popular latch-keys of Paradise. But, in respect to this, it is sufficient to say that the great principle of the Reformation, "justification by faith," had dawned on his mind, by the instrumentality of Staupitz, more than ten years before, and had been driven home upon him, on his road to the Italian capital, six years before. Now, to this day the greatest teachers of the Roman communion hold indulgences to be of discharge only from the penal consequences of sin in this world. But their exact efficiency is yet matter of debate. 188 JSRAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. They are proffered for certain visits and religious services in some of the churches of Rome to this day. They were, in a late day, vended in large quantities in Mexico and South Amer- ica. In Luther's time the promises made by Tetzel as to their cogency and their currency took in heaven no less than earth. He, Tetzel, said he had saved more souls by his indulgences than the apostles by their sermons. The great purpose to which Leo X. would apply the proceeds was the completion and adornment of the magnificent cathedral of St. Peter's, yet at Rome the admiration and pride of the Catholic world. But if souls, deluded by the promise of immunity from condemna- tion, were the chief patrons of this traflBc, the stones and tim- bers of that edifice have a history behind them not in keeping with the words to St. Peter, alleged by the Catholic Church as the charter of his superior power in the apostolic college and in the whole Catholic (Ecumenical Church : " On this rock I will build my Church." As Tetzel stated it, the barter of faith, receiving lucre for license, and so warranting celestial grace, it is not too much to say that the blood of souls de- ceived to their endless perdition was the cement of that stately structure. And what the prophet of old said to Israel, in days of Hebrew fraud and violence, comes back to a devout and meditative Protestant, as he gazes on that splendor: "The beam out of the timber shall cry and the stone out of the wall shall answer it." Not Peter, nor Paul, nor David, nor Abra- ham, nor the Master himself, would sanction the creed of sal- vability as mercenary and matter of traflBc, as Tetzel coarsely propounded it. Luther was justly indignant. It was no emulation, in hope of scanty gains, to his mind socrude and blasphemous, but be- LVTUER AND MIS TIMES. 189 cause absolute purchase with gold was simony. If John the Baptist preached repentance as the harbinger of Christ's king- dom, Luther preached that of repentance and regeneration as based on Christ's free love and redemption, on his cross, as still, after sixteen centuries, the law of the eternal kingdom. He attached ninety-five theses, or propositions, against indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg church. It was on the last day of October, 1617, that he nailed them there, amid pilgrims who in crowds had come to buy indulgences, and returned to their hamlets and fields with copies of Luther's protest instead. Tetzel was, of course, enraged. Luther's timid friends quailed, but Luther as yet honestly held that Leo X. would disavow such principles as Tetzel proclaimed when vending like a charlatan his sacred wares. Leo X. thought it a mere monks' quarrel. Fugger, a rich German banker, of the house who so magnificently entertained an emperor by a fire of cinnamon, into which were fed notes and bonds recording the emperor's indebtedness to the house, was the capitalist behind Tetzel in the sale of the bulls of indulgence, and was, of course, not in- different to the discredit of the wares and the opposition en- countered by the main pulpit vender of the merchandise. Luther moved widely, preaching everywhere his denunciations of doctrines so reckless. He printed his theses, and also com- mentaries on the Lord's Prayer and on the Decalogue. His works found their way even into Italy. Luther was told to appear before Leo X. at Rome. He would not go. The dun- geon and the scafEold would have awaited him there. A leg- ate was sent into Germany, the Cardinal Cajetan, who called Luther to an appearance at Augsburg. He appeared, and re- fused retractation. The Elector of Saxony, his sovereign, a wise 9 190 £!11AS AND CHABACTERS OF MISTOBT. but cautious prince, would not deliver Luther to the legate. Luther appealed from the Pope to a general council. Luther continued his lectures, which drew crowds from far ; and pub- lished expositions of Scripture, especially that on the Galatians, which he used to call his own epistle, an exposition which Bunyan, years after, so profited by. The imperial seat being vacant, Frederick, the Saxon Elector, was offered support to become the occupant of the throne. He declined it, and gave his influence to the election of Charles V. Luther's life was openly and in secret threatened. Some brave knights, friendly to the Eeformation, offered their aid in arms to protect him ; but the reply of the dauntless man, a martyr in heart, was, " By the Word the world has been conquered ; by the Word the Church has been saved ; by the Word, too, she will be re- stored. I do not despise your offers, but I will not lean upon any one but Christ." The restoration of which the great con- fessor had not yet despaired was his aim ; not the overthrow of the Christian commonwealth, but its establishment on the one immovable foundation, Christ — on his righteousness, on his sacrifice, and on his oracles. In 1520 he launched an ap- peal to the German nobles on the Reformation of Christen- dom. Two thousand students had clustered about him at Wittenberg. In that same year, 1520, when he addressed the nobles on Reformation, he assailed in another treatise the Mass ; and then his work on the Babylonian captivity of the Church appeared, comparing the lot of God's people to the exiled Israel when the Chaldeans led them from native land to the banks of the Euphrates. In a letter to the Pope, Leo X., he compares him, the Pope, to Daniel thrown among wolves, as Luther held the pontiff to be at his capital. LUTEER AND HIS TIMES. 191 The pontiff launched a bull of excommunication. It had cer- tainly more the howl of a wolf than the tones of a Daniel in its repudiation of the heretic of Wittenberg. On receiving it Luther drew up a solemn protest, carrying his appeal to a general council, and in December, 1520, invited the University to see the pontiff's bull burnt before the church door. Eras- mus as yet had said that the best men inclined to Luther, who had been condemned only by two universities, and by them, though condemned, not confuted. The Emperor, lately crown- ed, was understood to favor the pontiff ; but, from regard to his patron, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, would have Luther con- demned only by a regular diet at Worms, where two questions- were to be presented — reformation in the political condition of the empire, and in religion. He, Luther, was summoned to appear before the Emperor and retract, and edicts against his books were everywhere placarded. On his way to Worms, the Elector's chancellor, a high officer of this his own sovereign, entreated Luther not to enter a town where his death was already decided upon. "Tell your master," was his reply, "were there as many devils in Worms as tiles on its roofs I would enter." On bis knees, amid friends, he prayed for grace, and then followed the herald that cited him to the as- sembly. He was asked as to the authorship of certain books, and then required to renounce them. He would not ; speaking calmly, first in German, then in Latin, refusing retractation, except as convinced of error by the Word of God, and closed : " Here I take my stand. I cannot do otherwise. So help me God!" Many violent friends of Eome and of the Emperor Charles V. would have Luther burnt and his works thrown into the Khine. In his later years Charles V. is said to have 192 EJiAS AND CHABACTEKS OF HISTORY. expressed regret that he did not violate his solemn safe-con- duct before given that Luther should be safe in visiting the diet. Charles V. pronounced, however, the ban of the empire. After three weeks the safe-conduct would expire. All were forbidden then to shield or feed him, his works were to be burnt, and Luther's friends were to be seized. On his quitting the diet, yet under the shelter of the unex- pired safe-conduct, Luther was, in the forest of Thuringia, not far from Eisenach, the old city of his second college, stopped by armed knights ; the dress of a knight was substi- tuted for his own ecclesiastical apparel, and he, not aware of the secret purpose of his escort, was carried a prisoner to the Castle of Wartbnrg, a fortified building on an eminence sur- rounded by woods. Most of his friends supposed him sacri- ficed by treachery. Ten months was Luther there : but not idly or despairingly. He busied himself in his great German version of the Bible from its original tongues, prepared in what he called "his Patmos." A cardinal. Archbishop of Mayence, prepared to renew the sale of indulgences. Luther, from his retirement, launched on it a philippic that made the cardinal quail and equivocate, promising to live as a pious bishop and Christian prince henceforth. But during these months of incarceration there were agita- tions and ferments, among the adherents of the new movement, that distressed him. Luther left his asylum to counteract these tendencies, without the leave of his patron and sovereign, the Elector. His appeals did much to quell the disturbance. His version appeared soon ; first, of the New Testament, exercising on the language of his people as well as on their faith an influence universally recognized, and not yet spent. Henry LUTREB AND SIS TIMES. 193 Vin. of England, educated originally for a bishop's mitre, before the death of his elder brother had opened his way to the crown, and proud of the inowledge of theology and the Fathers thus obtained, undertook to answer the " Babylonian Captivity " of Luther, heaping contumely fiercely on Luther, and declaring him worthy to be burnt. The Elector dreaded his undertaking to answer a crowned antagonist. But Luther would not be persuaded; If the Tudor expected reverence for his regal position, he found in the sturdy German a doughty antagonist, who repaid insult with insult ; and Henry in vain appealed to the Elector to extirpate such heresy. Luther went on writing, and in one year launched one hun- dred and thirty treatises, and in the next year eighty-three, upon the world. Nobly and serenely the man of such pro- digious and unraitigable activity said, "Do not believe in Luther, but in Jesus Christ. I myself care nothing about Luther." Leo died. St. Peter's Cathedral is standing to our day; but standing also is Luther's work, and moving and smiting, right and left, adown the centuries, the doctrines, and letters, and treatises, and texts, and Bibles that exposed the in- dulgences which had paid for that cathedral's construction. Stands too Luther's testimony, defying, in pontiffs' bulls and in edicts of emperors, the ban that would bind the "Word of God. Say, in God's sight, who will and who dare, 1;hat the Eef ormer's paragraphs are not the nobler, braver, better, and more endur- ing work by far than is the dome which Michael Angelo lifted to the crown of that great cathedral, with all its affluence of painting, statuary, architecture, and costliness. The rim of that dome talks of Peter. The work of the true-hearted Keformer tells of a greater — Peter's Master and Saviour, 194 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. Adrian VI., an old Netherlander, the friend and former teacher of the Emperor Charles V., was elected to. succeed Leo, and proposed to '' reform the Church by steps." " By steps," said Luther, " putting centuries between the steps." The con- troversy between Luther and Carlstadt and the Swiss Eeform- ers, as to the nature of Christ's presence in the Lord's Sup- per, and the Peasants' War, followed. Bucer, in Switzerland, Melancthon, in Germany, aided, and yet in another light they also clogged him. His controversy with Erasmus brought Luther no literary reputation, and brought Erasmus no gain of theological fame. Erasmus, timorous and courtier-like, was engrossed in literary activity, and became less and less friendly to the cause of the Gospel that he had in earlier years favored. At the Diet of Spires measures were adopted for a future exe- cution of the edict of the Diet of Worms. To resist this virtual abrogation of the Gospel the friends of the Reformation and the enfranchised Bible presented, as rulers of the several states, and as representatives of several great towns, a solemn Protestation. It originated the name of Protestant, in 1529. In 1530 came the Diet of Augsburg; and the great confession there presented was the explanation of the Reformed doctrines, drawn up by Melancthon, and approved by Luther. Luther would have been willing to have been immolated, as was Huss at the Council of Constance, and became indignant when he found that Melancthon was inclined to temporize with the papal representative. In 1525 Luther had married Catherine von Bora, a nun, who with her sister nuns had adopted the Protestant doctrines and renounced the conventual vows. As a husband and fa- ther he was an exemplar of tenderness, simplicity, and fidelity. LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 196 His letters to his little son, on God's garden and the leave to be asked fram the owner that little Hans might come and play there ; his grief at the death of his daughter Magdalena, a sorrow most touohingly and repeatedly expressed ; his general letters, a large and striking collection ; bis hymns, which ring yet in German sanctuary and worship ; bis hospitality amid narrow means; as well as his fearlessness, and bis untiring activity, as writer, teacher, preacher, and controversialist, show him a man of many-sided powers, and all dedicated, not with- out occasional and grave mistakes, indeed, but in singleness of intent generally, to the glory of the Master and his ransoming Cross, and presenting as the only righteousness the sinner's justi- fication by faith in that one Christ. " The Church," said he (and there he is indeed at variance with Eome and her edicts and principles), "is a poor sinner without Christ; not the Church, but Christ is the faith." Like Bunyan, he, the great Eeformer, lost bis life on an errand of the peace-maker — Bun- yan, the author of the "Pilgrim," in reconciling a son to the father whom he has offended and left ; Luther in a journey to Eisleben, his old birthplace, to make up a family variance among the household of the Counts of Mansfield. "Him I have taught, him I have confessed, him I love as my Saviour and Eedeeraer. . . . Take my poor soul up to thee." After uttering the words that so many Christians have used as their last utterance, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit " (the household of faith, in the train of their great Elder Brother, employing the words of bis, the Master's, pallid lips), he expired in 1546, eleven years after Loyola had instituted the Order of the Jesuits, and in the very year when the Council of Trent meets. His body was removed from Eisleben to be 196 S!RAS AND CHABAOTMiS OF HISTOBT. interred in Wittenberg, where he had so long taught, and to the doors of whose church he had attached his ninety-five theses against indulgences. He had seen but sixty-three years ; but how much had he accomplished. Perhaps his "Table-talk" — the hastily uttered and often imperfectly narrated remarks of liis meal-times, when he was to the poor student and the traveller a generous host and an ever accessible and afEable talker — show most the raciness, the wit and kindliness, and the ruggedness and the honesty of his soul. Burns, the Scottish poet, was not more a man of the people, familiar with their hearts, ways, and blunt speech. In his controversy with the Reformers of Switzerland as to the real presence of Christ in the sacramental elements, there was a bitterness on his part that, however natural, was to be regretted ; and the effects of the dissension thus bred are not yet eliminated from the Reformed Churches of the Continent. In the grievances of the peasants, as breaking out in the Peas- ants' War, he took manfully at first the side of the oppressed tillers of the soil ; but against their rebellion he early set him- self. As against the views of the Holy Spirit and his oflSces in the Church, in his controversy with the Anabaptists, he took ground that, if more deliberate and less under provocation, he would probably have softened. There were those, of the nomi- nal adherents to his own Confession and the Protestant com- munion, who held the great truth of justification by faith, per- chance, as with Antinomian proclivities. The Baptist move- ment in that respect, had he regarded it (as in its beginning Melancthon was disposed to do) with favor or acquiescence, might have guarded the reception of the great doctrine of jus- tification by faith from Antinomian abuses, by making it hinge LUTHER AND HIS TIMES. 197 \vith, and revolve around, the great doctrine of regeneration, personally experienced, by the influence of the Spirit, invoked, and received, and obeyed. For the schools of Germany he accomplished much. The more accomplished but less daring disciple, who continued his ■work, Melancthon, did yet more, and has been called by grate- ful successors the School-master of Germany. Worldly love and worldly lucre were not their objects of pursuit; and nei- ther hoarded of this world's goods more than did their great compeer — and reluctantly and reverently in some cases their opponent— in the Churches of France and Switzerland, Calvin. DoUinger, one of the most learned of men in Church his- tory, the Catholic scholar who has been prominent against the infallibility of the pontiff, had, in a work long preceding that controversy, gathered from a wide field, and with a keen eye and an apt hand, many instances of the abuses that, as even the great leaders complained, many Protestant scholars made of the great truth of faith only as justifying, as if it warranted license and led to depravation of morals. But the compari- son, as made over a yet more expanded field, and as continued through a yet longer tract of time, leaves the moral effect of the great Eeformatory movement under Luther, far above the results of a general and an unquestioned and an intolerant Eo- manism. More than seventy years ago the French Institute offered a prize on the temper and influence of the Keformation under Luther. It was a body nominally Catholic, far as it was not sceptic, the Institute promulgating the offer. Villers, the author of the essay to which the prize was adjudged, was a Catholic by education, though some French scholars modify the effect of his judgment by intimating that he married a 9* 198 ERAS AND CHABACTEB8 OF SISTOBT. Protestant lady. His wort, translated into English, and repro- duced in Britain and America, shows how a scholar of such surroundings recognized the mighty and beneficent influence of this great movement, on the conscience and intelligence and heart of the nations. More recently, in our own day, Lave- laye, a publicist of high reputation, a professor in a Catholic university in Catholic Belgium, has written and ^ent out an able comparison of the relative influence of Catholicism and Protestantism on the nations, in which this acute and intelli- gent observer, looking out from a Catholic land, adjudges most largely the preponderance for good to be with the Protestant faith. It is to be regretted that an essay so worthy of wide currency has not found an American publisher, though its first appearance was coincident with the pamphlets of Gladstone on Vaticanism, which on this side of the Atlantic, as on the other, were so largely re-issued and read. But was Luther himself personally a Christian of a high order ? Bossuet, with his high talent and rare eloquence, has in his " History of Variations " represented Luther by citations not always cautious or over-honest from the Eeformer's writ- ings. And in our own times a scholar of widest reading and rare keenness, the great Scottish metaphysician. Sir William Hamilton, allowed himself to cite and endorse these quotations from Luther at second hand and as found in Bossuet, as genuine and incontestable. It led to a reply by the late Archdeacon Julius C. Hare, an English scholar of ripe culture, and for some time resident in Germany. His defence of Luther, we think, showed very fully that Sir William Hamilton had allowed him- self without examination to adopt and reproduce as Luther's language mucli that Bossuet had grossly perverted, and that LUTEBR AND HIS TIMES. 199 Hamilton, had he but referred to Luther's own volumes, could not have used in the sense which, as taught by Bossuet, he ascribed to them. The work of Hare, now gone, was of that high ability that in Germany, Luther's own native country, its merit was acknowledged ; and the King of Prussia, brother and predecessor of the present sovereign and emperor, by his ambassador and friend, the late Chevalier Bunsen, sent to Hare the gift of a gold medal, as an expression of Germany's grati- tude to one who bad thus vindicated the illustrious Reformer. Other scholars, less liable to the imputation of a Protestant bias from an English education, may be cited as bearing like evidence. The late French historian, Michelet, has also trans- lated the "Table-talk" of Luther, and written also a life of the great Saxon, marked with strong admiration of the man and of his labors for truth and the race. Another Frenchman, but a strong Catholic, M. Audin, has devoted an elaborate volume to the career of the great raonk of Eisenach and Wittenberg, do- ing more justice than earlier Romanists to the high powers and many of the virtues of the great professor and teacher, who from Wittenberg shook the world and launched his lightning- bolts against the Church of St. Peter's. But a Protestant read- er will, of course, in a treatise like that which M. Audin has devoted to Luther, as in his similar volume against Calvin, find much that he must disallow and repudiate, as strongly mis- judging and greatly misrepresenting this rugged and heroic character. A Protestant, of Swiss residence and German training and French origin, the late eminent and excellent Merle d'Au- bigne, in volumes too justly valued and too widely scattered to need larger reference, has presented winningly and, in our judg- 200 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. ment, irrefragably, most of the great movements of the first heroic man, prophet-like in dignity and martyr-like in tempera- ment, whom God raised up to bring again the doctrines of Augustine and of Paul, the theological master of Augustine, and the doctrines of Paul's Master, the one head and teacher of the Church, into fresh remembrance before the peoples and tongues, who, in the name of an imaginary and perilous immo- bility, had allowed their communities to stagnate into most grievous and noisome superstitions. " The word of God is not bound," " It abideth forever," were favorite mottoes of the monk of Eisenach and Wittenberg. And in Protestant mis- sions and Bible societies how vigorously and broadly has that divine Word received from Divine Providence its fresh com- mission to visit the benighted, and to enfranchise the imprison- ed and the down-trodden. And when pontiffs in our own days, sitting in the shadow of St. Peter's, have denounced, as did Gregory XVI., and as did Pius IX., the labors of these associations and their dif- fusion of the divine oracles, it is scarce needed that the friends of Luther should apologize for the strength and sharpness of some of his controversial utterances. How, against the quiet translation and distribution of the Book that prophets and apostles by divine inspiration wrote, for all times and lands, has the authority, affecting infallibility, and presiding over a Church that claims unity and unchange- ableness, rolled out vaticinations of invective that Luther's sternest words scarce equal in severity and bitterness, when denouncing the antagonism of what he believed to be God's truth. Luther never claimed such personal infallibility. See the sacrifices and perils by which some of these missionary LUTHER AMD BIS TIMES. 201 versions have been framed, and the wide-reaching charity that has labored to carry the book to the cannibal's hut and the side of the. pyre where living widows were burnt by the corpse of a dead husband. And as we remember what God has already done by the boots, and for their readers and prayer- ful students, a candid collation of the divine and the human — of what the Christ, head of the Church on high, has said, and of what the human potentate, affecting to represent and explain him on the earth, has said — may well cause us to turn with a calm, sad earnestness from the councils and thrones when the edict of banning and of execration is proclaimed, with the exclamation of the dying patriarch upon our lips, " Unto their assembly, O my honor, be not thou united." For the union that truly relieves and establishes the Church is that of a divine life. It is a book, but not as locked in dead tongues ; but a book open to every reader and addressing itself to every conscience, that it be searched and collated and heeded and obeyed. The unchangeableness of councils and pontiffs is imaginary and supposititious. Wildest strife and foulest scan- dals have at times flecked and drenched this alleged unity and indefectibility of the conclave and the tiara. But trust the sin- gle soul to the one unchanging, omniscient, and omnipresent Saviour pledged to be with his people to the end of the world. Thus trusting in the Christ, indefectible and eternal, we come imploring and experiencing and obeying the monitions of that Paraclete — first author of that revelation and ever ready to answer the supplication of its docile and loyal reader. And here we have, in the one head, invisible but real, of the Church militant and the Church triumphant, and in the agency, free and living, exhaustless and unerring, of that Spirit 202 EBAS AND CHABACTMRS OF HISTORY. who came down in Pentecost — we have, alike for the solitary believer and the assembled disciples thus moored to the one Rock and held by the one Spirit, a hope " sure and steadfast." It is a hope surer than twenty centuries of oecumenical councils could make it; it is a hope steadfast with the steadfastness of that God who is in one mind and none can turn him. And the soul thus moored in the eternal anchorage upon the infinite and unmovable verities has the perfection of the Godhead as the warrant of confidence. Such a trust, passing out of the reach of Inquisition and martyr-stake and martyr-rack, has gone " within the vail whither the forerunner is for us entered, even the Jesus, a high-priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." The synodal and the oecumenical documents, that essay to reproduce on the earth this eternity and impeccability inher- ing only in the true Melchizedek, are valueless at the bar to which we tend. As to development, which has bewitched some minds, its exemplification in the individual or in the Church is not encouraging. We recognize identity in the thinker and writer, under the growth of maturer years, and the decrepitude and wrinkles of extremest age ; but shall we therefore idealize as glories in that identity the enlargement given to limb and frame by the dropsy ; the efflorescence, red and fiery, of the cancer ; the erosions, ghastly and revolting, of the leprosy ? We may hail, in the Church, what is true ; but what is abnormal and diseased — not according to the divine record, not attested and attended by the renewing and sancti- fying Spirit (however attached to old and venerable associa- tions) — we regard as the development of disease, the old life, invaded and perverted by the incipient death. We accept no such standard of beauty or vigor or health. LVTBER AND HIS TIMES. 203 To the law and the testimony. Thither Luther went, for thither Luther's Master sent him, and sends us. Far as that Book of that Emmanuel — and of that Spirit, as unfolding and irradiating the boot — sustains a doctrine, a communion, or a rite, we revere the divine authority. But if this standard re- pudiates the opinion or practice, then, though scores of Sanhe- drims favor it with their benediction — though against its ques- tioners councils of Trent and councils of the Vatican thunder their anathema — we turn to an authority paramount, perma- nent, and immovable. If not thus written, if not thus avouch- ed, the usage, however long descended and widely sanctioned, is to be denounced. " There is no truth in them," when the Christ and the Paraclete and the oracle all fail them. The German and the English speaking people have a large share in the literature, commerce, science, liberties, and history of the world. If equally loyal to the faith of the incarnate Saviour, heaven, as well as earth, is the heritage set before them. From the Patmos, as he termed it, of Luther's Wartburg issued the first instalment of the German Bible, that went so far and has done so much. From the old Patmos, where Do- mitian had penned John, came the Apocalypse, the chapters which shut up Eevelation. He who walked there — the true and faithful Witness — we are credibly informed, is living yet. From each new impediment and barrier cast in the path of his people — banned, and proscribed, and excommunicated — he is able to minister, in all the far future, new deliverances and victories, that shall ultimately brighten into the glories of the upper Paradise, the rest that remaineth for his people, dark- ened by no error. 204 EBAS AND CBARACTERS OF MISTOST. Luther was under the ban of the Pope and the ban of the Empire. The Inquisition had the approval of the power that banned thus our older worthies; the great Spanish Armada, dubbed Invincible, had the solemn benediction of the same infallible potentate. It blessed the Stuarts, and they lost the British throne. It blessed the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; but both slaughter and revocation have gone into history under another light than that in which the Infallible and Immutable would have placed them. The Syllabus has banned Bible societies and religious toleration, and pronounced solemnly for the infallibility of the Roman pontiff in the person of the aged pontiff, as compared with some of his predecessors, the less intelligent and the more superficial Pius IX. What says the word of God in the mat- ter of claims so novel and yet so sweeping ? JOHN CALVIN. 206 X. JOHN CALVIN. Br the estimate alike of the friends and of the antagonists of that great movement in the religious history of the world which is generally called the Eeformation, the name of Calvin stands next to that of Luther, in the vastness of his labors and the wide scope of his influence. The range of the power wielded by the monk of Wittenberg has run mainly through the people using the German language. From the impulse given by the efforts and character of the younger laborer has gone out a continuous energy, felt not merely in his native France, and in French Switzerland, the land of his adoption, but through Northern Italy, and through Holland, and in Brit- ain, both the English and the Scottish portions of the island, and all the colonies of Britain and Holland, alike in our own West and in the ancient East. Wherever the English tongue has become prevalent by the settlements and conquests of the stalwart Anglo-Saxon — wherever the Huguenot refugees, flung from France by the perfidious and tyrannous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, have lighted on European or American soil, and carried the French tongue to the new homes of the exile — the memory of John Calvin has travelled. The relative share of these tongues — German, English, and French — in the literature and intercourse of the future is a matter of debate yet to be determined. A half-century since, the tongue of po- 206 EMAS AND CUAMACTMBS OF MISTOMT. lite France seemed likely to become the language of diplomacy and fashion over the civilized world. But since that recent date the wide difEusion of the English traffic and colonization and freedom has given to their tongue a broader currency, which it is little likely to surrender or to see materially nar- rowed. And though the rich augmentations made by German genius, both to the literature and the science of modern civili- zation, have rendered the mastery of its speech more and more desirable to the scholar, even German scholars, with all their patriotic admiration of their native tongue, have held it proba- ble that the English has higher promise and greater adaptation, for its being made the dialect of the world's ultimate civiliza- tion and of the world's final fraternization. Into both the French and the English language, the story of Calvin and his teachings and institutions is more deeply wrought than that of the heroic and devoted Luther even. Far as the books and institutions of any people give pledge of shaping the future, the literature of England and of France is, to man's judgment, more sure of holding and of moulding the ages that are to come, than even the rich and the varied literature of Germany. In the year 1509, when Luther began in his professor's chair at the University of Wittenberg to give lectures on Scripture, which attracted general attention throughout Germany — but two years before the time when, in the service of his order, Luther made that visit to Eome, the Eternal City, which so deeply impressed him, and when he climbed on his knees Pi- late's Stairs — but two years before this stair-climbing, we say, there was born in Picardy, a northern province of France, in the town of Noyon, an infant son to a notary. The father, not a man of large means, but having some influential connections JOHN CALVm. 207 with the Church and the aristocracy of the region, endeavored to give his son, John Calvin, a good education. This was se- cured in part by the lad's sharing the studies of the children of the noble family of Montmorenci, and in part by the father's securing for this mere boy a place in the Church by the bishop's favor — an abuse of the times, giving boys not yet adolescent rank as Church teachers, when they had not age or capability to become as yet more than learners of the first elements. Sent to Paris, he had there the instructions of Corderius, famous to many after generations of school-boys for his Latin Colloquies, a school-boot now disused. But though tonsured, or shorn on the crown of the head, for orders, the lad was not in orders ; and the father, judging that his talents promised success in a more remunerative profession, that of the law, would have him study jurisprudence. In this, too, the youth showed great ap- titude ; and the eminent Alciat, one of the great jurists of the age, was among his instructors, and he became a Doctor of the Law. Such was his marked proficiency, even before his thus attaining the degree, that, in the absence of one of his profess- ors, L'Estaples, he occupied before his fellow-students occa- sionally the vacant chair of their teacher. On the death of his father he abandoned the pursuit of the law, to which he had turned in obedience to that father's wishes ; yet the training thus given to his intellect was, in God's wise leading, bene- ficial in his after devotion to religious and scriptural themes. A kinsman, Olivetan, afterward the first translator of the Bible into French, recommended to him the study of the Bible. At the college where he had Alciat for his teacher in jurispru- dence he met Wolraar, who taught him Greek and brought him to the study of the New Testament in that language. He 208 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OE HZSTORT. described, years after, in his Preface to tlie Psalms, his conver- sion as sudden. Religion became now his absorbing pursuit ; and though, as he frankly expresses it, his taste and bearing were somewhat clownish, or " subrustic," flavored with awk- wardness, to use his classical phrase, he became the resort and counsellor of other students who were like-minded. But his studies were intemperately pursued to midnight, followed by a regular review of what he had last learned, and then resumed at a very early hour on the next morning. This consuming zeal laid the foundation for the disorders which made his later years those of continuous suffering, and led to his compara- tively early death. Calvin had been but a boy of some eight years old when Luther nailed on the church door at Witten- berg his memorable theses against the abuses of indulgences. The storms, that were gradually increasing in volume and in darkness throughout Germany, must have more or less rever- berated around the French home and college life of the youth who was destined to become so powerful an ally in the great movement. When by the decease of his father released from the jurist career, for which his acuteness of mind and tenac- ity of purpose so fitted him to shine, and left free to fol- low the guidance of conscience in those religious studies and avocations for which the ambitions hopes of his father had induced him to turn for a time aside, Calvin's absorption in religious questions and duties was hailed with delight by those of his friends who had imbibed a relish for the Gospel, and whose interest was strongly enlisted for that reform in the Church which the best men on all sides acknowledged to be so greatly needed. Though studious and by preference retired, Calvin seems to have attracted, by his principles and temper, JOHN CALVIN. 209 the favor of many in the leading classes of the nation. For a time he was sheltered by the influence of Margaret of Navarre, the sister of Francis I. of France ; and when finding it neces- sary to quit France, he was for a time in the court of Een6e, Duchess of Ferrara, herself an adherent of the new opinions. She, a daughter of Louis XIL, a former King of France, was a woman of high worth, but in her religious sentiments she had not the sympathy of her consort, the dute. Calvin had passed to a residence in Switzerland, where his talents and consecration of purpose had awatened for him the strong regard of friends of the Eeformation. He came to Geneva, intending, as he says, to pass but a night there and continue his journey ; but Farel, a man of great zeal, and as a preacher of more popular gifts than Calvin, but not of Calvin's grasp of intellect or depth of learning, was strongly impressed with the powers and worth of the young scholar ; and with something of that sternness and celestial majesty, as of one of the old prophets, which marked the character and bearing of Farel, he denounced on Calvin the divine displeasure, declaring that the curse of God, if he refused to abide and occupy that field, would rest on Lim as on " one seeking rather himself than Christ." Thus adjured and admonished, the young French scholar, but twenty-eight years old, consented to remain, and was soon appointed teacher of theology. A career thus begun, as athwart his own indi- vidual preferences and his former purposes of life, but usher- ing in so wide a sphere of labor, and leading to results alike so extended and so enduring, might well furnish to his own mind an illustration of that great truth of the divine foreordination, which looms up so largely in the theology and writings of the great Swiss Eeformer. His classical studies had given him 210 JSSAS AND CBABACTEBS OF HISTORY. command of a style, admired even in that age, when so many eminent classical scholars were found in Continental Europe. He had formed it, it has been said by some of his biographers, and continued to maintain it, by the assiduous study of the works of the great Eoman orator and moralist Cicero. But other men, like Erasmus and Sadolet and Bembo, were men thought to have effectually acquired the peculiarities of the Ciceronian idiom, in whose mind the flow and grace of expres- sion was put to no such high uses as those to which Calvin had dedicated his days and toils and entire soul. He had, in France and in Italy, been in peril for his religious opinions, and martyrdom was the gate into which the zealous and fearless confessors of Christ might in that age be sum- moned suddenly to walk. Of habits of life and apparel sim- ple and self-denying to austerity, if not to positive asceticism, Calvin was a man of stern convictions, walking with a loftier sense of ever-incumbent duty than ever bound Simon Stylites to his fantastic pillar — in the words of a fellow-Protestant long after, the British Mlltqp, walking " as ever in his great Task- master's eye." And he had studied that great Task-master's words, and pondered his divine example, and implored, too earnestly and penitently, that master's prompting Spirit, that he should be willing to accept as his stint of obligation, as his solemn and glorious " task," the mere pattering of beads, or standing on a lofty column to meet the applauding but stolid gaze of superstitious crowds ; as if thus the great cross-bear- ing Brother were to be effectively honored, and the vast mass of the estranged multitude were to be won into the open Kingdom of Heaven. Without Luther's command of the pop- ular style of his countrymen, without the personal magnetism, JOHN CALVIN. 211 hearty and homely and nigged, by which the Wittenberg Re- former attached the crowds to his pulpit and his person, Cal- vin relied on the grave presentation of important trnths in the most thorough and impressive style. More a scholar and more a recluse than his great Saxon prototype, but also less a man of the people, and less conversant with the people's jests, proverbs, and apothegms, he was, withal, a profounder thinker, and a reasoner whose arguments hung, as by links of steel, to one another. That he had the power of attaching students and friends, who saw him intimately and who saw him long, with enduring bonds to himself, is evidenced from the testi- mony of men like Beza and like Knox, who had thus observed him narrowly and nearly. Not capable of blundering, as Lu- ther sometimes did, into inconsistency, yet when Calvin took lip a wrong conclusion in practice he followed it up, with a self-denying indifference to the sacrifice of feeling that it in- volved, which to other minds seemed cruelty and arrogance, when, on his part, it was the resolute adherence to what he supposed principle not to be on any account surrendered. A strong will both had; but in the German Reformer it was sailor-like bluffness ; in the Swiss it seemed to the subjects of its severity like the jailer's hard-heartedness. When yet in France Calvin had prepared an edition of the old Roman Seneca on " Clemency," with the indirect purpose, as some thought, of swaying Francis I., then upon the French throne, the rival of Charles V. for European predominance, to thoughts of greater kindliness toward the nascent Reforma- tion. If this was the purpose, it was not avowed, and the in- direct aim was not attained. He sought it, more ably and with fullest frankness, in the preparation of his great work on 212 JEHAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. theology, tbe "Institutes." This he inscribed to the French king, in a dedication that, in its own day and long afterward, ■was regarded as one of the masterpieces of literature, in the form of the dedication, as a porch to a book putting high the patron's name in the forefront of the volume it opens. Schol- ars hailed as the three great dedications of European literature Casaubon's introduction to his Livy, De Thou's to his History of France, and that of Calvin to his " Institutes of Theology ;" all three writers were French by nativity, and two of them were Protestants, and the third, De Thou, though a Catholic, so liberal and outspoken that his immortal history incurred the ill-will of many Romanists. But Calvin, in his dedication, endeavored to divert from his fellow-religionists the accusation of sedition against the monarch. By successive revisions and improvements, the " Institutes " were rendered one of the most perfect, as to logical connection, of all systems of theology ever issued. In his address to the French king, who, becoming allied by his political interests to some of the Protestant princes of Ger- many, was inclined to represent his measures of repression against Protestantism in France as being not so much against religious error as against political sedition, the illustrious Re- former had said, in replying to the imputation of novelty, as brought against Reform : " When they call ours a new religion they mock God, whose Holy Word never has deserved to be held suspected of innovations. For those only is our religion a new thing to whom Christ and his Gospel are something new. Because of their own ignorance they hold our religion some- thing dubious and uncertain. But much as they may jeer at the uncertainty thereof, whenever they shall be prepared to JOHN CALTIN. 213 seal their own faith with their own blood men will discern how high they in truth prize it. Of quite another kind is our persuasion, which shrinks not either from the fear of present death or from the throne of God's judgment here- after."* Geneva, where Calvin commenced his career, then had cast off the power of the Duke of Savoy, and also ejected its bishop, who was little worthy of respect for his character personally, and whose policy was, in connection with that of the Duke of Savoy, directed to the overthrow of the city's liberties. But Calvin, when installed a teacher there, found the community little inclined to accept the moral reforms which were necessary to Christian purity, and to abiding free- dom as well ; and, after a period of three years, he and his fellow-teachers were required to leave the city and pass into exile. Calvin passed first to Basle, and after to Strasburg, preaching in the French church there and lecturing on theol- ogy. Sadolet, a Catholic bishop, had endeavored to win back Geneva to the Eomish faith during Calvin's absence; but Calvin published a reply to the bishop's letter, which disap- pointed the scholarly prelate and left his efforts utterly fruit- less. In three years his old flock had seen sufficiently the moral results of their rashness to desire the return of their pastor; reversed the decree of banishment, and penitently asked in earnestness for his return. In every alternate week he preached each day ; on three days in the week taught theol- ogy ; read the Scriptures in the congregation, attended weekly the meetings of his consistory ; prepared commentaries on the * Herzog. Theol. Real. Eacyclop. Bd. II. p. 613. 10 214 £!IiAS AND CHAIiACTEBS OF HISTORY. books of Scripture; held numerous controversies, and main- tained a widely extended correspondence. He had, in fact, become the oracle and adviser, consulted from all quarters of Protestant Europe. As he wrote to a friend, "I have not time to look out at the blessed sun. . . . When I have settled my usual business I have so many letters to write, so many questions to answer, that many a night is spent without any offering of sleep to exhausted nature." Many of those com- mentaries on Scripture, which are yet consulted with so just a reverence, for their power of holding and presenting the cur- rent of connected thought in the mind of the prophet or the apostle, whose words are the subject of commentary, were but the shorthand writers' reports of oral expositions delivered by the great scholar in his desk to his pupils in theology. To crowned heads in England and Scotland he addressed, at their request or as emergency seemed to demand it, epistles or dedi- cations that made the humble desk beside the Geneva Lake part of the council-chamber of some powerful nation or distin- guished sovereign. He occupied till the Master came, but not with the self-recruiting intervals of retirement and refreshment which that Master, amid his own divine energies, inculcated and enforced on his apostles when else they had not leisure so much as to eat bread. It was a daily martyrdom that, however honest in purpose, was lavish, if not suicidal, in its measure and in its final results ; for, at the age of fifty-five, under a compli- cation of spleen, and asthma, and gout, and the scholar's old complaint, as it was then called, the stone or gravel, he sunk to the tomb, " spent in over-service "■ — as truly an oblation on the sacrifice and service of the newly-recovered Gospel as was the apostle's, the Paul, whom in so many traits he resembled. - JOHN CALVm. 215 ■when making his own blood, gladly and heroically shed before Nero, a libation upon the confession of the Churches whom he had gathered in far provinces of the empire, and whose needs he remembered in the prayers of his dungeon, and whose igno- rance he instructed in epistles that the manacled hands in- scribed, when, as Christ's prisoner, he awaited the time of his being offered np. While at Strasburg, Calvin had launched a French version of the Bible, though mainly the work of his kinsman Olivetan, yet revised by the Reformer himself, and therefore bearing his name. Most of his great works were in Latin, though he wrote also in French ; and some recent critics have attributed to Calvin something of a like share in forming modern French that belongs beyond all question to Luther in forming and fix- ing, by his own German Bible, the modern German. And, indeed, any dialect, raised from merely secular and trivial top- ics, to deal with and present worthily the great topics of eternity and duty and salvation and God, must in the hands of writers of any fair competency put on new vigor, and dig- nity. The range of its idioms is not only widened, but the force and pith of its expressions are elevated and intensified by this intermeddling with themes of greater moment and solem- nity. The tongue becomes baptized as from a new and higher Castalia. The speech of the mart and the truckster's booth be- comes the dialect of sacred hymn and of dying confession. It prays, and it lives by the upward aspiration. A man so engrossed with his work would have little leisure for the amenities and the repose of domestic life. Study, con- troversy, and the care of all the Churches upon him, as Paul said plaintively many centuries before in his own case, would 216 £!BAS AND CHABACTEMS OR MISTOBY. leave him scant season to know the worth of the family hearth and its gatherings. He married Idolette de Bure. It is a sig- nificant comment on the fierce and wild aspersions of immoral- ity lavished on the early Anabaptists, a body with whom Cal- vin was himself brought into controversy, oral and written, that this partner of the Eeformer's joys and sorrows was her- self the widow of an Anabaptist, and, as some say, an Ana- baptist pastor. If they were the foul herd of Silenus and of Comus, which some paint the body, it would seem unaccount- able that the illustrious Eeformer, after engaging several of his friends to interpose their good oflaces in securing him a fit helpmate for his home, should have been left to plight hand and troth with one of that community. She is said to have been the mother of children by her first marriage. To the Eeformer she bore but one. The loss of this child, and after- ward of its mother, to whom he seems to have been sincerely attached, grieved hira ; but he carried his woes in this, as in all other regards, to the throne of grace and the field of Christian toil, the closet and the teacher's desk. He was not only indefatigable, but it must in all frankness be said he was immitigable, in the purpose to crowd into the narrow limits of the earthly life all possible witnessing for God's discredited truth, and all accessible work for the difEu- sion of that truth among the nations. There are those to whom the memory of Calvin is asso- ciated inseparably, if not solely, with the name of Servetus as his victim. It must be allowed that the great but rash Span- ish physician, intimate from his nativity in the Iberian penin- sula with the Moor and the Jew, dreamed most wildly, in con- seqaence, of an idle and unwarranted recasting of Christianity JOHN CALVIN. 217 ■which should undeify the Saviour and Judge of the world, and so pave the way for reconciling Hebrew and Moslem to an un- divine teacher, who would, in the very recasting of Ms own statements, be proved no longer the Light of the World ; for, as Leasing long after said, in his unbelief, if Christ were not divine, he, the Christ, said so much, looking to an assumption of Deity, that, in that respect, Mahomet himself were a more consistent and safe leader ; for Mahomet evidently and explic- itly never claimed the Godhead, while Jesus said at least many things, as Leasing phrased it, which bear that interpretation. But Servetus was fierce and harsh of utterance, and had said much that must, to a devout receiver of the evangelical faith, seem sheer blasphemy. As a blasphemer by the law of Gene- va Servetus was cited, and condemned, and executed. We fear that the share of Calvin in efEecting the arrest is incontroverti- ble. That he would have softened the form of death has been alleged, but the accounts are perplexed. With all his services to the cause of evangelical truth on the one hand, and to the cause of political freedom in the young Republic of Geneva on the other hand, it is yet undeniable that Calvin, like many of the worthies of his age, failed to read aright the Master's ut- terance, " My kingdom is not of this world." But that such especial energy of denunciation should be lavished on the Ee- former for this, an error inherent so generally in the senti- ments of his age, while so little is said by the same impugn- ers against his contemporary, Francis L, saying that he would burn his own son at the stake and carry Wood for the purpose, were he found guilty of heresy, and against his contemporary, Philip IL of Spain, inviting his court to the spectacle of the solemn burning of Inquisitorial victims in the auto-da-fe, as 218 ERAS AND CEARACTERS OF HISTORY. an act of regal piety ; and while, too, so little is said against the burning of Arians in Protestant England under James I., and in the days of Bacon, Lord Verulam — in a day still later than Calvin's, and in a time comparatively of greater illumina- tion in this matter of religious toleration — seems to us an in- stance of strange lack of impartiality. Indeed, so general was the feeling of alarm and detestation aroused by violent de- nunciations against the Trinity, that Protestant sovereigns and Protestant doctors almost held it requisite, to the vindication of the Eeformation against the imputation by the Bomish Church, of complicity with impiety, that they should thus, as in blood, lave out the stain of the accusations which Eome, by many a writer, brought against the Eeformation that it, with Mahometanlsm, was leagued to thrust Christ from the throne of heaven. There was a boot, in its day, of currency, and of no little ability, that has in this respect an instructive history. It was the " Calvino-Turcismus " of William Eeynolds, an English con- vert to Eome, who left his native Britain, in consequence, after receiving his education there, and became a teacher in the Eomish English Seminary at Douay. That seminary was for the training of English Catholic priests, to be sent back to England to plot revolutions against the government, and to restore the old subjection of the British isles to the Eoraan faith and see. His history was a peculiar one. He was the brother of that Dr. John Eeynolds, one of the most learned Puritans of England, who had a great share in obtaining the preparation of the received English version. John Eeynolds, a man of great personal worth, and one of the ripest scholars of Europe in a very scholarly age, was the author of many JOHN CALVIN. 219 works of vast erudition ; and one of these, on the Apocrypha, a German scholar has, within a very few years, cited in his own work on this theme of the Apocrypha, as yet one. of the very best and most exhaustive treatises on the subject. Thomas Fuller, the Church historian, reproduced the current tale, that each brother had been originally in the other faith than that in which he ultimately settled ; that the one brother, in attempt- ing to proselyte his kinsman, had lost the faith he would teach, and accepted the other which he would at first have impugned. According to this untrustworthy story, John, the chief scholar, had been a Romanist converted to Puritanism in the recoil of his own attempt to propagate Romanism; and William, the refugee, had been originally a good Protestant, who lost his first creed and took up his brother's Romanism when John abandoned it. But this mutual reaction in conversion is with- out any legitimate basis of evidence, and is now generally and justly rejected. John, the great scholar, never was a Roman- ist; but William had been, and bestowed much effort and study in his book to show that the system of Calvin is one, in guilt and moral results, with the fatalism of the Turks as imbibed from the Koran. We suppose that any judicious and candid observer of Mahometan society, and any patient stu- dent of the Moslem history, must acknowledge that the great truths of the divine sovereignty — the vast overarching sway and survey of Heaven, as foreseeing all events and ultimately meting out all destinies and results: as far as these truths have been, by the nation or by the individual recognizing the Koran, the subject of prolonged meditation and the motives of moral action — may have conduced to the heroic and fixed characteristics that are found in so many details of Saracen 220 ERAS AND CSABACTEBS OF HISTORY. and Turkish history. A belief in God's constant and sleepless supervision, no matter how many and grave the deadly errors, intermingled with that truth so believed, may have its marked effects, to restrain, to impel, to uplift, and to consolidate the human spirit, accepting that rule and cleaving to that grand truth. But the attempt to identify Calvinism, with its worship of a divine and suffering Kedeemer, as being one with Mahom- etanism, which denies the divinity of Jesus and the reality of his death, is, however patient and able, a foregone absurdity. A contemporary scholar, the English Dean Sutclive, answered it, though anonymously, with much point, and the statements that Sutclive, as of his own personal knowledge, makes against the personal character and morals of Bishop Bonner, one of the chief Eomanist persecutors in England, who fed the fires of Smithfield so ruthlessly, with victims so holy and illustrious, may well be pondered ; and, if it be in their power, answered by Eomanists, who, because of a common faith in the divine predestination, would confound the doctrine of Calvin with the creed of the Koran. It is Koinanism that has been from the beginning, and is to this day, in its invocation of saints and worship of images, and in its idolatrous exaltation of Christ's mother to the throne of her divine Son, in its oppres- sions of the Moor and its betrayal of the Greek, in its pilgrim- ages, and its crusades, and its idolatrous use of the Holy Land, responsible for very much of the obduracy and the inacces- sibility of the Moslem mind when approached by the Gospel of Christ. Henry IV. of France, after becoming a pervert to Rome, and after having been in youth a pupil and confessor of Protestantism, held, knowing both systems — the Romish and JOHN CALVm. 221 the Protestant — that it was the Protestant form of Christianity ■which was most likely to win and enlighten the Mahometan. As the judgment of one who knew St. Bartholomew's night, and was to fall, though he then knew it not, by the dagger of the Romanist fanatic, Bavaillac, the opinion of Henry of Navarre is worthy of some respect as to the moral weight of Calvinism before the Saracen and the Turk. It should, in jastice to the character of the great teacher of Geneva, be remembered that he was himself no Antinomian — a man of reckless and vicious habits. The Romanist authors, whose estimate of Luther we quoted in a former lecture, the Abb6 Glaire and the Vicomte Walsh, in their article on Calvin, repudiate the thought of giving echo or credence to the vituperations of some Romanist authors against the moral character of Calvin. And yet the Jesuits, who as a body have prided themselves on their culture of Latin poetry, and who have ventured to call the immortal denunciations of their own Jesuit casuistry and morality, in the " Provincial Letters " of Pascal, the unrivalled and the unanswerable — " the immortal liars " have made it their especial delight to accredit and to diffuse these false imputations against the illustrious Genevese Reformer. The illustrious Pascal proved it upon some of their great teachers that they, the Jesuit doctors, have held it law- ful to coin and to circulate known falsehoods against those who may injure or offend members of the order. In the case of Calvin, at least, fellow -Catholics, like the authors of this Catholic encyclopaedia, writing in modern Catholic Paris, dis- avow this atrocious libel on a man of high, stern, pure charac- ter, who lived in the eye of all Europe, under the fierce light of observation, both of friends and foes, so incessant and so 10* 222 ERAS AND CMASACTESS OF HISTORY. intense ; and who died poor, when inconsistency, or covetous- ness, or ambition would have made him affluent and sovereign, the wearer of a mitre perchance, or the aspirant even to the tiara. For the so-called chair of St. Peter has been occupied by no man, be he Gregory VII. or Innocent III. or Sixtus V., who was, in breadth of intellect, the equal of John Calvin. Since the days of Augustine no teacher of the Church, not Bernard or St. Thomas Aquinas or Bellarmine, has displayed such power of bringing concentrated thought upon great religious themes into symmetric and logical cohesion as this same Calvin. And add to Calvin the theologian, the merits, rare and high, of Calvin as the expositor, we suppose that Augustine is not his peer. More of the touching eloquence of the heart both Bernard and Augustine had ; but, in the other merits of the systematic and philosophical theologian, and the acute and perspicuous expositor of Scripture, neither of these good and great men is the peer of that austere, grave, sad-eyed recluse, dying by the Leman Lake, and leaving his property of a few hundred crowns to poor scholars and his colleague and the children of his brother, a simple book- binder. There is a prejudice among very good men, Protestants and men of true worth, scholarship, and piety, against Calvin. We are bidden by a higher than Calvin's authority to call no man master beside Christ. But it should be remembered that, in its essence, the system of the great Genevan teacher radiated from one very simple truth. It was, that God is the owner of the world which he himself made — that he has full cognizance of all its history, to the tiniest atom of its elements, and to the uttermost hour of its duration ; and that, seeing as he does JOBN CALVIN. 223 " the end from the begianing," he will provide that the ulti- mate results of his government shall not be failure. The way in which human liberty and responsibility have their free de- velopment within the all-surrounding hem of the divine con- trol, changeless in its wisdom, and omniscient in its purview, and omnipresent in its witnessing, is a mystery which, we sup- pose, the intellect of man and even of angel cannot adequately comprehend, much less formulate. All of sin is in the aposta- sy, wilful and inexcusable, of man and angel from the end of the Creator. All of good is, in its first germ, of grace ; and must, in its loftiest culmination of excellence, and in its latest utterance of exultation, give out its verdict for the divine glory, untarnished and irreproachable. Specks of gloom will start out upon the finite and human mind in facing the orbed maj- esty of the Godhead ; but the darkness is in the eye beholding, not in the blazing orb which it beholds. The specks are of the earthly optic, not of the divine and celestial vision, Gro- tius may have complained, and Wesley and the holy Fletcher of Madeley, all learned and wise and devout men, against cer- tain statements of Calvin, and in certain phrases of Calvin he may have been justly criticised ; but the sovereignty of grace is, after all, the one sure hope of the world. Back of Calvin and back of Augustine lies Paul and the ever true and ever worthy Master and Eedeemer and Judge of Paul, the Christ of the Nativity, and the Passion, and the Eesurrection, and the great white Throne. Geneva has reared its monument for Rousseau ; but for a more illustrious citizen, Calvin, though it shows the cathedral where he preached, and the house where he is said to have lived, it cannot tell where he was buried. It was well that the 224 SSAS AND CHABAOTERS OF HISTORY. man who wrote so effectively against relics in the worship of the Eomish Church should have disappointed in his own case the worshippers of relics, by leaving an unmarted grave. Yet, for political freedom and for moral worth, in the world of after times, how much has Geneva accomplished; and how much of the vast influence is traceable to this single, poor, suffering invalid. His religious influence went out over Switzerland, and over France, far and long as it was Huguenot ; and over Britain, and over Holland, and over our own North America, far as Britain and Holland colonized its shores, and shaped its later institutions and history. When the Huguenots were expelled from France by the disastrous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, how widely, amid their poverty, their sorrows, and their desolation, did those illustrious exiles diffuse over the Nether- lands, and Protestant Germany, and Protestant England, and to our own land, yet British and Colonial, their blessed influence for freedom, for justice, for enlightenment, and for the virtues of the home and the mart and the legislative hall. Lady Rus- sell, the meet, fearless wife who sat at the side of her patriotic husband, Lord William Eussell, taking notes, when he was to be sacrificed at the ruthless will of James IL, was the descend- ant of a French Huguenot nobleman, Rouvigny. The Coligny, and the Sully, and the Mornay of French history, how much did they radiate of the influence of Geneva. There is a glorious recoil of influence, in quarters alien or even hostile to the religious body exercising that influence, which must be remembered to know all of good that God garners around his people's hearth-stones and graves. When papal and royal fanaticism expelled the Huguenots from France the great Catholic preachers, Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaolue, JOHN OALVm. 225 F16chier, and Massillon, who had so illustrated France while the Huguenot pastors and professors were on the same soil their competitors, passed away with the expujsion of those competi- tors ; and the Catholic pulpit of France had no successors, in talent and power, equalling these coevals and rivals of the men of Saumur, Sedan, and Charenton. Catholic France eclipsed the light of her own pulpits when overturning the less gor- geous dests of the Protestant and the Calvinist. When the men of the Huguenot stock went out to the galleys, or to the scafEold, or to the fight of the Cevennes, or to the refuges in Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, Britain, and Colonial America, the voices of the dominant-Church diminished in volume, and their moral influence dwindled also, rapidly and ingloriously, down. So the great Jansenist movement, that accomplished so much for morals, for literature, and for Christian piety, in the recluses of Port Royal, and in the men who with Quesnel and others sought shelter in Protestant Netherlands, was largely traceable to a reflex action of the Calvinistic controversy and schools and churches of France. The St.-Cyran and the Jan- senius began their studies in consequence of and in strict con- temporaneousness with the great Synod of Dort, where the Calvinism of Holland met the antagonistic doctrine of the Arminian. That Calvinism drove these young Catholics to the study of the works of Augustine. The one, Jansenius, pro- duced his great volume on the views of that Church father, after repeated perusals of his entire writings, and gave his own name to the system thus proclaimed. Through what bit- ter conflicts and agonies of life it moved. It had its Arnaulds, vexed with taunts against the Protestant blood of some of their ancestry, and the De Saci, and Pascal and his sister. What 226 MBAS AND CBARACTEBS OF HISTORY. new life it breathed into' French literature, and what master- pieces, in his " Thoughts," and " Provincial Letters," Pascal left to the study of aftertimes, and the admiration even of an in- fidel Voltaire. Down from the days of their Duguet and Nicole to the times of Koyer-Collard, in our own age, how much have the men, thus glorifying God's Scripture and God's grace, benefited their land and their age. For, as of old, it is true : those whom God honors are those who honor him. Upon our own first Puritan colonists of New England how strong was the impress of Calvinism on the Hookers «nd Shephards that emigrated hither, and on the Ames that in- tended to pass hither. So, in England, the Hampdens and the Cromwells, and the Pyms, traced to their cradles and homes and family altars, are found of the spiritual Mth and kin of the men of the Leman Lake. In Kevolutionary times the Rutledges, and the Laurenses, and the Jays, and the Eamsays, and the Pinckneys, we believe, were of Huguenot stock. God forbid that we forget the high services of the men and the Churches, who questioned or who withstood this great movement of religious feeling and opinion. From both sides will ultimately come the accordant testimony that of the divine grace — whether it were the Calvinist or the Arminian that on earth best expressed it — of the grace of God, free and sovereign, came all good ; and when, at the last day, angels lay the last coping on the completed and symmetric structure, forgotten all earthly controversy in the clear light of the beatific vision, and eclipsed all meaner lustres of doctors, con- fessors, and martyrs in the splendor of the manifested Eedeera- er, shall rise, sweet, and unanimous, and unceasing, the shout, " Grace, grace unto it." JOHN KNOX. 227 XI JOHN KNOX. "A PERFERviD race — the race of Scottish men" — is the judgment pronounced upon his nation by one of their great scholars, George Buchanan. Perfervid, a Latin phrase for ex- cessive or boiling ardor. Nor is the epithet other than one of eulogy and of benediction, unless the trait which it describes be counterpoised by attendant defects of character which should hinder that seething energy from leading to usefulness ; as if, by the precipitancy that makes no adequate scrutiny, by the inconsideration that pronounces without knowledge, by the flippancy whose gushings bear no freight of thought, by the inconstancy that soon abandons what it has capriciously and suddenly begun, or by the inconsistency that has no singleness of aim and no steadfastness of purpose, and that blends its hosannas and its anathemas over one and the same banner with very rapid and heedless alternations. The Apostle Paul, who, under God, has accomplished so much for the Church of God and for the entire Gentile world, has declared that " it is good to be zealously affected " in a good cause. The consum- ing energy and ebullient ardor, characteristic of the stock whence he sprung, lacked neither decision nor forecast nor perseverance, as its attendant influences, in the career of John Knox — the perfervid Reformer of a perfervid people. His soul, all aglow for the truth of God when he had once discerned it. 228 ERAS AND CHAHACTEES OF SISTOBY. proclaimed and defended the Gospel of Christ, thus discerned, with an engrossing and blazing earnestness that the blandish- ments of a court could not wilt, and which the hardships of the galley, where, with fettered ankles, he toiled at the heavy oars, nineteen months a prisoner, and the menaces of death, frequent, close, and malignant, as it dogged his track, could not make to quail. A price set on bis bead, burnt in effigy as a heretic, marked for assassination, solicited to yield by more timorous and pliable, but often noble and wealthy, associates in reform, he held on with a resolute integrity that could not be manipulated by the intriguers, or disheartened by the waverers of his own party, till his own people, before his death, learned to describe him as the one who, in planting Christ's Gospel in their nation and land, and in watering it when so planted, had surpassed all others of his countrymen and fellow-laborers. Kugged, impetuous, and uncontrollable where he deemed prin- ciple involved, he yet displayed naught of the overbearing in his temper to his associate confessors; nor are the traces of personal ambition or greed found in any part of his course ; and in the home, and in the intercourse with his fellow-preach- ers and confessors, he showed himself a man eminently loving and lovable. "Where God's truth was to be asserted or avenged he stood up, stern and immovable as the granite hills ; but in commending that truth to the sad, the lowly, and the kindly, his speech rippled, sparkled, and bounded and bubbled, like the brooks of his country finding their clear way in speed through the clefts of bare hill-sides, exultant and loud, on their way to the sea. Luther did his work in an old Geiman empire splintered up among various principalities and electorates. Calvin's seat of JOHN KNOX. 229 instruction was in a free city, with democratic institutions by the Leman Lake. But Knox had his lot cast in a turbulent kingdom, with a powerful but discordant nobility ; its court torn by relations, now to the English monarchy and nation in the southern portion of the island, and now to the kingdom of France, with which rOyal intermarriages had closely connected both its regal and noble houses. The minority of the heir to the Scottish throne in two several periods, and the Kegencies wielding power daring such minority, complicated the difficul- ties at home and abroad; while the great Reformer did his work and delivered his testimony. The land of Wallace and of Bruce presents itself often, to the fancy of a modern observer, only with the pastoral and the chivalrous environments with which the genius of her Bums and her Walter Scott have surrounded her people and her scenery, in later and happier days. But, in the age upon which God's providence had cast the lot of John Knox, the country had much of wild anarchy, of moral degradation and gross ignorance, of irreligion, and of comparative barbarism in certain portions of its population. The race who had fought at Bannockburn and at Flodden Field were a brave race, but the schools and the pulpits and the presses and the libraries of succeeding times were not as yet their possessions, A states- man and scholar like the Frenchman, Du Plessis Mornay, in a work that was sent out but a few years after Knox had sunk into the grave — Momay's treatise on the " Truth of the Chris- tian Eeligion," issued in 1580 — speaks of the barbarians of our time, and presents those dwelling in Greenland and in the ex- treme parts — the outlying regions — of Ireland and Scotland as such, though his own country, France, and Scotland were 230 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. so closely and often intertwined by political alliances ; and he could not, tlierefore, be utterly unconversant with the condi- tion, as to literature and religion, of a kingdom thus blending often in military and national action its interests with his own native France. Mornay's words, of course, intended mainly or exclusively but an allusion to the far northern regions, and the outlying islands of the Scottish territory, its far Hebrides swept by wintry winds and laved by restless seas. Bat it is signifi- cant how he clusters thus Esquimaux, and the contemporary clansman at the extreme north of what is now lettered and cultured Scotland. Coming down to a day much nearer our own, that of Fletcher of Saltoun, who died but in 1716, some one hundred and sixty years ago, we find that true patriot pro- posing, in forlorn despondency over a certain part of the poor of Scotland, to remedy and elevate their condition by selling them into a sort of slavery that would care for them. There are those who have dwelt with more of lamentation or even bitter denunciation, on the rugged zeal of the great Eeforraer of Scotland, than seems fitting or grateful. They would appear to forget that, in eras of strife and grinding col- lisions between great interests, secular and religious, brought into deadly antagonism, mere gentleness would be often sheer- est inefficiency. " Eevolutions," say the French, " are not made with rose-water." A far higher authority, speaking of the garb and haunts and bearing of his own great forerunner, and of the wearers of soft apparel, in contrast with him, said that they were to be looked for " in kings' houses ;" but the eater of locusts and wild honey, and the wearer of rough camel's hair, gone out into the wilderness, was like the Elijah of a former age, whom he worthily reproduced — the fitting reformer of a JOHN EN OX. 231 degenerate time and an apostate Church. His stern rudeness of bearing and of surroundings the better adapted him to startle a land out of its perilous slumberings ; and if in rous- ing the conscience of a Herod he bred the murderous grudge of a Herodias, the results of the turmoil and the martyrdom did not disprove the divine mission of our Lord's forerunner. In the providence of God the century into which Knox was flung was a very maelstrom in the mad whirling of its various and furious elements. The stout diver who was successfully to traverse its currents needed a stout heart and a sinewy arm, if he were to re-appear presenting for his beloved country a re- covered Gospel. And the violences so much deprecated were earlier, and were fiercer, and were more enduring with the ene- mies of God's truth, than with its advocates and evangelists. When, in the early days of Knox's reforming career, four Scot- tish men were hung at Perth for eating goose on a Friday, and a yonng woman, with her sucking infant on her breast, was drowned because in the birth-peril she refused to invoke the Virgin Mary as her helper ;* when the good Wishart, the friend of Knox, scholarly, eloquent, and irreproachable, meek and kindly, was burnt by Cardinal Beatoun, after Knox, who had before, as disciple and guard, carried the sword in front of his excellent but threatened teacher, but had by that revered teacher been sent back to his own pupils and home, Wishart saying, in full prospect of the fate that awaited him, " One is sufficient for a sacrifice ;"f when, in a later period of the struggle, Walter Milne, at the age of eighty-two, a converted priest who had become a preacher of the Gospel, was committed * MoCrie, p. 25, note. f Ibid., p. 25. 232 MSAS AND CHASACTESS OF HISTORY. to the flames, expressing the hope that he should be the last to sufEer death for that cause (1558);* and this sacrifice was exacted by the Archbishop of St. Andrews (that martyr, his victim, a holy and blameless man in character), it seems scarce equiable measure, to reserve all the sympathy for the ancient and picturesque hierarchy that rejoiced in such hangings and drownings and burnings, and to deplore the harsh firmness that, against such odds and confronting such treatment, up- lifted its voice for the truth as Christ gave it. The contem- porary poetry of Scotland, by Sir David Lindsay, described the clerical orders, both the secular and the monastic, as sunk deeply in corruption ; and a national Church that slaughtered its opponents in the mood of Athaliah, the old truculent queen- mother in Israel, and some of whose clergy and monks wallow- ed, like Hophni and Phineas, the sons of Eli, in uttermost de- basement of morals, around the precincts of old sanctuaries, is scarcely to be regarded as the true legitimate successor of the old Culdees of lona, much less of the still elder fishermen Apostles of the Galilean lake. In what sentence of what epis- tle or of what gospel was it written that the mother, to whom, when she interfered overweeningly as to miracle-working in the feast of Cana of Galilee, her son exclaimed, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" has, since her ascension to Paradise, undergone such grave alteration of character, and received such vast expansion of rights, that the young mother and her little nursling who invoked not, in the hour of nature's anguish, that mother's special patronage and aid, should for the omission be drowned bodily in ingulfing waters ? • MoOrie, p. 133. JOHN KNOX. 233 Born in 1505, it was not until he was of the age of thirty- seven, in the year 1542, that Knox fully identified himself with the cause of the Eeformation. But scant thirty years followed of a life -term for him; yet in that brief space of thirty years how much did that dauntless, heroic, and prayer- ful man accomplish for his country and for his age, before, at the age of sixty-seven, in 1572, he sunk exhausted into death. It had become almost, under the bitter denunciations of the Eomish authorities and the feeble defences of later Protestant historians, a foregone conclusion to regard the traits of Knox, in his reforming work, as those of violence and barbarian fierce- ness. But the thorough researches, close, patient, and unassail- able, of M'Crie — not connected with the Established Presbyte- rian Church of Scotland, but belonging to one of the smaller Dissenting communions — have presented, as the scholars of Scotland have since very generally and eagerly acknowledged, the character of the great Reformer in a most attractive aspect. Justice, after the interval of more than two centuries, was done to the position, movements, and influence of a man to whom Scotland owes so much which she can never adequately repay. The inventions of his papal opponents were, indeed, full of disparagement ; but his traits, as they re-appear, on full and honest examination, in his travels, his kinsmanships, his corre- spondence, his preaching, his political influence, are invested with an energy, a disinterestedness, a simplicity, a tenderness even, and an absorbing consecration to his ministry, that make him, while heroic and martyr-like, eminently a man of the masses. Put the work of Luther on the shoulders of the more courtly but timid and ease -seeking Erasmus, or even on the gentle but yielding Melancthon, and the world of European 234 EMAS AND CSARACTERS OF HISTORY. civilization might have missed enlightenment and enfranchise- ment, and sunk wearily into a new languor and stupor that would have required the sorest judgments to arouse her, or an overwhelming ruin to mark her guilt, and to terminate the fearful entailment of her persistence in fraud and her impu- nity in wickedness. The character of Knox has been more severely judged be- cause to so many the contemporary image of Mary Queen of Scots — for some years his sovereign, and in some signal emer- gencies his antagonist — has bewitched their fancy, and cast a spell over their judgment as to the era and its responsibilities. In few of the great personages of modern history has the in- terest of after generations been so vividly awakened, and in few careers have the errors of human forecast as to the future been more remarkably illustrated. Left at the earliest stage of life an orphan by the death of her royal father, who, when the birth of a daughter was announced to him, exclaimed, in allusion to the accession of his Stuart line to the throne by a daughter, " With a lass it came to us, and with a lass it goes again from us," expecting manifestly that, in an infant and female heritor, the sceptre would be snatched from their lineage and pass to strangers : it was the purpose of her father's op- ponent, the bluff and arrogant Henry VIII. of England, to espouse the infant orphan girl to his own infant son, the only boy of his progeny, afterward Edward VI., then a child of some five years old ; and thus, as the young princess's dower, annex Scotland to his own English dominions. Had the little child passed to the court of Henry, and received such training, in its comparatively more wholesome atmosphere, as made Lady Jane Grey what she became, or as trained the daughters of Sir JOHN KNOX. 235 John Cheke, learned, devout, and noble women, to become one of them the mother of Sir Francis Bacon, the illustrious Lord Verulam, and others the ornaments and delight of other hon- ored homes — had she, Mary, become first his -wife, survived as his widow her husband, Edward VI., how new an aspect had the annals of the next century worn for England and for Scot- land as well. But, early sent to France to be reared for her lot as the consort of the heir-expectant of the French throne, in the most dissolute as the most refined court of Europe, where Catharine de Medicis was the controlling spirit; and the in- fluence as to truth, principle, secular polity, and religious belief was so thoroughly, though bewitchingly, evil ; there, early a bride and early a widow, but initiated in the craft of State and the delusion of Church, as Borgias might exemplify and as Machiavels might idealize both State and Church, how nat- ural it was that, full of fascination and rich in the varnish of external accomplishment as she might be, the young bereaved princess should return to her native Scottish shores full of re- gret for the Paris she left, and of distrust and scorn for the rugged Scotland she was to rule. The Guises, the malign geniuses of the French metropolis and realm, sworn and ruth- less enemies of the far nobler Colignys — the Guises, her prompt- ers, her models, and her oracles ; and the fearful massacre of St. Bartholomew, as it occurred, ere her own descent from the Scottish throne, but a natural specimen of the temper and pur- pose of that family compact, into which those Guises and she, Mary, and the reigning pontiff had entered for the extirpation of Protestant heresy. She bewailed with tears, on quitting it, the gayety of the land of her adoption, and her education, and her betrothal ; but how much of what she thus prized was the 236 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. elegance and richness of a Homer's Calypso or of a Tasso's Armida, as compared witli the more sober but more blessed views of life and of duty, into which the Bible and Plato would have introduced her, had Asoham been her tutor, and she, under his care, the fellow-pupil of Lady Jane Grey ? She attempted first to fascinate, and this failing, then to entangle and to crush Knox ; but under the influence of Darnley first, and then of Bothwell, and then of her English kinswoman and jailer, Elizabeth, how did her career of brilliancy and light- heartedness darken down into dishonor and craft thwarted. Death, boldly confronted at the last, yet has left her name, while to many a theme of admiration and lament, to others and the vast mass of readers and thinkers but what Knox sternly denounced it as being, the name of a Jezebel, adulteress and murderess, her husband her victim, and her son, if not per- verted to Eome, to be, far as her will could effect it, disinherit- ed, and his crown and realm made by a mother's act to pass to strangers. Yet her beauty, signal and radiant, her high refine- ment, and her many graces of manner, have so preoccupied the judgment of many that she has awakened in successive gener- ations her defenders ; and some have even wished to urge on the papacy, of which she was so firm an adherent, the oflBce of giving her the honors of canonization. Far as the papal court may have ventured in the work of lifting strange candidates for saintship into the calendar, it has halted and demurred in this case ; and the process of beatification has^not yet at least been inaugurated in behalf of Darnley's widow, and the para- mour of Bothwell, and the mother of the uncouth and awkward James I. of England, who came so near being exploded in the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes. JOHN KNOX. 237 Knox, born in 1605, was educated in the University of Glas- gow, with Buchanan as his fellow-student ; taught for some time in the University or in noble families, and became a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. Study of the early Latin fa- thers, and especially of Augustine, made him disfavor the ex- isting scholastic philosophy and theology. The writings of the Continental Reformers had won some currency in his native land. The old movements, under Wycliffe and the Lollards, had in early times reached certain portions of his country; but the traces and memorials of these seem scarcely to have affected him. Patrick Hamilton, a youth of noble rank, had visited Wittenberg and become a disciple of Luther and Melancthon. On returning to his native Scotland, he, Hamil- ton, was decoyed into a conference, but for the purpose merely of arresting him, and he was burnt in 1528, when Knox was some twenty-three years of age. Hamilton, when thus made a victim, was but twenty-four. The stake of this heroic suf- ferer must have lit up many a study of the more sober and devout men of Scotland. Multitudes became interested in the new views ; some fled to the Continent, others were martyred. Knox left St. Andrews, then under the controlling influence of Cardinal Beatoun, a determined enemy of reform. Sentence was passed against Knox as a heretic when escaped ; he was degraded from the priesthood, and, according to Beza, Beatoun employed assassins to waylay and kill him ; but the patronage of some noblcfamilies shielded him, and Knox found employ as a teacher of the sons in the languages and in the new views of religious truth. The severities and iniquity of Cardinal Beatoun provoked a conspiracy in which Knox seems to have had no personal share ; but in the result of which, as bringing 11 238 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF BISTOBT. to a violent and sudden end a persecutor of God's truth and people, Knox saw no little cause of rejoicing. It was held by the religious of the day that Wishart, when burning by Bea- toun's order, had predicted the speedy and violent end of his persecutor. Knox's zeal for the truth, and his talents in com- mending it, had awakened the attention of many of the re- ceivers of the Gospel. John Eough, preaching to a garrison the recovered Gospel, found his fellow-believers united in the opinion that Knox ought to be called into the same ministry. Unexpectedly to him, Eough, in the presence of the congrega- tion, and as in a charge received from them, concluded his dis- course by calling on Knox to receive his vocation into the min- istry of the "Word, if he would avoid God's heavy displeasure. Turning to his hearers, he, Eough, asked if this were not so, and if they did not approve this vocation. They replied, " It was, and they did approve it." It shows that the view of Knox's character, by many held, as if he were all adamantine, is thoroughly groundless, and that sincerity and deep feeling lay beneath the uneven rind of his outer manner, when, on this sudden appeal, Knox burst into tears, left the assembly, and shut himself in the solitude of his own chamber. For many days sad and burdened, he finally acceded to it, as the call of God's flock and God's providence; and, in the many changes and perils of after years, he never regretted his decision to abide by the solemn indication thus given him of the service to which God had called him. His powers as logician and de- bater had been early evident. In his new post they became soon called for. Eough, his fellow -pastor, was not deeply learned. A Eomish priest had assailed Eough as not giving to the Church the authority which it deserved ; that Church JOHN KNOX. 239 having, by the condemnation of Luther and his heresies, shut np all farther controversy. Knox to this replied in challeng- ing the assailant to a public debate on the Sunday, in which he would show that the Pope was the antichrist and the Man of Sin. With a text out of Daniel and his vision of the four empires, Knox, with the command of hearty and popular elo- quence in which he so early and eminently excelled, showed that the Pope met the scriptural tallies and marks of the anti- christ ; and that, of course, he and his pontifical Church could have no authority. The discussion produced a wide, resonant impression, and the hearers and influence of Knox rapidly in- creased. The Church grew by rapid renunciations of Eoman- ism; and the simple Lord's Supper was set up instead of the old idolatrous Mass. But a French fleet came in ; the castle of St. Andrews was besieged, and after a brave but fruitless resistance was surren- dered. Eough had before the siege set in left for England. Knox was among the prisoners carried in the French fleet, and in the galleys kept a prisoner afloat on the coast of France. Mass was often said in the hearing of the Protestant captives. The history of Knox relates an incident that is generally sup- posed to describe his own personal story. The captives, loath to honor either ceremony or image, a flnely painted figure of the Virgin was brought to one of them, and he was urged to give it the kiss of adoration. He declared it an idol, and refused to touch it. The oflBcer who bore the deity insisted he should, and thrust it toward the prisoner's lips. Watching his opportunity, the prisoner clutched the wooden image and flung it into the river Loire, on which their prison-ship was lying, with the exclamation, " Let our Lady save herself now ; 240 EBAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. ste is light enough ; let her learn to swim !" A proselyte so intractable was happy in escaping with his life ; but liife firm- ness exempted him from all farther importunities of the kind. If the Virgin swam, or if she sunk, she certainly did not enlist Knox, by the day's incidents, among her votaries. Confine- ment and severity shook Knox's health, and from a fever which ensued his life was by his fellow-voyagers despaired of. But his fortitude never left him. 'Brought to a part of the Scottish coast, he was asked by a fellow-prisoner, who afterward recited it, if he recognized the shore. " That steeple," said Knox, " is St. Andrews, where God first opened my mouth to glorify his name. Weak as I now seem, I shall live to glorify him again in that same place." Captive and sick, it seemed unlikely of accomplishment; yet, years after, Sir James Bal- four, the fellow-prisoner to whom Knox spoke this, repeated it to many witnesses, as having been said to him, and having been long after accomplished. He obtained his liberty after nineteen months, in consequence of peace between France, Scotland, and England ; and, as it now appears, by the per- sonal influence of Edward VI., the English king, exerted in his behalf. Visiting England, Knox attracted notice and such favor that Edward VI. offered him the appointment of Bishop of Roch- ester, a see where, if ease and wealth were his object, they were more sure and near than in his native land. He declined it because of scruples as to the scriptural warrant for diocesan episcopacy. But he was appointed one of the King's chap- lains in ordinary; and Latimer, and John Bradford, men in some peculiar sense of his own type of piety and of mental en- dowment, seem to have been among his intimate and beloved JOHN KNOX. 241 friends. It is the infelicity of some recent writers in the Eng- lish Establishment to decry, even passionately, the services and character of Edward VI. It augurs ill for the growth of a just reverence toward the English Establishment, either in the minds of the Non-conformists of England or of the Protestant Christians of other lands, when this course of remark becomes prevalent in English ecclesiastics. Latimer, even in the judg- ment of Saunders, the bitter libeller of the Eeformation, was a preacher and a wit of rare powers. As for John Bradford, the Christian literature of England has few nobler and purer char- acters ; and the young monarch, whose removal left the gaping gulf into which Lady Jane Grey went down as a martyr, and out of which emerged the monstrous forms of Mary and her Gardiner and her Bonner as martyr-makers, little deserves from those who recall his piety and his services to purer religion the disparagement and scorn some Anglicans have ventured of late to lavish upon him. Knox is regarded as having had influence to remove from the Common Prayer-book, in the revision un- der Edward, some features involving adoration of the elements in the Lord's Supper. In Queen Mary's time a persecutor de- plored his (Knox's) influence in that regard, as the authority of what the persecutor called "a runaway Scotsman." Into honor with God and with man the illustrious John Knox has " run " very far " away " from, because very far ahead of, his impugner. Dr. Weston, prolocutor, under Queen Mary, in a dis- putation with good doughty Bishop Latimer. Knox was of- fered promotion to a City charge in London. He incurred the ill-will of the powerful Earl of Northumberland, afterward a recreant, going over to the Romish Church, but seems to have conciliated the especial regard of the devout sovereign, lost too 242 EBAS AND CHARACTERS OF BISTORT. soon to his subjects and to Protestant Europe. And Knox, a man of very keen, searching eye as to character, has left his testimony as to the rare and unmatched merits, for his years, of the prince early lost and deeply lamented. On his death Knox left London, but preached in other parts of England, fol- lowed by large congregations. Mary's policy of persecution, awhile veiled, was soon disclosed ; and Knox left England for France. He repaired to Geneva, and formed the acquaintance and won the friendship of Calvin, with whom he long corre- sponded. Other Protestants fleeing from England were scat- tered over the Continent. To a colony of these at Frankfort he was asked to minister. Other refugees from England were opposed to his views, as not sufficiently favorable to the Epis- copal model, and insisted on introducing the English Prayer- book ; and as Knox had denounced the approaching marriage of Mary of England with Philip II. of Spain, these opponents strove to stir up in Frankfort the magistrates against Knox. He left for the sake of peace, but it was to minister to a simi- lar group of English refugees at Geneva, where he was warmly welcomed by Calvin. A Queen-regent, as she was called, ruled now in Scotland, who, though Eomanist, was somewhat in pol- icy alienated from the papist Queen Mary of England, her neighboring sovereign, and gave the Protestants of Scotland more opportunity of meeting than they had before enjoyed. To hearten and edify them Knox again visited Scotland, en- couraged thera, and then, on the appearance of new troubles, returned to labor for two years more with his English-speaking flock in Geneva. There he had some share in the English Ge- neva Bible, which continued long the favorite of many English Puritans, even after the received version was prepared. JOHN ENOX. 243 This year he issued, with his usual boldness and impetuosity, a work against female government generally, "A Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Kegiment of Women," occa- sioned by the terrible and sanguinary results of the sway of Queen Mary in England, then at its height. The Salic law had been long that of the French monarchy, forbidding the acces- sion of women to the crown. Knox would make it a universal rule. When Mary died, her sister, Elizabeth, who succeeded her, but with far other relations to Protestants than her prede- cessor, was inclined to regard this volume of the Scottish teach- er as a grave and unpardonable offence. On the death of Mary of England the refugees from that country on the Continent flocked homeward from Geneva, as from other continental cities. The Scottish Queen-regent was understood to promise some toleration and possible reformation in the Church of Scotland, but soon threw ofE the mask and avowed her sympathy with the Guises of France, in the scheme for the final and universal suppression of the Keformation throughout Europe. Knox landed in Scotland. Some favorers of reform dissuaded his appearing ; but he replied that none need be solicitous on his account. He craved not defence from any man, but only audi- ence ; if not there, he would find it elsewhere. He appeared in the pulpit of St. Andrews, his theme the ejection by Christ of the money-changers, and for three days he continued his preaching. The magistrates and people set up the Reformed worship, pulled down monasteries and images and pictures. The billow of the movement went through the other cities of Scotland, and the monastic edifices went down before it. The saying, " Down with the rookeries, and the rooks will not re- turn," is attributed to Knox at this era. The philosophy was 244 ERAS AND CHABACTEBS OF BISTORT. sound. How far those wlio plead the Old Testament polity as a basis for the organism of the Christian Church are entitled to overlook the Old Testament denunciations of all idol wor- ship, and the patterns of a Josiah and a Hezeldah in the forci- ble and utter destruction of the image, the fane, and the grove, does not seem very apparent. The Protestants of Edinburgh, the chief city, chose Knox as their minister. He went, accord- ing to his own image, through the land as the priests of old about Jericho, blowing with trumpets as God gave strength. There was force in the image used by Sadlier, the English am- bassador, years after, when he said of the Eeformer's influence that one man, this same Knox, in one hour could infuse more life into the minds of the people than six hundred trumpets blaring in their ears.* And as to the potency of spiritual al- lies — unseen but supreme, on the one side, and of secular forces, visible and numerous but insuflScient, on the other side — it is an illustration of Knox's faith that he said that he dreaded, as bringing down the divine displeasure, the celebration of one mass more than the introduction on the enemy's side of ten thousand armed men. It has been a profane saying of Na- poleon's, often recited as if unquestionable for pith and ver- ity in our times, that God was always, in the affairs of the nations, on the side of the heaviest battalions. If the Bi- ble be true — and the story of the nations has often repeated its loud echo to that record, as of verity all trustworthy — the battle is really the Lord's, and he gives it often to the few, the feeble, and the overthrown ; ay, as man intends it and in- terprets it, to the extirpated. When the morning of the Kes- * McCrie, p. 203. JOHN KNOX. 245 urrection broke, it was not Cassar, or Pilate, or Herod, or Caia- phas that had the victory. It remained with the Spiritual and the Supernal, the Invisible, but the Omnipotent and the Omni- present; the Christ of the vacated tomb was the heir to all the camps and the palaces and the treasuries and the libraries of all the emperors. And he came, blessed be his name, to stay. Truth is indestructible. And the men enlisted simply and heartily in the cause of that leader, "the Truth and the Life," will outwear the Napoleons and outwatch the Machia- vels; for He whom they serve is in one mind, and none can turn him ; and the Father has covenanted, and under your eyes and mine is compassing the performance of that covenant, that his Son, the disowned, and rejected, and defenceless sufferer of Calvary, shall have the heathen for his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession. The congregation of the Protestants of Scotland moved for- ward. The Eegent Queen was defeated, and soon died. The French allies her reliance withdrew, and a free Parliament was called. A Confession of Faith was adopted, and Scotland was Protestant. Queen Mary of Scotland, now a widow, was preparing to re- turn to Scotland, firm in the purpose to use her iniluence, far as it should be safe, in restoring the Eomish faith. As she afterward wrote to the Council of Trent, this was her fixed pur- pose. She sent for Knox, and had earnest conferences, at first calm and fiattering even. A massacre at Vassy, in France, of the Protestants excited, on the report of it, great agitation in the Protestant nations ; but Mary gave a splendid ball, with dancing prolonged to a late hour, as in very ill-timed connec- tion with the savage story. Knox's discourse on the follow- 11* 246 ERAS AND CRABACTEES OF HISTOSY. ing Sabbath was understood to comment sharply on the vices and pleasures of princes. She cited him to her council-cham- ber, but his replies were gravely firm. Her popish attendants, on seeing him quiet after the interview, exclaimed that he was not afraid. "Why should the fair face of a gentlewoman af- fright me ?" cried he. " I have looked many angry men in the face, and have not been extravagantly alarmed." Her marriage with Darnley, a feeble youth and a Catholic^ was soon mooted. Knox opposed it. He was summoned to meet the Queen. She vowed to. be avenged of him, and burst into a flood of tears. Knox protested his distress when, called to chastise his own sons, he saw them weep ; far less could he rejoice in her Majesty's tears, but the sorrow he must bear, rather than betray his own conscience and the commonwealth by a guilty silence. Not long after she had him cited for a letter on public affairs. She had him summoned to answer on a charge of treason before the Privy Council. Friends ad- vised submission and retractation, but Knox was not to be daunt- ed, and her own Privy Council found his defence unassailable. The alienation between the ill-mated royal pair was followed by the murder of Rizzio. Knox had no share in it, but regard- ed it as God's just judgment. When Darnley was murdered, and Bothwell, the alleged murderer, became the Queen's hus- band, with unseemly haste and most clumsy arrangements, the indignation of the kingdom and of Europe was stirred. Knox, absent at the time of the union with Bothwell from Edinburgh, was worthily and bravely supplemented by his colleague in the pastorate, Craig, who, while publishing the banns, denounced the union. The flight of Bothwell, the surrender and impris- onment of Mary, her resignation of the government, and her JOHN KNOX. '^4^1 ultimate escape to England, where Elizabeth refused a personal conference, and instituted an imprisonment that led to plot- tings, treasonable against the Queen of England, however natu- ral to the imprisoned Queen of Scotland, were rapid descents along the downward course of the beautiful and accomplished, but it is to be feared guilty, Queen of Scotland. Knox had no hesitation in pronouncing her guilty of the double crime of adultery and murder, and held death the penalty to each, and much more to the coalescence of both crimes, enhancing and envenoming the one the other. The virtuous Earl of Murray, Kegent, was assassinated by a retainer of the Hamilton family, whose life he had spared when convicted and sentenced to die. Reminded on his death-bed of his act of gentleness to his murderer, the earl replied naught should make him repent of an act of clemency. Care and labor, and feelings deeply tried, brought upon Knox an attack of apoplexy. But he soon resumed preaching. When ie could speak but once, and mount to the pulpit only supported on either side, he is de- scribed, though on first entering the pulpit so feeble as to lean against it, soon so animated with his theme and message, as a young scholar, his hearer, describes it, he appeared soon ready to dash the pulpit, narrow and high, in which he stood into fragments as he spoke. News came of the terrible St. Bar- tholomew's massacre in Paris. The French ambassador to Scotland was present at Knox's appearance in the pulpit. Gathering the remains of his strength, Knox denounced the vengeance of Heaven against that murderer and traitor, the King of France, Charles IX., and bade the ambassador tell his master, that divine vengeance would never quit him or his house without his repentance. The ambassador complained 248 SJSAS AND CHABACTEBS OF HISTORY. of the indignity, and -would have the Eegent of Scotland silence such a preacher. But this was refused, and the embassy quitted the kingdom. On his death-bed Knox asked his wife to read the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the magnificent description of the Eesurrection, and blessed God for the consola- tion which that chapter had given him. He asked afterward his wife to read, as he phrased it, the part of Scripture " where he first cast anchor" or began to cherish strong hopes of per- sonal salvation. It was the seventeenth chapter of John's Gospel. Telling his three fingers, he said, " Now I commend my soul, spirit, and body into thy hands, Lord." His last sigh was accompanied with the words, "Now it is come." When they buried him, the Eegent of Scotland, the Earl of Morton, uttered over him the words so often cited : " There lies he who never feared the face of man." He was a great writer, in the sense of energetic and fearless appeal, an able reasoner, and most of all a fervent and un- daunted and spiritual preacher. Souls in multitudes looked to him as to their spiritual guide and their father in Christ. He seems to have had the warm love of his friends and near associates. But when duty required it he could break from associates loved and revered, and incur their coldness, if thus only the interests of the nation or of the Church were to be guarded. Scotland, in her after history, has been his best vindication and his most abiding monument. The schools which have so diffused education throughout her people were his work originally, though his more scholarly successor, Andrew Mel- ville, more highly developed them. It has been, amid thrift and integrity and diligence and JOHN KNOX. 249 enterprise, the glory of the Scottish people to hare made their influences, moral, spiritual, and mercantile and martial, more and more prized, and more indispensable to their English fel- low-subjects. It has been the weakness of the pure English or Anglo-Saxon stock to lavish scorn, often brutally, on the Taffy, the Sawney, and the Paddy of their Celtic fellow-subjects, as they clumsily travestied the names of the patron saints — St. David, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick — :of these associated peoples, sharers of their destinies, their burdens, and their battle-fields. The people thus taunted have not reciprocated in like temper on St. George and his Dragon, as the Geordies. But the land which has been illustrated by the genius of Adam Smith and Eeid and Sir William Hamilton, of Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and Campbell and John Wilson, has done yet more for the interests of the empire, in the influence of the Covenanters and the revivals of Cambuslang, in the ministry of the Alexander Henderson, and the Alexander Peden, and the Thomas Chal- mers, and the Thomas Guthrie. Scottish soldiers have fought her battles from Sir Ealph Abercrombie and Sir John Moore down to Sir Colin Campbell. Her scholars and her lawyers, like the Erskines and the Jeffreys and the Kaimes, have been no ineffective or indolent contributors to the influence and glory of the land. But there arise, from time to time, those who affect to de- plore and to denounce the strong indignation of John Knox. His own times, when he was more nearly and more thoroughly known, held him a man of God, and that his sayings were often found prophetic as against individuals untrue to duty and to the cause of truth. Even men enemies to his creed yet quailed before what seemed the evidence that God was 250 ERAS AND CBARACTERS OF UISTOBT. near this true man of God. For one so nearly yet reverently communing with the Most High, and so conversant with holy Scripture, might well read character more aptly than his or- dinary neighbors, and there is a sense in which " the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him." So Englishmen held it of the good Archbishop TJssher, and devout Covenanters of the good Alexander Peden. Those who think, with some of our times, that all high ear- nestness and sharpness in religious controversy are out of keeping with courtesy have lost sight of the old prophets and apostles. Cobbett was fond of admiring the sharp epithets of Swift, and aptly emulated them. Had he the naming of some schemes of reform, he would describe them as hoping to recast the world under the auspices of Smirk and Slobber. A court- ly smile was on the one side to invite all adhesions to what was commended, and the rheum of a profuse scorn was to flood away all that was to be rejected. There are men who, strong in the vaunted progress of the nineteenth century, ex- pect to banish conscience and Scripture and the old creeds by the deluge of their glib disparagement. Such reformers would expect, in the sweep of the flood that streams from their sov- ereign lips, to obliterate landmarks solid as the old Pyramids of , Egypt. The oldest foundations of a divine authority are to be subverted and overthrown, when these lofty speculators void upon the ancient monuments their rapid and their vapid denunciation. The process has been tried before, in the days of the old Alexandrian eclecticism, in the times of scepticism that attended the Classic Revival, in the nascent days of Ger- man RationaUsm, as before in the heyday of French material- ism and atheism. But the floods went by, and the Word of JOSN KNOX. 261 God remained; for it could not be floated ofi by the mere word of man. And he who, like John Knox, fearing not man's face,.finds in the fear of the Lord the beginning of his wisdom, and in the cross of Christ the foundation of his hopes, and in the judgment-bar of Christ his last audit and his sure record, is not to be railed out of court by the men whose sovereign wisdom is an amplification of Self. The world's ills are not conjured away by such spells, and the world's true reformers are invincible to such impeachers and mockers. The Scotland of the nineteenth century is the attestation that Knox was a God-sent and a God-owned man. Let his as- sailants match and surpass his work. 252 ERAS AND CSABAOTEBS OF BISTORT. XII. THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. There is a drift in our age toward materialism -which leads men unconsciously to exaggerate and overvalue advantages that are merely material and tangible, as if these last only had reality, and all else were but visionary and worthless. But, in truth, spiritual conquests may be of far higher moment to the happiness of the individual and the nation than any gains and inventions that are but of the earth earthy. Italy could far better afford to lose the magnificent Cathedral of Milan, with all its splendor and majesty and artistic wealth, than that it should have missed the glory and the impulse lent its litera- ture by the great epic of Dante, the "Divina Commedia." Bet- ter for the race to be without the building than without the book. And the old pagan Classical Italy, of yet earlier cen- turies, would have been less impoverished by some earthquake that should have ingulfed bodily Eome's massive Coliseum, than had the storms of Northern invasion and Gothic barba- rism swept out of existence and memory all manuscripts of the orations and philosophical treatises of Cicero, and of the poetry of her Virgil, her Horace, and her Juvenal. The man, formed in the image of God, was not meant to "live," and finds him- self by bitter experiment unable to live, " on bread alone." Gains and luxuries that may be told upon the fingers or but- toned securely into the pockets, commodities of the larder and THE PVniTAN AND THE MYSTIC. 253 the buttery-hatch and the •wine-cellar and the exchequer, will not meet the cravings of the heart, when fully awake, or calm the troubled and foreboding soul. Steam-engines, and rail- roads, and spinning -jennies, and submarine telegraphs — all mighty and gold-breeding in their way — yet, in their consum- mate and conglomerated successes, are something lower and poorer than are freedom and conscience and moral character and eternal destiny. An Alfred did more for the English people than an Ark- wright with his looms, or a Jenner with his vaccination. The inventor of the stocking-loom did well for his nation and his times ; but the barons who extorted Magna Charta centuries before had done far better for their own island and for the race. And though a pontiff banned the sturdy barons for their work, the papal curse did not hold, and the national charter did hold; and every free people now on the face of our planet is at this time the richer for the influence of their act — an influ- ence, be it remembered, spiritual, and not material. Great national upheavals have owed their success, not to the battles so much, that came in their front or in their train, and to the material expenditure of treasure and of blood which they re- quired, as to the spiritual truths that moved behind them. Crusades, and Spanish Armadas, and French Bartholomew mas- sacres have, spite of the pontiff's benediction, failed, because the truth of Christ's Gospel, an unseen but most potent ele- ment, was not with the blare of their trumpets, the flutter of their banners, and the keen edge of their swords. The Lollard preachers of Wycliffe, plainly clad and bare- footed, went down before persecution, but not their spiritual testimony. The Testaments of Tyndale went by hundreds to 254 ERAS AND CHARACTERS OF HISTORY. the fire, as did their meek, brave translator. But no Sunday- school child, in outlying log-hut mission, in any land where the English tongue is spoken, is there but is this day the better for the work of those harried and incarcerated and execrated and incinerated witnesses for Christ and for his Gospel. Paper and ink from preachers and from Eeformer were burnt, but their message was vitrified by those fires into the national heart and character. The stool on which Jenny Geddes sat, her sole substitute for pew-back and pew-cushion, when she hurled it indignantly at the oflScial reciting a prelatical service in her old sanctuary, was a material weapon and of homeliest and clumsiest aspect. But behind it, back of that awkward missile, was the conscience of a nation whom Knox had evan- gelized, and who grew indignant at the invasion on ancestral liberties and ancestral worship. And that invisible spiritual power moved onward, through these and the like crude engine- ry, to. the ultimate overthrow of the Stuart dynasty, the relig- ious independence of Scotland, and the political freedom of the British people. Even David Hume, not an illiterate or incom- petent witness, and one biassed with no religious partialities in their favor, accords to the Puritans the origin of the political liberties of England. With what heroic steadfastness did they move toward that end, and to a higher end — the moral renova- tion of England — past dungeons, scaffolds, and battle-fields. There are those who rejoice in the freedom and vaunt its worth, but who speak flippantly of its winners. Gray, in his great "Elegy in a Country Church - yard," intimates but too dis- tinctly that one of these Puritan leaders was complicated in the responsibility for the slaughters which resistance to the tyranny of Laud, Strafford, and their royal master, the first THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 255 Charles, involved — was not "guiltless of his country's blood." Surely the guilt of martyr-blood and patriot-blood, munificently poured forth in defence of man's best rights and of God's holi- est truths, comes to the door of the mitred and crowned op- pressors whose aggressions extorted the sacrifice, and not on the heads of the heroic victims who counted not their own lives dear when the great spiritual boons, freedom in religion and conscience, were at state. Who the Puritans were and what they did we may well ask, for the inquiry leads us back to deeds of stirring pith, and the name, once given in scorn as a term of darkest obloquy, has now put on dignity and renown. As used through the whole period of the reign of the Stuarts in England, from the days of Ben Jonson to those of Butler, the author of " Hudibras," it was given scoflBngly to men who were regarded as assuming a special pureness and sanctity of character, which was felt to cast reproach on the Sunday revellings of the rural green and of the royal court, on the mask and the mixed dance, and the deep potation and the glib cursing of what called itself the gallant knighthood, and the cheery carousing of Merry Eng- land. Households like those of Baxter's father and of Philip Henry, father of the Scripture commentator, were hardly beset in the endeavor to keep quiet Sabbath at their own homes. Prelates, oflBoious and eager, hunted out the preachers of this obnoxious class ; and fine, prison, and exile often were the visitation of what were by a very grim irony called the Spirit- ual Courts, upon those who would not as preachers read from their pulpits the King's license, that Sunday afternoon should be given to bear-baiting, dog-fighting, revelling, and dancing, and tippling. It was like the name given, in a later day, of 256 ERAS AND CEABAGTEBS OF HISTOBY. Methodists to the young students who lived after a method or constant rule in their reading and praying ; and the scoff, meek- ly accepted, became the designation of the body which, under the Wesleys and Whitefield, and Hervey, and Howell Harris, did so much to evangelize England and Wales. In later days it was replaced by the title of " The Saints," or " The Godly," applied with bitter hate to Wilberforce and his friends in the movement to infuse new life into the torpor of the Establishment, and to set free the multitudinous cap- tives who had been reft by Christian Britain from pagan Af- rica. Through what storms of derision did Wilberforce move to his end. George III. and his whole household were against the early movements. Consult the light literature of the day to tnow the rancorous invective and the gay contempt that by turns assailed the meek champion. But he persists till, as Daniel O'Connell said, in one of his best flights, he (Wilber- force) went up to heaven, bearing in his hand the rent mana- cles of myriads on myriads of enfranchised bondmen. The planters of our own New England were largely of Pu- ritan faith and Puritan blood. It was the bitter jibe of a school-boy in one of the great English public schools, many years since, that the Adam and Eve of these North American Colonies of Britain came out of Newgate. He was confound- ing the Botany Bay colonists of Britain's Australian posses- sions in his own times, with the heroic and scholarly and mar- tyr-like men, contemporaries and school-mates and correspond- ents of the younger Vane, the Cokes, the Pyms, the Eliots, the Baxters, the Hampdens, and the Cromwells, and the Sel- dens, and the Owens, whom no college, British or Continental, might not be proud to own, and who, in statesmanship, and THE PUMITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 257 valor, and moral worth — and some of them in ancient descent — were the peers of Europe's oldest nobility and the conquer- ors of Britain's doughtiest chivalry. The Hookers, the Nor- tons, and the Sheppards, and the Mathers of our own early his- tory were no weaklings in the study or in the pulpit ; nor was Roger Williams such — the guest of Vane, and the visitor of John Milton, and the champion for two continents of religious freedom, when the Westminster Assembly men, and the Pres- byterians of Scotland, and the Episcopalians of England all banded together to denounce his hardihood. Intended to denounce as preciseness and as affectation, or as sheerest hypocrisy, the exactness of those who believed that Christianity was a practical religion — demanding holiness in those who were recipients of Christian ordinances, and from the attendants on Christian sanctuaries — it took in, in their distinctive peculiarities, though not in its first coinage, the Presbyterians of Scotland no less than the men within or out of the Episcopal Establishment in England, who laid stress on Christian character, as the indispensable accompaniment and the natural exegesis for the people's eye, of Church creeds and of Church rituals. The Covenanter, hunted down by Claver- house and his dragoons, or hung in the Tolbooth, because he demanded freedom to hear his Bible -expounded by teachers whom he revered in modes to which he and his fathers were devoted, was, with his co-religionists, in doctrines and general bearing akin to the Puritans of England and the North Ameri- can colonists who sailed from England to plant our eastern coast. The body were not destitute of scholarship. In their views of the great Calvinistic system of doctrine, and in their views as to what constituted the religious experience of the true be- 258 EBAS AND CEABACTER8 OF HISTORY. liever, they had on their side scholars like the great Archbish- op Ussher of the Irish Episcopal Establishment, a worthy com- peer of Selden. They had had, when our received version of the Bible was first suggested, among them John Reynolds, one of the finest theologians and scholars of England, in many walks the equal, and in others the superior, of Bishop An- drewes, one of the most learned of the adherents to the Church polity and party. Alexander Henderson, and Samuel Rutherford, and David Dickson, and David Calderwood, and George Gillespie of the Scottish Presbyterians were eminently devout, and were men, too, of scholarship. The name given to similar trains of like believers had, in the days of mediaeval persecution, been reproduced by a kindred epithet from the Greek, of the same general sense, " the Ca- thari," men seeking to cleanse themselves from the clinging de- filement of the Apocalyptic Babylon — men who, because their Saviour was holy, heeded his charge as he charged them to be themselves also holy. And back of these " Cathari," standard- bearers of primitive truth and primitive holiness, in the dark days of general torpor and spiritual apostasy, the name was found as applied to a class in the very Scriptures of our com- mon faith. Not with a special reference to certain exclusive and peculiar devotees, as the Papal Church has applied the term, the epistles of the New Testament, the work of the Apostles under plenary inspiration, had designated the entire body of Church adherents as " Saints," called to be such by the vows of their first confession, and if truly received into the fel- lowship, sealed as such by the graces and energies of the Holy Ghost. The Saint is but the Puritan by anticipation ; and the God of the Bible gave the designation. THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 259 Take the terra, then, in its historical aflSnities and it shows the Puritan and the Covenanter, the successors of the mediseval Cathari, and of the primeval Christians ; men ■who, at the bid- ding of a Divine Master, avouched his sacred will as their rule of life, and his blessed example in his human incarnation as the model to be evermore studied and reproduced in the entire body of the faithful. Truth, as accepted by the enlightened conscience and the regenerate heart, was a moral transfigura- tion ; and holiness became its necessary and inevitable eflBux, radiated forth upon the darkness of the world and against the mocking enmity of that great enemy who rules in -the hearts of the children of disobedience. And it was a singular instance of the ready and instinctive retention by the old antagonist forces of evil and paganism and heresy — all riot and all infi- delity — as flinging the watchwords of the old strife against the contemporary defenders of the old Gospel, that in the Christian Britain of our nineteenth century the pristine form of the epi- thet was used half scoflBngly and half admiringly against the like-minded followers of the Christian Captain Havelock in the wars of India. Some service was needed that, to be effectual, required sober heads and prompt movements. " Call out," said the officer above him, " Havelock and his Saints — for they are always ready, and they are never drunk." Ay, the apt and pat word, and yet how old — " Saints " — such in the page of Paul — such in the " Cathari," that in the wilderness testified against, and bled before, the apostate mother of harlots — such in the Covenanters and Cameronians of Scotland and Northern Ire- land — such in the Non-conformists and Methodists of later days. Not like them of Koman calendars, haunters of cells and hermitages, and dwelling with Simon Stylites on the pillar- 260 ^SAS AMD CHABAOTEBS OF MISTOMY. top, catching all hearts and eyes by the spectacle of voluntary self-torture, but saints of daily life, in the mart, the booth, the camp ; with Bunyan at the tinker's task, or in the twelve-years dungeon ; with Keach in the pillory ; with Baxter, aged but calm, under the insults of Jeffreys ; or with Owen and John Janeway, or Kenwick, or Guthrie, in quiet study or under grim gallows-tree, everywhere and every way cultivating holiness in the fear of God, and by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Ex- iled, emigrant, prisoned, pilloried, impoverished, derided, pro- scribed, and hunted ; and yet, amid all this variety of treatment and condition, endeavoring as in the sight of God to be and remain unblemished before the world that maligned them, and eying resolutely and cheerily the death-day and the judgment bar to which that scoflSng world was in all hot haste hurling them. Puritanism, in its just and wide application, takes in those of similar faith and the like godliness in Huguenot France, and in Protestant Holland and Switzerland and Germany. The word " Pure," that Englishmen devised to affix upon them, came, as scholars say, through Sanscrit and Greek origins, from the idea of a purity, or cleanness, ascertained and refined as by fire ; and God's Spirit long since spoke of graces " tried as by fire " — a fine gold of consistent and devout persistency, that did not shrink from the mounting flame and the glowing cru- cible. Whoever coined the epithet, and with whatever intent of disparagement and derision, it is a banner under which apostles did not shrink from marching. It was a sternness of Christian principle and a thoroughness of Christian loyalty that accepted obedience to God at all risks, as before man, as the only course of true wisdom and genuine freedom and in- IBM PURITAN AXD TEE MYSTIC. 261 nate manhood. William of Orange, the enfranchiser of the Netherlands ; Coligny of France, the brave admiral, victim of St. Bartholomew ; the Latimers and the Hoopers of England — how glorious are the names that glisten on the muster-roll of this great troop ! " Tried by fire, they shine as the fine gold." From the origin and bearing of the name let us pass to some brief glance at their deeds. Look at what they did for England. Our existing received version was suggested, at the Hampton Conference, by Dr. John Reynolds, a most devout man, and one of the most learned scholars in a very learned age ; Ussher, Andrewes, Selden, Gataker, and Lively, and Hugh Broughton among his contemporaries; and he was the peer of any one of them, the superior in erudition of the most of them. He did not live to see the completion of the new re- vision ; but it was the request of his party and himself, and while life was indulged him his last days were spent in con- tributing to the work. Though in many respects by his tastes severed from them, in general opinions and in political action Selden was with them. The share of him and his more Puri- tan associates, Pym and Hampden, in bringing about, by the great Bill of Eights and kindred measures, a dike that effect- ually shut out the ingushing flood of despotism that Charles L, under his French and Romanist councillors, would have brought upon British freedom, is a history of which British annalists cannot well tire. It was Puritanism that, in Cromwell and in Ireton and Har- rison, on the land, won victories before which the chivalry and Cavaliers could not stand. It was Puritanism that iu Blake fought so resplendently on the seas, and made France, Spain, 12 262 ERAS AND CHAJiAUTERS OF HISTORY. and Italy, with all their Catholicism, quail before the valor of English sailors, many of them, with their captains, eminently God-fearing men. It was Puritanism that, under the Admiral Lawson, the Baptist Puritan, won the victories that inured to the credit of James, Duke of York, afterward as a king James II., both on land and on sea showing for himself so little of valor or conduct, and so much of cowardice. It was Piiritanism that gave, through Milton, its greatest epic to English literature. It was Puritanism that, through Bunyan, dreaming and tagging laces for his children's bread in Bedford Jail for twelve years, gave England its greatest al- legory, yet unmatched and unapproachable — the "Pilgrim's Progress." And England paid the poet with mocking, and taunts, and neglect, and poverty. And England paid the alle- gorist with taking one-fifth of his life for the dungeon-walls, and with telling him of her mercy in not having hanged him as a recusant when neglecting attendance on his parish church — him who was meanwhile preaching and writing for more of a multitudinous mass of readers, his virtual parish, than the best of their bishops ever reached, or is ever likely to reach, Puritanism went on when the Stuarts returned from exile. There was a recoil from severity to extremest license ; but on whose part was this recoil ? In part the camp-followers of the good old cause, who had followed it, like Pepys, when it was in fashion and furnished good pay, but glad to throw ofE the mask of outer conformity when the fashion turned and prof- ligacy was in rule. But, in another party, the license was in those returned from exile, adherents to the Eoyal party, who had dangled around Continental courts in their exile, and now, when the peril was past and the great Protector dead, who ran THE JPVRITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 263 riot witli all unmatiliness of revenge and all brutality of indul- gence. But another part of the old Puritan party were in their conscience adherents to the cause which they loved; houseless, without stipend or shelter, but writing, and preach- ing, and suffering — how effectively the literature of Non-con- formity, issued from under the edge of the scaffold and from within the prison gratings, shows to this day. Decried they have been as the enemies of learning. Was Pool — was Gale, author of the " Court of the Gentiles " — was Owen — any one of them — less than a scholar of high attainments 3 The great preachers and writers of the Eestoration in the Established Church, like Tillotson, and Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor, and the elder Sherlock, and South even, were men who had re- ceived their college training in the days of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate ; and their powers and their works show that Puritanism, to them at least, was no ungenerous or unsuc- cessful school-mistress. England boasts, in sacred literature, of her Polyglot bearing the name of Bishop "Walton. Though himself of the Estab- lished Episcopal Church, that great work was prepared while Puritanism yet ruled in Britain; and in consequence some copies, now rarely met, contain a dedication to the great Pro- tector Cromwell, under whose auspices it was first launched. The Eevolution of 1688, that saved England from absolu- tism, and achieved under "William III., was in a great measure but the return of those free institutions prepared under the Commonwealth, suppressed by the Stuart Eestoration, but re- placed and redintegrated, so to speak, by the accession to the British throne of a scion of the illustrious Protestant lineage of Orange in Holland. 264 ERAS AND CHABACTERS OF HISTORY. While, then, English literature cherishes the names of Milton and Bunyan ; while the history of the land must admit the greatness of that Oliver Cromwell whose image among her sov- ereigns her Eoyalist prejudices \vill not permit her yet to in- stal ; while the closets and sanctuaries of England retain the writings of Howe and Baxter and Owen and Eeynolds ; while her more erudite inquirers turn to the labors of a Lightfoot and a Pool and a Gale, the honors done to Puritan loyalty in the vindication of great principles, and to Puritan nobility in setting God's truth above all sacrifices to be incurred in main- taining it, must go on ; honors that, the longer postponed in their full allowance, bring at the last a more overwhelming arrearage on the part of those who must, sooner or later, face the account. As to the obligation of these United States to the New Eng- land forefathers, it is a topic that we need not here and now discuss. Its very scope forbids its having more than the merest allusion as we pass it, greeting while we pass. I. But against the whole form of religious feeling and practice presented in the Puritan home and school, and town- rule, and state polity, an opposition exists in some minds that, if vague in outline, is strong in its dislike. It loots upon this aspect of Christianity as mystical. The word thus used in dis- paragement is itself of some vagueness. Borrowed from the more recondite practices of old heathenism, it characterizes that which is secret and hidden from outer scrutiny. Many of these mysteries in old paganism were pretentious and bootless, and others, again, were revolting and degrading. But true re- ligion is itself a life, and the Great Teacher himself presented his doctrines as a life, and claimed to have a kingdom " set up THU PVMITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 265 within " his followers. The closet was to be the personal con- ference-chamber between each true worshipper and his God, the searcher of hearts. His proselytes, as Nicodemus learned, were to become neophytes of a change, internal and pervasive, a second birth, a true individual renovation. But among the early divergences from the true faith were those Gnostics who, infected by the influence of pagan philoso- phy and mysteries, would have something occult as the pos- session of favored disciples, imparted stealthily and under great and strict reserve. Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, under whose inspection such forms of error would most naturally and largely come, denounced them as mysteries of infatuation and destruction. Speaking of the simplicity of the terms of ad- mission to the salvation that Christ gave, he, Paul, bids the learner not to seek to clamber upward, asking, " Who should ascend into heaven?" or to tread a crooked and slippery way downward — "Who should descend into the deeps?" The Word near and clear — and clear as near — was in their minds and their hearts simple, present, and hearty trust in a perfected salvation from a present, divine, omnipresent, and almighty rescuer. But, spite of these warnings, inside of the Christian Church and outside of it in Judaism and the surviving schools of pagan philosophy, and afterward in Mahometanism, men's love of the occult and the mysterious and the recondite and the exclu- sive led them to favor a doctrine abstruse and difficult, com- municated by degrees and only through certain peculiar teach- ings of man's own spirit, or of angels, or of God himself, the Spirit apart from ordinary revelation in the written Word. The Jewish Cabala, and the secret discipline of the nominal 266 ERAS AND CHAHACTEMS OF HISTOMY. Christian Cliurch, and the eclectic philosophy of those Alexan- drians who sought to reform the old paganism into some sem- blance of clearness and of profundity borrowed from Christian- ity, that should fit it to rival and to replace Christianity ; the mystics of early monastic life, and then the later mystics of the Romish Church, like Eckard and like Tauler and like the anonymous writer of the " Theologia Germanica," an author once so admired and accredited ; saints of the Roman com- munion, like St. Theresa of Spain and St. Brigitta, and of the other sex, St. Bonaventura, have moved in the same direction. The mystic writings of Molinos in Spain, at first favored by one of the pontiffs, and then denounced ; those of Madame Giiion, favored by Fenelon, and then, as denounced by Bossnet, put under the pontifical curse, and disowned meekly by Fenelon when thus proscribed, all flow in the same channel. In Protestant Germany, Behmen, though but a cobbler, in his acute and solitary musings became the founder of a school which even Law admired, and which Sir Isaac Newton is said to have in some degree approved. It was a movement in the same channel. In later times Swedenborg has built up his system — a man of learning and genius, but whom John Wesley, personally knowing him, deemed of unsound mind. He has written largely and abstrusely. The Friends, or Quakers, were by some at least of the con- temporaries of their first founders, Fox, Barclay, and William Penn, thought to lay too much stress on the power of the in- ward light, as distinct from or oven antagonistic to the letter of written Scripture. A late French school of Martinez Pasqualis excited notice in our own day ; his followers were called the Martinists. THM PUKITAN AND TEE MYSTIC. 261 Tlie younger Vaughan has written ably in his " Hours with the Mystics " on some of these multiform schools, but without exhausting the theme or the literature, refined, complex, and bewildering as it is. Against mystic theology, alike Catholic and Protestant — that favored by the Romish Church and that denounced by the pontifical see — there lie the grand objections. Though true re- ligious life is and must be an inward and spiritual thing, there is fearful peril in mating the first sources of truth to be the spirit of man, witnessing from its own resources and of its own authority. Here comes in rationalism ; dictating to God and recasting the divine oracles, or, as Coleridge said, once a prose- lyte himself to the error, " Every man the mater of his own Bible." The younger of the Newmans, Francis W. Newman, brother of John Henry Newman, lately made cardinal by the reigning Pope, Leo XHI., has thus passed, it is understood, from Christianity and the Christian Church to a creed of his own selecting and compounding — a deist, framing and authenticat- ing his own oracle. But there is another form of mysticism that may prove equally perilous, and lead more speedily to yet more audacious impiety. When man approaches — the Christian Scriptures within reach of his hand, and the Christ, the true light of the world, proffer- ed there to every inquirer — when, rushing past these, a man appeals to the supreme and creating spirit, God, repudiating the Christ and the Oracle, and the Paraclete promised of the Christ, to aid in reading and elucidating the Oracle, such in- quirer has no warranty in Providence and no promise of God's giving that he shall be saved from falling under the influence 268 EBA.S AND CHARACTERS OP HISTORY. of that invisible but most potent teacber, the Father of Lies, who is permitted at times to veil himself to the presumptu- ous " as an angel of light." When Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of George Herbert, the sacred poet, and himself the father of English deism, wrote a book denying the possibility of a written revelation, he, nevertheless, in his rash self-confi- dence, asked an answer from Heaven sanctioning and endors- ing this new treatise. He thought himself to have received the sanction. But the multitude of English deists since have never accepted his strange revelation as binding on thera, or regarded as quite consistent, for himself, the first promulgation of this strange renunciation of his own principles. Revelation, which could not be to the race, might be — and was — to him, Herbert of Cherbury, vouchsafed. It was one of the legends that his Romish enemies coined against Knox that, grotesque as malignant, represented the Reformer as evoking by magic spells apostles for his patrons. When Satan appeared bodily Knox's confederates fled in affright, but he persisted. What was foulest invention as against that worthy may, to those ac- cepting Paul's literal statement of " the doctrines of devils," seem but too possible in the case of the self-reliant and Bible- defiant spiritualist. Such an one, summoning angels, may evoke demons. Rome, in her Theresas and her Bonaventuras, has added much to the Scriptures ; but it is often not added light, but only entanglement. The Thauler, whose book Luther so praised, recognized Mary, the mother of our Lord, as in some sort a mediator with her Son. Bonaventura, canonized as he is by the infallible Church, has gone so far in the same peculiar path that he took the whole book of Psalms and by a fearful THE PUniTAN AND THE MYSTIC. 269 temerity substituted Mary, the human mother, for the divine Messiah, in its whole structure, far as he could insert the cruel and irreverent interlineations into the record as inspired Psalm- ists, the prophets of God, left it. Another mediseval mystic, Eckard, really furnished the pantheist system which Hegel adopted centuries after. This we learn from an independent and scholarly Catholic, Hegel's friend, who claims to have shown Hegel the mediseval authority, which the modern pan- theist gladly adopted. Spinoza, a learned Jew, was pantheist ; and modern rationalism in Germany has, even in such minds as Schleiermacher's, gone from apostle and prophet to seek higher truth in Spinoza, making all human history in its multi- form aspects but the rim and fringe, so to speak, of the Divine Essence permeating and swaying all nature. Hindoo Brahmin- ism went no farther. As to Swedenborg, the Christians of the world have generally passed by his new and strange additions to, and perversions of, the doctrines and oracles of Scripture with profound distrust and confirmed dislike. HI. How was the Puritan guarded from all such mysticism 3 Religious life was to him a warfare, an inner and home-felt reality. But in his mind and creed the Word — the written and inspired Word — was the great standard of. knowledge, duty, and hope, and blessedness. He found the fall of the first Adam there written, and confirmed by the wail of the race through the whole course of the centuries. To his own mind, thus warped and blinded and surrounded by malign and misguiding influence in the world, he might not trust. He searched the inner record, but he collated it with the outer record of God's book. In that volume he found his own right, personally, and apart from all churches, and synagogues, 12* 270 ERAS AND QEARACTERS OF BISTORT. and pontiffs, and fathers, to come to God's one Christ, and plead that blood-shedding which availed for him personally. Individualism, in the Pnritan system, has its highest rights and its noblest developments. It is, in the language of an old philosopher, in the religious existence of each devout student, "a flight of one alone to God, the only One." He, the Jeho- vah, from Eden and from Sinai and from Calvary has spoken. His legislation admits no improvement. His promises and blessings require no amplification — letting out their tucks and seams, as by a rationalistic man-millinery — into broader devel- opments and fuller truthfulness. Variety and difiiculty, need- ing patient meditation and devout collation and close scrutiny, he finds in God's book of nature, as vrell as in God's bo6k of Scripture. Mysteries of this kind do not appall him. He finds, as did Job in his day, obscurities in the arrangements of the Divine Providence. He awaits the disclosures and fuller lessons of the Father's house on high for their elimination and full illumination. The vast mass of the book is radiant with light and love and blessedness. But especially is he, in the images and prophecies of the earlier Testament, and in the histories and miracles and dis- courses of the later Testament, introduced to God in Christ, the son and equal of the Father. That Elder Brother is be- come his (the penitent's) kinsman and sin-bearer, the compan- ion of his pilgrimage, and the captain of his warfare. That battle of the brief earthly life is leading soon, and leading as- suredly, to full salvation. The character and face of the Sa- viour there displayed is its own evidence. Unparalleled it stands in the life of the race — amid the religions, and the phi- losophies, and the sciences — the one exhibition, of perfect and TRE fUlilTAN AND THE MTSTIU. 271 transcendent holiness, wisdom, and beneficence, and justice. The righteousness thus revealed to simple faith was the hope of Augustine, of Waldo, of Luther, of St. Cyran, and Janse- nius ; of Pascal, and Leighton, and Owen, and Baxter, and Ban- yan. It is his — his own, personally and evermore. And the vision thus unveiled transfigures while it enlightens. The stu- dent is changed from glory to glory as into the Master's im- age. And these transmutations of character — many and mul- tiform, in so many centuries, in regions so remote — are sub- stantially a cloud of witnesses, ever broader and ever brighter, that girdle the book around with new attestations. And mys- terious as, to the careless and perfunctory reader it may seem, he knows that Christ, beaming out thence, is the light of the world, the way, the truth, and the life. He is bidden, as under the edge of this Tabor of a new moral transfiguration, to try the spirits. He does not, there- fore, lightly credit a new voice, though claiming to speak in the name of a wide philosophy or a very exact material sci- ence. He does not need infallible Church or infallible pontiff. Whither shall he go, you ask, to meet the loss thus occasioned? We answer. He turns to a present Redeemer — with his people to the end of the world — a divine omnipotence and a divine omniscience, that is alike infallible as to its truthfulness and indefectible as to its consummate and immaculate holiness. But schools, traditions, and oecumenical councils would bar the way. As the individual, alone with his God, and by a right given to him from that God, he waives aside all such authority of mere man, as intrusive, presumptuous, and contradictory. Christ has now his throne of all power on the earth just as much as in the heaven. If so omnipresent and omnipotent, 272 JSJiAS AND CHARACTERS OP HISTORY. why did he, the Christ, not bar the way of his martyrs like Paul to the tlirone and headsman's sword of Nero? Because suffering glorified the Master and purified the disciple apostle. The incipient errors and scandals of the Churches deserved such visitations of persecution, and were in many purged away by the discipline of the amphitheatre. And the antichrist, copy- ing the heathenism and clutching the power of pagan Eome, was to have its lease of seeming impunity till the guilt was ripe, and the impending bolt was, after being long poised, in the dire hour to fall. No earthly sovereign, on the throne of any European or Asiatic dominion, has the full, personal real- ity to the devout student that inheres in this Christ. To him — in the page of the opened Bible, given of him and revealing him, in his own individual right and his own individual duty — the student comes. Christ is, more really than any one of you now is. Yours is a derivative, a dependent, a variable, and an imperfect life ; his, the underived, independent, unva- rying, and all -perfect life, upon which that of the universe hangs. Your knowledge limited, and your presence localized, his knowledge is the illimitable ; his presence is flooding, and overlapping, and bounding, as the sea bounds the shore, the whole continent of creation. This Saviour invites your and my approach, personal, prompt, and all-surrendering ; his blood to cancel our sin, his grace to fill our vast accruing necessities. The praises of Israel girdle his throne ; ay, their prayers to him, the Christ, are praises yet imperfectly articulated. They invoke a might not yet spent, a grace not yet weary. But, beyond his own personal work and influence, the Puri- tan finds sealed in this Scripture the open patent of his heav- enly sonship, the pledge of another advocate — another com- THE PUlilTAN AND THE MYSTIC. 273 forter. Give to the name of the Paraclete either of these versions. The Son, who is unforgetting, unswerving verity, pawns — so to speak, in all reverence — his own nature and God- head, that this npw teacher shall take the things of the Father and of the Son, and show them unto the devout and patient reader. It is God's gauntlet thrown down, not in defiance, hut io loving and fraternal encouragement, to betroth his Church to himself, in an unbroken fellowship and for an eter- nal reunion. Has not the Church proved the powers of that Paraclete ? The missions of our day — the reforms, political, social, religious — are but new waves of influence emitted in brightness and felicity from this personal representative of the Father and of the Son. You say : But the sons are not always adhering to the les- sons and oracles of their fathers. Did God promise they should? Solomon could not have written the Psalms of his father David. Did the apostasy of the more lettered offspring throw doubt on the divine utterances of the less literate but more devout parent? The children of the Huguenot nobility in France apostatized; did that blemish the graces of their martyr fathers, less fond of the world, and more fond of their God and his truth and his heaven ? No ; here again, as the Puritan holds it, individualism asserts its place. Each apart is called to come personally to a personal Saviour, by a personal Spirit, the individual renewer and enlightener and sealer. Of mysticism, in the. sense of a secret communing of the individual soul with its God, Puritanism has what the Bible demands that it should have, " a fear of the Lord" taught, not by the precepts of men, but by oracles and Spirit and Son of God, to the lonely, isolated inquirer, who for himself re- 274 ERAS AND CHARAVTMBS OF HISTORY. pents, for himself believes, and for himself lives, obeys, and inherits. But a mysticism that substitutes the human reason or soul as authority above God, or that goes directly and apart from Christ to the spirit as of God (without any sufficient safeguard but that it is a false, misguiding spirit of demoniac assump- tion), is foreign to the first principles of the Puritan. A faith, Bible-bred and Bible-fed, at the feet of the one Eedeemer and Propitiation, under the invocation of the one Paraclete, is the confidance in which he breasts the storms of this life, and in the strength of which he meekly looks to confront the opened books of the world's registry, and to hear the doom of an unalterable destiny. Deride it as the world may, let a " Hudibras " empty all his jests on the character and the creed — in Britain and in America — through nineteen Christian centuries, the Saints, the Cathari, the Puritans, have brooked the world's jeers, taunts, and calum- nies ; and when that world could, and when they dared, — dart and sword and rack and stake have been added to the con- tumely. But the verdict of history already is against the world and with the Puritan. See the language of Lord North- brook (of the Baring family, so widely known to commerce), but lately the Governor -general of India, presiding a few weeks ago, in London, at the anniversary of our Baptist For- eign Missions, and attesting from his own Indian observation that in eighty years the faith of Carey, Marshman, and Ward has wrought a change which would to themselves at the begin- ning of those eighty years have seemed sheer impossibility. But a few years since a nobleman of his position, an ofiBcer wielding supreme power in India, would have lost caste by the THE PURITAN AND THE MYSTIC. 275 recognition. The next eight years may precipitate, in God's good providence, in a tithe of the time, yet greater changes than did the last eighty. We know in ■whose book it is written that nations may be born in a day. But God's Christ lives, resistless and unswerving, a vigilant omnipresence, and woe to the Church or creed that undertakes to constitute herself or itself an administrator on the effects and chattels of a deceased Christ, as their rationalism or their Vaticanism holds it — evanished and dead out of his throne, and leaving spirits human or superhuman to seize on his void heritage with the prompt craft of the old husbandmen in the Gospel parable : " The heir killed, and the inheritance ours." Though invisible, Jesus is no absentee proprietor. The Messiah holds the literature, com- merce, and science of the centuries as his own appanage ; and the Spirit enswathes and can wield them all, as the upper air wraps our globe. Skies, morally, in their arid gloom as brass, his touch can melt into the showers of a Pentecost as wide as it shall be sudden ; and the Zion of God, with a household speaking all of earth's polyglot dialects, shall exclaim, as they avouch one faith and invoke one Lord : " Who hath begotten mo these ?" INDEX, Abekcrombie, Sir Balph, 249. Adrian VI., 194. Aloiat, 207. Alexander VI., 121, 123, 128, 1.30. Alfred the Great, 253. Allies, 12. Anabaptists, 196, 216, 221. Ananias of Damascus, 10. Andrewes, Bishop, 258, 261. Anthony, St., 47. Antinomians, 196. Apocalypse, date of, 35, 40 ; lessons of, 43 ; false interpretation of, 164. Apocrypha, Reynolds on the, 219. ApoUonius of Tyanea, 15. Aquinas, St. Thomas, 222. Arians, Persecution of, 218. Aristotle, 177. Arkwright, 253. Arnauld, Angelique, 53. Arnold, Benedict, 141. Asoka, Buddhism established by, 96 ; holds synod, 97. Assassination, papal, 55. Athanasius, 91. Audin, 199. Augsburg, Diet of, 194. Augustine, birth of, 71 ; youth of. 77 ; as a commentator, 78 ; St. Beuve'a estimate of, 79 ; works of, 80 ; compared to Goethe, 81. Ayasuluk, modem name of Ephesus, 23. Bacoit, Lord, 52, 218. Balaam, 141. Balfour, Sir James, 240. Ban of Pope and Empire, 204. Banks, Sir Joshua, 160. Barclay, 266. Baronius, 54. Barrow, 263. Basil, 49, 75. Baths of Nero, 14. Baxter, 266, 260, 264. Beale quoted, 100. Beatoun, Cardinal, 237. Becket, Thomas k, 112. Behmen, 266. Bellarmine, 222. Bembo, 210. Benares, 94, 95. Benedict, 60. Bengel, 42. Berenice, 27. Bernard, St., Luther's estimate of, 60, 130, 222. 278 INDEX. Beschi, 54. Beugnot, 73. Beza, 211. Black Prince, 114. Blake, 261. " Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women," 243. Boadicea, 13. Boileau, 24. Bollandists, 54. Bonaventura, 266, 269. Bonner, Bishop, 220. Borgia, CsBsai-, 130. Borgia, Roderic, 130. Bossuet, 79, 198, 224, 266. Boswell, 160, 161. Bothwell, 236, 248. Bourdaloue, 224. Bradford, John, 240, 241. Bradwardiue, 130. Erightman, 42. Britannicus, murder of, 5, 26. Broglie, 73. Broughton, Hugh, 261. Bucer, 194. Buchanan, George, 227, 237. Buddha, birth — leaves home, 93; finds disciples at Benares, 94 ; be- comes a mendicant — wife and son become proselytes — ^his death, 96 ; in Roman calendar as St. Josa- phat, 99. Buddhism, history of, 93-97 ; teach- ings of monastic schools, 97 ; sup- posed connection with Therapeu- tiB and Essenes, 98 ; contest with Brahminism, 98 ; compared with Christianity, 99 ; deficiencies of its teaching, 101-106, 109. Buddhists, estimated number of, 91. Bunyan, 140, 190, 260, 262, 271. Burns, Robert, 133, 229, 249. Burrhus, grief at Nero's stage-play- ing, 10. Caaba, shrine of the, 143. Cabala, the, 265. Cabet, 60. Caesarea, Paul at, 1. Csesars, the early, 3. Calamy, 78. Calderwood, David, 258. Calmet, 54. Calvin, John, 197; stands next to Luther, 205; his influence, ib.; birth, 206; education, 207 ; assid- uous study, 208 ; at Ferrara, 209 ; settles at Geneva, ib. ; style mod- elled on Cicero, 210; compared with Luther, 211; his edition of Seneca on Clemency, ib. ; Insti- tutes of, 212 ; goes to Basle and Strasburg, 213 ; return to Geneva, ib. ; his great activity, 214 ; trans- lation of the Bible, 215 ; influence on French style, ib. ; his marriage, 216; Jesuit slanders against, 221 ; great power, 222 ; compared with Augustine and St. Bernard, ib. ; system of theology, ib.; friend- ship for Knox, 242. Campbell, 249. Campbell, Sir Colin, 249. Caractacus and the Britons, 13. Carey, 274. ISDEX. 279 Carlstadt, 194. Casaubon, 212. Cathari, the, 268. Cerinthus, 34. Ceylon, 96, 97. Chalmers, Thomas, 249. Champagny, Comte de, 73. Changing the word of a king, 111, 135. Charles V., 192. Cheke, Sir John, 235. China, 97. Chivalry, Ages of, 179. Christ, the security of the Church, 18, 19. Christians, early, 16. Chrysostom, birth of, 71 ; youth of, 76 ; made archbishop, ib. ; exiled, 76 ; as a commentator, 77. Church, its union with Christ, 201 ; its growth, 202. Cicero, 7. Claude of Turin, 130. Claudius and Agrippina, 3, 7. Clement, 55. Clement VII., 118. Clootz, Anacharsis, his evidences of Mahometanism, 138, 139. Cobbett, 260. Cobham, Lord, 120. Coke, 256. Coleridge, 267. Coligny, 224, 261. Coliseum, 29. Columbus, 175. Confucianism, 92. Constance, Council of, 119, 124. Constantine the Great, 70. Corderius, 207. Councils, their unchangeableness im- aginary, 201, 202. Cromwell, 256, 264. Cross in heart, not on shoulder, 180. Crusades, period covered by, 163; causes of, 164; preached by Peter the Hermit, 165; Children's Cru- sade, 166; second crusade, third crusade, 168; fourth, fifth cru- sades, under Louis IX., 169 ; their failure, 170; against Albigenses and Stedingers, 171 ; numbers sac- rificed in, 175 ; results of, 177-179. Cunningham, 79. Dante, 252. D'Aubigne, Merle, 199. De Bure, Idolette, 216. De Saci, 54, 225. D'Estouteville, 55, 56. De Thou, 212. Dickson, David, 258. Dies IrsB, 63. DoUinger, 197. Dominic, St., 51. Domitian, 28, 30, 67. Donatists, 78. Dort, Synod of, 226. Douglass of Cavers, 141. Dugnet, 226. Dura, Plain of, 110, 149. EcKAED, 266, 269. Edkins, 108. Edward III., 115, 169. Elijah on Carmel, 157. Eliot, 256. 280 INDEX. Eliot, George, portrayal of Savona- rola, 123. Ellicott, Bishop, 76. Elliott, E.B., 42. Ephesus, 21 ; Church at, 22. JEpistolce Obscurorum Virorum, 63. Erasmus, 125, 191, 194, 210. Erskine, 249. Essenes, 46, 41, 98. Eudocia, Empress, 76. Evelyn, 140. Faber, F. W., 53. Family — its origin and necessity, 58, 69, 60 ; influence on Augustine and Chrysostom, 82. Farel, 209. Felix, Tacitus's estimate of, 6. F^nelon, 79, 224, 266. Flathead Indians, 61. Flechier, 225. Fletcher of Madcley, 223. Francis!., 211,217. Francis of Assisi, St., 51. Frederick of Prussia, 139. Frederick of Saxony, 190. French Institute, 197. Formation of Christendom, 72, 73. Fourier, 60. Fox, 266. Fuller, Thomas, 119, 219. Gale, 263, 264. Gallio, 1, 7, 12. Garnet, 55. Garson, 53, 126, 130. Gataker, 261. Gautama, 94, 96, 99. Geddes, Jenny, 254. Geneva, 213, 223. Gentile Churches, 39. Gibbon, 50. Gillespie, George, 258. Gladstone, 198. Glaire,Abb6, 221. Gnoiitics, the, 265. Godfrey of Bouillon, 166. Gray's " Elegy in a Country Church- yard," 254. Gregory VII., 164, 222. Gregory XVI., 200. Grey, Lady Jane, 234. Grosseteste, 119, 130. Grotius, 223. Guiccardini, 130. Guion, Mme., 266. Guises, the, 235. Guthrie, Thomas, 249, 260. Guttenberg, 145. Hamilton, Patrick, 237. Hamilton, Sir William, 198, 249. Hampden, 226, 266, 261. Hardy, quoted, 99. Hare, Archdeacon, 78, 198. Harris, Howell, 266. Harrison, 261. Havelock, 259. Hegel, 269. Henderson, Alexander, 249, 258. Henry IV., remark of, 220. Henry VIII., 193. Henry, Philip, 255. Herbert of Cherburg, 268. Herculaneum, destruction of, 29. Hervev, 256. INDEX. 281 Hooker, 226, 257. Hooper, 261. Hospitallers, institution of, 167; their decline, 170. Howard, John, 93. Howe, 264. " Hudibras," 255, 274. Huguenots, 224. Hume, David, 187, 254. Huss, John, 112; birth and death of, 113 ; defending Wycliffe's works, 124 ; persecuted and driven from Prague, 124; brought before coun- cil — ^makes his defence, 125 ; safe- conduct broken — burnt to death, 125, 194. Hutton, Bichard H. — estimate of Mahomet, 140, 156. "Imtaiion of Christ," 53. Individualism among the Puritans, 270, 271. Indulgences, sale of, 187; in South America and Mexico, 188. Innocent III., 128, 169, 222. Ireton, 261. Jacob at Peniel, 162. James II., 224, 262. Janeway, John, 260. Jansenius, 78, 225. Jeffreys, 249. Jenner, 253. Jephthah, 45. Jerome, 74. Jerusalem taken by crusaders, 166 ; retaken by Saladin, 168. Jesuits, 176. Joachim of Floris, 42. John XXIII., 124; removed from papacy, 126, 128, 130. John of Gaunt, 114. John, St., 24 ; related to John the Baptist, 31 ; tradition as to mar- riage of Cana, S3 ; martyrdom and miraculous escape, 34; anecdote of, ib. ; profundity of thought, 41. Johnson, Samuel, 140, 160. Jonson, Ben, 265. Josaphat, St., 99. Josephus, 25, 27. Judas, 129, 141, 150 ; Mahometan le- gend of his death on the cross, 153. Juggernaut, 128. Julian the Apostate, 71. Julius Caesar,. 2. Kaimes, 249. Karens, 108. Keach, 260. Kingsley, Charles, 6. Knox, John — his character, 228, 248 ; his scene of labor, 229 ; birth, 233 ; education, 237 ; call to the min- istry, 238 ; taken captive by the French, 239; anecdotes of, 239, 240 ; offered Bishopric of Roch- ester, ib. ; visit to England, 241 ; preaches in Frankfort and Gene- va, 242 ; return to Scotland, 243 ; meeting with Mary, 132, 245, 246 ; vigor in the pulpit, 247; death, 248 ; friendship for Calvin, 211. Koran, 139, 142, 145, 148; compared with Bible, 151 ; its defects, 152, 219. 282 INDEX. Lacoedaire, 34. Lamaism, 97. Lamennais, 54. Latimer, 109, 240, 241, 261. Lavelaye, 198. Lawson, Admiral, 262. Leibnitz, 109. Leighton, 271. Lenau, Nicholas, 122. LeoX.,128, 131, 188. Leslie, Charles, 140. Lessing, 217. L'Estaples, 207. Libanius, teacher of Ohrysostom, 72, 75. Lightfoot, 264. Lindsay, Sir David, 232. Lively, 261. Lollards, 120. Louis IX. of France, 169. Louis XIV., 25. Loyola and the Jesuits, 51, 52. Lucan, 12. Luther, Martin — remark as to the Exodus, 69 ; son of a miner, 184 ; age in which he lived, ib. ; birth, 185; studies at Erfui-t, 186; be- comes a monk, ih. ; becomes pro- fessor, ih.; sent to Kome, 187; made vicar-general, « J. ; nails the- ses to church-door, 189 ; summon- ed to Rome, ih. ; refuses, but ap- pears before legate at Augsburg, ib.; protected by Elector, 190; ap- peal to German nobles, ib.; ex- communicated, 191 ; burns bull, ib. ; at Diet of Worms, ih. ; con- cealed at Wartburg, 192 ; trans- lates Bible, ib.; reply to Henry VIIL, 193 ; controversy with Swiss Reformers, 194 ; with Erasmus, ih. ; marriage, ib. ; his death, 195 character, ib. ; " Table-talk," 196 ill effect of Swiss controversy, ii. position in Peasants' War, ib. controversy with Anabaptists, ib. work for German schools, 197 personal Christianity, 198; resort to God's Word, 200 ; did not claim infallibility, ib. ; referred to, 123, 144. Machiavel, 130, 131. Mahomet, 140 ; various views of his character, 141 ; compared with Benedict Arnold, ih.; Judas and Balaam, ib.; complexity of his character, 142; left an orphan — brought up by an uncle — mar- riage, 143 ; enforcing belief by the sword, 145 ; denouncing im- age-worship, 146 ; his license, 148 ; claim to have been foretold in Scripture, 155, 171. Mahometanism, 146 ; acknowledging predestination and divine sover- eignty, 147; allowing polygamy, 147, 148 ; proposed accommoda- tion with Christianity, 150 ; proph- esies Christ's return, 154; prob- able overthrow, 156, 170, 171 ; Christendom, sections of, 149. Makkedah, Cave of, 84, 85. Malebranche, 79. Mamelukes, 169. Mara, 95. INDEX. 283 Maraoci, 142. Margaret of Navarre, 209. Marshall, 5S. Marshman, 274. Martel, Charles, 146. Martinez Pasqualis, 266. Mary Queen of Soots, 112, 132, 234, 236 ; marriage with Damley, 246. MassiUon, 229. Massuet, Dom, V8. Material and spiritual, 252-254. Mather, 257. M'Crie, 122, 233. Made, 42. Medicis, Catharine de, 235. Melancthon, 123, 194; influence on schools, 197. Melville, Andrew, 248. Messalina, 4. Metastasio, 25. Michelet, 199. Miletus, 22. Milne, Walter, 231. Milton, 262, 264. Miscreant, original meaning of word, 179. Molinos, 266. Monasteries, establishment of, 48. Monasticism, meaning of, 4B ; origin of, ib.; persecutions and abuses of, 52, 53 ; hymn-writers and mis- sionaries of, 53, 54 ; lessons of, 57, 63 ; solitude and retirement of, 64, 65. Monica, 82. Montalembert, 54. Montmorencia, 207. Moore, Sir John, 249. Storavians, 127. Mornay (Du Plessis), 224 ; allusion to the Scotch, 229. Mummery, derivation of word, 179. Murray, Earl of, 247. Mysticism — its relation to Rational- Ism, 267 ; distinguished from Pu- ritanism, 274. Mystics, Catholic and Protestant, 266. Napiee, 42. Napoleon, handwriting of, 36, 158. Napoleon, Louis, 3. Narcissus, 9. Nats, 108. Neander, 77. Nebuchadnezzar, 111, 149. Nelson — victory at Trafalgar, 113. Nero — ^youth of, 5 ; called Ahenobar- bus, 4 ; first five years of reign, 2 ; murder of his mother and wife, 8 ; death of, 14, 15. Newman,F."W., 90, 267. Newton, Sir Isaac, 42. Nicephorus, 31. Nicola, 226. Nirvana, 97, 103, 106-108. Northbrook, Lord, 274. Northumberland, Earl of, 241. Norton, 257. Noyon, Calvin's birthplace, 206. OCTATIA, 4, 8. Olivetan, 207, 215. Owen, 256, 260, 263, 264. Pachomius, 47. Palestine, 163. 284 INDEX. Pallas, brother of Felix, 6. Papal power, 172. Paraguay missions, 55. Parthia, scene of St. John's aposto- late, 33. Pascal, 52, 221, 225, 271. Pascal, Jacqueline, 63. Patmos, 23. Patriarchal religion in Arabia, 143. Paul — appeal to Cassar, 1 ; persecu- tion of, 10 ; at Rome, 11 ; at Epli- csus, 21. Peace, true and false, 129. Pearson, 63. Peiien, Alexander, 249, 250. Penn, WilUam, 266. Pepys, 140, 262. Persecution in Scotland, 231. Petavius, 54. Peter in prison, 85, 86. Peter the Hermit, 163. Philip II., 2ir Pius IX., 200. Plato's " Republic," 60. Plautius, 13. Pomponia Grsecina, 13. Pool, 263, 264. Poor, Gospel to the, 145. PoppiEa, Sabina, 8. Port Koyal, 63. Prayer, power of, 84, 85, 86 ; condi- tion of growth, 87, 88; for the Spirit — its answers, 153. Prayer-mills in China and Thibet, 108. Preaching, 69, 70. trideaux, 142. Prophecy, study of, 42. Protestant, origin of the name, 194. " Provincial Letters," 52, 221, 225. Pulpit and Press, 88, 89. Puritans, the, 255-257 ; origin of the name, 260 ; services to learning and freedom, 261-263 ; influence on literature, 262 ; accused of mys- ticism, 264. Pym, 226, 256, 261. QuESNEL, 64, 225. Racine, 25. Rationalism, German, 158. Ravaillac, 55. Reason, Goddess of, 139. Reformation called Deformation, 183. Reiser, 78. Religions, comparative history of, 92. Renan, 139. Ren^e of Ferrara, 209. Renwick, 260. Reuchlin and Hutten, 52. Reynolds, John, 218, 258, 261, 264. Reynolds, William, 218. Richard the Lion-hearted, 168. Ridley, 109. Rizzio, murder of, 246. Robespierre, 158. Rome, meaning of the name, 4, 5 ; burning of, 12. Roscoe, 122. Rough, John, 238. Rousseau, 139, 223. Rouvigny, 224. Royer-CoUard, 226. Russell, Lady, 224. Rutherford, Samuel, 258. INDEX. 285 Sacred Fire, fraud of, \'H. Sadolet, 210. St. Bartholomew's Massacre, 132, U1. Ste. Beuve, T9. St. Brigitta, 266. St. Cyran, '79, 226, 226, 271. St. Simon, 60. St. Theresa, 266, 268. Saints, as a term of derision, 256, 259. Sakya Mouni, 94, 99. Saladin, 168. Salome, mother of St. John, 82. Saunterer, derivation of word, 1Y9. Savonarola, 111; birth and death, 113 ; his great influence, 120; per- secution and death, 121, 122 ; va- rious estimates of, 122 ; his work, 123. Schleiermaeher, 269. Schopenhauer and Nirvana, 10*7, 108. Scotch, Buchanan's judgment of the, 227 ; character in days of Knox, 229 ; worthies of the, 249. Scott, Sir Walter, 229, 249. Selden,256,261. Seneca, 7, 9. Servetus, 140, 216, 217. Shakspeare, 120. Sheppard, 226, 257. Sherlock, 263. Siberia, 97. Siege of Jerusalem, 27, 28. Sigismund, Emperor, 124. Simeon Stylites, 47, 48, 210. Sixtus v., 222. Smith, Adam, 249. Smith, Bosworth, 141, 166. Smithfield, 133. Sobieski, John, 146. Socialism, 62. South, 263. Spinoza, 269. Spires, Diet of, 194. Stafford, Sir Thomas, 112. Stamboul, origin of the name, 24. Star, falling, in Revelations, 144. Steere, 79. Strasburg, 213, 215. Success, what constitutes, 128. Sully, 224. Sutolive, Dean, 220. Swedenborg, 266, 269. Swift, translation of motto by, 182. Syria, promised to Abraham, 172 ; Jews return to, 173, 175. Taaoism, 92. Tancred, 166. Tauler, 186, 266, 268. Taylor, Jeremy, 77, 263. Templars, institution of, 167 ; their decline, 170. Tetzel — sells indulgences 187; his claims, 131, 188. Teutonic Knights, 167. Thackeray, 6. Therapeutae, 98. Thibet, 97. Thomas h Kempis, 53, 126. Thomas de Oelano, 53. Tillemont, 53. Tillotson, 263. Titus, eulogies of, 25 ; youth of, 26, 27; friendship for Tacitus; 26; 3 286 INDEX. magnanimity of, 28, 29 ; death of, 30; Talmudic legend as to, 31; referred to, 164. Trajan, 2. Truth and heresy, IT. Tzschirner, 73. Union with Christ, 272. Unitarians and Mahometanism, 140. Urban II., 165. Urban VI., 118. Ussher, Archbishop, 250, 261. Vane, Sir Harry, 2S6. Vassy, massacre of, 245. Vaughan's "Hours with the Mys- tics," 267. Vespasian, 13,27. Villers, 197. Voltaire, 54, 93, 109, 226. Von Bora, Catharine, 194. Vows, rash, 45, 46. Vulgate, WyclifEe's version founded on, 116. Waldo, 271. Walsh, Vicomte, 185, 221. Walter the Penniless, 165. Ward, 274. Wartburg, Luther's Patmos, 203. Wesleys, the, 223, 256. Weston, Dr., 241. Whitefield,256. Wilberforce, 256. William III., 263. William of Orange, 112, 261. Williams, Roger, 257. Williams, Rowland, quoted, 91. Wilson quoted, 94. Wilson, John, 249. Wishart, 231. Wolmar, 207. Worldliness, effect of, on the Church, 36, 87, 38. 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