Columbia ©nitjewftp THE LIBRARIES MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY LECTURES ON MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF LECTURES DELIVERED AT QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON BY EICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. ABCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN CHANCELLOR OP THE ORDER OP ST PATRICK SECOND EDITIQMr~MEyj:SED AND UI PROVED /^( 'OL A (U.I. N X MACMILLAN AND CO. 1879 All I'iyhts reserved LONDON : PRINTED BY BPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STUEET SQUARE AND pahi.iament street PEEFACE. I DELIVERED a goocl many years ago, and more times than one, conrses of Lectures on Church History to a class of girls, at Queen's College, London. One course dealt with Early Church History, another with Modern, and between these was one on Medieval. This last course has constituted the groundwork of the present volume, published by re- quest of hearers, but those hearers, as I must acknowledge, Iny own daughters. I had intended at the first to do no more than print the Lectures as delivered, with some slight occasional revision ; and certainly had very imperfectly recognized how much more than this would be required. Little by little I became aware that my present esti- mate of persons and of things was not always what it once had been, that later books demanded to be read, and later knowledge used ; not to say, that it was one thing to address a class of young ladies ; who, however little one might know oneself upon a subject, were toler- ably sure to know less ; and another, to lay oneself open to the criticism of all comers. It has followed that much has been re-written, something withdrawn, not a little added. But with all this I have not sought to discon- vi PREFACE. nect these Lectures from the place where they were first given and tlie hearers to whom they were first addressed. My general view of the manner in which a certain ac- quaintance with Church history may be imparted to those who cannot make of it a special study, has not changed. What I tlien thought to be a better scheme for the distribution of the materials than such schemes as are generally adopted, I think so still ; — but on this and on other kindred subjects I have said something in an In- troductory Lecture, which went before my entire subject but which I have now prefixed to this present division of it, as being the only one that I shall publish. Not less have I kept tlie Lectures, in what they say and in what they do not say, as originally they were composed, namely as Lectures for girls of the upper and middle classes ; and I have recognized here and there certain reticences and restraints of statement which this assumption of the age and sex of my hearers imposed upon me. More I have not considered that this circumstance required. Bishop Blomfield, indeed, is reported to have excused a popular preacher, when some strong-thoughted lawyers complained that there was not sufficient body and resist- ance in his sermons ; pleading that he had preached so long to bonnets as to have forgotten there were brains. I cannot think the antithesis of ' bonnets ' and ' brains ' to be a just one. How far the wearers of bonnets would bear the strain of competition with those thus taken to be in exclusive possession of brains, supposing the matter fi PREFACE. vii in hand to be one demanding originative power, on this I give no opinion ; but, having regard to receptive capacity, to the power of taking in, assimilating, and in- telligently reproducing, what is set before them, my con- viction after some experience in lecturing to the young of both sexes is, that there is no need to break the bread of knowledge smaller for young women than young men ; and, save as already indicated, I did not in the original preparation of these Lectures, nor yet have I in the later revision of them, because my class was, or was assumed to be, a female one, kept anything back that I should have thought it desirable to set before young men of the same age and condition of life. Palace, Dublin : Nov. 26, 1877. CONTENTS. LECTURE PAGE I. On the Study of Church History ... 1 II. The Middle Ages beginning , . . . . 13 III. The Conversion of England . . . .27 IV. Islam . . . 44 V. The Conversion of Germany . . . .58 VI. The Holy Eoman Empire . . . . . 75 Vll. The Iconoclasts 87 VIII. Monasticism 100 IX. Hildebrand . 115 X. The Crusades . 132 XI. The Papacy at its Height .... 149 XII. The Popes and the Hohenstaufen . . . 168 XIII. The EucHARiSTic Controversies of the Middle Ages 186 XIV. The Earlier Schoolmen 201 XV. The Sects op the Middle Ages 215 XVI. The Mendicant Orders 230 XVII. The Waldenses 248 XVIII. The Schoolmen and the Mendicants . . . 264 I. X ■ CONTENTS. LECTURE PAGE XIX. The Babylonish Captivity 279 XX. The Great Councils of the West . . .293 XXI. WiCLiF and the Lollards 309 XXII. Hus AND Bohemia 323 XXIII. Offences . .338 XXIV. The German Mystics 356 XXV, Latin and Greek 371 XXVI. The Eevival of Learning 388 XXVII. Christian Art in the Middle Ages . . .401 XXVIII. Aspects of Christian Life and Work in the Middle Ages . . . . . . . 418 XXIX. The Eve op the Reformation .... 436 INDEX 449 / CO] LECTUEES ON MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY. LECTUEE I. ON TEE STUDY OF CIIUBCE HISTORY. In the study of any vast and complex subject, above all when it is one on which we can bestow only a very limited portion of our time and attention, which therefore it is quite impossible we can master in all its details, it is all-important for us that we should know beforehand what we should look for, on what concentrate our attention ; what, as of real significance for us, we should keep in the foreground of our thoughts ; what, as of secondary interest, we may allow to fall into the background ; what, as in- deed of no importance at all, we may dismiss and suffer to fall out of sight altogether. Our faculties are so limited, our memories can retain so little, the claims on oiu- time are so infinite, art is so long and life so short, that all such economies of time and labour are precious. They can nowhere be superfluous or out of place ; but hardly anywhere can they be so valuable, indeed I should say they are nowhere so indispensable, as in the study of Church history. The subject is so immense, extending over so large a tract of time, over such vast regions of B 2 ON THE STUDY space, having its points of contact with so much of deepest interest in almost every other domain of human activity, demanding to be looked at from so many different points of view, while at the same time it affects so closely our own position, and even our own conduct, that we may well desire some preparatory helps to its study, if such can be obtained, some touchstone enabling us to discrimi- nate and discern between that which is most worth our knowing, and that which is of less worth, and that which is of no worth at all. I must complain of those who have written our Church histories, that they are often very far from help- ing us here as they ought. One is sometimes tempted to make against them the same complaint which the country- man made, who, having gone to see for the first time some famous city, complained on his return home that he could not see the city for the houses. This has been sometimes cited as a very foolish saying, but it expressed a very real fact ; and, looked at a little closely, there was nothing absurd about it, but what indeed was very much the contrary. What he felt that he wanted was a total impres- sion, with the great distinctive features of the city rising up before him ; and this, lost amid a labyrinth of streets and lanes, and with no one to guide and place him on some station of vantage, he felt that he had been unable to obtain. Now there are Church histories about which one might make a similar complaint. The writers of these have so crowded their pages with smaller events, have so little aimed at giving due prominence to the greater, have so filled their stage with secondary and subordinate personages, that the really grand events and grand actors are in danger of being lost in the crowd ; we fail to distinguish them from the multitude of far in- ferior importance, or of no importance whatever, that OF CHUEGH HISTORY. 3 distract our attention or obstruct our view. We cannot see the city for the houses. Neither is the way of escape from this inconvenience so easy. If, hoping to avoid it, we betake ourselves to abridgments, saying to ourselves, These at any rate, by the very necessity of the case, will deal only with what is primary, with what is well worth the remembering, we shall probably be quite disappointed in any anticipations of the kind. Not to say that these abridgments are very often hungry, barren, dry skeletons fi'om which i all that constitutes the flesh and blood of history has been ruth- lessly stript away ; not to urge that they often justify too well the medieval proverb, Compendia Dispendia, we may very probably encounter in them the same mischief which we were laboiu-ing to avoid, and this in a more aggra- vated form. Shut up in closer limits, the writers have not the less sought to include a little of every thing and a notice of every body within these. Painting on a much narrower canvas, they have introduced into their picture almost as many figures as did those others into the ampler spaces at their command. And thus in these compendiums the same defects will often exist, and in a form more inju- rious still. Let me avow boldly that in my judgment the first question one with such a task as mine, and confined for the performance of it within such narrow hmits, should ask himself is this, — not ' How much can I put into my story ? ' but ratlier, ' What can I omit, and yet at the same time efiectually tell that story ? What of the lading can I throw overboard, so lightening the sorely burdened ship, at the same time retaining, if not all of the freight which is precious, yet at all events whatever of that is most precious ? ' This is the question which in these Lectures I shall constantly put to myself ; and shall seek B 2 4 ON THE STUDY to answer it in the sense which I have already suggested. Instead of multiplying details, such as, if you wish to know them, you may obtain almost anywhere, I shall endeavour to put you at points of view for the taking in of those larger aspects of the subject which more or less determine and dominate the whole. You must not wonder or com- plain if, having such a story to tell, with so few hours in which to tell it, I omit, foreshorten, trace outlines only, leaving to you to supply what is lacking, to fill in these frameworks at your leisure. Then only you would have ground for complaint, if I wasted on trivialities, such as would inevitably be forgotten almost as soon as heard, on persons and events of little or no ultimate significance, however they may have filled the world with their noise for a while, the brief time we have at our disposal. But there are other devices — technical and mechanical some of them will appear — which may yet materially assist you in obtaining a clearer oversight of your subject, with mastery up to a certain point of it, and of the relations of its "several parts to one another. For instance, there is the distribution of it into periods of manageable length. None of the kingdoms of this world have a history extend- ing over a tract of time at all approaching that over which this history of the kingdom of God extends. And indeed how should they have this ? Those kingdoms of the world rise but to fall ; while this is a kingdom which endures throughout all ages, having already endured for more than eighteen hundred years. It is needful then in the study of such a history to secure pauses for the mind, ' landing- places,' as Coleridge has called them. You may fairly claim to have this long story divided for you into shorter and, if I may say, handier portions. Now, if these divi- sions are to be of any real service, they must not be OF CnUBCE HISTORY. 5 merely arbitrary and artificial. They should each of them represent a different act in that solemn drama of divine Providence which is being enacted on the world's stage. And here it is that I find fault with an arrange- ment which has hitherto been a very favourite one with Church historians. They have distributed, that is, the story which they had to relate into centuries ; and, this done, have told all which belonged, or which seemed to belong, to one century before entering on the events of another. The Magdebm^g Centuriators, in many ways most worthy of honour as the fathers of modern Church history, proclaim by their very name that this is the scheme which they have adopted. To each of the thir- teen centuries whereof they treat they have attributed a volume of its own; and, down to the time of Mosheim, such has been the popular arrangement. But this distri- bution by centuries, besides often cutting up the history into portions inconveniently small, lies under the fault which just now I noted, namely, that it is purely arbi- trary ; and, if it has some advantages, has inconveniences, which, in my judgment at least, very much outweigh its merits. The great movements of the Church very awk- wardly adapt themselves to it ; often do not adapt them- selves at all, altogether traverse and ignore it. These movements will not begin exactly at the beginning of a century, nor end exactly at its close, so to fall in with some artificial scheme of ours ; and only when stretched on a bed of Procrustes, or on that same bed abridged and cut short, will they even seem to conform themselves to it. For myself I am persuaded that I shall do wisely in subordinating the chronological order and sequence of events to the higher interests of my story. With this conviction I shall endeavour, so far as this may be, to 6 ON TEE STUDY have one central fact or thought in each of my Lectures as its proper subject-matter ; to group my materials round this, recapitulating what may be behind, anticipating what lies before ; refusing altogether, so often as a higher interest seems to demand this, to play the part of annahst or centuriator ; and seeking to marshal my materials ac- cording to quite other laws than those of time. Of course, as events happen in time, and as the time when they happen often gives them their chief significance, time cannot be altogether ignored. I shall not, however, count myself bound to string the events which I care to record on the thread which it offers, but shall often pre- fer to arrange and combine them according to inner affinities of their own. But this much being on this subject said, there are still errors on the one side and on the other which in the selection and distribution of our materials it behoves us to avoid. That kingdom of heaven which Christ founded in the world is not exclusively the Leaven work- ing inwardly in the hearts of men. As little is it exclu- sively the Mustard seed, visibly growing up in the sight of all, and spreading forth its branches until it has covered with the shadow of them the whole earth. It is both of these ; and our Lord, when He desired to set forth the future development of that Church which should unfold itself fi'om Him as from its living seed, spake both these parables, one close upon the other (Matt. xiii. 31-33), that they might mutually complete one another, and that we might learn to give due prominence to both aspects of the truth. Such, no doubt, was his intention, yet this is not always done. There are some Church historians, and those men of eminent piety — indeed no other would be OF CHUBGH HISTORY. 7 likely to fall into this error — who have an eye only for the inward operations of grace in the hearts of individual believers. They trace with inexhaustible interest the working of the leaven, the transforming power of the truth, as it fashions into newness of life those who have hidden that truth in their hearts. JSTeander is the noblest representative of the historians with whom, despite of all their excellencies, we must find this fault. Not too spiri- tual, but too exclusively spiritual, what he gives us is often a succession of most interesting biographies, a his- tory of the working of the leaven in the souls of separate men. But for the history of the mustard seed, we may often search his great work in vain. It is the Gospel he tells us of, but hardly the Gospel of the kingdom. As we read, we would fain hear more, we want him to care more and to tell us more, of that kingdom, as it visibly shapes itself in the world, as it confronts the kingdoms of the world ; and to trace for us with a livelier interest, and in bolder and firmer outline, the whole course of its outer fortunes no less than that of its inner life. With other historians on the contrary this, which I have called the history of the mustard seed, is all in all. They bring before us the long array of Councils and Popes and emperors ; they detail at length the events adverse and prosperous which befell the Chiu"ch, the outer conditions of its conflict with the powers of this world. They invite us to mark the visible growth of the tree, the spreading of its branches ; how the birds of the air, the great ones of the earth, came and sought shelter in its branches, how this and that tribe or nation cast aside its idols, accepted baptism, and was aggregated to the Church. But with all this the inward renewing power of the word of life, its secret energy, as it makes its presence felt in the hearts and thoughts and lives of men, is kept 8 ON THE STUDY out of sight ; of these matters they tell iis little or nothing, for these they have no eye. If the others were at fault in making Church history merely a history of personal piety, these are still more in fault, not caring to tell us anything about that which after all is the distinctive mark of tlie children of the kingdom. In takinoj these two parables, of the Leaven and of the Mustard seed, and giving to both of them their fiiU rights, we shall find our best protection against onesidedness in this direction or in the other. There is another point which you have a right to ex- pect that we shall not permit you to miss, the relations, namely, of this history to contemporary profane history, and at the same time its difference and distinctness from that history. Two dangers are before us here ; the one, to lose sight of its distinctness, that is, its supernatLU"al character, to merge it in the world-history ; the other, to forget the fact that the Church exists for the world, quite as really as the world exists for the Chm-ch, so that there can happen no worse thing for the Church than to forget or to deny this. I know that there are some for whom the Church is at best nothing better than the organization of the moral life of a human community for the furthering of moral ends ; and who therefore are quite consistent when they afiirm that the lines which divide sacred history and profane exist nowhere except in our imaginations. All history, they urge, is sacred ; and so in a manner it is, being the history of man ; and cer- tainly if a heathen moralist could say. Homo, sacra res^ much more, and with better right, can we. And yet these, emptying that history of a divine presence and a divine purpose, peculiarly its own, are indeed working toward quite another result, toward the making of all history profane. But that history of which I speak, what OF CHVBGH HISTORY. 9 should it be for us ? What else but the record of the carrying out in time of a divine purpose for the knitting anew into one fellowship, under the headship of the Son of God, of all those who, receiving Him, do themselves become also sons of God, What other purposes beyond this the Church may exist to fulfil, how far these may reach, and whom besides men they may include, all this is only obscurely liinted in the Scriptures ; and such pur- poses, while we would not exclude, we as little dare to urge. These, if there be such. He who is ' the King of Ages ' will in due time declare. You have a right then to demand of us that we shall tell this story as a divine and a heavenly, not as an earthly and a mundane ; that we shall justify the weaving of this man or of that event into the texture of our story by tracing their relation to the objects and ends which I have just mentioned ; that we shall mark, and help you to mark, the great stream of tendency, which in the midst of con- fusions, eddies and perplexing back-waters is evermore setting heavenward. This is a divine history ; what there- fore we are to look for first and chiefly are the vestiges of God, the print of his footsteps, in it. But it is the history of the Church not as an institution which will know nothing of the world, which in fact has been separated off from the world to the end that the one might be saved, and the other perish. God forbid ; it is one rather whose separa- tion from the world exists as much for the world's sake as for the Church's own, that so there may be for the world a City of Eefuge, an abiding witness in the midst of it for a higher life than its own ; which life, higher though it be, may yet be the portion, and on the simplest terms, of every one who will claim his share in it. The history of the Church is the history of the life of Christ in his members ; not indeed without infinite faults, infirmities, 10 ON TEE STUDY shortcomings, sins, cleaving to those in whom that Hfe is embodied ; but, despite of all these, a continuation of the life which He began upon earth ; the history of a divine Society by Him founded, and which, strange to say, like an inverted tree, has its roots above and not below, in heaven and not on earth. All that has been the true ex- pression of this divine life, all that has helped the unfolding of it, all the precious flowers and fruits by which it has made its presence known, all too which has hindered the unfolding of that nobler life, it is of these that any Church history, which is true to its own objects, should tell us. Here then we have something of a clue to guide us through that which else might prove an inextricable laby- rinth. Let us have grasped the events, let us have recog- nized the persons, that have effectually wrought to the unfolding of this higher hfe, and then, whatever else we may have failed to make our own, the leading threads, the true stamina of the history, are in our hands. Let us on the contrary have missed these, let us not have attempted, or attempting let us have failed, to disengage these from the multitude of facts and people with which they are mingled, and among which they are in danger of being lost, and however well we may be up in names and dates, in martyrdoms and persecutions and heresies, in Fathers, in Councils, in Popes, in Emperors, in events of this century and events of the other, still the real meaning and purpose of Church history will have escaped us. I would not willingly bring this brief introductory Lecture to a close without naming to you one or two faults, not so much intellectual as moral, into which, as it seems to me, some who have undertaken to tell this wondrous tale have fallen, and have led others to fall ; and in which, if we did not watch against them, we might also be very OF CEUBCE HISTORY. 11 easily entangled ourselves ; faults from which I would fain keep myself clear, and help to keep you clear. Beware then, I would say to you, above all of those who in their survey of the Lord's field have an eye only for the tares, and none for the wheat ; who point out to us the moun- tains of chaff on the Lord's floor, but who neither them- selves see, nor help to make others see, the golden grains which are abundantly hidden among this cliaff; never so well pleased as when, at the expense of the Chiu-ch, they can gratify a proud and self-satisfied world. Such there are, though certainly it is not English Church writers who are the greatest offenders here. To have been a standard-bearer of the truth is no title of honour in their eyes, but rather the contrary. If they have any heroes, these are to be found among such as the Church has been compelled to put from her and to disown, not among them whom she has delighted to honour. But indeed they have seldom any heroes at all. At their touch all which was high becomes low, all which was heroic dwarfs and dwindles into littleness and meanness. The men who spent themselves in contending to the death for truths which should be dearer to us than light or life were at the best enthusiasts whose earnestness may just redeem them from our contempt. But there is much very short of this, against which it is well you should be upon your guard. That Church of the living God, some stages of whose growth we would fain trace for your instruction — you are not without it, but within. It is your shelter, appointed of God to be this. Nothing of its past history should be a matter of mere curiosity or entertainment to you. You are heirs of whatever it has held fast and made its own, you are losers by whatever it has lost or let go. But the temptation is strong to contemplate all this as fi:-om some ' coign of 12 ON TEE STUDY OF GHUBGH HISTORY. vantage ' external to it, admiring this and criticising that ; adjudging praise to this man and blame to the other ; resolving that this one went too far, and that not far enough ; that TertuUian was too fierce, and Jerome too touchy ; that Luther might sometimes have kept a better tongue in his head, and so on with the others. Dwell not, save in so far as this is necessary that so you may not miss the lessons which God would teach you, on the faults and mistakes of those who have been called to do his work in his Church, and have done it. There is something better for us to dwell on in this work of theirs ; for He who is wonderful everywhere, is nowhere so wonderful as in the congregation of his saints, that is, of those who with all their errors, their sins, their shortcomings, were the elect of humanity, the bravest, the purest, the noblest whom the world lias seen. Accept then, I would say in conclusion, accept with all reverence the fact that the Church militant, if in all ages a success, is also in all ages a failure. The success may be more evident in one age and in one land, the failure may be more marked in another ; but tokens of this and of that will never be wanting. Some may dwell almost exclusively on one of these aspects ; we shall do well not to hide our eyes from either. For us who believe the Church to be an institution in the world directly divine, it must be a success, even as it shows itself to be such by many infallible proofs. For us who know that the trea- sure of God's grace is contained in earthen vessels, it must be a failure no less, an imperfect embodiment of a divine idea. Let us boldly face this side of the truth no less than the other ; taking its history for what it most truly is, an Acta Sanctonim, but not forgetting that it is something very different from this as well. 13 LECTUEE II. TEE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. I VENTUEED ill my former Lecture to find fault with the distribution of Church history into centuries, as a distribu- tion purely arbitrary and artificial, and one to which the actual events and movements with which that history has to deal refuse to conform. But suppose we were to say, This history presents itself to us under three leading as- pects, one succeeding the other ; its several periods having each its own characteristic features, and, so far as we can judge, a purpose and task of its own to fulfil ; I will there- fore mentally distribute it into three portions, correspond- ing to these several periods, and call them each by a several name, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Here, supposing that assumption to be a correct one, would be a scheme of distribution natural and not forced, one answering to facts in the world of realities, one therefore which would afford genuine assistance to the learner, and help to bring real clearness and order into his studies. But this much being admitted, it would still be neces- sary to define precisely the limits of these several periods : at what date Ancient Church history should be assumed to have closed and Medieval to have begun ; and again, when Medieval came to an end and Modern commenced. That these are questions not perfectly easy to answer is evident from the very different limits and landmarks of each period on which different writers have fixed. To 14 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. take, then, Ancient Church history first : — there can indeed be no question about the time of its beginning. The day of Pentecost would on all sides be acknowledged as the birthday, the dies natalis, of the Church. But about the date of the termination of Ancient Church his- tory there would not be at all the same consent. Some would assign to it a duration of eight hundred years, would make it reach to the revival of the Empire under Charles the Great (800). I must needs think that this is a duration as much too long as that of Hallam is too short, who counts the Middle Ages to have commenced with the invasion of Gaul by Clovis (486); and so too Dowhng, who says, ' we cannot find a later era for their commence- ment.' My own conviction is that we articulate the history more justly when we affirm that, as Ancient history it closed, and as Medieval began, with the Pontificate of Gregory the Great (590). In liim, the last of the Latin Fathers, the first, in our modern acceptation of the word, among the Popes, we bid adieu to the old Greek and Eoman culture and Hterature and habits of thought as the predominant and ruhng forces of the world. The ancient classical world still lives on in bequests innumerable, visible and invisible, not a few among these of priceless worth, which it has made to all times after. But another order of things is shaping itself; and Gregory the Great, standing at the meeting-place of the old and the new, does more than any other to set the Church forward upon the new lines on which henceforth it must travel, to constitute a Latin Christianity and Christendom, with distinctive fea- tures of its own, such as broadly separate it from Greek, Then, too, there are several grand events in the fif- teenth century which suggest themselves as world-epochs ; fitted as such to mark the conclusion of the Middle Ages, the commencement of another Age. There is the Inven- THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. 1-5 tion of Printing (1440). There is the Fall of Constanti- nople, and with it of the Eastern Empire (1453). Closely connected with both of these, but still capable of being distinguished from them, even as it commenced before them, there is the Eevival of Learning ; to which, however, it is impossible to affix an exact date. There is, lastly, the Discovery of America (1492), with the widening of men's thoughts to correspond with the outward fact of a remoter horizon and a wider world. They are all events of an immense importance ; and each one of them well fitted to toll the knell of a departing age, and to announce the birth of a new. They might every one of them plead its own fitness to be the merestone to mark where one era termi- nated and another began. But they have all of them primarily a more or less mundane significance ; and seeing that we are treating of a history which is not of this world, however it may be in it, I should be disposed to look a Httle further, to the Eeformation (1517), and to conclude the period of Medieval Church history with it. No doubt, in some respects, it is too late a day. We are already well advanced in the modern world ; but grave embarrass- ments attend the selection of any other date, graver than those which attend this. Modern Church history remains, that which is actually unfolding itself before our eyes, and in which we our- selves play our part. What the limits in duration of this may be, what will come after it, if indeed it shall not prove a winding up of the present dispensation, these ' times and seasons ' it is not for us to know. But these three periods, each of them including many hundred years, are still too big to be conveniently handled. The larger blocks of time must again be broken up into smaller sizes, the divisions must be in their turn them- 16 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. selves further subdivided. All who have undertaken to tell the Church's story have felt this, and that resting- places at shorter intervals must be found. Thus Ancient Church history might again be profitably distributed into three lesser portions. The first of these periods would be properly characterized as the Apostolic, reaching down as it does to the death of the last of the Apostles, St. John (98), and embracing therefore something less than one hundred years. This period has a distinctive character of its own, being in the Apostles and Apostolic men authoritative and constitutive for the after Church. Upon this follows the period of the Churcli's conflict with heathen Eome, the period of the Ecclesia pressa, as it is sometimes called, reaching down to Constantine's Edict of Toleration (311). Then, completing the period of Ancient Church history, follow some two centuries or more, during much of which the Church rides on the high places of the earth, having exchanged the trials of adversity for the temptations, at least as dangerous, of prosperity. In the same way Medieval Church history will fitly fall into three subdivisions. The first, extending from the Pontificate of Gregory the Great to that of Gregory VII. (1050), will embrace the Middle Ages in their formation, as a new order of things is gradually shaping itself out of the chaos and confusion in which those Ages began ; the breaking up of an old world, and little by little the organization of a new. The second period will reach from the Pontificate of Gregory VII. to that of Boniface VIII., or the Middle Ages in their glory and at their height. To this, their creative period, belong all those magnificent births which they have bequeathed, some to the admiration, and all to the wonder, of the after world the Crusades, the rise of Gothic Architectrue, the Uni- THE MIDDLE AOES BEGINNING. 17 versities, the Schoolmen, the Mystics, the Mendicant Orders. To this belongs the struggle, so grand and so terrible, between the world-king and the world-priest, the Emperor and the Pope, with the triumph, complete though temporary, of the latter ; and thus to this also belongs the Papacy in the most towering heights to which it ever ascended. Then follows the period from Boniface VIII. to the Eeformation, or the Middle Ages in their decline and fall. Their productive vigour is exhausted ; they are unable to bring forth any new births, or to maintain at their height and in their strength such as they have received from the times which went before. These Ages, once so confident in themselves, but now defeated in so many of their dearest expectations, are losing heart ; they have ceased to believe in themselves any more, and so give clearest intimation that whatever good piu^poses they and the institutions which were proper and peculiar to them were capable of serving, these they had served already ; that the one crowning favoiu: which some of the most characteristic among these institutions could now confer on the Church and the world would be to pass away, if so a new and a better might succeed in their room. The period of Modern Church history, being as yet only partially completed, being one, moreover, which we do not contemplate from any external point of view, but in which we ourselves are involved, is less capable of being further subdivided than either which went before. At the same time the Peace of Westphaha (1648) offers a real turning-point in the Church's history and a conve- nient resting-place for the mind. With this Peace the political, though not the rehgious, conflict between the Eeformed and the Ptoman Cathohc communities in Latin 18 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. Christendom came virtually to an end. That remarkable reaction, which had so signally counter-checked the early triumphs of the Reformation, which had won back to the Eoman Obedience much that at one moment appeared lost to it for ever, in its turn had run its course ; and, having discovered what it could effect, and wdiat it could not, was then compelled to admit, in fact if not in word, that the attempt to crush the Reformation by mere force, as something which had no right to exist, must for ever be renounced. Hitherto we have contemplated the Church as existing under conditions of time. I3ut it subsists also under con- ditions of space ; and at different epochs has, so to speak, shifted its centre, and occupied different portions of the area of the civilized world. We may profitably lay out a geographical as well as a chronological ground-plan for our study here. And first, is there any order which we can trace in the midst of all their confusion in these changes of its local dwelling-place ? And if so, can we recognize the law which has in different ages determined the bounds of its habitation ? I am persuaded that there is, and that we can ; and we shall be the more confident that in this we are right, when we find in the main the great changes of place coincident with those other changes in time of which we have just been speaking. Thus I do not need to remind you at how early a day the Chiu-ch chipped its Jewish shell, refused any more to be bound in Jewish swaddling clothes ; how the Word of life, rejected by those who had the prior right to its blessings, was offered to the heathen, and eagerly embraced by them, — the Apostles, St. Paul in chief, planting Churches in all the principal cities of the Greek and Roman world. Thus during the first period, tlie THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. 19 Eoman Empire, that zone of fertile land which surrounds the great inland sea, to which we now restrict the name of ' the Mediterranean,' was the chief, almost the exclu- sive, sphere of the Church's activity. Here and there might be some missionary effort beyond, or even an out- lying Church, as in Persia or beyond the Danube ; but these were accidental and exceptional. I have called it the Grseco-Eoman world, for the Asiatic cities, such as Antioch and Ephesus, which play so important a part at this time, had been thoroughly hellenized — this was one of the fruits of Alexander's conquests — indeed, the Greek spirit was immeasurably stronger and more living in them than in Greece itself, where indeed it was very nearly dead. Such is the appointed sphere wherein the Church lives and moves for the first five or six hundred years of its existence. At first overlooked, then repelled as an intruder, slandered, fought against, persecuted, trampled under foot, it yet makes good its position, over- comes by patience, by meekness, by the word of Ihe testimony, by the blood of the Cross ; until at length it appropriates the classical language and culture, fills them, so far as they are capable of being filled, with the spirit of a new hfe ; and within the limits of the Eoman Empire there rises up, first a Greek and then a Latin Church- literature of inestimable price for all after times. But the Eoman Empire is doomed. Cliristianity can delay its perishing, but cannot avert it. God has some- thing better in store for his Church than the inheritance of a well-nigh worn-out world. It shall display its power, not in arresting for a wlnle the decay of an old and dying civilization, nor yet upon nations the best of whose life had been long overlived before the Chiu-ch was planted in their midst ; but upon those whose best is all in the future. The rude and unsophisticated children of the North 20 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. break down the barriers which Eoman arts and arras had so long, and for the last century or two so painfully, maintained against them. They settle in all the fairest provinces of the Western Empire. Ere long, however, they own the mighty power of the Gospel of Christ; of his Church which has stood erect when all other insti- tutions have gone to the ground before them. These races, barbarous indeed, but full of native energy, with many noble possibilities which only waited the word of the Cross to call them out, accept the yoke of Christ ; and after a little while the message of the Gospel is carried back by them among the tribes of their kindred which had remained in their primitive seats. The Church is travelhng westward and northward, making conquests in these directions which shall serve as a compensation for the immense losses which it is enduring in another quar- ter ; for indeed the great Arabian heresiarch and the Caliphs, his successors, are doing their work only too well, so that in lands once the very cradle of Christianity, it now barely exists through the sufferance and contempt of its foes. The Church is not so much Greek and Latin, with these two hemispheres balancing and completing one another, as Latin and Germanic. I use this word and not German, to indicate that I include therein all families of the Teutonic stock. What is Greek indeed still sub- sists, but has fallen so far behind that it can hardly be counted any more in the running. In Modern Church history there is a still further shifting of the centre of the Church's life. Eome is not this centre any more, neither do the nations occupying the soil of the Latin Empire stand in the forefront of things. Eepelling and repudiating, as all these did, the Eeformation, in which was the Church's hope for the future, they too have fallen into the rear. As the Greek THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. 21 Chiirch fell behind in the second period, so the Latin, as represented by Eome and the Churches in communion with her, is falhng behind in the third. Not we ourselves, but those who come after must declare of us whether we, into wliose hands the lamp of faith has now passed, shall have run aright the race set before us ; whether we shall have accomphshed the glorious destiny placed within our reach, but which only too easily we may miss. It is yet to be seen if England, this Esther which has been so marvellously exalted to one of the imperial thrones of the world, will listen to the voice that is saying to her, 'Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this.^' or if the kingdom shall be taken away from her, and given to some other who shall know how to make better use of such grand opportunities as now are hers. It is with the second of the three periods thus marked out that in this present course of Lectures we have to do. We start with the Pontificate of Gregory the Great (b. 540, d. 604). Let us seek to take a brief oversight of the main features wdiich Western Christendom presented, when he was called to the helm of the sorely tossed ship of the Church, and trace with this some chief aspects of his own work. And first let me observe that, whether for good or for evil, he must be accepted as the true founder of the Medieval Papacy. It is a source of infinite confusion, and throws back the historic existence of the Papacy to a period at which, in its later developments, it did not exist at all, when we speak of a Pope before the time of Gregory. None, of course, would deny that the Bishop of Eome bore that title before ; but he only bore it, as all other Bishops did. It was not tiU about the sixth century that the title began to be restricted to one Bishop of the West ; this restriction being, no doubt, an 22 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. indication that the difierence between him and other Bishops was so making itself felt as to demand an utterance and expression in words. Much, no doubt, in the circumstances of the world around wrought together for the marking out of the dif- ference between him and all those others whose office was not in itself inferior to his own, and for giving a new em- phasis to this difference ; yet in the main it was the virtues of Gregory, these seconded, it is true, by his rare gifts of government, which gave to the office that he held so far higher a significance, and so much greater a weight than ever it had possessed before. Those virtues were indeed eminent, and endured the proof, being tried to the utter- most in a very evil time. For in truth the prospect which the Church in his day presented, to whatever side he turned, was so dark and threatening that it could scarcely have been involved in a deeper gloom. After long wars which had utterly wasted Italy, and left Eome itself little better than a desert, famine and pestilence consuming what the sword had spared ; after troubles and confusions which had loosened or quite dissolved the bands of ecclesiastical discipline, the Byzantine Emperors, thanks to the genius of Belisarius and Narses, had recovered their Italian dominions (553), though presently to lose for ever the larger part of them again. This meant that the Bishop of Eome was once more their subject ; and if, out of prudential motives, treated sometimes with a certain deference, yet not secure from the worst outrages and in- dignities, should he fail to jump with all the shifting doc- trinal humours of the Byzantine Court. Nor was this a mere chimerical danger by which they were threatened. One of Gregory's successors, Martin I., refusing to conform to the changing moods of the Imperial theology, was sent in chains to the East, was put there on his trial, and being TEE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. 23 condemned, endured tlie worst which the malice of foes could devise (655). But there were dangers nearer and more urgent. It was but a few years before Gregory's elevation that the Lombards, a Teutonic tribe, and the last of these which settled in the western territories of the Eoman Empire, pressed upon by other tribes in their previous seats to the North-East, had occupied those fertile plains of Upper Italy to which they have bequeathed a name that has long survived their comparatively short-lived dominion there (568-744). These Lombards were still Arians ; but though their Arianism sat loosely upon them, it was excuse or motive enough for every sort of fanatic outrage on the Catholic faith and the holders of it ; while from one cause or another they were less accessible to the humanizing influences of Eoman culture than any other of the Teutonic tribes. Eome and the Eoman Bishop were in constant danger from them. Tardy and insuffi- cient was any help which could be looked for from the Exarch or Imperial Viceroy at Eavenna. The Emperor could oppress, but was helpless to protect ; while the star of deliverance which, rising in the land of the Franks, should bring freedom to the Church at once from the Greek and the Lombard, was not yet visible above the horizon. Nor was the outlook beyond much more encouraging. In the conversion of the Arian Goths in Spain and of Eeccared their king to the Catholic faith (587) was almost the one gleam of light and comfort which Gregory, as he looked around him, could anywhere have detected. Frightful calamities following hard upon one another had reduced the once glorious North African Church to a faint shadow of what once it had been, that shadow itself in less than a centiu-y wholly to disappear (670). The line 24 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. of the Danube and the Ehine, lost to the Church during the wild anarchy of the preceding centuries, was only being slowly regained ; while the serried strength of Teu- tonic heathenism beyond remained unassailed as yet ; and, until its strength had been effectually broken by the stronger hand of Charles the Great, was an abiding menace to civilized and Christian Europe. Of England, for the most part heathen still, I shall speak in another Lecture. In the East the prospects of the Church were not more cheerful. The long ignoble agony of Byzantine Christianity had fairly begun. The Council of Chalcedon (451), while it renewed the Church's protest against Nestorianism, so chilly and rationahstic, had condemned no less the more spiritual errors of Eutyches and the Monophysites ; but its wise moderation had profited little. That middle position between naturalism and enthusiasm which the Church had assumed served only to expose it to assaults alike on the one side and on the other. The decisions which should have been the end, proved unhappily rather a new beginning of strife, or at any rate served as a new departure for it. In some parts of the Empire, as notably in Egypt, and we may say generally in the non-Hellenic provinces, the Monophysites far outnumbered the Catho- lics, these and those furiously raging against one another ; while the Emperors, Justinian and his successors, seeking with their ' Patterns ' and ' Expositions ' to compose the quarrel, but meddling as arbiters in a conflict w^hich was not to be settled by Imperial decrees, only inflamed the strife which they thouglit to allay ; and th us all was ripening for that tremendous catastrophe, that judgment- doom upon the Eastern Church, which, unguessed as yet by any mortal man, was even then at the door. The Arabian camel-driver who should change the whole face of the East was some twenty years old when Gregory was THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. 25 called to the Pontificate (590) ; he had reached his thirty- fourth or thirty-fifth year when Gregory died (604), though it was not till some seven years later that he began openly to proclaim his mission. And yet we may say boldly that had the gift of pro- phecy been added to the many gifts which Gregory pos- sessed, had he known all that was even then so near, this knowledefe would not have shaken his confidence that the kingdom of God is the one kingdom which cannot be moved ; even as in this faith he did so much to bear up the pillars of a tottering Church and world. Whether he was fully aware that old things were passing away, and about to make room for new, may very well be a question ; as it is always a question whether the primary actors in such mighty transformations as that which the Western world was already undergoing, and for which the Eastern world was ripe, are themselves fully conscious of them ; but certainly both in what he wrote and in what he did, there are tokens of a sense upon his part of an old time overhved, of a new time beginning. Thus it may seem but a small matter, yet in fact is very significant, that he should announce in the Preface to his cliief theological work that he did not intend to embarrass himself or his readers by any painful adherence to the grammatical laws of the Latin language. Much utters itself here. Plainly he has turned his back, so far as this was possible, on the old Greek and Eoman world. The foremost man of his age, classical literature does not interest him in the least ; he has only rebukes for a Bishop whom it does interest. Then, too, the creduHty which in the Middle Ages so often took the place of faith, which failed to draw any line of distinction between history and legend, is only too strong in him. In his own writings may already be detected germs of errors that appear full-blown in a later age. 26 THE MIDDLE AGES BEGINNING. All this must be freely admitted, while yet, when all is said, he must be owned to complete, and worthily to com- plete, the grand quaternion of the recognized Doctors of the Latin Church, and to close the hst of these. Nor is this all. So many changes in the service-book of the Church have found place during the twelve hundred years which have since run their course, that it is easier in general terms to acknowledge the largeness of oiu: debt to Pope Gregory, as first and greatest of hturgic innova- tors and reformers, organizer of the Church's worship as it never had been organized before, than to define exactly wherein that debt consists. Only I will mention that to him we owe that plain song or chant, which still bears his name ; and which, if it wanted the freshness, the move- ment, the popularity of the Ambrosian melodies displaced by it, very far siu-passed them in dignity and solemnity ; while it broke definitively away from all of Greek and Pagan which still fingered about and haunted those other. But if the whole Latin Church owes him so much, there is a pecuhar and special benefit for which English men and women are his debtors, and wliich we should prove most unthankful if we forgot or suffered to fall out of sight, this namely, — that, regarding as part of his high commission to take oversight of the heathen world, to reduce under spiritual culture the outfield of the nations, he saw and seized the opportunity for reannexing England to Western Christendom, from which it had now for nearly two hundred years been violently torn away. The Conversion of England, by Gregory auspicated and begun, will furnish the subject of my next Lecture. 27 LECTUEE III. THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. The conquest of Britain by the Saxons and Angles, and their own settlement in the conquered land, differed in some most important features from corresponding events in other countries which had, like Britain, once formed part of the Eoman Empire. In other lands it was a for- cible taking possession of the soil by the intrusive race, who thrust out the old occupants from such parts of it as pleased them best ; and this extrusion was no doubt car- ried through with no smaU amount of violence and of suffering to the conquered people. At the same time, as Guizot showed long ago, it is easy to exaggerate the amount of this suffering ; and one thing is beyond doubt, namely, that there was no extermination, in oiu" modern sense of the word, nor yet any complete displacement of one nation by another ; that a modus vivendi was dis- covered, and the conquering and the conquered races contrived to subsist side by side ; nay, more than this, that the conquering accepted before very long the lan- guage, the civilization, and in the end the religion of the conquered. It had been quite otherwise here. There had been no attempt at any transaction of the kind between the Saxon and the Briton. The invaders made a thorough clearance of the land as they advanced, win- ning their way now swiftly, now slowly, and at times coming to a stand. What remained of the British popu- 28 TE:E conversion of ENGLAND. lation, all which had not perished in a stubborn but un- availing resistance, was pushed westward and northward ; to West Wales, that is to Cornwall, to North Wales, or Wales as we should call it now, and to other the northern parts of the Island. Britain, or England as we must name it henceforth, was paganized anew. A wedge of heathen- ism, thrust in between Christian Ireland and the Christian continent of Western Europe, it kept these asunder, and was itself completely cut off" from any share in their higher and better life. To Gregory the Great we owe the foundation of the mission by which England was restored to a place in the commonwealth of Christian nations. I pass by, though not as questioning its truth, the tender and graceful story of the Angles and the Angels, of Deira and De Ira, of Ella and Hallelujah ; and of the first impulses to a noble work found in these significant plays upon words. It will be sufficient for me to remind you how this illlustrious Bishop of the Western Church saw that the time had ar- rived for drawing once more within the pale of Christendom this Island, which had been lost to it so long ; recognized in the marriage of Ethelbert, King of Kent — King, that is, of the most civiUzed part of the land, and in a sense overlord of the whole — to Bertha, a Frankish and thus a Christian Princess, an opening afforded which should not be neglected. It was not a sudden thought. The Eng- lish mission, with its toils and dangers and honours, he had once hoped to appropriate to himself. But, raised to his present dignity, he must be content to select another, the Eoman Abbot Augustine, who should make good that lack of service upon his own part which now was un- avoidable. With him he associated nearly forty compa- nions more. Hitherto the Benedictines, with all their merits, had shown little missionary activity ; but the germs TEE OONVEBSION OF ENGLAND. 29 of a magnificent future in this line of things were by this act of the Eoman Pontiff planted in them. Need I tell you how he cheered, encouraged, and rebuked his mis- sionaries, when these, having gotten as far as Gaul, would fain have turned back, terrified by the reports which they heard of the people to whom they were sent, ' a people of a fierce countenance, whose language they could not understand ? ' Famihar also to us all is the story of the favourable reception wliich they found, such as must have made them profoundly ashamed of their unfaithful fears ; King Ethelbert himself before very long accepting the yoke of Christ (597), and drawing after him, as was the ever-recurring featiure of these conversions, his chiefs and others nearest to his throne, who in their turn drew after them the mass of the people. Augustine, satisfied that a genuine work had begim, joiu-neys as far as France ; is there, according to the in- structions which he has received, consecrated by the Pope's Vicar, Vergilius, Metropolitan of Aries. Eeturn- ing to England, he uses his hberty in selecting Canterbury as the future ecclesiastical centre of the land, and not London ; which Gregory, with his imperfect knowledge of the actual pohtical conditions of England and the division of its kingdoms, had designed and named ; but wliich at this time was in fact inaccessible as being heathen still. And now some additional helpers joined him from Eome, with assistance in other shapes from the Pope, who watched with a tender and anxious solicitude over the Church wliich he had planted. Nor did he omit to send to Augustine the pall, at once a token of the archiepisco- pal dignity wherewith he was now clothed, and of his holchng this as the direct gift of the Pope. But more valuable than all the rest were the wise monitions with which the large-hearted Pontiff, who knew his man, ac- 80 THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. companied his gifts, urging as he did upon liim that he should not push too far his demands of an exact confor- mity to Eoman rules and usages in things indifferent on the part of liis new converts ; seeing that none, accustomed to the old, straightway desire the new. Whatever any- where he foimd of good and edifying, let him adopt and make it his own. Augustine had ample scope and opportunity before long for the exercise of that wisdom and moderation by Gregory enjoined on him here ; but it must be owned that the opportunity was missed, and the admonition laid very imperfectly to heart. A good man, Augustine was also a narrow and unconcihatory. The grand breadth and tolerance, at least in things secondary, of Gregory would in vain be looked for in him. On a review of his whole career, we have no choice but to say that, as will sometimes happen, the work was grander than the man who wrought the work, that he did not so much achieve greatness, as have greatness thrust upon him. No other judgment about him is possible. Augustine, as I have said already, found England in the main a heathen land ; and yet not so but that British Christians and a British Church existed still. The Teu- tonic invaders had destroyed all which they could destroy in the deserted Eoman province, but had not been able to make a clean sweep of Christianity from the Island. Augustine felt it most desirable to come to some under- standing with the heads of the British Church. He hoped that these, acknowledging his authority, and with this, of course, that of his sender, might be underworkers with him for the evangehzing of the Enghsh people ; a work not to be accomplished by the little band which he had brought with him, and the scanty reinforcements which had subsequently joined him. But the task of associating Biitish and Eoman missionaries in a common work was THE CONVEBSION OF ENGLAND. 31 one most difficult and delicate, and, with all which we owe to Augustine, it must be freely allowed that he was not the man to effect it. On the other hand, it can as little be affirmed of the British Christians that they yearned to take that glorious revenge on their Anglo- Saxon enemies which was placed within their reach. These or the ancestors of these had despoiled them of earth ; they were little disposed in return to help their spoilers to heaven. The attempt, however, to arrange terms of co-operation was made. Augustine got together a Synod at which a certain number of the British Bishops were induced to attend ; but these, offended at his as- sumption, refused to accept the Eoman rule for the keep- ing of Easter, or otherwise to submit to the supremacy of the Bishop of Eome, of which they declared that they had not heard before, and which, hearing of now, they re- pudiated altogether. It was not very wonderful that this attempt at reconciliation, or, to describe it more accu- rately, this summons to submission, did not close the rent and rift between the Churches, but rather left it wider than before. Yet the fault was very far from being all on one side ; thus Laiu-entius, Augustine's successor, com- plains that a British Bishop would not eat with him, nor so much as take food under the same roof. Let me note here that it is altogether a mistake, though a very common one, to assume that the difference about Easter, which did so much to keep the Churches asunder, was a revival of the old dispute between the Churches of Asia Minor (Ephesus above all) and the rest of Christendom — the same which had been settled at the Council of Nicsea ; and it is error reared upon error to adduce this as a proof that Britain had received its Chris- tianity from the East. It is just possible that this may have been the case, but there is no evidence for it here. 32 THE CONVJEBSION OF ENGLAND. In the Cliiirclies of Asia Minor, whicli professed to follow the tradition of St. John, the method of calculation, fundamentally distinct from that of the West, was such that the Easter festival might fall upon any day in the week. Nothing of the kind could possibly happen in the British, whose Easter basis of calculation, if I may so call it, was identical with that of Eome. The only difference between them was, that in the application of a rule com- mon to both, the other Churches of the West and Eome at their head, not being cut off from the suj3erior astro- nomical knowledge of Alexandria, had learned fi'om time to time to make allowance for certain disturbing facts, and had adjusted their calendar to these. The British Church meanwhile, separated for long years from the science of the Christian world, had failed to make the corrections in her calendar which were necessary, if Easter was to preserve its j)roper place. Other points of divergence there were, though none among them assumed the significance of this ; thus a different fasliion of the tonsure, the British preserving that from ear to ear, and not adopting till 718 the coronal tonsure of Eome, the token of the priest's possession of a kingly dignity. The centre of interest shifts after Augustine's death, of which the exact year is not certainly known (cir. 605), from the little kingdom of Kent, wherein alone his very moderate missionary successes were obtained, to the more important kingdom of Northumbria. There King Edwin, he too married to a Christian princess, after long hesita- tion is won for the truth (627), to which he loyally cleaves, and for which in the end he lays down his hfe. For the victory was not yet won ; and, whatever may have been the triumphs thus far of the Gospel in the land, England was not converted or nearly converted yet. If THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. 33 the truth goes fortli ' conquering and to conquer,' yet it has its defeats, its dark days, before the day of a com- plete triumph arrives. The corn of wheat must die, or appear to die, before it bears much fruit. It seems indeed an ahnost universal law of missionary work, that the definitive victory is not won without a temporary reaction more or less severe. The powers of darkness, seen and unseen, the spiritual wickednesses which con- stitute the true background of every form of heathenism, these, with all whom they can enlist in their service, gather themselves up, as with the energy of despair, for a last and decisive struggle with the kingdom of light. A tempest of wrath and wrong sweeps over the Church, and the patient work of years perishes, or appears to perish, in an hour. So fared it, though not to the full extent, in the Eoman Empire. A Constantine might seem to have brouo-ht, but did not indeed bring, all to a happy end ; there must still be a Julian and an apostasy before a Theodosius comes, and effectually does what Constantine had only appeared to do. And so fares it in cases innumerable. Ansgar must prove the truth of this in Sweden. Hungary twice relapses into heathenism, even after a St. Stephen had sat upon its throne. In our own days we have seen something of the same kind in New Zealand and Madagascar. It was not otherwise in Anglo-Saxon England of old. The fierce pagan King of Mercia, Penda by name, heads the heathen reaction ; and when Edwin falls in battle, it might seem as though with him had fallen the whole imposing but unstable edifice of Christianity in the north of the Island (633). But Christ is mightier than Woden. The work, arrested for a while, goes forward again. Yet it is not the band of Italian monks, who are too few, nor yet missionaries from the British Church in Wales, who have D 34 THE GONVEBSION OF ENGLAND. too little heart for the task, by whom the conversion of northern England shall be accomphshed. Other evan- gehsts, and these from quite a different quarter, appear upon the scene, and take up the uncompleted work ; and to them the chief glory of it must belong. To the Celtic monks, who were also the travellers, the scholars, the missionaries of the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth centuries, England, and indeed all North- Western Europe, owes a debt of gratitude which is hardly as yet acknow- ledged to the full. Bede, though writing altogether from the Eoman point of view, bears honourable witness to the singie-mindedness and devotion with which they addressed themselves to the missionary work. Two hundred years had elapsed since St. Patrick died ; but he had left mul- titudes behind him, his lineal spiritual descendants, in whose hearts was burning the same sacred fire which had once burned so brightly in his own. Not a few of these, passing over from Ireland, had chosen the little storm-beaten island of lona among the Western Hebrides, with the hope that from it as from a centre might radiate the light of God's truth into all the darkness beyond; nor were they disapj^ointed in their hope. On all those points of discipline and ritual observance on which the British Church of Wales was at issue with Eome, they were at issue no less ; but there was nothing in their past history to estrange them from the English as the Britons were estranged ; and they threw themselves with a will, not one by one, but by troops and companies, into the work which was before them ; Aidan, called the Apostle of Northumbria, gentle, and winning souls by the gentleness of Christ, leading the way (d. 651). The points of difference and divergence between these and the missionaries who had received their commission from Eome, came into no perplexing prominence so long^ as THE CONVEBSION OF ENGLAND. 35 their several spheres of labour, north and south, lay mainly apart from each other. But when, by the very successes which attended their labours, the northern and southern missions came to touch, as before very long they did, the crisis, sooner or later inevitable, arrived, and the question demanded to be determined, whether Celtic or Eoman Christianity should be paramount in the land. It was a question which hung for a while in the balance. Eome triumphed in the end. We may regard the Council of Whitby (663) as the turning point. At this, we are told, the upholders of the Eoman celebration of Easter and of the British severally pleaded before Oswy, then the most powerful monarch in the Heptarchy. He, being assured by the advocates of the Eoman use that this was according to the mind of St. Peter, and that St. Peter had the keys of the Idngdom of heaven, to admit or to exclude whom he would, did not think it prudent to put liimself in opposition to one so powerful, and declared for this use. Assuredly the manifold significance of the choice which he thus was making can have only dimly and faintly dawned on him ; but it ought not to escape us, who read it in the light which more than a thousand years throw back upon it. ' It was,' as has been said, ' the end of the Scotic ascendancy, the triumph of the " Catho- Hc Easter " and of other continental Church usages, the opening of a free communication with Latin Christianity properly so called. There was good in this, and also some evil. The Latinising process gave system and order, and organized and concentrated force, and a certain mag- nificence which could teach great lessons through the imagination, and overawe rough natures as by the visible presence of a kingdom supreme over lord and churl ahke. That the Latin tone and spirit also fostered superstitious D 2 36 THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. and spiritual despotism, and that the tightening of Knks to Eome had some ill effects on Enghsh Church freedom, are positions which medieval history puts far above all doubt ' (Bright). The tide of popular favour set from this time forward ever more and more strongly in the direction of Eome ; which httle by little triumphed not in England only, but in Ireland and Scotland as well, until lona, the latest stronghold of Celtic Christianity, was itself won (716). Many, it is true, of the more ardent and independent spirits among the Celtic missionaries refused to accept the yoke and to bow to the obedience of Eome. Seeing no place for them here any more, they crossed the seas to found, or where tliis was already done, to strengthen and extend, the Mission Churches in Frisia and Northern Ger- many, which their brethren had already founded. A grand career was open to them there, and they were not wanting to it; while yet in the end the same issues which the conflict had found in England, it found also abroad. The struggle with Eome was again renewed on the German soil, and with the same results. By the year 743, thanks mainly to Boniface, — of whom in another Lecture, — Eoman Christianity was everywhere in the ascendant there. The work of the Celtic missionaries was with their God. Owning as we must that there were precious truths held with clearness by the Celtic Church, or Church of the Culdees, as you will often hear it named — truths which were already more or less obscured in the Eoman, we are sometimes tempted to wish that the issue had been different. And yet it would be well to consider, Was there, in any Celtic Church which could then have been founded, what would have enabled it, or the England formed and fashioned under its influence, to endure the THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. 37 tremendous strain of the next four hundred years ? All was better as it was. The centuries which followed showed only too clearly the weak points of Celtic Chris- tianity. Devoid of that unifying power, of that won- derful gift of order and organization which was the strength of the Eoman, passionately throwing itself into tribal quarrels, and, making them its own, it would have consumed itself in intestine strifes. Instead of offering a basis of unity for the land, and refusing to recognize, as the Eoman Church refused to recognize, the rivalries and enmities of Northumbrian and Mercian and South-Saxon, it would have introduced new elements of discord and division ; and that unity of England, anyhow so hard to win, and so long struggled for in vain, would have become well-nigh or altogether impossible. Neither could England, on the remote outer fringe, as it then was, of the civihzed world, have afforded to be separated from the arts and culture of Western Europe, which all found their centre at Eome ; and which, few and frag- mentary as they were, were yet all that survived from the mighty wreck of old Greek and Latin civiUzation to carry the Church and the world through the dark and evil days that awaited both. At the same time, con- siderations such as these ought not to abate in the least our gratitude for all which we owe to these Celtic evan- gehsts, who wrought so large a share in the conversion of England, and in whose experience that law of the king- dom of heaven, which none but envious niggards will grudge or will repine at, was so signally fulfilled, ' One soweth and another reapeth.' I cannot close this sketch of the first founding of our Enghsh Church without honorable mention of one who did more than any other to bring into harmonious working order and to knit into an organic whole what hitherto 38 THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. had been little more than a mere assemblage of isolated missions. Theodore of Tarsus, philosopher and divine, trained in the East, but having accepted a mission from the Pope (669), is deservedly an illustrious name in our ecclesiastical annals. To him we probably owe the first rude outlines of our parochial system. It was he who recast, according to later needs, the episcopal divisions of the land, which had been originally co-extensive with the kingdoms of the Heptarchy. If much has since perished of his arrangements — and the Danish Invasion swept a great deal away — not a little still survives to the present hour. The victory of Eoman over Celtic Christianity was already practically decided when he came ; but he did much to reconcile the victors and the vanquished, a Wilfrid, ' of great parts and greater passions,' as Fuller has it, and a Chad, clothed with that grace of humility which Wilfrid sometimes lacked ; nor shall we ascribe to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, too high an honour, if we regard him as in some sort a second founder of the Enghsh Church, giving to it broader and safer foundations than an Augustine, or those who wrought merely in the spirit, at once narrow and timid, of Augustine, could have ever given. Having brought this story thus far, to the events which determined the future character of the Church in this land, I must renounce any attempt to follow it further ; and content myself with calling your attention to a few of the leading aspects which it presents, until such time as, with the Norman Conquest, our English Clnirch may be said to have taken a new departure. Certainly it had accom- plished much in the first hundred and fifty years of its existence. There are brilliant pages in its annals. A nation of heathens had beeii converted, not by violence. TEE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. 39 not by the sword, as the Saxons of the Continent should be, into a nation of Christians — most imperfectly con- verted, no doubt, but so that outwardly all save a few slight traces of heathendom had disappeared. There was much for which to thank God ; and yet, with all this, it must be fi^eely admitted that it was very far in its later days from fulfilling the promise of an earlier time. None, it is true, with good right could call that tree a barren one which put forth such shoots as this did, which produced scholars and theologians such as Bede and Alcuin, a poet such as Ca3dmon, missionaries such as Willibrord and Boniface, saints such as St. Chad and St. Cuthbert, a statesman such as Dunstan, a king such as Alfred. But for all this, there are grave shadows resting on the Anglo- Saxon Church ; nor can these be sufficiently explained and their gravity extenuated by a reference to the terrible calamities which after a while overtook this Church, seeing that those calamities themselves can only be re- garded as the just punishments of preceding sins. There have been races which, under the transforminaf influences, primary and secondary, of the Gospel of Christ, have laid aside their inborn fierceness, yet without laying aside or losing the strength and energy of character, of which that fierceness had been the perverted utterance ; races which have brought all their native energy with them into that new and higher sphere in which now they moved, and have found room to exercise it there. Fore- most among the races which thus kept all they before had that was worth the keeping, while adding much to this, which only that higher civihzation by Christianity rendered possible could give, w^ere the Normans. These, as their name attests, were Northmen once, Scandinavian pirates, with all the tameless strength of those wild and adven- turous sea-robbers ; who settling themselves down here and' 40 THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. there, as in Neiistria, in Calabria, in Sicily, in Greece, adopted the arts, the creed, the language of those among whom they settled, with whatever of rarer or finer culture those might own ; but w^ho did all this without bating one jot of their original vigour, manhood and love of adven- ture. An aspiring race they were, subtle and crafty ; yet not relying on these serpentine gifts alone ; but strong also to do and to dare ; the most brilliant cliivalry of Europe ; hewing out with the sword principahties and kingdoms for themselves, as was shown upon many a famous field and day ; and chiefly on that field of Senlac and day of St. Calixtus, field and day most memorable of all, when the Saxon battle-axes went down at even before the Norman spears, and the fate of England for long centuries, we may be bold to say for all time, was determined (1066). But of Angles and Saxons it must be owned, that if they gained much when they bowed to the yoke of Christ, there was also something which they might have kept, but did at the same time let go. Among the grave shadows at which I hinted just now, I certainly will not reckon the devotion felt and shown by the English Church to the distant mother that bore her. And yet it must be fi-eely allowed that this devotion, romantic, childlike, and happily ignorant of much which would have tried it severely, was not always bestowed wisely or well. Its existence none can contest. Among all the Teutonic tribes, the English, being once converted, proved the most devoted children of the Church. More than thirty kings and queens de- scended from the throne to end their days in cloistral retreats. It would be difficult to number the other scions of noble houses, and of both sexes, who thus sought to win heaven by the abandonment at once of the pomps and duties of eartli. From no other western land were pil- grimages to the thresholds of the Apostles, of rich and THE GONVEESION OF ENGLAND. 41 poor, of male and female — these often for the latter at- tended with the most disastrous moral results, as Bede assures us — so frequent or so numerous. From no other land did there flow into the Papal exchequer such rich contributions. Peter's Pence, if afterwards ado])ted by others, was an English invention at the first. The Anglo- Saxon Church had certainly deserved better than that, after centuries of such devotion, the Norman invader should go forth for its overthrow under a banner, as he did, consecrated by Papal hands. The monks had converted England. It was thus inevitable that the monastic element shoidd be strong throughout the whole of Anglo-Saxon life, from the throne to the cottage should pervade it all. This was natural and, in a land newly converted and only little by little to be weaned from innumerable heathen superstitions and idola- tries, was not in itself to be regretted. Still, a submission to these influences might easily be overdone, and many years had not elapsed before it was overdone. It was not very long before all or nearly all of the pubhc lands were ahenated for ever to churches and monasteries, till little or nothing remained with which to recompense those whose strong amis and courageous hearts had shielded, or should hereafter shield, the throne and uphold the State. Under whatever obligations to military service these lands may have been held, every such alienation must have diminished the number of those who should have borne arms in the country's defence. The thane, whose place was in the forefront of the battle, had assumed the ton- sure, oftentimes his sons with him. England was fast becoming a nation of monks. A genuine piety, however ill-directed, may have had its share here ; but love of ease, an ignoble shrinking from the task and toil of life, had lilso their share in developing this cloistral religion in 42 THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. a manner so excessive. Becle, when as yet the danger was remote, had already asked with anxiety what would be the end and issue of these insane gifts, of this forgetfulness of arms and all martial exercises on their parts who were the natural defenders and guardians of their native land. It did not take very long to show what this end would be. Keep all these things in mind, and also the fact, not to be denied, that there was a coarse animalism, a sluggish self-indulgence, from which the Anglo-Saxon temperament was not free, and which such unworthy withdrawals from toil and from danc^er must have done much to foster and feed, and you have in good part an explanation here of the frightful calamities that in the eighth and ninth cen- turies overtook Christian England, of the faint and ineffec- tual resistance that the spoilers and destroyers who made it their prey encountered. A people such as this needed to be emptied from vessel to vessel, if they were not hope- lessly to settle down upon their lees. The needful disci- pline was not wanting. The Dane first, and the Norman after him, were stern but effectual reminders that men cannot with impunity leave unfulfilled the duties to which God has called them, whatever else in the way of will- worship they may substitute in their room. These re- minders were not altogether thrown away, thanks above all others to Alfred the Great (871-901). Many precious boons we owe to him, but this the most precious, because it included or made possible all other, namely, that the Danish invasion was a scourge and no more, that the very life of Christian England was not crushed out by it ; as might very well have been, if a monarch of less heroic mould, if one who could only pray, a monk at heart, and not one who could both pray and fight, had sat upon the throne at this crisis of England's fate. Eestorer and reviver of Christian life and learning in the land, sober. THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND. 43 dauntless, resolute, patient, his spirit lived in his son and grandson ; scarcely indeed the men of faith that he was, but in many aspects splendid sovereigns, who saw clearly the work which was for them to do, and who did it. There were no grand characters among chiu'chmen in the later days of the Anglo-Saxon Church to correspond to these. Milman's judgment is severe, but not more severe than true : — ' The Anglo-Saxon Clergy, since the days of Dunstan, had produced no remarkable man. The triumph of monasticism had enfeebled without sanctifying the secular clergy ; it had spread over the Island all its superstition, its thraldom of the mind, its reckless prodi- gality of lands and riches to pious uses, without its vigour, its learning, its industrial civilization. Like its faithful disciple, its humble acolyte, its munificent patron, Edward the Confessor, it might conceal much gentle and amiable goodness ; but its outward character was that of timid and unworldly ignorance, unfit to rule, and exercising but feeble and unbeneficial influence over a population become at once more rude and fierce, and more oppressed and servile, by the Danish Conquest.' Let me in conclusion invite you to observe how the work of the conversion of England exactly corresponded in time with the first triumphant advance of the Mahomedan anns. Pertaining as these events severally do, the one to the extreme West, the other to the further East, we may easily miss their connexion, might find it hard to recog- nize that such connexion existed at all. And yet, in the providence of God, the one was set over against the other ; and the West was knitting itself into the strength and unity which it would need for that collision with the great heretical impiety of the East, which sooner or later was certain to arrive. It is the rise of Islam with which in my next Lecture I shall deal. u LECTUEE IV. ISLAM. While the Church was making these spiritual conquests in the West, securely j^lanting herself in regions which should henceforward form her most flourishing seats, organizing herself under a single head, dark clouds were gathering and a tempest brewing in the East, from a quarter where beforehand they might least have been looked for. Nor were these merely transient perils, the devastations of an hour or a day. The regions which had been her earhest haunt and home, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, these all within little more than a century were torn from her ; neither did the losses of that earlier time at all exhaust the losses which she was thus destined to endure. It was from Arabia that the stonn thus suddenly broke upon the Church, which was forcibly to rend away so many of her fairest branches. Up to this time Arabia had played little or no part in the world's history. Satisfied with maintaining their own independence — and with only some partial and recent exceptions they had defied or eluded the attempts of the mightiest conquerors to place a yoke upon their necks, — the children of Ishmael had hitherto dwelt apart in their solitary world. From this they were now to break forth, and profoundly to stamp themselves, their manners, their customs, their faith, on a large and important portion of the globe, and to win for the faith ISLAM. 45 which they professed the devoted adhesion of some seventh part of its inhabitants. The Arabs had been, so far back as history knows anything about them, a free, warhke people, thinly scat- tered over their immense peninsula, their tribes oftentimes at war among themselves, oftentimes at war with their neighbours ; if, indeed, the freebooting excursions to which they were addicted deserved so honourable a name. Whatever original knowledge of the one God they may have possessed had been gradually overclouded and lost. In the times of their ignorance — for so the Musselmans fondly term the period before their prophet rose, and brought them back to the primitive patriarchal faith — the land had been full of idols and of idolaters, Sabcean star- worshippers and others. Nor did the presence of a con- siderable colony of Jews in Arabia, and of some Christians as well, do much to dispel the darkness of idolatry which brooded over the land. With scanty and imperfect knowledge of their own faith, entangled in manifold superstitions and errors, these Jews and Christians were alike little fitted to be witnesses against the superstitions and errors of others. Such very briefly was the political and religious condition of Arabia when Mahomet was born (569 or 571). Mecca was the place of his birth. Of his early life legend knows much, history very little. He belonged, though himself poor, to one of the noblest tribes in the land, to that, namely, of the Koreishites. To the mem- bers of this tribe appertained some not very clearly de- fined sacerdotal privileges ; among others the guardianship of the Caaba, a heathen sanctuary or temple, which had been the Holy Place of the Arabs long before Mahomet, adopting and weaving it into his religious scheme, gave to it its second consecration as the middle point of Ma- 46 ISLAM. Jiomedan worship. His youth excited no special remark. Too poor to carry on commercial affairs upon his own account, he transacted those of a rich widow, and this with such fidelity and prosperous issues, that after a while she bestowed upon him her hand and her fortune. The affairs in which he was thus engaged involved many journeys, and brought him in contact with men of various countries and diverse faiths ; for Mecca was the centre of an active commerce, and sent out its caravans eastward and southward through the whole Arabian peninsula, and to many regions beyond. Twice he visited Syria. It was probably on one of these journeys that he fell in with that mysterious Nestorian monk, who plays a part alike in the Mahomedan and Christian tradition of his Hfe, but whose relations with him are wrapt in an obsciurity so deep. From him, as some will have it, Mahomet obtained whatever measure of acquaintance with things Jewish and Christian he possessed. His knowledge, indeed, of these, however gotten, was small, fragmentary, and inac- curate — ridiculously inaccurate one might call it, were not the whole rise of Islam too terrible an event for the human race to allow the employment of such a word a knowledge not derived from the Scriptures themselves, but from sources the most turbid, from Talmudic legends and aprocr3^hal gospels, and, as we may confidently affirm, not drawn at first hand even from these. Such a portentous birtli as a new religion, and that religion a false one, could scarcely come to pass without labour-pangs corresponding. It did not so here. Of much we must remain ignorant ; but this much we know, that in or about his fortieth year Mahomet began to listen to secret intimations that there was a divine mission for him to fulfil ; while there did not want other whispers that these suggestive voices were not from above, but below. ISLAM. 4.7 The crisis of his life had arrived ; fleeing from men, hiding in mountain caves, deeply sunken in religious reverie — epileptic fits his enemies would have it — seeing visions and dreaming dreams, now lifted up as to heaven, and now cast down as to hell, it was only after a long interior conflict that his life wrought itself out for him into any distinctness of purpose, and that he began to declare, as God's message by him to the world, There is no god but God, and Mahomet is his prophet (611). And yet something of the course by which he had been led thus far I think we can trace. Doubtless in the years which went before he had been deeply impressed with the moral and spiritual degradation of his country. There are many clear tokens that amid all the darkness of idolatry, all the falsehoods with which the land was full, a sense of the unity of the Godhead had not been quite obliterated from the minds of his fellow-country- men. It revived in strength in his own. He saw truly what lay at the root of all their miseries and dissensions, of tribe evermore at war with tribe, and family with family ; namely, that faith in a common Lord, the only true bond which can bind men together, was wanting. He saw that their very worship, being as it was the worsliip of things which were beneath them, and not of One who was above, instead of drawing upward, did it- self only drag them down and debase them the more. It was the custom until very lately never to name Mahomet without some opprobrious addition to his name — ' the impostor Mahomet,' ' the Arabian false prophet ; ' while, if I do not mistake, the pendulum is now swaying in an opposite direction, and we may soon have Mahomet placed on a level with Moses — at the least, and the Koran, if a lower revelation than the Bible, pronounced a divine revelation still. The truth, as I am bold to affirm, is 48 ISLAM. neither here nor there. If by ' impostor ' we understand, and we can scarcely understand less, one who devised a cunningly constructed system of fraud and falsehood, which then, with the full consciousness that it was such, he sought to impose upon others, impostor Mahomet was not. Deceiver I believe that he often was, but only where, not of course without his OAvn sin, he was himself first deceived. On any scheme of simple and self-conscious imposture it is altogether impossible to explain the results of his preaching, which has changed the face of so large a part of the world, given birth to a religion which for many centuries contended as on equal terms with the Christian ; and which, if waning ^'^ now like the moon that is its symbol, yet still subsists a mighty power and passion, filling the hearts, and moulding the lives, of milhons of our fellow men. ' Lies,' as our proverb declares, ' have no legs ; ' at all events lies that are nothing else but lies have not legs which will carry them through some twelve hundred years and more. Instead of dismissing without more ado this rehgion as a lie, and its founder as an im- postor, it will profit us more to ask ourselves what were the sources of its strength, to divide, as far as this may be, the hght from the darkness in the man and in the faith, and to do such justice to both as they have a right to demand. But first to follow to its close the outward history of the man. His claims to the prophetic ofiice are met by contemptuous indifference, and then by bitter hostility, no where so bitter as at Mecca ; for he too is a prophet who finds no honour in his own country. Driven from thence at length by the persistent enmity of his own tribe, and hardly escaping with his life, he and the few whom he has persuaded to believe in his mission take refuge at Medina, not so named before, but now ISLAM. 49 acquiring this name of The City — the city, that is, of the prophet. This was in 622, some eleven years after he had begun to preach. The year is worth remembering, for the Hegira, or Fhght to Medina, is the Mahomedau era, the date from which they reckon, as we do from the Nativity of our Lord. At Medina he found the behef which had been refused him at Mecca. New adherents united themselves to him. Early fiiends, scattered from him at the time of his flight, gathered round him again. The Koreishites, indeed, still pursued him with implacable hate, and many battles were fought with varying success ; these, it is true, being little more than skirmishes which grew out of the waylaying of caravans and similar marauding expeditions. But with all tliis his cause was gaining ground, the number of his adherents increas- mg and when in 632 he expired, all Arabia recognized him as her prophet and her king ; and he who at the first had aspired, at the utmost, to the giving of a law to his own people, did now, his horizon having widened with his success, bequeath to the Chahfs, his successors, the task of subduing the world to the faith which he had pro- claimed. God, he said, had long tried gentleness, the meekness of Christ ; — for he did not deny the divine mission of our Lord, nor yet that of Moses, but always assumed these, and his own mission as the complement of theirs ; — ^but now, wearied out with the obstinacy of sinners, He commanded that they should either accept the true faith ; or yield themselves tributary to those who had accepted ; or, refusing both these alternatives, should be destroyed as rebels against the Lord of heaven and earth. The task which Mahomet left to those who came after him to accomphsh, they prosecuted with a zeal E 50 ISLlM. and a success which for a while seemed to threaten the estabhshment of the faith of Islam on the ruins of every other religion in the world. Terrible indeed was the first outburst of the children of the desert from regions where they had been cooped and confined so long ; the first carrying out of that war against mankind which in efiect their prophet had proclaimed. The two acknow- ledged powers of the East, the Byzantine and the Persian Empires, each with an able monarch at its head, Herachus (610-641) and Chosroes (d. 628), had been weakening one another by alternate victories and defeats. Each in turn had brought the other to the very brink of destruc- tion ; little dreaming the while that a power was growing up in secret which was watching them both, and in the end should destroy them both, and one within a few years. On some of the fairest and most flourishing of the Asiatic provinces of the Byzantine Empire the storm fell first. Exhausted by those long wars with Persia, defended by ill-paid mercenaries, swarming with per- secuted sectaries, with oppressed Jews, with subjects disaffected from one cause or another and only too well pleased to change their master, that Empire was wholly unequal to resist the shock. Ten years had not elapsed since the death of the prophet, and already Palestine and Syria and Egypt had accepted the yoke ; already three out of the four famous patriarchates of Eastern Christen- dom — Jerusalem (636) and Antioch (638) and Alexandria (641) — if not actually blotted out, retained little more than a merely titular existence. It wanted but a little that the fourth and last had shared their doom ; for Con- stantinople itself, twice besieged by the Saracens (in 669, and again in 716), with difficulty weathered the first vio- lence of the storm, and, except for the opportune invention of the Greek Fire, might have succumbed to Mahomedan \ ISLlM. 51 arms, not in the fifteenth century, but the seventh or the eighth. The tide of conquest rolled onward. The Persian Empire ceased to exist (637-651). North Africa was subdued (665-709). Crossing over from this into Spain, the Arabs, or Moors as they were here called, from having assimilated to themselves the Moorish population of North Africa, overthrew in a single battle the kingdom of the Goths (711), surmounted the Pyrenees, planted themselves in Aquitaine, and threatened to make all France, and with France all Western Europe, their own. It was here at length that their proud waves were stayed : for it was here that they first came in conflict with races organized on a truer moral basis and therefore stronger than they w^ere. At the famous battle called sometimes of Poitiers, and sometimes of Tours (732), one of the ' decisive battles of the world ' — for we must go back nearly three cen- turies, to the battle of Chalons (451), before we can find such another — Charles Martel encountered the armies of Islam with the assembled chivalry of the West, and earned, or deserved to earn, his name of The Hammer, inflicting on them so crushing a defeat that for long centuries all their aggressive pressure upon Western Christendom was arrested, and, indeed, has never again revived in its full strength. Some indeed at this day ex- tenuate the importance which has for long been ascribed to this victory as an arrest of the onward march of Mahomedan conquest ; and claim for Leo the Isaurian, of whom we shall hear more anon, that his overthrow of the Saracen hosts which besieged Constantinople (716) was the real shattering of the aggressive forces of Islam in this century ; but on this question I cannot enter. How shall we explain these extraordinary successes, the going forth of this novel faith over the world, thus E 2 52 ISLAM. bringing tlie world to its feet? It is not enough to appeal to the simple habits of the conquerors, their hardy training, their martial character ; while the populations with which they were brought into conflict were for the most part unwarlike and effeminate, enervated by luxury and self-indulgence, estranged by one cause or another from their natural rulers, and eager to accept almost any other in their stead. This might explain much, but it would not explain all, or nearly all. We must look for causes lying deeper. The Moslem hosts went forth in the confidence of a mission from heaven. Not Kaled only, but every Moslem warrior felt himself indeed to be ' The Sword of God.' Comparing what they now were with what they had been in those ' times of their ignor- ance,' when they worshipped dead idols, they felt that they had been brought into a new spiritual world, now at length had learned what was the true g'ory and dignity of man, namely, to be the servant of the one God, maker and ruler of all ; that such servants they were ; whose office it was to proclaim his power ; themselves submitting, and compelling others to submit, to his will. What a truth was here, to have taken possession of a multitude of souls ! No w^onder that, in the strength of this, in- numerable tribes, which had hitherto done little but mutually bite and devour one another, were presently knit together into a nation, and the worshippers of a thousand discordant falsehoods into a Society which bore some sort of similitude to a Church. And then, if you would look further for an explana- tion, turn to the conquered. ' Where the carcase is, there shall the eagles be gathered together.' This is the law of God's dealings with men, with nations, and with Churches. Where they are abandoned by the spirit of life, and have thus become as a carcase, there the eao'les, the executors ISLAM. 53 of the divine vengeance, are at hand, presently to remove out of the way that which, suffered any longer, could only taint the air and defile the earth. The Eastern Church was not altogether such a carcase, and therefore it did not wholly perish ; but yet we must needs confess that it had grievously provoked those terrible judgments which now fell upon it. How rent was it and torn by inner dissensions which men would not lay aside even in the presence of a common foe, hating one another so much that the triumph of that foe seemed infinitely preferable to the triumph of a rival Christian sect; what mere strifes about words had taken the place of a zeal for holiness, and how fiercely were these debated ; how much of superstition was there everywhere ; how much which, if it was not idolatry, yet played most dangerously on the verge of this. We can regard Mahomedanism in no other fight than as the scourge of God upon a guilty Church. He will not give his glory to another. He will not suffer the Creator and the creature to be confounded ; and if those who should have been witnesses for the truth, who had been appointed there- unto, forget, forsake, or deny it. He will raise up witnesses from quarters the most unlooked for, and will strengthen their hands and give victory to their arms, even against those who bear his name, but have forgotten his truth. And yet, it may be very naturally asked, does this negative aspect of Mahomedanism exhaust its whole meaning? had it no other purposes in the councils of God? was it merely such a scourge as this? for if so, why has it been pennitted to exist for long centiu-ies after this its proper work was accomplished? The rods of God's anger are for the most part, in the order of his providence, broken and cast aside so soon as ever his work by them has been accompfished ; but here it has not been 64 ISLAM. so. Before attempting to answer this question, let us a little consider what is the worth of this religion, not as compared with that decaying form of Christianity which it encountered, overcame, and supplanted in the East, but as compared with the Christian faith contemplated in its ideal truth and piurity. The name which the Mahomedans give to their faith is Islam, a word implying the yielding of oneself to God. Here, as so often, we have in the name that which lies deepest and nearest to the heart of the thing. The central idea of this religion in its noblest aspect is exactly the surrendering of oneself to God ; but then it is the surrendering of oneself to Him as absolute power, not as holy love. We behold it here at once in its strength and its weakness ; in its strength, inasmuch as it does preach this yielding of self to God, the will of the creature to the will of the Creator ; in its weakness, seeing that this surrender is but the surrender of the weak to the strong. ' Power belongeth unto God ' — this truth the Mussulman or true believer had grasped with all the energies of liis heart and soul ; but he had missed the truth which ought ever to go along with it, that this absolute power is wielded by perfect love. The sense of the dif- ference and distinction between God and man, the Creator and the creature, is mightily realized by him ; and he has been God's fearful avenger upon those who have dared to confound them ; but the fact of man's likeness to God and union with God he not only fails to make his own, but explicitly denies. Man is for him God's servant, not his son. A mighty gulf divides them, and shall divide them for ever. The very title, Son of God, is blasphemy in his ears. This name, first realized in the Everlasting Son, and then in as many as have received adoption through Him into the household of saints, this, which is the truest witness and guard against all idolatry, he accounts to ISLAM. 65 be the worst and guiltiest idolatry of all. In the assertion of the naked sovereignty of God, and the denial, in this involved, of the divine fatherhood, the family, in any true sense of the word, has been for ever rendered impossible. But Mahomedanism is not merely this falling back from the blessed truths of the Gospel ; it is a still further retrocession in the spiritual history of mankind. It falls short, not only of Christian, but even of Jewish truth. It is a Judaism not provisional ; not looking on to some better thing which it announces and prepares for ; not pregnant with a nobler birth ; but a Judaism stript of its prophecy and its promise, reduced to a religion of nature, without a priesthood, without a sacrifice even as it is with- out any deep consciousness of sin, without a Messiah. It has no ideal of a perfect hohness after which it summons its votaries to strive ; and indeed how should it have this, when the man who stands at its centre, though not with- out noble quahties, is yet so carnal, so full of blots and of bloodstains ? You may read the whole Koran through, without lighting on words which in the least resemble these, ' Make me a clean heart, God, and renew a right spirit within me. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean ; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.' Or regard it in its social working, as it has shown itself in the twelve centuries during which it has been upon its trial. It has all the faults, all the narrowness of a local religion which by strange unexpected successes has outgrown the region of its birth, a region where it was not without a certain fitness, and has obtained a dominion which recognizes no limitation except the inability to stretch itself further. If in Christendom the attempt has been often made to weave into one inextricable woof the kingdom of God and the kingdom of C£esar, yet, as we thankfully own, in the end the attempt has always failed. 66 ISLAM, In Islam it has completely succeeded, and succeeded, not as a perversion and defeat of the intentions with which Ma- homedanism was founded, but as the truest realization of all which it was intended to be. The despotisms of the East are not accidents, but the legitimate results of the Koran ; and so long as this exists as the authoritative book, nothing better can come in their stead. Nor may we leave out of sight, that in the very act of slightly alleviat- ing, the Koran has recognized and perpetuated, the two fatal social evils of the East, polygamy and slavery. But to return to a point which we left ; — if all this be so, if Mahomedanism be this backward step in the spiritual education of mankind, if it be no better than this bastard brother now of the Jewish and now of the Christian faith, having in the long run no truth to teach the Church which the Church does not of herself already know much better — how shall we explain its continuance, long after the work for which it was first permitted has been done ? We shall best, I believe, understand God's purposes here when we regard this religion in its relations, not to the religions which stand above it, but to those idolatrous worships which stand beneath it. Thus while Christianity has failed to attract the negro races with which it has been brought into immediate contact, many of the fetisch- worshipping tribes of Africa, long sunken in abject and brutal superstitions, have been raised, as it is impossible to deny, by the moral impulses which Islam has supplied, by a religion which was not too far above them, to the worship of one God, to a certain measure of order and morality, which, so far as we can see, without it they might never have attained. Such a process is even now going forward, as all the reports which reach us from the interior of that land of darkness declare. There are indeed few more curious spiritual facts than the present ISLAM. 67 spread of Maliomedanism in Africa ; a movement which has failed hitherto at all to attract the attention wliich it deserves. For the rest, it must be freely owned that as yet we see very little of its service as a conducting medium, as a religion of transition, as in its own rude fashion a school- master to Christ. Its position is still one of fierce anta- gonism to the Gospel. Shall it be so to the end ? Is that mysterious re-animation of Mahomedan zeal, which for the last thirty or forty years has been manifest to all thoughtful observers, no more than the quickening to a dread activity of all the anti- christian elements in this religion, that so it may challenge and provoke to a last struo-orle mjcrhtier and better forces than its own, and in that struggle may perish, dashed to pieces by that Eock upon which it might have been built ? Let us hope some- thing better. The end is not yet. It can scarcely have been for nothing that so much of Christian truth was per- mitted to be wrought up into this fabric of error, that the Son of Mary occupies the place which He does in the Mahomedan theology. Not merely things good, but also things evil, and much more, things, hke that wherewith we are dealing now, made up of both, a mingled woof of light and of darkness, they all serve God ; and shall be shown at last to have contributed their share to the work- ing out of his eternal purpose in the world ; even as in Eastern legend other spirits beside the good were com- pelled by Solomon to take their part and do drudging work in the rearing of the temple of the true God. 58 LECTUEE V. THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. The Medieval Cliurch of the West found in the seventh century an immense task before it to fulfil. The fulfil- ment of this task was the performance of a duty, but it was at the same time the conjuring of a danger. How real and terrible that danger might prove the Greek Church at this very time was giving lamentable proof ; from which one fair region after another, the cradle lands of the faith, was being torn away by the Saracen mis- beUever. Heathen Germany was hardly a less threaten- ing peril to Western Christendom ; and, even where it did not positively endanger existence, was a source of constant annoyance, infesting and wasting the border lands. Pauses in the conflict between the two there might be ; but endiu-ing peace was impossible between races on such different levels of culture, and so wholly antagonistic to one another in the highest matters of all. The missionaries who addressed themselves to the enormous task of the conversion of Germany may be conveniently divided into three groups — the British, the Franldsh, and, entering somewhat later into honourable rivahy with these, the Anglo-Saxon or the EngHsh. A word or two upon each of these groups. The British — they include Irish and Scotch — could no longer find a field for their activity in England, now that there the THE C0NVUB8I0N OF GERMANY. 59 Eoman rule and discipline, to which they were so little disposed to submit, had everywhere won the day. Their own religious Houses were full to overflowing. At home there was little for them to do, while yet that divine hunger and thirst for the winning of souls, which had so possessed the heart of St. Patrick, lived on, a mighty passion in theirs. To them so minded pagan Germany offered a welcome field of labour, and one where there was ample room for the exertions of all. There were, secondly, the Frankish missionaries, who enjoyed the favour of the Frankish kings, which sometimes served them in good stead ; while at other times this protection was very far from a recommendation in the eyes of the heathen, who were easily persuaded to see in these evangelists the emissaries of a foe. There were, lastly, the Anglo-Saxons ; who, mindful of the source from which they had received their own Christianity, were earnest in attaching their converts to Eome, even as they were themselves bound to her by the closest ties. The language which these spoke, one which as yet can have diverged very little from the Low German of Frisia, must have given to them many facilities which the Frankish missionaries possessed in a much slighter measure, the British not at all ; and this may help to account for a success attending their labours far greater than attended the labours of the others. To them it was mainly due that the battle of the creeds, which had been fought and lost by the Celtic missionaries in England, and was presently renewed in Germany, had finally the same issues there as in Eng- land. It was not until near the opening of the seventh century that the work of Germany's conversion may be said to have fairly begun. One noble apparition, for we can hardly call it by any other name, belongs to the close 60 THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. of the fifth, that, namely, of Severiniis. Of other eminent missionaries we generally know something, who they were and whence they came, and in one way or another what spiritual descent they owned. In him, as without spiritual father or mother, all is shrouded in mystery, till we find him ministering as an angel of consolation, with a self- offering love which knows no bounds, to populations of southern Germany reduced by the frightful anarchy of the times to the lowest depths of misery and despair. I am afraid that the names of others who were among the foremost to break up that hard soil, and to sow in its furrows the seed of everlasting life, well worthy as they are to be held in everlasting remembrance, must remain little more than names for you, so impossible is it for me to make more than briefest pause and that only upon a few. Augustine had not yet landed on the shores of Kent, when already the Scotch and Irish missionaries were pushing forward their assaults upon German heathen- ism. Fridolin among the Alamanni (cir. 589), Colum- banus (d. 615), a very strenuous worker, and mainly in the Vosges, who, like another Baptist, could stand before* kings and rebuke them ; and Gallus (d. 646), his most illustrious scholar, ' Apostle of Switzerland,' whose name lives in the monastery and canton of St. Gall, lead up the van. Kilian (d. 689) too, another Irish monk, must not be left unnamed ; he also by his boldness in rebuking vice winning for himself the martyr's crown. As little should Eligius (b. 588, d. 659) be forgotten, goldsmith and saint, the St. Eloy of Chaucer's Prioress, and well worthy of any just honoiu*, if not of that which she paid him. But he, with Amandus (d. 649), who laboured upon the banks of the Scheldt, into whose waters many times he was flung by the heathen, 'Apostle of Belgium ' he has been sometimes called, and Ens^lish THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. 61 Willibrord, who also toiled among the wild tribes of our modern Flanders and Brabant, belong to the Roman as contradistinguished from the Celtic group of evangelists. These are but a handful out of the number of those whose names, with more or less notice of their toils, have reached us. Innumerable others there must have been, now forgotten of men, but whose names are written in the Book of life. When we call to mind the disappoint- ments and defeats, with all of outrage and insult, of wrath and wrong, often even to death, which these must have endured from populations always savage and not seldom fanatic, before their work was accomphshed, what grander fulfilment could we anywhere find of that prophecy of Christ, ' I am come to cast fire upon the earth ? ' Who but He could have kindled and kept alive in so many hearts a flame so divine ? At the same time, there were differences in the in- tensity and obstinacy of resistance to the message of the truth, that would be offered by different tribes. There was ground, which at an early day had been won for the Gospel, but which in the storms and confusions of the two preceding centuries had been lost again ; the whole fine, that is, of the Danube and the Ehine, regions fair and prosperous once, but in every sense wildernesses now. In these we may note a readier acceptance of the message than found place in lands which in earlier times that message had never reached ; as though obscure reminiscences and traditions, not wholly extinct, of the earUer work had helped to set forward the later. Behind this fine, now reoccupied by the Church, there were populous regions in Frisia, in Hesse, in Thuringia, in Saxony, into which a solitary missionary had hardly penetrated as yet ; warrior races, which had never bowed to the superiority of Eoman arts and arms, which had 62 THE CONVEliSION OF GERMANY. faintly heard of Eome, if they had heard at all ; races animated by the deepest hostility against a Gospel of peace. The opposition of these was altogether different from any that had been encountered in the bringing to the obedience of faith those tribes which had already established themselves within the limits of the Eoman Empire. The German populations, which, when detached from their old seats, had so easily yielded themselves to the spiritual allurements of Christianity, which had re- ceived baptism and melted into the mass of Christian worshippers one scarcely knows how, offered a far more stubborn resistance when sought out in their own primi- tive haunts, among their own forests and morasses. It is not hard to see why. Established in lands which had been already won to the religion of Christ, and having left their own holy places, their fanes and sacred forests, even their veiy priests behind them, they were surrounded, in a manner awed, by a Christian civilization so immensely superior to any which they before had known or imagined, by a worship carried on in stately temples and with mag- nificent rites. But in their native haunts all this prestige and awe were wanting, with which the true faith was en- compassed elsewhere. A band of wandering monks would often be the sole representatives to them of that invisible kingdom, which demanded of them that they should submit themselves to its laws, renounce all or nearly all wherein liitherto they had gloried the most, and accept mysterious and dimly intelligible benefits in return. But despite of all difficulties in the way, much had been effected in advancing the frontier line of Christianity, many successful aggressions had been made on the stub- born heathenism of Germany during the century which intervened between the missionary labours of Columbanus and the time when Boniface first put his hand to the TEE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. 63 plough. Yet for all tliis, and fully recognizing that up to a certain point Boniface entered on the labours of others, we need have no scruple in admitting the title of ' Apostle of Germany ' which has been claimed for him. Winfrid or Boniface — ^whether Pope Gregory II. gave him this second name, or how he got it, is not clear — was born near Kirton in Devonshire, about 680. Fair and flattering prospects could not detain him at home, with so glorious an enterprise as the winning of Germany to Christ beck- oning liim to take his share in it. Some distinguishing fea- tures of his work are worth your attention. Thus all efforts for the subduing of Germany to the yoke of Christ which preceded his had been more or less unconnected and de- sultory. With him the organization of the enterprise as a whole began ; laying as he did first foundations, where it needed to lay these ; building on the foundations by others already laid, where such existed ; strengthening what was weak and tottering ; supplying what was lack- ing ; reviving things ready to die ; recalling to Christian order and discipline populations that had relapsed into heathen practices ; bringing the Clergy together in synods, which were hitherto unknown, or which, having once been used, had fallen into desuetude and neglect ; every- where working upon a large and well-ordered plan. In nothing were the early workers in the vast mission field of the world more worthy of note and imitation, than in their care to make sure, so far as this was possible, of the spiritual territory which they once had won, in the means which they adopted for impressing an abiding character on their work. They did not rely for this on any vague Christian sentiment which by their preaching they might have aroused among their converts ; but, as conquerors who not merely overrun but mean also to re- tain the lands which they have conquered, ever as they ad- 64 THE GONVEBSION OF GERMANY, vance are careful to leave fortified posts behind them, so these were diligent, by aid of churches and schools and monas- teries which they founded, to hold with a strong and per- manent grasp all that once they had made their own. Among many eminent for this, Boniface stands out pre- eminent. What an unerring eye was his for the discern- ing of the fittest spot for a monastery with its cloistral school attached, — Fulda, so long the centre of the theolo- gical culture of Germany, and notably his choice, is a signal witness to this, — or for the dividing out of some land, newly gained to the faith of Christ, into diocesses, and selecting the spot where the Bishop's See should be planted. And what he saw as best, he was able as Apos- tohc Legate to carry out. Immensely changed or modi- fied as the ecclesiastical arrangements of Germany have subsequently been, tliere is much in them wliich to this day attests his practical wisdom, his far-seeing out- look into the future. The Church has had few with a talent of organization such as his, fewer still who have had the opportunity of exercising this talent on so vast a scale. It is very interesting to note other points in which the practical instincts of Boniface led him to adopt measures for the spreading of the faith most closely resembling those to which the great Missionary Bishops of our own times, such as Selwyn and Patteson, have been led, measures alike in his case and in theirs crowned with signal success. He too sought to win the confidence of heathen chiefs so far that they were willing to intrust their children to be edu- cated by him. In these, trained in the school of Christ, he found afterwards some of his most devoted and efiici- ent helpers ; while it did not rarely happen that the hearts of the fathers were in the end turned to the children, TEE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. 65 tlie fathers through their children won to the obedience of faith. Let all of his somewhat excessive submission to the See of Eome, excessive even for his own time, be freely admitted ; let it be admitted too that he profoundly im- pressed the same submission, for good or for evil, upon the Churches which he founded ; let it be further owned that with the gold, silver, and precious stones which he brought to the spiritual building there were mingled some hay, straw, and stubble ; yet for all this the foundation whereon he built was Christ ; and where that is so, the true abides, the false perishes and passes away. Then, too, God often makes the faults no less than the graces of his own ser- vants to serve Him ; and it may very well be a question whether at that epoch of the Chiu-ch's history, and with all that in the next centmies was before it, a national German Church, which did not hold on to Eome, and to such learn- ing and light as could there and not elsewhere be found, was possible. I have touched on this subject already (p. 37), and shall not repeat what I then said. It is only fair too, before quitting this subject, to observe that there was nothing servile in this submission of Boniface. Against more things than one which he saw amiss at Eome he raised a clear and manly protest. A noble life had a not less noble close. Archbishop of Mentz— he would himself have preferred Cologne as the metropoUtan See of Germany — he might have claimed a peaceful close for so stormy and laborious a hfe. But no ; he cannot forget how in liis onward victorious march he had left behind him one fortress of heathendom untaken. His heart yearns after the Frisians whom in the early days of his mission he had sought to win to the faith, but in vain. He lays down his dignities, is the simple evan- gelist once more, revisits with a small band of faithful F 66 THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. fellow-workers tlie scene of his baffled labours in other clays. Many are now converted, while others are only the more embittered hereby, and at the hands of these he receives the martyr's crown (755). Until within the last few years there was in the land which owes to Boniface so large a debt, a very hearty and unquestioning recognition of his work, — and this on the part of Eoman Catholic and Protestant writers alike. With some among the latter all this is now changed. Attacks of an inconceivable bitterness upon him and upon the whole character of his missionary labour follow fast on one another. Kot the conversion of the heathen, — for about that, his accusers say, he concerned himself very little, — ^but the overthrow of the Celtic Churches of Germany, guilty of the unpardonable sin of declining to acknowledge the supremacy of Eome, was the life-task which he set before himself, and which he carried through with only too fatal a success. Shameful intrigues at the Court of Charles Martel and his sons, for the helping forward of this object, are laid to his charge ; and this without a tittle of historic evidence to sustain the accu- sation, as the accusers themselves are compelled to admit. Even his martyrdom is denied. The authors of his death, we are now told, were a wild robber horde ; and Boniface only got what was his due, seeing that, if he had not neglected his proper duties as a missionary Bishop, to curry favour at Courts, these would in all likelihood have been converted, have become peaceable members of society, and so have done him no wrong. Surely it must be in other interests than those of historic truth that all this is so persistently and passionately urged. At the death of Boniface the area of heathen Germany was very much contracted, as compared with what it had THE C0NVEB8I0N OF OEBMANY. 67 been when liis ministry began. He who once had so boldly struck and levelled to the earth the oak of imme- morial age, dedicated to the Thunder-god, had indeed . dealt a blow to Teutonic heathenism, from which it never i-^^' should recover.. But there was still one stronghold of paganism upon which httle or no impression had been made. The Saxon swarms wliich had passed over into England had submitted themselves for more than a century to the yoke of Christ. Boniface himself was a glorious witness of the spirit in which some among them had yielded themselves to Him. But not so those that had remained in their native seats, in a Saxony far wider in extent than any which we know now by this name, and including a large part of northern and mediterranean Germany. Of Saxons Tacitus in his muster of the tribes says nothing ; Pliny too is silent. Some have concluded from thence that they rose comparatively late to numbers and power and renown. It is more probable that the name only was recent, and that we have here some of the most famous of the tribes of old, the Cherusci and others, but associated under a new collective title ; such a process, as we know, being very far from imfrequent ; thus Suevi and Boii and Alamanni were all such collective names. The first mention of Saxons which we have in books belongs to the middle of the second century ; they do not actually appear on the world's stage till near the end of the third ; a wild, fierce and stony-hearted race ; indeed, as some Latin philologers erroneously urged, they announced as much in their name. Time was when these Saxons and the various tribes which coalesced under the common name of Franks had dwelt side by side on the banks of the Elbe and the Weser, and as brothers in arms had made common cause together ; but since the Franks had risen to such eminency of F 2 68 THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. glory and power, and, thoroughly crushing the Ala- manni, their most formidable rivals, had obtained the undisputed leadership of the Western world, above all since they had accepted the religion of Christ, the strongest antagonism had grown up between nations which had been neighbours and confederates of old. It was not ambassadors of peace who ' by the gentle- ness of Christ ' should allure these Saxons to yield them- selves to his service. Boniface may have hoped that this honour should also be his. It was such a hope which probably guided liim in his selection of Fulda, so near to the Saxon frontier, as the seat of a great ecclesias- tical foundation, from which as from an advanced strong- hold an effectual Saxon Mission might proceed. But it was not so to be. The task of their conversion was reserved for the strong arm of the mightiest of the Frankish Kings, even as the manner of the conversion was quite another. Seventeen years after the death of Boniface the wars of Charles the Great and the Saxons beofan. Agfain and again these last after an obstinate resistance submitted. Again and again, when Charles was occupied in some remote region of his vast Empire, beyond the Alps or the Pyrenees, on the banks of the Eyder or the Theiss, warring with Lombards, with Moslem, with Danes, with Avars, they threw off the yoke, renounced the baptism which was to them the badge of servitude, and which, among other consequences, entailed the paying of tithes, to which they had a rooted objection, and cruelly wasted the Frankish border-lands, destroying all the churches and murdering all the priests whom they could reach ; only to be as often crushed after a while by his mightier arm. This whole process of an armed mission, of which Eng- land during its conversion had known nothing, this reading THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. G9 into the Gospel of a leaf from the Koran, and, in another sense than that in which Christ spoke the words, this compelling of men to come in, if judged without reference to the spirit and circumstances of the time, can only be absolutely and unequivocally condemned ; and even with every such allowance may find excuses, but hardly a justification. Alcuin, with full knowledge of all the facts, did not hesitate to express to his royal friend and master how httle pleased he was with what was doing, did not fail to remind him that he might constrain men to bap- tism but not to faith ; for how, he asked, could a man be made to believe what he did not believe ? And yet it must be admitted that Charles' efibrts were crowned with a notable success. After a struggle, which with brief intermissions lasted for more than thirty years (from 772 to 803, or 805, as some will have it), through the larger part, that is, of his reign, he broke the Saxon obstinacy at the last. The chiefs, who had led the resistance, submitted, and now at length in good faith ; and the people as usual followed in their train ; for by a curious reversing of the course of things, conversions which had in the Eoman Empire spread upward, from the lower ranks to the higher, from poor to rich, from the slave to the noble, spread downward in the Middle Ages. It was the chiefs in almost every case who were the first converted, and the people who by their example and influence were drawn after them. No doubt such conversions of nations in a mass must often and for the larger number have been a merely external form, with no internal reality to correspond. Indeed, it was often no better with their chiefs who led the way. Some of the worst perfidies, treacheries, and murders of Clovis belong to a period subsequent to his baptism ; and his sons and grandsons. Christian by 70 TEE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. profession, do not appear to have unlearned a single heathen vice, or to have learned a single Christian virtue. Yet with the frankest admission of all this, it must not be left out of sight, that where this wholesale conversion was followed up, as it was in the case of the Saxons, with earnest conscientious efforts to bring the converts, not nominally only but in truth, within the Church's fold, much was hereby done, or was put in the way of being done. Public law was henceforward on the side of true rehgion. Idolatrous rites and practices were put down with a strong hand. Schools, churches, and monasteries were built ; bishopricks were founded ; in the present instance those of Osnabruck (803), of Munster (805), of Paderborn (814), of Bremen, with others, followed close on this pacification ; there everywhere went forward a ministry of the Word and Sacraments. And even where the first generation, which had adopted the faith by com- pulsion or in imitation of what others did, and with little or no sincere conviction, was influenced shghtly or not at all, the next, growing up under fairer auspices, would show that the training which from infancy it received had not been received in vain. How soon the Gospel struck its roots, and how deep those roots were, in the once stony hearts of this Saxon race, is attested by the poem Heliand (=Heiland or Healer) — a fife of our Lord, epically narrated, belonging to the reign of Lewis the Pious, Charles' son ; and which, springing up on Saxon soil, evidences everywhere the religious feehng, at once deep and popular, out of which it grew, and to wliich it ministered. The Eyder and the Elbe once reached, and Germany being, at least outwardly, brought to the acknowledgment of Christ, there was another group of tribes, nearly re- THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. 71 lated to the Germanic, as their rehgion, their language, their whole manner of life attested, which was in like manner to be won for Him. Neither was the man want- ing here. As Germany had its Boniface, so Scandinavia its Ansgar (b. 801, d. 865), ' Apostle of the North,' as he is called ; a gentler, tenderer spirit than Boniface ; with a more introverted eye ; less of a hierarch ; but with less also of his practical talent, though not coming behind him in the faith which no perils could daunt, and no failures could dishearten. One was a lineal spiritual descendant of St. Peter, the other of St. John. It would be well worth the while to tell, but I cannot undertake to tell it, how the work whose first lines he traced went forward after he was withdrawn ; how Jut- land and Denmark (1027), Sweden and Norway, which last boasts in St. Olaf (1019-1033) a very violent saint indeed, — these one after another became obedient to the faith ; Odin and Thor, and all the gods of the northern Walhalla, strugghng fiercely but in vain to maintain their dominion ; until by the end of the eleventh century all Scandinavia, — the isle of EUgen, last bulwark of Teutonic heathenism, and not converted till 1168, excepted, — was Christian ; a result for it most blessed, but scarcely less so for the whole of civihzed Europe. For just as at an earlier day the wild outbursts of the savage Hungarians ceased with their conversion toward the close of the tenth century, so now at length the intolerable ravages of the Danes (thus we name these destroyers, but their pirate hordes were recruited from all parts of Scandinavia), came to an end. These in their light ships infesting every coast, sailing up every navigable river, feared as far as the Adriatic, where they encountered Saracen rovers from the East on the same errand of rapine and desola- tion as their own, had everywhere found something to 72 THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. destroy ; wliile yet their fiercest and most fanatical hate had been reserved for the church and the monastery, the priest and the monk. What England suffered from them, and we know how dismal and disastrous a page in her history this was, almost all Europe was suffering as well. But now at length those perennial streams of wrath and bitterness, which it had been impossible to staunch, were healed at their source ; and the dreaded Vikings, the Eegnars and the Hastings, or others hke to these, with their desolating hosts, sat down to peaceful occupations in their own lands. All this, with innumerable details of interest, must remain thus slightly touched on and no more. As little can I follow at lensfth the conversion of the Slavonic races, with whom the Latin Chm^ch stood face to face so soon as ever the barrier between it and them, that namely of the unconverted Teutonic tribes, had fallen. These races, which as yet are very far from having played their full part in European story, constitute the third great wave of Aryan migration which spread over Western Europe, the Celtic being the first, and the Teu- tonic the second. Driven westward by the Huns in the fifth century, and again urged further westward toward the close of the following century by the Avars, they were already in contact with the Byzantine Empire. Nor had this contact been always a hostile one. The Greek Church had already made these tribes the objects of its missionary zeal. This zeal, it is true, at no time equalled that which animated the Churches of the West ; while yet it is most unjust to charge the Eastern Church with having wholly abdicated its duties as a missionary Church, in other words, as one holding the truth not for i^s own good only, but in trust for all the world. Con- THE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. 73 stantine, better known as Cyril (d. 867), and Methodius, Greek monks, brothers in blood as in toil, stand out the foremost, as ' Apostles of the Slavonic races,' A deep ob- scurity, which later investigations have by no means cleared away, rests on the history of both, above all on their relations to the Eoman See. Making no attempt to reconcile conflicting legends, or to choose between tliem, — for we are in a region here more of legend than of history, — I must content myself with observing that Bul- garia, not a mean province then, but a considerable king- dom, such as from time to time did not shrink fi'om measuring its strength with the neighbouring Empire, about 863 received the faith from Methodius ; Moravia from Cyril ; the Slavonic tribes owing to the latter, as to a second Ulphilas, an alphabet, and through that alphabet a literature. The sacred fire spread from Moravia to Bohemia, from Bohemia to Poland. It mifi^ht for some time have been a question whether these newly converted lands, or most of them, should not fall to the Eastern Church, which had first brought the glad tiding to them, rather than to the Western ; yet it did not prove so. Some indeed remained true to the mother from whose breasts they had first drawn the milk of the word ; and others, like the Bulgarians, who, however, were not Slavonic by race, but Turanian, were long an apple of discord between East and West, as they inclined now to one and now to the other. The Wends of Pomerania and Mecklenburg, fiercely fighting for their idols, and allowing no peace to their Christian neighbours, were broken at length by the might of the Emperor Henry I. and the Ottos ; while the Prussians, the most civilized of all the Slavonic races, were in the end rather exterminated than converted by the Teutonic Knights, an Order of military monks, hke the Hospitalers 74 TEE CONVERSION OF GERMANY. and Templars ; these, occupying their country, repeopled it with German colonists ( 1 230-1 283). Of the conversion of Eussia (988), by far the most important exploit, in this line of things, of the Eastern Church, there will be some- tliing to say hereafter. For the present it will be sufficient to bring to your notice that, at the close of the thirteenth century, the receding wave of Moorish population in Spain, and a few outlying groups of Finns and Lapps, were all that remained in Euroj)e not included within the pale of the Church. 75 LECTUEE VI. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIBH. Among the various Teutonic tribes which forcibly occu- pied the different provinces of the Eoman Empire, and made these their own, I have already mentioned the Lombards. Their relations to the See of Eome, as I then noticed, were almost always unfriendly, their ac- ceptance after a while of the Catholic faith, instead of the Arian which they had brought with them into Italy, doing little to abate an antipathy and remove an estrangement, which might almost seem inborn, so Uttle capable did these appear of mitigation on the one side or on the other. The Lombards having taken Eavenna, and destroyed the Greek Exarchate, and with this the Imperial ascendancy in Northern Italy, were constantly seeking to extend their dominion in the South as well, always tln-eatening, and more than once besieging, Eome. It was in vain that the Eoman Bishops turned for assistance to their rightful protectors, the Eastern Emperors, who still claimed their allegiance. These were far off; with embarrassments and perils more than they could successfully deal with at home. Unwelcome helpers at the best, even if there had been any effectual help in them, the Emperors were still more distasteful now, as destroyers of those images which the Westerns had learned to honour, and as branded with the note of heresy for this. The Popes looked round in their 76 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. distress for a protector more to their mind, and one less likely to fail them in their need. No nation had shown such devotion to the Papal See as the Franks, the might- iest of the youthful nations of the Western world, and Catholic from their first conversion. It was evidently the policy of Eome to disengage herself for once and all from the falling fortunes of the Eastern Emj)ire, and from the ignominious servitude which the connexion with this entailed, and to make common cause with the abler and more willing helpers at her doors. To these she betook herself now. The alliance between the two had for a long time past been preparing. Much in the conditions of the Western world was drawing them more closely together ; and it so happened that just when the need was most urgent, each was in a position effectually to assist the other ; so that the Eoman Pontiflfs did not come merely as suppliants, asking much, but with nothing to render in return. There was that which they, and they only, could give, which was of priceless value in the sight of those whose assistance they implored. The Mayors of the Palace, the virtual rulers of the Franks, counted that they had reio;ned long; enouoh in the name of the Do-nothing G CD (D O Monarchs of the effete Merovingian race. It was time that this empty pageant of royalty should cease, that where the reality of power was there should also be the name. But it was not a light matter to set aside an ancient dynasty of kings. A step such as this demanded the highest religious sanction which the Church could give ; only so could he who ventured upon it hope to satisfy his own conscience or the conscience of his people. But, as men at that day esteemed, such a consecration of the meditated revolution the Poman Bishop, as head of Christendom, alone could impart. Nor was this sanction THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 77 withheld. Pepin, the son of that Charles Martel of whom we have heard something akeady, and father of a still greater Charles, of whom we shall presently hear much more, is anointed King of the Franks by Boniface, Arch- bishop of Mentz, acting herein in the Eoman Pontiff's name (752); though some indeed call in question his actual presence and personal share in this anointing. Henceforward Pepin makes the cause of the Church his own. The Lombards meanwhile, altogether failing to take a right measure of their own weakness as matched with the Prankish strength, are rash enough to provoke a conflict which issues in their defeat by him (755) ; and when somewhat later the provocation is renewed, Pavia, the Lombard capital, is taken, and the Lombard kingdom by the arms of Charles the Great overthrown (774). This throwing of the whole weight of the Prankish Monarchy into the Eoman scale is one of the determining facts of medieval history. Charles, when he wrought this deliverance, already bore the title of Patrician of Eome ; this title, whatever it may have meant, having been first bestowed by a grateful Pope ujoon his father. But Charles' relations with the Papacy were destined to be more intimate still. ' The new Constantine ' as he was often called, he made over by donation to the Eoman See large portions of the territory conquered by the Lombards from the Greeks, and now wrested by him from the Lombards. He was thus, with his father who had already done something of the same kind, though on a more limited scale, the founder of the temporal dominion of the Bishops of Eome, — the so-called Patrimony of St. Peter dating back to this time ; the deed of gift, it is true, does not survive ; and the exact limits of the gift it is therefore impossible to define. The territories thus made over to the Pope he was to hold of the King, as of his '78 THE nOLY BOM AN EMPIRE, feudal superior, if we may thus anticipate a little the use of this language ; for Charles had no intention of setting up an independent state in the heart of his own states — least of all one with such pretensions as were inherent in the Papacy and inseparable from it. Those who in after times wrote in the interests of the Eoman Coiurt have represented this act less as a free donation upon his part, than as a restitution to the Eoman See of that which had been given long before by Constantine, but had since been violently rent away by the Lombard arms, and was now restored to its rightfLil possessors. The whole story, however, of the Gift of Constantine, which first emerges in a letter of Pope Adrian I. to Charles (755), but which there were never wanting some even in the Middle Ages, as the Emperor Otto III., to denounce as a fable and forgery, is now acknowledged by Eoman Catholic writers themselves to be no better. More, however, was behind ; the alliance between the Pope and King was destined to be closer still. On Christmas Day in the year 800, the Prankish Monarch was worshipping in the grand basilica of St. Peter at Eome, when, as if by a sudden inspiration from above, Pope Leo IIE., advancing toward the King, placed a golden crown upon his head ; the whole multitude present there- upon with loud acclamations hailing him as Ctesar and Augustus, in whom the Empire, lost so long to the sight and desires of men, was now revived and restored. This incident was one of profoundest significance. It is not too much to affirm that it is the hinge upon which the whole history of Western Christendom turned for long centuries to come. Emperor and Pope, they are the two centres round which the whole medieval history revolves, the two poles which mutually complete one another. It has been often sought to represent what Leo did as a THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. 70 liiglier inspiration of the moment, and one wliich took Charles altogether by surprise. This suggestion is as old, or nearly as old, as the crowning itself. The King is reported to have said among his friends, that if he had known what was to hapjDen, high festival as it was, he would not on that occasion have been present in the church at all. There may very well have been no distinct concert between the two chief actors on this ever-memor- able day ; but it is hard to believe that they did not understand one another. Certainly the marvellous swift- ness with which the multitude within and without the church at once comprehended, and by their acclamations adopted, this act as their own, if it does not betray a previous understanding, shows that the expectation of such an event was, so to speak, in the air. And who can doubt but that it must have been often in the mind of Charles himself, how mightily it would assist him in carrying out the grand designs of his life, if to all which he wielded of material power he could add the mysterious and yet most real consecration involved in this revival in his person of the Empire of the West ? We know that the moral fitness and political expediency of some step of the kind had already been urged upon him by Alcuin and by others. Nay, the project of substituting a Frankish for a Byzantine Sovereign had before this taken shape so far that Gregory II. in a letter to Charles Martel, of date 741, offers to transfer his allegiance from the Emperor to the Erankish chief. The idea of an universal theocratic kingdom as the divine idea of the government of the world, being one which the prophecies of Daniel did much to suggest and to nourish (Dan. ii. 31-45 ; vii.), exerted an immense in- fluence on the imaginations of men during the Middle Ages. In Constantiiie, the first Christian Emperor, and 80 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIEE. in his successors this idea had been reahzed, however im- perfectly, for a brief while. Its embodiment in any con- crete shape had now ceased for three hundred and twenty years ; but it still walked the world as a mighty ghost, eager to clothe itself in flesh and blood once more ; an august reminiscence ; which men were the less content should abide as a reminiscence only, now that the Byzan- tine Emperors had forfeited by their crimes every claim to be considered as its rightful incarnation ; and when, as the crowning outrage of all, a woman, namely Irene, that woman the murderess of her own son, and usurper of his seat, occupied the Eastern throne. Shadowy and undefined as might be the privileges and powers which this dignity conferred, yet this very vagueness had its advantages ; and certainly it was not a small matter to stand out acknowledged by all as in a manner the world's lord, Dominus Mundi, linking the present with a glorious past, and so, it might be looked for, with a glorious future. , Then too it woidd be a mistake to regard the Emperor as the only gainer. ' The Frankish alliance, the dissolution of the degrading connexion with the East, the magnificent donation, the acceptance of the Imperial crown from the Pope's hand, the visits to Eome, whether to protect the Pope from his unruly subjects, or for devotion, everything tended to throw a deepening mysterious majesty around the Pope, the more imposing according to the greater distance from which it was contemplated, the more sublime from its indefinite and boundless pretensions ' (Milman). ' What,' as has been asked, ' might not that authority bestow or take away which had re- newed and given the Eoman Empire ? ' Before we proceed any ftirther, let us a little consider the man who thus bound up so closely his fortunes and the fortunes of his house with those of the Church, who TEE HOLY BOM AN EMPIBE. 81 was willing to assume the official title of its ' Devoted Pro- tector and humble Helper,' and to undertake the duties and charges which this title involved ; at the same time accepting from it in return such moral consecration as it was able to bestow. Charles the Great (b. 742, d. 814), whose greatness is, in his French appellation, indissolubly bound up with his name, — great indeed in peace and in war, in arts and in arms, — was immeasm-ably the foremost man of his age ; nay, we must go back to Julius Csesar or to Alexander before we find another whose figure so fills and occupies the canvas of history as does his. Gibbon, who has sometimes an eye for greatness even when it displays itself in a Christian, as memorably in the case of Athanasius, has no eye at all for the greatness'of Charles : and it is not in his pages that you must seek an adequate appreciation of the mightiest man whom the Middle Ages produced. King of the Franks, by which title we do not mean King of the French, for Germany had very much the larger share in him, Aachen (Aix-la- Chapelle) and not Paris being the capital of his dominions, he had carried his victorious arms as far as to the Eyder on the north of Europe, to Pomerania on the east, far into Hungary, as far as to the river Theiss, on the south. All which the Lombards owned he had not very long before added to his dominions ; while in Spain, despite of one severe but isolated check, which romance has made more of than history would warrant, he had driven back the Arabs beyond the Ebro. Haroun Al Easchid (d. 808), the Mahomedan Caliph, with whom Charles exchanged gifts and courtesies, was the only ]30tentate who could even remotely compare with huu in extent of empire, in splen- dour, or in power. But Charles deserved the title of Great by a better right than that of the extent of his kingdom, or the G 82 THE HOLY BOM AN EMPIRE. success of his arms. He was indeed the very ideal of a Teutonic chief, for with all his admiration for the higher cultivation of Eome, he never committed the fault which Otto III. committed, nor sought to detach himself from his German root ; liimself foremost in strength and prowess among his warriors, terrible in war ; yet never fighting for the glory, but always for the necessity of the thing. And he was much more than this. He spoke Latin ; he understood Greek. He was always himself learning or teaching ; at once scholar and schoolmaster ; educating himself, or seeking to educate others, his own children above all. The desire which lay closest to his heart was to rescue whatever remained of the Greek and Latin civi- lization, and of Christian theology and learning — for all seemed in danger of perishing amid the anarchies of the time, — to found schools, attaching them in most cases to cathedrals and monasteries, as the only hope of their per- manence ; and by aid of these to scatter the darkness and to repel the barbarism which were tlureatening to make everything their own. He saw, and saw rightly, that in the Christian Church was to be found the one principle of all true culture for the nations under his sway. To the extending the influence of the Church — I do not mean by this the privileges and wealth of the Clergy ; to the resto- ration of its prostrate discipline ; to the repression of the frightful vices which were rampant in it ; to the raising up of strong barriers, material and moral, against any further pressure of the barbarous heathen on the civilized western world; to the turning, so to speak, the tables, becoming himself the aggressor, and blessing these against their will, bringing home to them benefits of which they knew and were disposed to know nothing ; to the making of all who bowed to his sceptre partakers of the highest Christian culture which was then witiiin reach, — to these as its TEE EOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, 83 central purposes his life was devoted. His contemporary biographer tells us that Augustine's City of God was the book which he was best pleased should be read to him at meals. The choice of that book was significant. Un- utterably remote as was that kingdom over which he ruled from the true City or Polity of God, it was toward this that he was striving. The attempt, however faint, to realize this, a theocratic kingdom, he had accepted as the task for which he lived. Nor is it without its mean- ing that in the famihar circle of his intimate friends, in which each assumed some name, scriptural or classical, King David was the name by which Charles was wilhno- to be known. It has indeed been often urged in disparagement of the work which he ^vrought, that in the larger part it perished with him, that the darkness, scattered for a moment, closed in again and swallowed up all. There is only partial truth in this assertion. The cloister schools which he had founded — Fulda and Paderborn and Hildesheim and many more — lived through the tenth century, generally acknowledged as of the Dark Ages the darkest of all. In these schools were cherished, and from these proceeded, those new -activities of the human mind which were to issue in the scholastic philosophy ; the University of Paris being in direct lineal descent from the Palatine school at Aachen, of which Alcuin was the founder. And if the reign of Charles does stand out as an island of hght with a night of darkness encompassing it on every side before and behind, so far from diminish- ing, this rather enhances the importance and significance of that brief season of refreshing, that breathing time thus obtained for arts and sciences, which might else have perished, unable to sustain life at all through the dreaiy centuries which were before them. G 2 84 THE HOLT ROMAN EMPIRE. But something more about diaries must not be left unsaid. The Chinese have a proverb, ' Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.' There were flaws and serious ones in the life of Charles, which it is not for me to keep back. A just and merciful ruler in the main, he avenged on one occasion a Saxon revolt, under circumstances, it is true, of extreme provocation, with penalties of blood, which, as we read, seem to tran- scend all measure. Then too in the matter of marrying and putting away of wives he claimed a liberty, and in his private life a licence, to which he had no more right than the meanest serf in his dominions. It is not there- fore wonderfid that, vast as were the Church's obligations to him, it did not see its way to make him partaker of the highest honours which it had to confer ; and when an Antipope, Paschal III., ventured on liis canonization, the Church itself neither absolutely disavowed, nor dis- tinctly allowed what had thus been done and had found favour with many. So long as the celebration of his day remained local, there was a tacit allowance of it. We return to the nobler aspects of his life ; nor, when all is said, need we shrink from affirming that, if the Eoman Empire was to be revived, Charles was well- worthy that it should be revived in liim ; if there was again to be a Lord of the World, that he should be that lord. And yet, admitting all this, what a multitude of questions suggest themselves to us, when we seek to estimate the precise significance of this event, to define to ourselves with any clearness what the relations were in which Emperor and Pope should henceforward stand to one another. Thus, by what right did the Pope claim to revive in the person of Charles the Western Empire, or, to use the favourite language of a somewhat later day, to translate the Empire from the Greeks to the Germans ; TEE HOLY ROMAN EMPIBE. 85 seeing that as yet the Popes did not arrogate to them- selves to be the givers or the takers away of kingdoms ? But if not as Pope, was it as acting under an immediate divine inspiration ? Or was it as representative of the City of Eome, — even as the rabble of that City claimed often in after times that the election lay with the Eoman people ; which people they styled themselves, trying on one memorable occasion to persuade Frederick Barbarossa of this, but with very notable ill-success ? Was it clear to either or both into what relations they were entering, one with the other, relations of mutual dependence, each in some sort owning the other as superior ? Thus the Emperor consented to receive the Imperial crown at the hands of the Pope, and only after this coronation to assume the Imperial title ; an arrangement so liable to misinterpretation that already within little more than half a century Pope Nicolas I. declared this crowning of the Emperor by the Pope to be a grant to him of the Empire by the Eoman See, an assertion in later ages repeated again and again. Once more, could the Pope withhold this coronation on the ground of irregularity in the election ? or unworthiness in the person elected ? or on any other plea ? could he, that is, hinder whom he would fi'om obtaining the Imperial dignity ? or, where there was a disputed election, did it lie with him to determine which among the competitors had been legiti- mately chosen ? But then, on the other side, the Emperor was not less Emperor at Eome than elsewhere. The Pope was in a manner his vassal, his man, swore fidelity to him, recognized him as the supreme Judge before whom he might be summoned to make answer to charges brought against him. And just as none might assume the title of Emperor, till anointed and crowned by the Pope, in the same way before a Pope, however canonically 86 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. elected, could be consecrated, it was necessary that the election should be confirmed by the Emperor. It must at once be evident that in this ' Eomau Con- stitution,' as at a later day it was called, there were innu- merable unsettled questions, a very seed-plot of occasions of strife, such as would be sure to spring up so soon as ever any lively memory of mutual benefits had a little faded away. Nor is it wonderful to read of German armies continually crossing the Alps to redress some real or fancied wrong committed against the majesty of the Empire, to compel the coronation, unduly withholden, of an Emperor elect, or to annul the consecration of a Pope, which no due confirmation from the Emperor had pre- ceded. It was meant that the two powers, the secular and the spiritual, should mutually sustain one another, each with the weapons that were most properly its own ; but suspicions, jealousies, conflicting interests, incompatible ambitions did not fail to set them at variance before long. The two swords, of which we are to hear so much, were continually clashing ; and the story of this clashing of theirs constitutes a large portion of the history of the Middle Ages. In treating of this coUision, which thus repeats itself again and again, we shall find it impossible to give our sympathy without reserve to the wielders of the one sword or of the other. Both are right, and both are wrong ; or rather both contend for a right, and with that right contend also for a wrong. But of all this there will be other and frequent occasions hereafter to speak. LECTUEE VII. THE ICONOCLASTS. Art had been so long and so completely in the service of the impure religions of heathendom, was so steeped in their spirit, had so often ministered to what in them was worst, that it is nothing wonderful if the early Church regarded it as something with which the faithful could hold no friendly relations, which they could only reject and condemn. It would be long to detail — and the story belongs to ages anterior to those of which we are treat- ing — by what steps this extreme aversion little by httle abated its intensity, gave way to other feelings ; until, though not without struggle and remonstrance, Art won for itself a place first in the houses of men, and then in the house of God ; this place in the end being such that the danger was no longer lest the Church should in a narrow spirit of intolerance exclude and ignore that which, kept within its proper hmits, might render to her excellent service ; but lest Art should abuse its victory, forget its proper subordination, and intruding into a region not its own, prove not a helper but a hinderer to any true worship of God in the spirit. The time in due course arrived when excesses in one direction provoked a reaction and a violent attejnpt on the part of some to return, not to the simple and naive intolerance of the primitive Church, for that was impos- sible, but to a disallowance, forcibly imposed, of all those 88 THE ICONOCLASTS. outward helps to devotion on which the faithful, for good or for evil, had learned to lean, and which through long use had grown into matters of necessity to many. In the Greek Church, as might have been predicted before- hand, the battle about the images, their abohtion or retention, was fought out ; the noise and wild tumult of this conflict, this tempest of wrath and wrong, fiUing for it the eighth century and reaching far on into the ninth. Not indeed that the Western was not continually di^awn into the quarrel, which was fraught with immense and abiding consequences, theological, ecclesiastical, and pohtical, for both ; destined mightily to help forward the disruption of whatever ties still knit the West to Con- stantinople, and to further to the same extent the birth and growth of a purely Latin Christianity. If this eman- cipation of the West from Byzantine influences was itself a gain, yet in many respects it would be difficult to imagine anything more disastrous than this ill-omened struggle proved. Dividing as it did the East from the West, it also embittered them in a thousand ways the one against the other; while the East, in addition to this separation, was within itself still further divided, torn by cruel mtestine strife ; some of its greatest princes wholly aUenated from their people, and the people from their princes ; and this at a time when aU the forces of the East and West combined, would not have been too many, if any effectual resistance was to be made to the hostile advances of Islam. In a recent Lecture on the rise and early spread of this new religion I dwelt a httle on the marvellous successes which waited during the first century after the death of its founder on the Moslem arms. The contro- versy of which we treat to-day is closely connected with these events. The outer bonds which connect one event THU ICONOCLASTS. 89 and the other may seem very slight, but the inner are very real indeed. I spoke in that Lecture of the hatred of idols which the followers of the Arabian prophet deeply felt, and missed no opportunity of displaying ; of the strength they found in the proclamation of the unity of the Godhead, and in the faith that they were raised up — and in this surely they were not altogether mistaken — as witnesses against the idol-worshippers of the world, against all who in any shape or under any plea gave to the creature the glory due only to the Creator. They were still in the full career of victory at the beginning of the eighth century ; Constantinople, twice besieged by a Saracenic army and fleet (668, 716), hardly escaping a catastrophe that would have abridged by some eight centuries the course which the Eastern Empire was des- tined in the providence of God still to fulfil. The principal agent in working out the second and more memorable of these deliverances was Leo III., Leo the Isaurian as he is called (717-741), the second founder of the Eastern Empire, as it is hardly too much to call him ; a hardy mountaineer, who by courage and conduct had raised himself from the humblest rank to be the founder of a new dynasty, and who offered in many ways a singular contrast to the effeminate princes, lapped in luxury from their cradle, ' the purple-born,' as they were called ; though resembling them only too faithfully in his inabihty to distinguish the lines and limits which divide temporal and spiritual power ; or rather in his claims to concentrate both in his own person, as supreme arbiter in the Church. We can scarcely be wrong in assuming that he learned his abhorrence of images from those with whom he had been brought into hostile contact. He is taunted in the polemics of the time with having taken the Arabs for his teachers ; and the charge was in all 90 - THE ICONOCLASTS. likeliliood a true one. He had seen tlie strength which the Islamites found in the one grand truth which among so many falsehoods they held, and he thought to make this strength his own. Probably he could ill brook the title of idolater, which the Mussulmans, and, where they dared, the Jews, cast in the teeth of the Christians. He will be an ecclesiastical reformer ; he will put down the worship of images (726) ; faihng this, and angered by his failure, he will abolish them altogether (730). In meddling thus, Leo does but follow the traditions of the Byzantine Csesars. Almost every Greek Emperor before him had been a theologian in his way, and gene- rally a persecutor to boot. A rough soldier, bred in camps, he seeks to carry his purpose through by courses the most violent and arbitrary ; while the mischief, doubt- less a most real one, demanded to be dealt with by methods the most careful and considerate. Entwined as the error was with so much which was not erroneous, it needed to be disengaged from this with a firm, yet also with a gentle and a reverent hand, with such care as men use when they take down ruinous houses which adjoin to temples, lest the sacred should be involved in the same ruin with the profane. There was no such pious heedfulness here. Doubtless the images often and in many ways ministered to superstition. Even those who were most earnest for their retention were compelled to allow as much ; that their use had degenerated into an abuse. Not a few of them were believed to have fallen from heaven ; men prostrated themselves, burned incense, before them ; counted that prayers made at the shrine of one image were more prevailing than those made at the shrine of another ; were well pleased to receive the sacred symbols as fi'om their hands ; with much more, deplorable enough, in the same kind. THE ICONOCLASTS. 91 These images, let me explain before going any further, were not raised sculptures or statues, for such the Greek Church has always condemned, but coloured portraitures on a plain surface, — icons it has therefore been found con- venient to call them, — or more rarely mosaics. These were precious to many, had endeared themselves to them by immemorial use, being associated for them with whatever they had learned to hold the most sacred. Of all this however the reforming Emperor took no heed. The army was enthusiastically devoted to a leader who had brought back victory to its standards ; and with the army upon his side he did not doubt that all opposers and oppo- sition might without much difficulty be beaten down. But he had not taken account of all with whom he would have to reckon. The Patriarchs of Constantinople were for the most part the servile instruments of the Imperial will : but now the aged Germanus resists ; and another, more prompt for every shameful compliance, must be chosen in his stead. His resistance indeed, and that of the tumultuary multitude of the city, might after all have profited little. And as little might have profited the trumpet notes of John of Damascus, the most famous theologian of his time ; who, dwelhng at Jerusalem under Moslem protection and thus beyond the reach of the Im- perial anger, incited the faithful by his writings as to a Holy War ; if it had not been for another army which Leo had left out of account. In the army of monks he encountered opponents as rude, as resolute, and as fanatic as himself ; they were men too whose interests no less than their passions were bound up in the issues of the conflict, for it was chiefly from their workshops that the icons proceeded. Let us pause here and consider for a little what the monks, who found the violence, and the theologians, who 92 TEE ICONOCLASTS. found the arguments, said for themselves in reply to charges, whose head and front was this, namely that in using and in defending the use of these images, they were break- ing, and defending the breach of, the Second Command- ment. Yes doubtless, they replied, such a commandment, meant also to be taken in the letter, was given to the Jews, though even for them it admitted tacit quahfications. The Cherubin shadowing the Mercy Seat, much of the furniture in Solomon's temple, — as the twelve oxen up- holding the molten sea (1 Kin, vii. 25), and in his house the twelve lions beside the ivory throne (1 Kin. x, 20), — were each and all a going back from the strict letter of this commandment. And then, in respect of that which offended the most, namely pictures of our Blessed Lord Himself, it was quite intelligible, they replied, that at an early stage in the rehgious education of mankind, men should be absolutely forbidden to make a likeness of Him whom no man had seen nor could see. But since the Incarnation, and by the Incarnation, all this was changed. God had appeared, visible to the eyes of men, had taken the human nature into personal imion with Himself. The picture which we make of Him, they said, is a confession upon our part in act, as elsewhere we make confession in word, of the mystery of the Incarna- tion. You condemn this picture of Christ, they retorted on their accusers, because it is a setting forth of Him in his humiliation ; but seeing that it was love which had brought Him to that low estate, it is indeed a setting forth of Him in his highest glory. So especially Theodore, Abbot of the Studion (d. 826) ; who belongs to the latest period of this long struggle, but is quite the most attractive figure in it, and the most notable theologian whom it pro- duced. The defenders of the icons further urged, — though this was capable of receiving quite another turn, THE IG0N0GLA8TS. 93 — that tlie enemies of these were weakening the whole position of the Church as against her nearest and cleadhest foes. What were they in fact affirming but that in this whole controversy the Arabian Antichrist was right, and the Church of God wrong ? It is only fair too to state that the most zealous fa- vourers and promoters of this ill-directed homage always disclaimed with indignation the charge of offering to the images any reverence which did not differ in kind, and not merely in degree, fi'om the worship which they offered to Almighty God, designating it as they did by altogether a different name. We shall very probably feel that in these distinctions which they drew between the one and the other, between the ' honour ' which they gave to these icons and the ' worship' which they withheld from these and gave only to God, there lay no shghtest justification of that in which they allowed themselves ; but these distinctions acquit them of idolatry, and it is the merest justice to remember this. Let me add a word or two more before resuming the o historic thread of the narrative. No one, I am persuaded, who has studied with any care, or bestowed any serious thought on the subjects which in this controversy were gradually drawn into debate, but will feel, and will ever more strongly feel, that much larger and much deeper questions came up here for determination than might at first sight appear. And yet for all this the whole theo- logical struggle which we are engaged in recording was only too mournfully characteristic of the Eastern Church. Assuredly the mascuhne common sense of the faithful in the Western would have chosen, even in the eigrhth century, some better field than this could ever prove, for fighting the battle of the Incarnation ; or, if from causes beyond their control compelled to fight it on this, would 94 THE ICONOCLASTS. have cleared the field betimes of all which encumbered it, which obscured or concealed what was really at issue, and has rendered it impossible to give more than a most limited sympathy to those who were persuaded that, as against their present foes, they were contending for the central truth of the faith. I shall not attempt to follow the details of an ill-omened struggle, in which all, if they had a right for which they fought, contrived also to put themselves wofuUy in the wrong ; I shall pass quickly over the story of savage tumults more savagely repressed, of a throne shaken to its founda - tions, and a Church miserably torn asunder. Leo was suc- ceeded by a son, Constantine Copronymus (741-775), as distinguished a soldier and able an organizer as himself, of a will as iron as his own. Fanatically resolved to carry through his father's work, he will give it the conse- cration which hitherto it has lacked. It is not difficult for him to bring together a Council, at which no Patriarch indeed, but 338 Bishops are present. What amount of freedom reigned at this Council, which called itself the Seventh Council of Constantinople (754), may be guessed from the fact, that by it the use of images was condemned as idolatry without one dissentient voice. And now every priest, every monk, every layman was required to give in his separate and personal adhesion to this con- demnation. Multitudes yielded ; but not the monks. No violence was spared ; scourgings, mutilations, bhnd- ings, imprisonments, exiles, cruel mockings, every device of insult and of wrong, all were without stint employed to force a submission ; and with so inexorable a purpose that, when the four and thirty years of Constantine's reign were ended, it might have seemed as if at last he had carried his purpose through. A monk was no longer anywhere to be seen. The monasteries had been turned THE ICONOCLASTS. 95 into barracks or stables. The images had wholly disap- peared from the churches ; only, it is true, to be more carefully cherished in the secret of the chamber and of the heart. On the walls of the churches, where used to be painted incidents from the life of our Lord or from the legends of the saints, there were now depicted land- scapes, hunting scenes, vintage revels and the like, the profane temper of the destroyers, irrehgious Puritans we might call them, not caring to conceal itself any more in the day of their triumph. Nothing we may be sure has been lost in the telhng of the insolences, the outrages, the cruelties of which the Iconoclasts in this day of their triumph were guilty. In the extreme poverty of contemporary records, we are mainly dependent on the adversaries who crushed them, and on these writing a full century after the events, for our knowledge of the acts and the actors ; and such unfriendly reporters may very well have made in their narration that uglier still, which doubtless was ugly enough in itself, even apart from the crowning touches which they gave it. But to return. It was but a shorthved triumph which the Iconoclasts could boast, and one destined presently to prove no triumph at all. An intriguing woman, the Empress Irene, finds herself guardian of her son, a minor, and craftily uses the opportunity to undo all which so painfully, and at a cost so enormous, had been effected. And now the Second Council of Nicsea (787) annuls all which the Iconoclast Council had decreed. It is true that under Leo the Armenian (813-820), the enemies of the images are again in the ascendant, that there remains one long and violent struggle more. But again a woman, Theodora, herself the widow of an Iconoclast Emperor, working with the spirit of the time, was strong enough to 96 THE ICONOCLASTS. overthrow an edifice tliat stood onlj' so long as tlie Court and army sustained it; but, their support withdrawn, collapsed at once (842). The images in solemn pro- cession are restored to their place in the churches ; and the fiiry of the storm is now felt so entirely to have spent itself that a feast, called the Feast of Orthodoxy, is in- stituted to commemorate in all after time the final and complete victory over the image-breakers which has been gained. Throughout this protracted conflict the Church of Eome had thrown her whole influence on the side of those who sought to retain all the abuses connected with the images. Nothing else could be expected. She was herself entangled too deeply in the superstitious use of these to be able to give wise and moderate counsels to her distracted sister Church in the East. But if not from her, it was yet from the West that the wisest words came — that is, from the Frankish Court of Charles the Great ; though unhappily they were not the words which finally prevailed. We may regard the four Caroline Books, — so named from him, and put forth in 790, three years after the Second Nicene Council, — as his manifesto, and that of the accomplished theologians, Alcuin the chief, whom he had gathered round him. In this book a line is taken remote alike from both extremes. Nor is it possible to contemplate without hvely admiration the abihty no less than the temper and moderation with which the whole discussion is conducted; and when we are tempted from an intellectual point of view to judge slightingly of the Dark Ages, it would only be just to ask ourselves whether in any age the questions here raised could have been discussed with a skill more masterly than in these books is done. And first there is in them a distinct and earnest condemnation of all religious homage THE ICONOCLASTS. 97 done to tlie icon, or in and through the icon to any whom it may represent, let this homage be reduced to what minimum it may, explained or explained away as men will a vigorous refutation of the arguments whereby it was sought to justify such homage. But so much thus plainly set down, the author or authors can the more confidently reprove the fanaticism of the image-breakers, who would recognize no moral difference between these images and the idols of the false gods of heathendom ; who would not be content until they had made a clean sweep of all wherewith httle by little Christian men had adorned and beautified their churches, or by whose aid they had sought to maintain and quicken a hvely impres- sion in their own minds or in others' of the sacred in- cidents and persons of the past. Man is not all soul, it is here excellently urged; but body and soul; and being thus sensuous in part, may lawfully use sensuous helps. Such is the ground tone and tenor of this very memor- able book, the more noteworthy as being in direct opposition to the contemporary utterances from Eome. Nor was this protest the only one. There was at the famous Council of Frankfurt (794) an express condem- nation of all which the so-called Second Nicene Council had on this matter taught. The Popes who owed too much to the Frankish kings, and were too much in their power, only timidly resisted ; being satisfied to leave to time and to the growing superstition of the age to make good their position ; nor, as the issue too plainly showed, did they miscalculate here. It was not lorig before the excesses of the West rivalled those of the East. I have not, you will have observed, invited you to deplore very deeply the ill success attending a movement which was yet directed, as no doubt this iconoclastic was, to the abating of a most perilous abuse in the Church. H 98 THE ICONOCLASTS. That the Church should have laid the axe at the root of this, and with this, of other mischiefs, should have recog- nized the steps by which it had been unconsciously drawn away from the simplicity of Christ, and thereupon retraced these steps, such a course would have been a ground of most earnest thanksgiving. But what profit could accrue to the Church through a reformation imposed by the arbitrary will of a monarch, and carried out with such violence and outrage and wrong as was this ? A Pope \artually claiming to be Emperor as well, a priest- king, is bad enough, and this the history of Western Christendom has abundantly shown ; but worse than this is an Emperor who demands also to be Pope, a king- priest, which was the persistent claim of the Imperial autocrats of Byzantium. And over and above this fatal flaw which vitiated the whole endeavour, namely that it was a violent intruding of the secular power into a region not its own, there cleaved to it other faults which gave sufficient evidence how barren of all good it would certainly have proved, if success had attended its efforts. Eeformations in rehgion can only be carried out to profit by those whose hearts God has touched, by such as are themselves religious. There must at all events be among the reformers a suf- ficient number of these to leaven with some sort of higher leaven the lump of the worldly, the self-seeking, the profane, who will inevitably put themselves forward as sharers in the work, in the hope that in one shape or another it will yield some booty for them. But assuredly no one will affirm that the fierce princes and their fierce satellites, the prime actors here, were animated by any earnest love to Clu-ist ; so far from this, the hatred of many for the images had passed into a hatred of those whom the images represented. No one will deny that, THE ICONOCLASTS. 99 with rarest exceptions, all the religious earnestness, all which constitutes the quickening power of a Church, was ranged upon the other side. Had the Iconoclasts triumphed, their work when it showed itself at last in its true colours, would have proved to be the triumph, not of faith in an invisible God, but of frivolous unbelief in an incarnate Saviour. I can close this Lecture with no better or wiser words than those with which Dean Milman reads to us the lesson of this mournful story : ' There was this irremediable weakness in the cause of Iconoclasm : it was a mere negative doctrine, a proscription of those sentiments which had full possession of the popular mind, without any strong countervailing excitement. The senses were robbed of their habitual and cherished objects of devotion, but there was no awakening of an inner life of intense and passionate piety. The cold naked walls from whence the Scriptural histories had been effaced, the despoiled shrines, the mutilated images, could not compel the mind to a more pure and immaterial conception of God and the Saviour. Hatred of images, in the process of the strife, might become, as it did, a fanaticism, it could never become a religion. Iconoclasm might proscribe idolatry ; but it had no power of kindling a purer faith.' H 2 100 LECTUEE VIII. MONASTICISM. A REHABILITATION — for this I believe is the word — of men and things, of some that might reasonably have despaired that such would ever include them, has gone forward of late years to a very remarkable extent. If you ask me what that unusual word means, I cannot answer better than by saying that it has been long, if not in Enghsh, yet in law-French, a word to signify the re- storing and replacing in a position of esteem and honour, or, it may be, of authority, one who, rightly or wrongly, had forfeited such position ; it is a making him ' habile ' or able for this once more ;— or, not adhering so closely to the image which the word suggests, it might be de- scribed as a moral whitewashing of such as in men's sight were as blackamoors before. This rehabihtation has in recent times included men such as Sulla, Catiline, Tiberius, Nero, Eichard III., Alexander Borgia, Marat, and Eobespierre ; it has not excluded institutions such as the Spartan Krypteia and the Spanish Inquisition. But it has also included persons and institutions with better right to its benefits than any of these. It is nothing wonderful that medieval Monasticism has profited by the reopening of enquiries, which some at the beginning of this century had on very imperfect information too hastily assumed to be closed. Whether its rehabilitation will be complete, is another question. It may do much to MONASTIGISM. 101 explain and justify its existence, to show the debt which the Church and the world owe to it, and yet fall short of this. This much we certainly need not hesitate with a recent writer to admit — namely that in the midst of a fearfully demoralized state of society monasteries were comparatively places of peaceful industry, of devoted zeal and of Christian Hving ; while at the same time we may count it a sentimental reaction from a narrow and con- temptible prejudice to depict them, as Montalembert in his Monks of the West has done, as a kind of httle heaven upon earth. With these preliminary remarks let us enter on a subject which offers to us ethical problems of no little difficulty. The whole medieval Church, with its grand features of devotion, of heroic self-sacrifice, with all its strivings after the highest, and then this same with its terrible aspects of ^vil, of evil which often seems to us as though it were inextricably bound up with its very existence, and a part of this, is a constant perplexity to him who takes history in earnest, who is not satisfied with merely knowing that such and such things have been, but would fain know also why they have been, and to what ends they served. Above all is it a mystery and a perplexity to him who regards the Church as a divine institution for good, and only for good, in the world. Some, attracted and awed by the nobler aspects which the Church of those ages presents, have resolutely shut their eyes to all which was otherwise in it, have fallen down and worshipped, counting all succeeding ages a declension from the ' ages of faith,' which, with all they had most worthy of admiration and honour, have for ever passed away. Others, repelled and shocked by the frightfid mischiefs, spiritual and secular, of those times, 102 MONASTICISM. have had no eye except for these, and have refused to beheve any good about those ages at all. Now if the good were so separable from the evil, that, disentangling these the one from the other, we could approve the good, and condemn the evil, the perplexity would not be so serious ; though it must be freely owned that this process of taking and leaving, praising and blaming, is attended by subtle but very real dangers of its own in its reactive influence on them who thus become judges and in part condemners of men, it may be immeasurably greater and better than themselves. But in this woof which we are contemplating now the dark threads and the light are not capable of being thus dis- engaged from one another. This sense of an immense perplexity, of contradictions which it is impossible to re- concile, perhaps no where presses upon us so heavily as when we contemplate certain institutions which we cannot count as accidents of the medieval Church, for they are of its very essence, nor regard as the fringe of a garment, when we know them in a great measure to have been the very garment itself. Imagine the Papacy, imagine the Monastic Orders, both or indeed either of them with- drawn, and, as a period of Church history with charac- teristic features of its own, the Middle Ages would simply cease to exist. Of the Papacy I shall speak by and bye. We have now to deal with Monasticism. We cannot abdicate our right to judge it. A great moral pheno- menon which we do not go to seek, but which meets and confronts us unsought, we cannot without great mental cowardice shrink from having some judgment about it, whatever the dangers may be which wait upon such judging. To me it seems plain tha.t so soon as ever the better spiritual forces, which even at the beginning were not the MONASTIGISM. 103 exclusive ones, began to fail, the high tides to ebb, there sprung out of the Monastic system mischiefs the most enormous. To this we must stand, as by the penitentiaries, — I use the word in its early sense and not in its modern, — and by other records of those times, attested only too well ; while yet again and again we put to ourselves this question, How could those ages of the Church have done without it ? what substitute for it could they have found ? The missionaries who went in the early Middle Ages on the forlorn hopes of the Church, who wrought the con- version of England, of Germany, of Scandinavia, of Slavonia, where had they been trained ? Was it not in the cloisters of lona, or of St. Gall, centre of evangehza- tion for all South- Western Germany, — or of the Benedic- tine Abbey of New Corbey, from which single House the whole Scandinavian mission was sustained and fed, — or of some other religious foundation of like kind ? And the same difficulty besets us, though not perhaps quite so urgently, when we contemplate other functions which the monasteries and the monks fulfilled during those long ages, sometimes so dreary, almost always so tempestuous, that connect the ancient and modern world. Again and again we put to ourselves these questions. Who during those dismal times would have kept ahve the sacred fire of learning, if these had not been there ? How would that remnant of the precious treasures of ancient litera- ture which has escaped the shipwreck in which so much had perished have reached us, if they had not made it their business to transcribe and multiply books ? What would have survived of higher culture without the cloister schools? of art, if these had not cherished the sparks which might else have been quite trodden out ? Nor is this all. The world might have struggled on, poor savage world though it would have been, without hterature and without art. But they were the monks 104 MONASTICISM. who taught, not so much by precept as by example, that lesson of such surpassing worth, namely that in the labour of the hands there is dignity and not degradation. In- calculable was the gain when the Benedictines gave a religious consecration to the cultivation of the earth by the linking of this with prayer and the reading of Scrip- ture, thus effectually and for ever redeeming this labour from the dishonour which slavery had impressed in the old world on an occupation which was there regarded as the proper business of slaves, and relegated to them. And never was there more urgent need of such a moral glorification of labour than in those wild and savage times, when the earth, trampled and desolated by the march of successive barbarian hosts, its former tillers scared away or slain, required to be again, as from the beginning, subdued by patient toil to the service of man. We sometimes hear the petty observation — it used to be heard much oftener — that the monks knew how to select the best and most fertile spots for themselves ; when indeed it would be truer to say that they knew how to make that which had fallen to them — it was often the wilderness or the morass that none else cared to cultivate — the best ; but this by the sweat of their brow and the intelhgent laboiu" of their hands. And if in the end more of the soil became their pro- perty or that of other ecclesiastical foundations than was healthy either for the Church or the State, this had its ad- vantages no less than its serious drawbacks. There can be no doubt that the sequestration of lands for religious uses was at many times in the Middle Ages, indeed we may say almost always and almost everywhere after a while quite overdone, that in ' the dead hand ' of the Church there came by degrees to be grasped far too large a pro- portion of the national wealth ; for there was little wealth MONASTICISM. 105 except the laud. And yet if only kept within reasonable limits it assuredly was a gain that a certain portion of national property should have religious obligations dis- tinctly impressed upon it — obligations to maintain the service of God's house, to relieve the needs of his poor. However imperfectly these obligations might be felt and ful filled — and most imperfectly no doubt they often were — it was better thus than if all had been swept into the hands of the lay lords of the earth, who, as a general rule, had less to remind them of what the duties which went along with property were, the consecration to sacred uses which in part at least it ought to receive ; who seemed to themselves to be doing the most natural thing in the world when they spent all upon their pleasures or their pride. But freely admitting the greatness of the debt which was owing to the monks, can we yet refuse to admit con- cerning the monastic ideal of the highest Christian life, — the separating off, that is, of innumerable companies of men on one side, and of corresponding companies of women on the other, to live their lives apart, — that it is a human invention, running counter to a divine ? Of the monks of the West must we not admit that they shared with their Eastern prototypes the inevitable disease of seeming to protest against family life as gross and secular ? Did they not proclaim, and by act more plainly than by word, that the sexes would be then most holy when kept the most asunder ? That state of hfe by Christ regarded as an exception, which he who found in himself a special voca- tion thereto might, perhaps ought to embrace, they set forth as the ideal to which all should be invited and lu-ged. Now, without gainsaying the accidental and occasional benefits which sprang from such a separation of the sexes, yet such a witness, so borne, must have re- acted most injuriously on the whole life of the family in 106 MONASTICISM. Christendom, lowered its tone, and gone far to empty it of the beauty and consecration which according to the divine idea of the constitution of human society it should bear. What can we say to these things ? What indeed but briefly this, namely, that He who is at once the King of ages and King of saints, does in each age for his Church the best which the moral materials He has at command will admit. Men are free agents, with the choice there- fore of working for God or working against Him. He who has willed to be served by none but the free can only use the materials which He finds, whether these are absolutely the best or not. And thus He will give partial and provisional allowance to much which is very far from being according to his perfect and highest will, will show Himself the one supreme and absolute Work- master, in that with materials and instruments so imper- fect He brings about his piu-poses, making all things and, in one way or other, all men to serve Him ; not suffering the evil which may have mingled with his good to defeat it ; but rather causing the good to operate so effectually as often to rob what is not good of its worst power to harm. This much said by way of introduction, let me sketch very shortly some aspects of Monasticism in the West, so far as it falls within the times of which we treat. The first origins of the Monastic system, how it took its rise in Egypt where it was in a manner indigenous ; how it spread over the neighbouring lands of Syria and Palestine ; how it was brought by Athanasius to the West, found earnest resistance there at the first, but in the end an acceptance which should render it a mightier factor in the Church life of the Occident than ever in 3I0NASTICISM. 107 the Orient it had been, — showing itself more flexible, more able to adapt itself to new conditions, to rise to novel heights ; how it suffered by the anarchy and shared the disorders of the fifth and sixth centuries, all this I can just allude to and no more. Neither can I more than mention the fact that the monasteries were reduced to some sort of order and discipline by Benedict of Nursia (b. 480, d. 543), who, intending to furnish a Eule for his own convent of Monte Cassino (529), devised one of such wisdom and practical good sense that, little by little, it was adopted over the entire West. With all this, belong- inof as it does to a time anterior to that with which we have to deal, I have a right to assume a certain acquaint- ance upon yoiu- parts. In the disastrous times which followed the death of Charles the Great and the failure of his scheme to reor- ganize the Western world under a single head, the dis- cipline of the religious Houses fell with everything else ; fell, not perhaps quite so soon, yet by the end of the ninth century had fallen almost as low as it was possible to fall. But within these Houses symptoms of a spiritual reaction showed themselves earlier than elsewhere. The revival dates from 910, the year of the foundation of the mona- stery of Clugny in Burgundy, which was destined to exercise so enormous an influence on the future of the Church. While matters at Eome were at their worst, there were silently training within the walls of this Abbey the men who should inaugurate a new order of things (see p. 119). Already, so one said at the time, the whole house of the Church was filled with the sweet savour of the ointment there poured out. It followed that wherever in a religious House there were any long- ings for reformation, any aspirations after a higher hfe, that house affiliated itself to Clugny. In this way the 108 MONASTICISM. constitution of what was called a Congregation began, that is a cluster of religious Houses, scattered it might be over all Christendom, but owning one rule, acknow- ledging the superiority of one mother House, and receiving their Abbots or Priors from thence. In the Clugnian Con- gregation, for example, there were about two thousand Houses in the middle of the twelfth century — these mostly in France ; the Abbot, or Arch- Abbot as he was called, of Clugny being a kind of Pope of Monasticism, and for a long time, the Pope excepted, quite the most influential Church-ruler in Christendom. Peter the Venerable (d. 1156), best known through some points of contact with St. Bernard and with Abelard, but well worthy to be known for his own sake, occupied this post of eminent honour in the Church. Monte Cassino had been hitherto considered as the pattern on which other Houses should fashion themselves ; but its glory was now eclipsed by the greater glory of Clugny ; however it might retain, in the midst of all the novelties of younger competitors, a certain stately dignity and authority of its own. These religious guilds or corporations fell in with the temper of the time ; and thus the eleventh century saw the foundation of several new Orders, as that of Camal- doli(1018), of Vallombrosa (1038); and, more important than either of these, the Carthusian (1084) ; so called from Chartreuse near Grenoble, where it made its earliest abiding place. The Eule of this Order exceeded in severity that of all which had gone before, while it hardly left room for any which should come after to exceed it. The eudemonism of the present age does not require to be flattered and fed ; nor does our generation need, so far as one can see, to be warned against practising ex- cessive severities on itself; yet it is difl[icult not to feel M0NA8TICISM. 109 that the austerities by this Eule imposed were to a large extent pursued and practised, not as means to an end, but as an end in themselves, and as having an intrinsic worth of their own. Neither should we here leave the Car- melites unnamed ; who, tracing up their first origins to Elijah and Elisha, but indeed founded by a Crusader (1156), had their chief seat on Mount Carmel, being hermits living each alone rather than monks living in a community, until the conquests of the Saracens left them no choice but to retire to Europe (1238). Other smaller Orders there were, which claimed special works of mercy as their own ; of them, however, hereafter. But one was founded at the close of the eleventh century (1098), which should exercise a far stronger in- fluence on the Church's life than any that hitherto we have named, the Clugnian perhaps only excepted. The Cistercian, of which I speak, was, as all these new Orders were, an attempt at reformation, this reformation consist- ing in a reciu-rence to and stricter observance of the Eule of St. Benedict, with, it might be, here and there a drawing tighter of the Eule itself. But the Cistercian, besides this, was an attempt, not wholly unsuccessful, to make Monasticism more of a quickening element of spiritual life, not merely for those within the walls of the cloister, but also for the multitudes beyond. In this, which was a partial anticipation of what was afterwards more fully carried out by the Mendicants, was the main secret of their success. It was an effort to avert from themselves the accusation, so often brought against the monks, that they abandoned the Church and world to their fate, being only anxious by a cowardly withdrawal of themselves to secure their own salvation. Al first indeed the new Order gave no promise of the magnificent future which was before it, nursing-mother as it was destined to 110 MONASTICISM. prove of so many Popes, of Cardinals and Prelates out of number. Indeed at one time, as the first little band of enthusiasts who founded the Order died out one by one, and no others took their places, it seemed likely that it would expire without having enhsted a single novice, scaring these away as it did by the extreme severity of its Eule. It was in this precarious condition when St. Bernard, the scion of a noble Burgundian house, came to the rescue, drawing after him some thirty young com- panions of his own rank of hfe, whom he had inflamed with his own passion for a life so rigorous and austere. The Cistercians are sometimes called Bernardines from him ; and this name does no more than express the fact that he was their real, although not their nominal, founder. From Clairvaux, by him made famous for ever, for some five and twenty years he ruled not merely the Order which derived its chief lustre from him, but, it is , hardly too much to say, the whole Western Chufch.VV ^ '^ Counsellor and admonisher of kings, trainer and maker of Popes, healer of schisms, condemner of heresies, author of a new Crusade, he was in every aspect, save indeed in that of the highest speculative theology, the leading spirit of his age, even as he was the loveliest flower which medieval Monasticism could show. When this later embodiment of the monastic idea began to compete for the world's favour, and to show how formidable a rival it was hkely to prove, the older Clugnian foundation had already seen two centuries of existence ; and the lapse of years, the world's admiration, and an immense prosperity which this admiration drew after it, had began to teU upon it. We do not read of any scandalous disorders there, though doubtless some relaxation of the severer discipline of an earlier time had crept in. Of the lavish offerings of the faithful some part MONASTICISM. Ill had been laid out on their own Houses, which were often- times of regal grandeur and extent, and on churches, of which many were magnificent embodiments of the highest art of their time. To the grandeur of these the whole aspect of the Cistercian buildings was the strongest contrast, and, whether so intended or not, a silent rebuke. There were no splendours there, but everywhere an austere simplicity, a puritan plainness ; for costly tapestries naked w^alls ; for heaven-aspiring roofs low rafters ; for immense windows with their gorgeous wealth of stained glass, narrow openings just sufficient to let in the day ; for silver candelabra iron candlesticks, and of these only enough to give light : no splendid ritual, no elaborate music. Then too, while others, the Clugnians above all, gloried in their independence of any other authority save that of the Pope, and most of all in their exemption from Episcopal jurisdic- tion, a dutiful submission to this was an essential feature of the younger Order. It is not wonderful that the glory of Clugny paled before a glory which exceeded, before the stricter discipline and severer hving of Clairvaux. But the rigour of the Cistercians themselves was in due time to thaw beneath the sun of the world's favour. Already in the thirteenth century their fall had begun. The Inner Mission had been taken out of their hands by the Mendicants, and they succumbed to that doom of declension and decay, to which, as it would appear, all sooner or later were bound in ; for indeed those Orders, wonderful at their beginnings, and girt up as to take heaven by storm, seemed destined to travel in a mournful circle from which there was no escape. Goethe, recording the attempts to spoil him which followed his first hterary suc- cesses, has somewhere said, ' When a man has done a noticeable thing, the world takes excellent care that he shall never do another.' The words which possess so much 112 MONASTICISM. of cruel truth have their appHcation to societies no less than to individuals. In these Societies there was at the outset zeal and labour and love and self-denial ; and these excellent graces in so large a measure as to draw on the Order that could boast of them the world's wonder, men admiring and by gift or by testament heaping lands, riches, favours of all sorts upon it. And then after a while prosperity did its work. The salt lost its savour, and the first love departed, and a revival in some novel shape of things ready to die became necessary ; which re- vival sometimes arrived, but not always ; — this also in due time to spend and exhaust itself, as all before it had done. Fuller, at once witty and wise, as is his wont, has put it well : ' As mercers when their old stuffs begin to tire in sale, refresh them with new names to make them more vendible, so when the Benedictines waxed stale in the world, the same Order was set forth in a new edition, corrected and amended, under the names first of Cluniacs — these were Benedictines sifted through a finer searse, with some additional invented and imposed upon them .... Secondly, Cistercians, so called from one Eobert living in Oistercium ; he the second time refined the drossy Benedictines.' With whatever jealousy the different Monastic Orders might regard one another, or might one and all be re- garded by the parochial or secular clergy, they were safe never to want the good will and protection of the Papal See. The Church could not exist without its Bishops and Presbyters, who were by divine appointment constituent elements of it ; and yet it was not upon these that the Papacy mainly relied, or to whom it looked for its chief support. This support it found rather in the Monastic Orders, which were its own creation, its natural allies, from whose ranks the Pope himself had usually MONASTIGISM. 113 been drawn, and for which were reserved the choicest favours and exceptional privileges. This j^reference after all was not very wonderful, and did not want its measure of justification. There was probably more real work to be gotten out of the monks than out of the secular clergy, as certainly they were held in higher estimation and' honour by the world in general ; they were the ' re- hofious : ' while to the seculars no such title of honour was applied. If a signal emergency arose, the monks were the readiest and the fittest to meet it ; being found ever in the front where the battle of the Church or of the hie- rarchy was to be fought. A new Order, petted and favoured, was often a safety-valve to carry off a perilous enthusiasm. That which, left to run its own course, and embodying itself in the form of a sect, might have gone far to wreck the Church, did in the form of an Order strengthen rather and sustain it. The Monastic Orders with their freer activity have been sometimes likened to the Schools of the Prophets ; the secular Clergy, in their routine of fixed services, to the Levitical priesthood. The comparison is not altogether a fanciful one. I shall fitly close this Lecture with a few words from two of the most accomplished defenders of the Monastic system in modern times, but who lopked upon it fr'om somewhat different points of view. | Montalembert, the latest of these, in his Monks of the West, repels and refuses with no httle warmth and with some indignation the praise which Chateaubriand bestowed on the monasteries, namely that they furnished a refrige and retreat for the weary and sick of heart, for those whom the arrows of the Almighty had pierced, for the disappointed, the mis- understood, for multitudes who, so far as this world was concerned, could not boast of being ' men who had succeeded,' but might be regarded rather as having I 114 MONASTICISM. fought the battle of hfe and lost it, or perhaps as having failed to fight it at all. He dechnes to see in these cloisters such hospitals for the sick and the weary as Chateaubriand describes them. They were rather in his judgment training places for the strong ; where not what was feeblest, but what was most robust and most vigorous in the Church's hfe was to be found, where the men were moulded and fashioned who should afterwards rule the Church or convert the world. There is truth in both statements, but doubtless in the best days of Monachism, and in the best examples of it, the judg- ment of Montalembert is nearer to the truth than the more sentimental view of the otherj Of the qualifications with which either conclusion must be accepted, of the abatements which must be made from both, I have already said something, and cannot for this present undertake to say more. 115 LECTUEE IX HILDEBBAND. So long as Charles the Great lived, it was not likely that there should be any serious collision between the spiritual power and the temporal. Few would have been dis- posed to provoke a conflict with one so powerful and predominant, so clearly resolved to allow no encroach- ment on the domain which he claimed as his own. He too upon his part recognized the limits which divide the two domains. In remarkable contrast to the Byzantine Emperors, and notwithstanding his own lively interest in the theological questions of his time, he abstained in the main from any undue interference with them; or, where as Rector Ecclesice, for this title he assumed, he did inter- fere, he usually so carried the Church with him, that none were disposed to question or resent the share which he took in her affairs. But the Empire which Charles had won, it needed another Charles to keep together. His institutions had done something here, but his personal influence much more, and to this he left none to succeed. Of his sons one only survived him, the youngest and the weakest, Lewis the Pious ; fitter for the cloister than the throne. Through family quarrels and intestine jars, aided by the mutual jealousies of Eoman and Teuton, the mighty fabric of empire which Charles had reared fell into frag- ments not very long after his death, and all attempts to I 2 UG BILDEBBAND. piece these fragments together in new combinations ended in faikire. The story is a deplorable one, but still we may deplore it overmuch. The throes and birth-pangs in which the new nationalities of Europe were born were terrible ; but if at the cost of these Europe was spared a second Empire of the Byzantine type, they were not en- dured in vain. Nor was it long before the rudiments of future kingdoms, shaping themselves, though with very dim and uncertain outlines at the first, out of the general wreck and ruin, began to appear. For a century indeed or more the Imperial dignity was not absolutely tied to anyone of these kingdoms, but shifted from one to another, while oftentimes there was no Emperor at all, his supre- macy and very name being alike in abeyance. In the end, however, the German kingdom, or kingdom of the East Franks, so transcended every other in power, that in the days of Otto the Great (93G-973) it permanently annexed the Imperial dignity to itself. The consequences of this, ahke for Italy and for Germany, for Italy above all, were incalculable. Throughout all the Middle Ages they stand in relations to one another the closest, and at the same time the most unhappy ; able to make one another miserable, but very rarely able to do one another any good. The Popes meanwhile have used the partial, or what was often the total, eclipse of the Imperial power for the increase of their own. Very cmious is it to note the steps of stealthy but ever watchful encroachment by which they sought to limit the one, and to enlarge the other. Small things here are often significant. Thus up to the time of Leo IV. (847-855) in all Papal documents the mention of the Emperor's name had preceded the Pope's ; but now it follows. In the same pontificate the Pope drops the use of Dominus in addressing the Emperor. Nicolas I. is HILBEBIiAND. 117 not anointed only, but crowned, which no Pope before him had been. It was at this coronation that an Em- peror (Lewis II.) first held the stirrup of the Pope. Nor does there want a brief gleam of more substantial glory to light up his pontificate who bears the title, and not without right, of the Great (858-867), for certainly Nicolas comes behind none who preceded or followed him in strength of character, in political insight, and in a high moral purpose as the animating principle of his life. But close upon this there follows a time of very deep degradation. All which in the eyes of men is counted the holiest becomes the spoil of wild and wicked factions among the Italian nobility. For fifty years and more (904-962) the election to the throne of St. Peter lies in the hands of three infamous women, a mother and her two daughters. Their domination has been often characterized by a word, which, though it veils its ugliness in Greek, I do not care even under this veil to repeat. The moral outrages which this time beheld are not to be told ; certainly I shall not attempt to tell them. Eoman Catholic writers make no attempt to conceal the depths of desecration and dishonour which the Papacy then passed through ; nay, they seem rather to take a pleasure in making the w^orst of these, arguing that none but a divine institution could have sounded such abysses of infamy, and yet emerged with a long future of glory and greatness before it. If indeed they were content to argue from this recovery how profound a root the Papacy must have had in the necessities of those times, the sense which men must have entertained that it fulfilled a part that no other could, there might be something in this argument. More in this survival I fail to see. Evil things in the end had grown so intolerably evil that even such as were most jealous of Imperial interfer- 118 HILBEBBAND. ence saw in this interference the only remedy for these ills, and besought the assistance first of the Emperor Otto I., from whom, as ' Defender of Western Christendom,' they had a right to claim this (963), — and when in the succeeding century the old mischiefs gathered strength anew, of Henry III. (1046). The help thus sought was honourably rendered. A series of respectable Popes, all nominated by the Emperor, and all German, brought back a measure of credit and reputation to the Papal Chair. This help, it is true, was not very gratefully acknowledged, seeing that the most immediate use the Papacy made of the new strengtli which revived cha- racter brought with it was to get rid for ever of the neces- sity of obtaining the Imperial approbation of the Papal elections. But while these princes did something to reinvest an institution so miserably discredited with some sort of good name, it was more from within than fi'om without that strength came to it again. The man who most effectually wrouglit for the lifting of it up to heights from which it might seem to have for ever fallen, for the giving to it a new lease of life, and a world-domination vaster than could have been dreamt of in the wildest dream (let us judge of him morally as we may), was unquestionably one of the few men who have made and moulded the history of their own and of after ages. Hildebrand — we know him officially as Gregory VII., but it is difficult not to call him by his proper name — was a Benedictine monk, trained in the famous monastery of Ckigny. This monastic House, the mother house which gave to the Order its name, had already grown to a spiritual force in Christendom ; and one so great, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that without a Clugny there could scarcely have been a Hildebrand ; or, if such there had HILDEBBAND. 119 been, that, wanting zealous and trained instruments to work out his will, lie would have found himself helpless for the carrying out of his vast designs. The name has a German sound, but it is not recognized as such by Ger- man scholars ; and there is no reason to doubt that he was Italian by descent as well as by birth. Long before his own elevation (1073), from the Pontificate of Leo IX. (1048), he had been more and more felt and acknow- ledged as the ruling spirit of the reforming party in the Church, had virtually named Pope after Pope, not fewer than five ; and under the shelter of their names had already begun the conflict, which, now that the time seemed ripe, he was prepared to wage more boldly than ever in his own. It was not so much new ideas launched by him upon the world, as the energy with which he embodied old ones in act, that gave him his grand position in history. All which he uttered had been uttered by others before him ; but that which others promulged and undertook with a certain hesitation, presently stopping short as men affrighted at their own boldness and shrinking in amaze- ment before the spirits which themselves had raised, he carried through to its ultimate conclusions. For him the source and spring of all the ills which afflicted, degraded, and threatened, unless arrested, to destroy the Church, lay in its bondage to the secular power. With its com- plete emancipation from this bondage the sole hope for the future was bound up. The Church must be free ; but for him it was only free when it had extinguished every other freedom but its own. Hildebrand could not so much as conceive a distribution of power that should leave severally to the Church and the State a domain of their own, each sacred, each divinely traced out. For him the one was holy, having to do with the highest ]20 HILDEBBAND. interests of men ; the other profane ; — Nimrod, the mighty hunter of men, being in his eyes the true author and founder of that organized violence, tlie State. Here was a distinct advance on the teaching of his illustrious predecessor and namesake, Gregory I., who had been content to affirm that the priestliood was of divine ordaining, but the kingdom of human importunity (with reference, no doubt, to 1 Sam. viii. 6, 7) ; the one having been freely founded by God, the other reluctantly extorted from Him. To one so minded, any other arrangement than that the Church should rule and the State should serve, must have presented itself as mon- strous ; as a denial of the fundamental ideas on which a Kingdom of God must repose. The first signal reform by which he hoped to de- liver for ever that spiritual kingdom at whose head he stood, from shameful subservience to the men of the earth, the princes of this world, was the revival and reinforcement of the laws requiring the celibacy of the secular Clergy, — laws wliich never since the date of their introduction in the fourth century had been universally obeyed, and in his time had fallen, at least among the lower ranks of the Clergy, into general neglect. Our own Dunstan indeed, himself in a narrower sphere and among a ruder people a prophetic type and harbinger of Hilde- brand, had attempted about a century earlier what Hildebrand now undertook, but with only partial and temporary success. The hierarchical system which Gre- gory had at heart was essentially anti-national. It could only subsist by the absolute subordination of the interests of any and every particular nation to the interests of the Papal See. A celibate Clergy might consent to this, might labour for this, but certainly not a Clergy of wliich the larger proportion were married. These ceased at once HILDEBEAND. 121 to be a militia in tlie heart of every land, upon whom as upon sure allies the Pope could under all circumstances rely. Their country, its honour, its dignity, its well-being were so much to them, that in any struggle it was at least as likely that they should be found ranged on the side of their native prince as on that of a foreign eccle- siastic. Other motives, and of these some worthy of honour, wrought in the mind of Gregory. Doubtless he saw the danger, in those days a most real one, of the Clerisy resolving itself into an hereditary caste ; all the higher places in the Church preoccupied and handed down from father to son, or made the subjects of some other family arrangement. And with this he beheld a glory and chief strength for ever departing from it, namely the offer which it made of a free career to all, its placing what it had of highest and best within the reach of the lowest and the humblest, if only they showed themselves worthy of it. The Church, it is true, has never been a pure aristocracy of merit, with all its highest places filled by the ablest and best of its sons ; but there have been in it nearer approaches to this, than any other, merely human institution could show. Himself humbly born, the son of a carpenter at Soana, his own experience had taught him what grand opportunities were thus afforded to such as knew how to use them, and he would fain preserve these for others. The issues which the battle against the family had, need not surprise us. The married Clergy, without or- ganization, with many misgivings about the rightfulness of their own position, with the rule of the Church plainly against them, however the law of God might be upon their side, were a very unequal match for one who had no misgivings about the rightfulness of his position. Yet 122 HILDEBBAND. even so it cost him a mighty struggle to carry out his purpose. Tlie opposers were not overcome till he had enlisted against them all the blind passion and coarse manichasism of the lowest among the people, hounding on as he did the rabble to insults and outrages of every kind against those who were now styled the ' Nicolaitans ; ' for in contests like this there is nothing so effectual as the fastening of an offensive nickname upon adversaries ; and so this heresy of the Nicolaitans was invented (witli allusion, no doubt, to Eev. ii. 15), and the married Clergy with their favourers and abettors coimted guilty of it. Of the frightful evils which sprang from the success that at length attended the efforts of the Pope, it does not need to speak more in particular. Let it suffice to say that his iron will and inexorable resolution triumphed in the end over all opposition. Milan, strong in her Ambrosian traditions, attempted resistance, but with no other result than the loss of ecclesiastical liberties which up to this time, in the face of Eome herself, she had preserved ; and from the Pontificate of Gregory VII. dates, not the demand of the Eoman Church that all who minister at her altars should be unmarried, but any approach to an universal observance of this rule. Henceforth the Clergy became an exclusive body, not patterns to the flock, not models after whom other of the faithful should order and fashion the lives of themselves and their families, but a separate class, lifted above their brethren, and in this central fact of their lives isolated from them. No sooner was it evident that Gregory would come forth from this struggle victorious than he followed up one blow with another. In his determination to put down the profane trafficking with holy things, and to suppress this not merely in its coarser, but also in its HILDE BRAND. 123 subtler forms, to preserve the C\mrc\\s pecuUiwi from being absorbed into the possessions of rapacious nobles and kings, — and the peril of this was immense, — he can only have our sympathy, and, when we contemplate all the selfish and brutal forces which he challenged to the conflict, in a large measure our admiration. But, as we shall see, this was very far indeed from all which he proposed to himself. And thus there comes now to the front that which is known as the struggle of the Investi- tures, a struggle which was not to reach its settlement until nearly half a century after Gregory's dea^h, and even then a settlement which, as it turned out, was very far from proving the end of strife. There are some conflicts which at certain epochs in the world's history are due ; they may arrive a little sooner or a little later, the exact moment of their break- ing out being determined by accident, or by the action of some single will ; but in themselves they are inevitable. This of the Investitures, which, once begun, shook Western Christendom so long, in which pen and sword were alike so busy, was one of these. It will not be very difficult to explain to you its nature. In the eleventh century the whole feudal system as it existed in the later Middle Ages was rapidly shaping itself, and was so effectually moulding European society to its own condi- tions and requirements that the Church itself could not escape its influence, but must submit to its control. This system may be briefly described as a complete organiza- tion of society through the medium of land tenure, in which, from the king down to the lowest landowner, all are bound together by obhgations of service and defence, — the lord to protect his vassal, the vassal to do service to his lord. Growing as this system did out of the cir- cumstances of the time, with all its faults it met the needs 124 HILVEBBAND. of the time ; probably did more to satisfy these than any other would have done ; in all likelihood was the only one possible. But manifestly it could not continue, if one half of the land, — and in many countries the Chiu-ch was in possession of at least a moiety, — had escaped the obligation of those services that were everywhere else the condition of land tenure ; or had been so held that the rendering of such services could not be enforced. The secular princes therefore demanded that a Bishop should not enter upon the enjoyment of the temporalities of his See, should not indeed be consecrated, until he had done homage for these temporalities, and received from their hands the Investiture of them ; the Bishop engaging him- self hereby to the fulfilment by himself, or, where this was not possible, by proxy, of the duties corresponding. There was a complaint of long standing on the Church's part against the form in which this Investiture was made, namely, by the delivery of a crosier and ring. As many as had the faintest instincts of churchman- ship about them w^ere justly offended at this employment of the sacred tokens, symbolizing as these did, not the temporal rights and emoluments which were all that the lay patron could confer, but spiritual gifts and relations ; the ring the Bishop's marriage with his Church, the crosier his commission coming direct from Christ Himself to feed the flock committed to his charge. This manner of Investiture was a practical denial of the spiritual character of the Church ; an ignoring of it as a kingdom not from this world, but from above : though scarcely intended so by Charles the Great, who probably was the first to use it ; and they were altogether in their rights, — Hildebrand the first and foremost of these,— who requij-ed that this Investiture should clothe itself in some other form. He felt, and felt truly, that spiritual power must HILDEBBAND. 125 be a diviue power, not derived from any mere man what- soever ; that no king nor kaiser could be the source from whence it flowed ; that either the priest is nothing, or is called of God to his work. But he and the Chm^chmen who fought this battle by his side did not stop here. They were resolved to get rid not of this offensive form of homage or Investiture only, but of the homage itself in any and every shape. All the abuses connected with the obtaining of Investiture from the lay-patron, simoniacal payments and the rest, frequent and flagrant as they were, he was resolved by a single sti'oke to make for ever impossible ; and, more daring purpose still, by the same stroke to release the Clergy for ever from any and all dependence on the secular power. The property of the Church, now the desecrated spoil and merchandise of the princes of tliis world, he would reduce within his own dominion. Hilde- brand was not the man to assert a claim like this without seeking to put it through ; and in a Council at Eome (1075) he deposed every Bishop or other spiritual person who had received Investiture from lay hands, putting them under an excommunication, till they should have renounced the accursed thing which by this impious com- pliance they had gotten. The same excommunication he laid on Emperor, Prince, Potentate, whosoever he might be, that presumed to demand this homage, or to confer on any by Investiture the temporalities which belonged to his See, Abbey, or other benefice. With claims like these, which, if admitted, would in fact have released from every obligation to the State the holders of one half or more of its soil, it could not be long before the two powers thus placed in opposition proceeded to measure their strength against one another. What settlement was reached at length I shall do best now to 126 HILDTJBBAND. relate, though in fact it was not till nearly fifty years after Gregory's death that this settlement arrived. The first Crusade, which followed hard upon that death (1097), drew men's thoughts away from the home-struggle for a while. But only for a while. Before long it occupied them anew ; and various ineffectual efforts were made by means of some compromise to close the quarrel — Pope Paschal II., — he is known in English history as the sup- porter of St. Anselm, — in the year 1111 going so far as to consent that the Clergy should renounce all possessions held by them on the tenure of homage. This compromise, or surrender rather, would certainly have brought the quarrel to an end, seeing that nothing would have then remained wherewith to invest ; but the German Prelates, not very unreasonably, refused to accept an arrangement that would have stripped their sees of their entire endow- ments ; and they compelled the Pope to go back from this undertaking. After inkshed in abundance and bloodshed not a little, a settlement was arrived at, which has since acquu'ed the name of the Concordat of Worms (1122). The term concordat, I may observe, applied to such amicable arrangements between the spiritual and the temporal power, does not date earlier than the fifteenth century; but was then applied to earlier compromises of the kind. In this concordat each of the contending parties gave up some- thing, but one much more than the other ; the Chiu"ch shadows, the State substance. The more important elections should be henceforth made in the presence of the Emperor, or of his deputy, he engaging not to inter- fere with them, but to leave to the Chapter or other elect- ing body the ft-ee exercise of their choice. This was in fact to give over in most instances the election to the Pope, who gradually managed to exclude the Emperor from all share in Episcopal appointments. The temporahties of HILDEBBAND. 127 the See or Abbey were still to be made over to tlie Bishop or Abbot elect, not, however, any longer by the dehver- ing to him of the crosier and ring, but by a touch of the sceptre, he having done homage for them, and taken the oath of obedience. All this was in Germany to find place before consecration, being the same compromise that seven years earlier had brought the conflict between Anselm and our Henry I. to an end ; in Italy and in the kingdom of Aries within six months after the same. Crosier and ring should still be delivered, but not by any secular hand ; even as it was not any longer by these emblems that the temporalities were conferred. But we have put oiu"selves in advance of the times of Hildebrand, to which we return. It was not long before the Papal pretensions brought him and the young Ger- man King, Henry IV., into mortal collision. It must be freely owned that if, in this first hostile clash of arms between the kingdom and the priesthood, the Church was magnificently represented, such was far from being the case with the State. Henry, left an orphan at six years old, in childhood and youth submitted of a purpose to the most corrupting influences, having already alien- ated by tyrannous courses and driven into open rebelhon those on whose loyalty his throne should mainly have rested, displayed in the earlier stages of the quarrel none of those higher and nobler qualities which adversity re- vealed, if it did not create, in him ; and assiu-edly was ill to cope with the great and politic Pontiff, who had so dextrously selected not Philip of France, still less William of Normandy, but in their stead this dissolute boy for his antagonist ; while yet, if he could humble him, the highest in worldly dignity of the Princes of the earth, he might be regarded as in some sort having humbled all. Little by little the relations between the two became 128 HILDELEAND. more aud more strained : the Pope complaining of the King that he nominated Bishops hostile to the Eoman See, that he retained among his confidential advisers ex- communicated persons, that his rule was an intolerable tyranny, and his private life a shameful outrage on all decency ; and in the end citing him to make answer for himself in person to these charges. The fact that such a citation should have been possible gives us a glimpse of the wonderful reversal which two or three centuries had brought about in the relations of Pope and Emperor. Henry understands what it means ; that the Pope is claim- ing the right to depose him ; that in all likelihood he will exercise this right. He snatches at whatever weapons of defence are at hand. Hastily calling together a Diet, he hurls countercharges against the Pope, as sorcerer, simonist, fautor of heretics, — this last charge referring no doubt to the favour which he showed to Berengar, — with whatever other accusations a blind rage can suggest ; and will anti- cipate his own deposition by a proclamation of the Pope'? (1076). And now the Church's thunders do not sleep. Henry is pronounced under ban ; to have forfeited his crown. This ban of the Church had not yet lost its terrors ; the frequency of these thunderbolts had not bred their contempt. Never indeed till now had they been launched against an Emperor ; but they prove good against him as against the meanest. Henry's adherents fall fi'om him as from ' a man forbid.' He himself loses heart and courage, makes abject submission (the w^ell- known scene at Canossa) ; but, once restored to the Church's communion, repents his repentance, takes up arms again, and displaying energy and conduct for which none had given him credit, wins back the larger part of Germany by arms. An anti-Ccesar, raised up by Gregory — and such in these ages are almost as plentiful as auti- HILDUBBAND. 129 popes, — perishes in battle (1080) ; Henry carries the war over the Alps, and, various causes helping, compels the Pope to abandon Eonie, and to seek the protection of the Normans. Norman adventurers, as I shall have occasion again to observe, had recently founded a kingdom in South Italy, which on this occasion and on others proved an opportune and welcome refuge to Popes in the day of their adversitiy. Here, at Salerno, Hildebrand dies (May 25, 1085), in exile and defeat ; to all appearance the vanquished champion of a lost cause ; but indeed, as the issue proves, not the conquered but the conqueror in that mighty duel which was now fairly begun, that tragedy in several acts, played now on Italian, now on German soil, and now on both, whereof this was the opening act. But I have followed up to its close this struggle with Henry, which was indeed the main affair of Gregory's life, to the neglect of some other aspects of it that must not be altogether past by. His restless activity, his high- flying claims, brought him into collision with other of tlie kings of the earth. It was under a banner consecrated by a papal benediction that William of Normandy went forth to win the crown of England ; nor did Gregory fail to demand homage from him for the goodly kingdom which this benediction had enabled him to win. But when William refused, saying bluntly that he had promised nothing of the kind, that his predecessors had never yielded this homage to the Pope's predecessors, and that neither would he to him, Gregory let the matter drop. The same caution he displayed in the matters of Philip I. of France. Indeed, none was more wary than he was to know how far he might venture and with whom ; and to let fall, for the time at least, claims which were likely to be seriously contested ; none had laid closer to heart the maxim of the Eoman poet, in audaces non est audacia tuta. It is a charac- K 130 HILDEBFAND. teristic of the man which the least favourably impresses us. One would willingly see in him a little less of cun- ning, and a little more of uncalculating fanaticism. Lines and colours of the darkest have been freely employed in drawing the portrait of this Pope, not Hilde- brand, but ' Brand of Hell,' as our Homily with a grim play upon the name has called him ; ' HoUenbrand,' as not seldom the German Eeformers. This is not very wonderful. With no misgiving but that his cause was the cause of God, he trampled without pity or remorse on human hearts and their strongest affections. Over- throwing one tyranny, but, unable to conceive of a free Church except under the conditions of a servile State, he reared high another, and a more intolerable in its room. Eminent statesman as he was, he yet was one in whom the serpentine craft left little or no place for the colum- bine simplicity. Cardinal Peter Damiani (b. 1007, d. 1072), the man of his right hand, who knew him in his heights and in his depths, in one of his letters fondly calls him his Sanctus Sataiias, his ' St. Satan,' or, shall we render it ? his ' Holy Devil ' ; and if this was said more than half in jest, yet, as the proverb tells us, many a true word has been uttered in jest. But we owe justice to all : and wdio can refrain from admiring the mighty energy of will which enabled this man, in defiance of such oppositions, to bring the Church upon new lines, lines uj)on which for centuries after it ran ? His conversation was ' without covetousness,' in all ages a rare grace among Churchmen to what ever branch of the Chiurch they may belong. Then, too, if stern to others, he was first stern to himself. Far off from him and from his Court, as it is almost needless to say, w^ere those shameful disorders which had so disgraced the Court of some who went before him, and should disgrace HILDEBRAND. ]31 the Court of others who came after. He took his place and his work in earnest. To be highest in dignity meant for him to be foremost in toil and first in danger. And when npon his death-bed he exclaimed, 'I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and therefore I die in exile,' let there have been what of self-righteous- ness there may in such an appropriation of words that only One had a right to make without reserve his own, they were the utterance of his deepest conviction ; and if this absolute identifying of his cause with the cause of God was his sin, it was also that Avhich left pardonable the sin. Not to us must the great Pontiff, — in my mind the greatest of all, for Innocent III. in the main did but reap what Hildebrand had sown, and fill in an outline which he had traced, — not to us, but to his own Master must he stand or fall. Whether he was one of the good it is not for us to determine ; certainly he was one of the great of the earth. K a 132 LECTUEE X. THE G BUS ABES. To understand the Crusades ariglit, and the motives and impulses which led to them, we must travel back a little, and acquaint om^& elves with the history of the Holy Land in the centiu-ies immediately preceding. Jerusalem had fallen at the first burst of the Mahomedau invasion into the hands of the immediate successors of the Prophet (688) ; but had yielded upon terms which, so long as they were observed, ensured a tolerable existence to the Christians who were content to remain under Moslem rule. Nor was the treatment of pilgrims from the West on the whole intolerable. So far from this, the Saracen regarded with a certain sympathy these devout visitants to spots which they also counted holy. It had, indeed, once been a question with Mahomet whether he should not select Jerusalem as the sacred City, the religious metropohs of Islam. This, with other similar baits, he had at one time held out to the Jews, and only let them fall when he discovered that the Jews were not by them to be won. But this fairer estate of things did riot last. Great revolutions in the East brought the Holy City and the Holy Land under the dominion of a bar- barous Turkish tribe (from 1078), recent converts to the Mahomedan faith, but converts of the old fanatical stamp ' — and changed the position of Christian residents and THE CRUSADES. 133 Christian pilgrims very much for the worse. These pilgrims, who were much more numerous in the tenth and eleventh centuries than before they had been, the passion for this religious travel having by this time much increased, brought back the most lamentable accounts of the treatment of their brethren in Palestine ; of the outrage and insult wherewith all places by Christians counted the holiest were treated ; and, it would often be, of scorn and misusage which they themselves or their fellow pilgrims had endured. Men had listened to these stories long, and with an ever-growing irritation ; but as Western Christendom became more conscious of the new strength that was stirring in it, slowly there rose up in men's hearts a desire to win back the land which the Eedeemer in the days of his flesh had trod, the grave wherein He had lain, — for, while all was holy there, his Sepulchre was the holiest of all ; and at the same time of avenging all this injury and securing for themselves and for their brethren in all time free and unhindered access to the sacred places. Long before a Crusade came actually to the birth, such thoughts had been stirring in the hearts of many. From Sylvester II. (999-1002) there came a voice, 'a cry ' — for so he called it — ' from Jerusalem laid waste,' summoning all the faithful to its rescue. But the time was not yet, nor should be for almost a hundred years. The great thought came much more nearly to embodi- ment in act in the time of Gregory VII., to whose heart such an enterprise lay very near (1074); but what between quarrels with the Emperor, quarrels with the city of Eome, struggles with an antipope, he had made only too much of work for himself at home ; and it was not till Urban II. was Pope, not, that is, till very near the close of the eleventh century, that armed 134 THE CRUSADES. Europe was actually afoot and girded for this glorious toil. Where there was so much inflammable stuff as in Latin Christendom had been accumulating for years, a httle spark was sufficient to kindle all into a blaze. Peter the Hermit did not show himself a very capable leader of a crusading host, nor, when it came to hard blows, in any way a hero ; but the furnishing of this spark is usually attributed to him. Himself an eyewitness of the wrongs which the Christians in the East endured from the brutal and fanatic Turks, having been entrusted with letters by the Patriarch of Jerusalem beseeching assistance from the faithful in the West, he passed, with the Papal sanction, from land to land, telling everywhere what things he had seen, perhaps had suffered ; and, gifted as he was with a rude but popular eloquence, stirred the Western world to its depths. Such is in the main the generally accepted ver- sion of the part which in the rousing of Christendom he played. And certainly Peter and his ass have so estab- lished themselves as recognized stage-properties at this point of the wondrous story, that one accepts unwillingly the results of later enquiries, which, stripping him of his legendary fame, leave him an obscure fanatic with no influence whatever in the first wakening up of the West ; although, when this once was accomplished, there were not wanting in him gifts which enabled him to allure a huge unhappy multitude to theh ruin. The leaders of the age made no attempt to repress the enthusiasm, but rather did all which in them lay to fan tliis fire to an ever stronger flame ; most of all the Pope, who could not fail to perceive the immense increase of in- fluence which from such an enterprise must redound to him, the moral consecration of his power which must grow to him from the placing of himself at its head, even THE CEUSABES. 135 as this headship would of necessity devolve on him. He saw, for indeed there was much more of settled policy in the Crusades than we sometimes assume, that, as men in that day were minded, a devoted soldier of Christ meant also a devoted soldier of the Church, and this a devoted soldier of the Pope, not now any longer merely the spiritual, but also the military chief of Christendom. Urban himself made early proof of the gains at home that were to be gotten from these enterprises abroad ; owing as he did his triumph over an antipope, Clement III., to the armies which at once he found at his beck. One of these chased his rival from Eome. What motives wrought with others, — superstition, love of romantic adventure, sense of wounded Christian honour, — I shall seek presently to set before you. Let it suffice for the present to say that when, at a solemn Council held at Clermont in Auvergne (1095), the Pope, in an impassioned discourse still preserved to us, set him- self at the head of a Crusade, and promised absolution from all their sins to as many as in a state of true penitence died while engaged in this holy warfare, there burst from the enormous assembly an universal cry, ' God wills it ! ' ' God wills it ! ' JSTo time was given for colder calculation. All who offered themselves for the work attached at his bidding a cross to their right shoulder. This, sewn upon their garments, was as a visible token that they were Christ's soldiers, pledged to this holy war, and prepared after the chivalrous fashion of the age to fulfil his com- mand, ' If any man will be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow Me.' And now the intense eagerness to take part in this armed pilgrimage, to have a share in the delivering of the Holy Land from the yoke of the infidel, knew no bounds. Germany, it is true, was slow to kindle, but kindled at 136 THE CRUSADES. last. England had not yet recovered the shock of the Norman Conquest, nor indeed in any case would William Eufus (1087-1100) have found a Crusade very much in his line. Spain had already on a smaller scale a Crusade of her own, which had lasted for centuries, and was to last for centiu-ies more (711-1492). It was thus inevitable that France should take the lead. Indeed, this lead would any how have been hers, incomparably rich as at this time she was in saints, in warriors, in poets, in scholars, — foremost not in one movement only, but in all that were now beginning to quicken as to a nobler life the heart of Christendom. It would have been impossible to repress, and none tried to repress, the excitement. Fathers, mothers saw with joy the departure of their only sons on this perilous but glorious adventure ; wives the departure of husbands whom they loved the best. Monks and other recluses, some with the leave of their superiors, many without it, forsook their cloistral retreats ; Bishops and other ecclesiastics put themselves at the head of their flocks ; women, conceahng their sex, were found in the ranks of men. Few wished to stay behind, and fewer dared. If here and there some knight, who in the general opinion might have gone, tarried at home, the Troubadours made insulting songs about him ; or perhaps the ladies of the neighbour- hood sent him the unwelcome present of a distaff, as the only implement he showed himself worthy to wield. So many pledged and pawned their worldly possessions to raise funds for their equipment, that the price of land fell im- mensely in the market ; while that of a horse, or of armour, or of ought that would serve a warrior's need, underwent a corresponding rise. Whole regions appeared to be depo- pulated, so vast a proportion of their inhabitants had set forth for that city now the cynosure of so many eyes. Europe, recovering from the anarchies of the early Middle THE CRUSADES. 137 Ages, was not the less conscious of innumerable social dis- comforts ; of pent-up energies which were seeking some- w^here a vent. The yoke of feudalism with its cumber- some obligations and complicated ties sat uneasily on the nobles ; the bmilen of vassalage on the serfs. Men rushed into the Crusades as a relief from all this, as affording an outlet for forces which, comprest and represt, were in- tolerable to them. All aspects of that time were marvellous, but the moral aspects the most marvellous of all. There wall be dark coloiurs enough in any truthful pictm'e of the Crusades ; let us regard them first on their brighter side. Not a few who before had been bitterest foes now embraced and were reconciled, and as brothers in arms set forward for Palestine together. Many who had hitherto been plunged the deepest in worldly lusts, — men violent, impure, pro- fane, sacrilegious, with hands steeped in blood, — seemed suddenly to be awakened to a nobler life, to leave their former selves behind them, and, setting forward to the eartlily Jerusalem, to have become pilgrims also to that Heavenly Jerusalem, whose towers and pinnacles shone as it were behind and through those of the earthly City, This was eminently the case, St. Bernard tells us, with the Knight Templars, a vahant Order of soldier-monks, founded a httle later (in the year 1118) for the defence of the Holy Sepulchre ; and in the main recruited from men such as these ; so that, as Bernard with perhaps a faint touch of irony observes, the world was as much benefited in losing as the Church was in gaining them. He is sometimes spoken of as their founder, which is a mistake ; tliis much, however, is true ; that without his enthusiastic allowance of them and the consecration — for the word is hardly too strong — which this his approval gave them, they would never have grown to what they 138 THE CRUSADES. did. Their Eiile too, which was that of St. Benedict, but this adapted to so novel a phenomenon as an Order of miUtary monks, they owed to him. A mighty tempest of elevating, purifying emotions swept over western Christendom. It is not easy for those who have never known, to understand what it is for an age receptive of noble impressions to have a purpose and aim set before it, which enlist all its energies, meet all its peculiar conditions ; while at the same time, lifting it above the commonplace and the mean, they are far loftier than any that men's minds have hitherto entertained. Such a purpose and aim, such a high-pitched endeavour, were the Crusades during well-nigh two centuries ; and the answer which Christian Eiu-ope returned to the appeal thus made to it is an unmistakeable testimony of the pre- paredness of the Middle Ages for noble thoughts and noble deeds. I have said already that, in presenting the Crusades to you from this point of view, I would not lead you to suppose that all was tluis elevated and grand about them. Every page in their history, not to say the final issue which they found, and which must be taken as the Divine judgment about them, would bear witness against me. The false was mingled in large proportion with the true, the dross with the fine gold. All did not set forth to Palestine, no, nor yet nearly all, single-minded warriors of the Cross. Some, on the contrary, drawn along with the crowd, and unwilling to stay behind when so many went ; some out of a mere love of adventure, and weary of inaction at home ; some hoping to find that wealth and position in the East which were denied them in their own land, — to carve out a domain, or it might be a kingdom, for themselves with the sword ; others, again, that they might escape tlieir debts and leave their THE CBUSABES. 139 creditors behind them, — for so long as they were en- gaged in this holy war none might disquiet them in person or property, nor did the interest of debts accumu- late ; others, again, that they might relieve themselves from heavy penances which they had incurred, the Church accepting the Crusader's vow as a discharge in full of whatever ecclesiastical censures a man might have come under. ' Thieves and murderers,' exclaims Fuller, ' took upon them the cross to escape the gallows. A lamentable case, that the devil's black guard should be God's soldiers.' All these and many other such motives helped to swell the armies of the cross-bearers. The atrocities of which too many among them were guilty, — the spoliation and massacre of Jews on the way to Palestine being accounted by these nearly or quite as laudable a work as the slay- ing of infidels in Palestine ; the dissolution of morals ; the extent to which multitudes succumbed to the temptations of the East ; all this made it only too plain that the fire which in many bosoms had been kindled, was not fire from heaven ; that in any true sense Christ's soldiers and servants they were not, since, whatever victories over tlie infidel they might win, they had not won the victory over their own appetites and lusts. I must pass over with only the briefest notice the mighty acts which on both sides were wrought — and mightier the world has never seen — the battles, the sieges, the prosperous and adverse fortunes, the frightful sufferings inflicted, the friglitful sufferings endured ; for these do not properly find place in a Church history at all. It will be enough to remind you that this precipita- tion of Europe upon Asia, beginning in 1097, lasted on for the larger part of two centuries, during which time Jerusalem was twice won and twice lost again ; that, not 140 THE CRUSADES. to speak of the stream of pilgrims, armed and unaraied, that was continually setting eastward, there were during this period seven great expeditions, — expeditions in which, besides kings and princes of a second rank, three Emperors took a personal share, — styled the seven Cru- sades ; though it is not difficult to count them, as some have done, at fewer or at more. I will run rapidly through them, and as a little help to your memory, will attach to each one or more of the most illustrious persons or most remarkable features connected with it. Of the first you have heard something already. It was the Knights' Crusade, no Emperor or King gracing it with his presence ; but Tasso sung it. It issued in the taking of Jerusalem (1099), and the founding of a Latin kingdom, on the pattern of the feudal kingdoms of Western Europe, under Godfrey of Bouillon ; although he, noblest and worthiest of this first band of Christian warriors, refused to be styled King, or to wear a golden crown, in that city where his Lord had worn one of thorns. But that Latin kingdom, though constantly recruited by new accessions from the West, though sustained by the knightly valour of the two military Orders, the Knights of St. John and the Knight Templars, in whose members the characters of soldier and of monk were so strangely blended, utterly refused to take root ; and in less than fifty years another Crusade became necessary (1147) for the propping up of an artificial edifice, which, under- mined by vices, jealousies, quarrels from within, and hard-pressed by the gathering forces of Islam fi-om with- out, was already tottering to its fall. Edessa, one of the minor principalities which the crusaders had founded, and the main outlying bulwark of the kingdom, had already fallen (1144). Of the second Crusade St. Bernard stands out as the principal figure and the animating spirit. It THE CRUSADES. 141 was he wlio, leaving liis beloved retreat at Clairvaux, and passing tlirough Germany and Switzerland and the Low Countries, everywhere roused by impassioned speech or earnest letter the chivalry of the West, that they should hasten to the aid of their sorely distressed brethren ; persuaded Conrad III., first of the Imperial line of the Hohenstaufen, not to fall short of so grand an occasion ; invoked a divine benediction on their arms who went, and promised them a success which never came ; for, as the event too plainly proved, seer he might be and was ; but, as the proverb which had now its birth, Bernardus non vidit omnia, acknowledged, even to him there had been vouchsafed no vision here. This Crusade, thanks in part to Greek intrigues and treacheries, in part to miserable dissensions among the Crusaders themselves, proved a disastrous failure. Its leaders, the German Emperor, and a French king, Lewis YII., return home, having effected nothing, and bringing back with them hardly a wreck of the magnificent armies which they had led to dishonour and defeat (1147-1149). If the dreaded catastrophe which this Crusade should have averted did not arrive at once, it was only delayed for a season by dissensions of the Mahomedans among themselves. When indeed the tidings came at last that the Holy Sepulchre was again in the hands of the infidel (1187), a cry of anguish went up from all Western Christendom. Quarrels at home were made up for a while, and the armed knighthood of Europe girt itself for one mighty effort more, which, as it was fondly hoped, should be the last that was needed. And now two Crusades, the third and the fourth, — for it is best to count them as two, — were on foot at the same time ; one mainly German, the other English and French. Great names, and names more or less famihar to us all, are 142 THE CRUSADES. connected with both. Frederick Barbarossa indeed, the grand Hohenstaiifen, is less famihar to some of us than he should be, and we do but faintly estimate the loss wdiich his death, drowned as he w^as in crossing a little river in Asia Minor (July, 1190), entailed on the crusa- ding hosts; but Philip Augustus of France (1180-1223) wdth Eichard Coeur-de-Lion of England (1189-1199) on one side, and the royal-hearted Saladin on the other, are more than the mere ghosts and shadows which so often are all wherewith the past is peopled for us, if indeed it be peopled at all ; though for a nearer acquaintance with these many among us have to thank Sir Walter Scott and The Talisman rather than any proper studies of our own. JN'ot the winning back of Jerusalem, but only some precarious privileges accorded to the pilgrims proved the sum total of advantages which by these mighty efforts were obtained. What should have been the fifth Crusade (1204) and what by some is reckoned as such, — though I shall not count it a Crusade at all, — did not so much as attempt the recovery of the Holy City. It issued in the capture of Constantinople by the Latin armies, under the plea of re- storing a rightful Emperor to his throne ; and when he was slain, in the setting up of a shortlived Latin Empire of their own, where the Greek had stood so long. False and treacherous the Greeks, from the Emperor downward, had been from the beginning, embarrassing, thwarting, and betraying the Crusaders, and for these ends often- times in secret league with the infidel; yet this was a shameful diverting to objects of selfish greed and ambition, — such a diversion as became only too common at a later day, — of armies gathered for quite another pm^pose. In the fifth Crusade, which lasted some fourteen years, there stand out two principal figures ; at its open- THE CRUSADES. 143 ing Innocent III., who by his passionate appeals did much to revive the old crusading s|)irit that was waning fast ; at its close the Emperor Frederick II., grandson of Bar- barossa, and one of the most enigmatic characters in his- tory, of whom I shall need to speak more by and bye. A Crusade was indeed a strange enterprise for the Im- perial freethinker ; while yet it was crowned with so much success, that what others had failed to win by utmost efforts of arms he obtained by negotiation, namely the cession of Jerusalem with some other towns, as Bethelem and Nazareth, dear to the Christian heart (1229). These, however, did not remain long in Christian hands ; nor did. it fare better with Jerusalem, which, falling once more under the dominion of the Turks, has never since been wrested from them. The passion which animated Western Europe was now very nearly spent ; nay more, there were voices of earnest remonstrance lifted up here and there against such expe- ditions at all. And yet there must be two more Crusades ; or three, if we include among these the expedition of Eicliard, Earl of Cornwall, King of the Eomans and brother of our Henry III. (1240) ; which, however, hardly rose to the dignity, of a Crusade. I count therefore but as two those still to come before the end should arrive ; those two, moreover, the result of one man's high-hearted devotion to that which he believed to be the cause of God, rather than to impulses moving still the popular mind and heart of Christendom. They were both exclusively French, and the nobiUty of France who followed St. Lewis, followed out of loyalty to their sovereign, rather than out of any lively sympathy of their own for the task he had in hand. In the first of these Lewis lost his liberty (1249) ; in the second, undertaken after an interval of more than twenty years, his life (1270). U4 THE CBUSADES. This last abortive effort closed tlie list of the Crusades. This is not wonderful ; for who could hope to succeed, where the saintly King had so signally and disastrously failed ? It was quite time that they should end. Whatever work they could do was done ; whatever benefits Europe could derive from them, and these had been many, were already obtained. A new Crusade might still figure in the Papal programme as often as a new Pope came to the throne ; he might announce, as did Pope Pius II. (1458- 1464), that he would himself be the leader of it ; princes, as our own Henry IV,, might assume the Cross, and profess themselves bound, so soon as more urgent affairs at home would permit, for the Holy Land ; contributions might still be demanded from the faithful, and, indeed, it was sought to levy a permanent tax upon them, ' Saladin's tithe ' it was called, to meet the expenses of these coming expeditions; nay, the rudiments of fleets and armies destined for the East were more than once gotten to- gether, at Venice, at Genoa, and elsewhere. But these were faint umbrages and no more. All such prepara- tions came to nothing. Men did not mean what they said, or at all events did not mean it with a whole- heartedness strong enough to overcome the manifold hindrances which, in giving actual shape and body to their intention, they were sure to encounter. The crusading passion had fairly worn itself out. It could hardly co-exist with what I will not call the money-making spirit, for I have no wish to find fault with it, but the commercial spirit which was beginning to pervade Europe, and which these very expeditions had done so much to arouse. If the passion revived fora moment, when the fall of Constantinople (1453) revealed to Christendom the nearness and the greatness of the danger which threatened it from the Ottoman arms, this THE CRUSADES. 145 never embodied itself in the shape of an eighth Crusade; and those who tried to quicken it again, as for instance Pope Pius 11. 5 with an earnestness which did him much more honour than did other passages in his hfe, were doomed to discover the truth of the homely proverb which says that it is no use to flog a dead horse. On the first blush of the matter the Crusades present themselves to us as a lamentable failure ; and such failure in one and in a very real sense they were. After all that prodigal expenditure of hfe and treasure, after nearly two centiu-ies of toil, during which the winning back of the Holy Sepulchre had been the darling purpose of Christendom, for whose attainment no sacrifice had been counted too costly, after the loss it has been calculated of some six millions of lives, ' the world's debate ' had ended, but had ended leaving all as it was at the beginning. The miscreants — for we owe that word to the Crusades, and it meant at first no more than mis- believers — still kept the spot where the Lord of Glory had lain. The Christians of the East still groaned under the yoke of their Mahomedan oppressors. The pilgrims from the West had to pay as heavy tolls for the privilege of visiting the Holy Places, on their way to these were as much exposed to insults and outrages, as ever. If the petty Latin states which still survived in the East dragged out for a while a feeble existence, they owed this temporary respite of their doom to the rivalries and discords of the Moslem enemy. But the end, delayed for a while, arrived at length ; and with the fall of Acre (1291) the last fragment and wreck disappeared of structures so dearly and painfully reared, to which generation after generation had so lavishly contributed their prayers and toils, their tears and blood. L 14^^ THE CRUSADES. And yet this is not the whole story. The baUince sheet of history does not offer all this loss upon one side, and zero in the matter of gains upon the other. Of some of these gains I have spoken already. Let me, before we leave this theme, speak also of some other. Assuredly if Christian Europe found not what it sought, it found much that it had not sought. I will not dwell here on the new roads which commerce discovered for itself, the manifold arts and inventions which were brought back from the East ; nor yet on the rise of a middle class through the impoverishing of the nobles by these costly expeditions. These were secondary, yet at the same time important, benefits w^hich grew out of the Crusades. But other benefits were more important still. Europe, emerging from the anarchies of the earlier Middle Ages, owed to the Crusades, and to the bringing together of the nations of the West in one common enterprise, its first vigorous consciousness of constituting one body, one Christendom. Inner divisions might still set one portion of this against another ; but as against all external foes henceforth it was one. Nor may we forget that, if the tide of Mahomedan invasion was not rolled back, yet for two most critical centuries it had been effectually arrested. To the Byzantine Empire were given three centuries of existence more than it would have otherwise enjoyed — a respite not without significance for the whole Western world. This arrest of the onward progress of Mahomedan arms might have been proclaimed for ever as a pohtical necessity, but would have been pro- claimed in vain. No appeal merely to the reason, but only an appeal such as this, addressing itself first and chiefly to the feelings, the passions, the imagination, the devotion of Christendom, would have profited at all, or roused the nations to a common resistance. The struggle THE CBU8ABE8. 147 with Islam has so long ceased to be a life-and-death struggle for the possession, material, moral, and spiritual, of the world that we now find it most hard to believe that such it ever should have been ; and yet, let us for a moment bethink ourselves of what, despite this check, was the tremendous pressure of Mahomedan power upon Western Christendom for centuries more, up to the Eefor- mation and beyond it ; let us recall the names, and the associations which the names bring with them, of Ehodes and Malta, of Otranto and Vienna, of Nicopolis and Le- panto, and we shall own that the Crusades could very ill have been spared. And then further, to them, to the high thoughts which they kindled in so many hearts, to the religious consecra- tion which they gave to the bearing of arms, we are in- debted for some of the fairest aspects of chivalry, as it survives a potent and elevating tradition to the present day/ Thus to them we owe the stately courtesies of gal- lant foes, able to understand and to respect one another, with much else that has lifted up modern warfare into something better than a mere mutual butchery, even into a school of honour in which some of the gentlest and noblest of men have been trained. The Happy Warrior of Wordsworth could never have been written, — for such an ideal of the soldier could never have been conceived, — except for them. What Europe gained by the Crusades we may best measure by considering what it evidently lost by their ceasing. It is not too much to say that with their ceasing the whole physiognomy of the Middle Ages changed ; their romantic, poetic, ideal aspect in the main disappeared. To a thirteenth century, with all which it had of grandeur and beauty, a fourteenth with its com- parative meanness, so poor and so prosaic, succeeded. And lastly, we may well believe that in contact and L 2 148 THE GBUSADES. conflict with tlie Unitarians of the East, the faithful dis- cerned, as they never had discerned before, what treasures of wisdom and grace were laid up in the Church's faith ; in her faith who is Unitarian indeed, but this in a far higher sense, — confessing as she does a divine Unity, but in that Unity a Father, a Sou, and a Holy Ghost the Spirit of both. We may leave then to Lord Chesterfield and to others like-minded with him to pass their judgment on the Crusades, namely that they were ' the most immoral and wicked scheme that was ever contrived by knaves, and executed by madmen and fools against humanity ; ' and we may thank God that at all events history is now so written, and the past so judged, that we are not even tempted to such ignoble verdicts as this. 149 LECTUEE XI. THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. Few thoughtful students of Ecclesiastical history, or in- deed of any history, medieval or modern, can have failed from time to time to put this question to themselves, Was it by divine providence, or by divine permission, or, to put it somewhat lower still, by divine patience, that the dominion grew up in the Church which we call the Papacy? It is a question not easy to answer; being made the harder from the fact that the lines which divide the providence from the permission, and the permission from the patience, can often only with difficulty be drawn. Indeed we inust not seldom renounce the attempt to draw them at all. An analogy has been sometimes suggested between the rise and growth of this power, and the rise and growth of the kingship in Israel ; that earlier deahng of God with his people being adduced as helpful and supplying a key to the understanding of the later. Contemplated from one point of view, — for so it has been urged, — that setting up of a kingdom in which God ceased to be the only King may be looked at as the outcome of the people's sin ; while yet in another aspect it was over- ruled by Him to fit into his scheme for the moral train- ing and discipline of his Church. Israel's demand for a king was the outcome of the people's sin; for where would have been the need or the want of a king, if only the people had held fast to the glorious truth that God was their King, and that therefore in all their dangers 150 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. and necessities the shout as of a present King was among them ? And as sin this request of theirs was regarded by Him : ' They have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them' (1 Sam. viii. 7). Nevertheless, having asked a King, God gave them the King that they asked, and wove this kingship, with which He was very far from being pleased, into the grand providential scheme of his grace. Something corresponding, however remotely, to this has been traced in the Church's story. Where, it has been asked, would have been the need, or where the desire of a visible representative of Christ upon earth, if Chiist Himself, the personal, ever and everywhere present, Lord of his Church, had not for most men receded very far into the distance ? But this human world-centre, in place of the divine world-centre, having been constituted once, God bore with it in his infinite patience, was content to use it, so far as it was capable of being used, for his Church's good ; not indeed as the final and abiding order there, but rather as that provisional arrangement wliich, allowed for a time, should be set aside so soon as a better order was prepared to occupy its room. But leaving this analogy for what it is worth, and with no further attempt to look within the veil and to read what may have been passing there, let us a little consider the main circumstantial causes which, converg- ino" to a single point, wrought together for the giving to the See of Eome during the Middle Ages a preeminence and preponderance so vast and so enduring, — such as still haunts and sometimes disturbs the world with memories of what it once has been, with forebodings of what it yet may be. It is of these secondary causes, and these only, that I propose to treat. First then among the circumstances which so mysteri- ously favoured the ascent of the Church of Eome to such THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 151 marvellous heights, let me draw your attention to the fact that this Church was the sole Patriarchate of the West ; towering so far above every other Occidental Church that none of these so much as dreamt of disputing her rank and precedence. Not indeed that the Pope in the palmy days of his power much affected this title of Patriarch, shared by him with four others, as compared with that of Pope, which from the days of Gregory YII. was absolutely his own, and might not be given to any other or taken by him. But if no Western Bishop could venture to dispute the preeminence of the Bishop of Eome, it was not less certain that, in any rivalry or competition with him, the Eastern Patriarchs would discover that they had to do with one stronger than them singly, with one stronger than them all combined. Before the day of their worst trouble came, before the outburst I mean of the Mahomedan Invasion, they had forfeited much of their credit and honour by unworthy disputes among them- selves ; not to say that presently three among them, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, if not wholly blotted out by the victorious advance of the Moslem arms, were reduced to merest ghosts of what they once had been, and henceforth subsisted only by Mahomedan sufferance. Constantinople alone remained ; — but this New Eome fighting at an immense disadvantage the battle of ' Who should be greatest ? ' with the Old. All the reasons which Constantinople could adduce in her own favour were purely mundane : — as that she was the Eesidence, the seat of Empire, the city of the amplest wealth, wherein was treasured up the best and choicest that survived of the arts and learning of the old world, the link between that old world and the new, with other arguments moving on the same level with these. But all this, it was plain, 152 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. could profit little, when it could be claimed for the other Eome that she was planted by one Apostle, even by him to whom Christ's great promise had been made ; watered by his blood, and by the blood of another, the next in dig- nity to him. Once more, the Bishop of Eome found an immense advantage in this, namely that his spiritual throne was not overshadowed by a secular and Imperial throne, set in immediate nearness to it. The Emperors of the East may have wished to treat him, and from time to time they did actually treat, as they constantly treated the Patriarch of Constantinople ; but distance did much to restrain and limit their injurious interference, and in the ninth century it ceased altogether. Neither did the peril, which was thus escaped in one shape, come back in another. Charles the Great, a genuine Teuton, did not care to make Eome the centre and capital of his domin- ions ; while all the fantastic schemes of Otto III., includ- ing this, his darling project of all, were cut short by his prematm"e death (1002). German armies might from time to time cross the Alps, and might succeed, or might not succeed, in imposing the Imperial will on a recalci- trant Pope ; but attempts of this kind, desultory and intermittent, were very different from a dwelling ever- more under the balefid shadow of Eastern Csesarism. The occupant of the Papal Chair enjoyed a freedom of action, a power of independent development, an escape from the miserable and often disgraceful intrigues of the Palace, such as was altogether denied to his less fortunate rival in the East, who was now the partner of these intrigues, and now the victim, and not seldom both. The superiority which in this matter the Old Eome possessed over the new was long ago felt and understood. Thus Dante describes Constantine as founding the city on THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGnT. 153 the Bosporos which is called by his name, that so ' he might give the Shepherd room.' As much indeed is very clearly expressed in the forged Gift of Constantine itself ; and on the assertion there made, no doubt, the statement of Dante rests. 'We have transferred,' Constantine is there made to say, ' the seat of our power and authority to the Eastern parts ; seeing that where the Lord of heaven has set up the head of sacerdotal authority, it is not meet that any Emperor should have there an earthly authority.* I need hardly tell you that it is wholly a mistake to ascribe this motive to Constantine ; but Dante's words express admirably well the result of the transfer of the seat of empire from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the Bosporos. The Latin Shepherd, and mainly through this transfer, obtained the room, the opportunities for a large and free unfolding of whatever capabiUties were in him or in his office, which to his Greek rival was absolutely denied. But there were other superiorities that belonged to Eome, and in which she left far behind, not merely that remoter rival, but every other city in the world. It was much that from her, the ancient mistress of the earth, this claim to an universal empire should proceed. We feel at once how impossible it would have been for a Bishop of Eavenna, or Milan, or Aquileia, to make good a similar pretension, even if it had entered into his heart to conceive it. But the world had been drilled and disciplined for so many centuries to the taking of its commands from the City on the banks of the Tiber, that there needed other centuries almost as many before it could unlearn this lesson of a submission wliich had well nigh become to it as a second nature. The new domination of Rome, ' that ghost of the deceased Eoman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' as 154 TEE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. Hobbes lias called it, with only such inevitable changes as the changed world-order demanded, seemed the natural, almost the necessary, continuation of the old. Eome might sink to the rank of a second-rate provincial town, all her significance might appear to have gone from her — so more than once it had — and yet in mysterious ways this would all come back to her, as to one that could not abdicate her position though she would. Dante himself in his great prose work On Monarchy everywhere takes for granted that Eome was the proper and divinely ap- pointed Queen of the earth. His, it is true, is the Ghi- belline interpretation of this divine intention. It is the Emperor as representing the Eoman people, and not the Pope, who is to order all things from thence. With all their unlikenesses, with this fundamental difference between them, that one asserted a dominion over the bodies, the other over the spirits of men, the resemblance was wonderful between the earher and the later Eome ; till it seemed impossible to exorcise the spirit of statesmanship, which still haunted and would not quit the City of the Seven Hills. Christian Eome did not disdain to learn from heathen ; to walk in the lines which the other had traced out ; to wax great by the same methods. From Eome secular she learned how to mix herself with the affairs of her neighbours, to play the part of a mediator or umpire, to take the side of the weak against the strong : — breaking down, for example, the power of Metropolitans by her support of Bishops in their conflicts with them, the Bishops, when their natural leaders were gone, being incapable of resist- ance, and falling an easy prey in their turn. In this and in other like ways she knew how to obtain a footing for her- self, that, once gotten, was not lost again ; to advance pre- tensions which, if the time was not ripe for them, might THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 155 remain dormant for a while, or, where this seemed safer, might be withdrawn altogether. If heathen Eome sent out her proconsuls, Christian Eome could boast that she too had her legates to carry her behests through the world, that for her the prophetic words of the Psalmist were fid- filled, ' Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children, whom thou mayest make princes in all lands.' It is impossible to say of Eome secular how early the thought arose in her heart, that let her only be true to herself and she should in due time be the queen of the world ; yet a dim prophetic instinct may have very early stirred within her that she was thus predestined to a mighty doom. As little can we tell at what date in other hearts the idea of the Papacy, of an universal spiritual kingdom, with the Bishop of Eome as its priest-king, arose. Certainly it obscurely wrought, claims being put forth inconsistent with the liberties of other Churches, at a very early date, — not first during the Pontificate and in the heart of Leo the Great (440-461), however much by his abilities and his virtues he may have done unconsciously to prepare the way for results which in their full accom- plishment were still many centuries in the distance. Nor may we leave out of sight a claim on the part of the Eoman Bishop that his should be regarded as the court of final appeal, and he the supreme judge and arbiter before whom all arduous or important causes might be brought, — this 'might' at a later day being changed into a ' must.' It was a claim which dated fi:-om a time anterior to that of which we are treating, and found this much to support it, namely that at the Council of Sardica (347) there was by the Council attributed to the Bishop of Eome a power of revision, so that, if any Bishop was dissatisfied with an ecclesiastical sentence, he might de- mand of the Eoman Bishop to institute a new investiga- 156 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. tion : — I need hardly observe that the constituting of such a Court of Cassation was purely an ecclesiastical arrange- ment, and was never supposed at the time to rest on any divine right. For all this it is easy to perceive how much there was, when once that claim had obtained partial admission, to nurse it into ever greater strength. In in- stances out of number the party worsted before some other tribunal would attempt to mend his position by a course which might better, but which could scarcely make it worse ; for on one thing an appellant could securely count, namely that there would be a certain predisposi- tion to regard him with favour, Neither, coming for help to Eome, was he likely to be under very strict self- restraint in the language which he used. He would declare that he came to that tribunal which was the last refuge of the oppressed ; that his sole hope was in the justice of the Eoman Pontiff, who, and who only, had authority to redress the wrong which he had endured ; with much more in the same tone. It was not in the nature of things that suppliants such as these should be repelled. We know that they were not, but were in every way encouraged ; that no injury at Eome was re- sented more keenly than the putting by any secular or ecclesiastical power of hindrances in the way of such appeals. Then, exactly when they were needed the most, in the earlier half, that is, of the ninth century (about 845), the famous Decretals, which claimed, but falsely, to have Isidore of Seville for their collector or editor, began here and there to be heard of. Decretals (Litterce Decretales\ let me say, were decisions by the Pope of causes and questions brought before him, which decisions thenceforth constituted a part of the Church's law. Such collections, with their falsifications of history more or less daring. TEE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 157 there liad been before, and have been since. But these siipphed exactly what was then wanted. The fatal fault and flaw in the whole Eoman pretension lay in its un- historic character ; in the fact that so much which was now confidently claimed had not been even heard of in. the first three or four centiu-ies. Some have tried in our own time to remedy this flaw by aid of the doctrine of development — with what success, each may judge for himself. Thisingenious scheme had not then been devised, or at any rate existed only in the germ. But here in these Decretals was all which was needed. Here were letters of the early Popes, beginning from Clement ; decrees of early Councils, all of them bearing out and sustaining to the full the latest and largest pretensions of Eome. If only these were authentic, there was no authority, preeminence, jurisdiction challenged by a Pope of the ninth century, which had not been challenged and allowed in the first or the second. The Popes, I believe, may be acquitted of any share in the forgery,^ for forged the far larger number of these Decretals have long since on all sides been acknowledged to be. When too they appealed to these — Nicolas I. was the first who did so (858), — they did this in good faith, being deceived, as almost all the world was deceived. Indeed Hincmar, Arch- bishop of Eheims (d. 882), who in more matters than one so boldly resisted Nicolas, is perhaps the only exception. It has indeed been recently urged that these Decretals were not originally thrust upon the Church with any purpose of setting forward Papal ambitions ; and other ingenious explanations of their primary intention have not been wanting. But let these possess what truth they may, the Decretals did not the less effectually do their work ; and, most remarkable of all, the complete demolition of their authority failed to shake in the slightest the huge 158 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. fabric whicli had been gradually reared on the assumption of their authentic character ; and up to this present day they remain the boldest, the most stupendous, and the most successful foi'gery that the world has ever seen. But professing to enumerate the chief causes which, working together, enabled the Church of Eome to leave so far behind her in dignity, in authority, in power, all the sister Churches of Christendom, it would be unworthy to pass over some of a different character from those on which hitherto we have dwelt. Thus assuredly we should not leave out of account, as having wrought to this end more than any other of these causes, the succession of statesmen, and these of the very highest order, who, often at the most critical moments, and just when they were required the most, occupied the Papal throne. We may fonn what judgment we will about them in other respects ; but none, I think, can deny this praise of high statesmanship to Leo I., to Gregory the Great, to Nicolas I., to Gregory VII., to Alexander III., to Innocent III. ; not to speak of many others who, if they may not take rank with these, yet did each contribute his stone to that wondrous edifice which thus grew from age to age, till it seemed that its top was to reach even to heaven. As little should we omit as an element of strength and power for the Church of Eome the fact that she had taken the side which finally triumphed, — in other words, the right side, in almost all the principal controversies which had agitated the early Church. She did so notably in that with the Arians ; so also, — with two memorable exceptions on the part of Vigilius (540-555) and Honorius I. (625-638), but these sufficient to defeat her claim to Infallibility, — in the long and confused struggle with Monophysites and Monothelites, which followed the THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 159 Council of Chalcedon ; until it grew to a popular convic- tion that the side which Eome took in any doctrinal struggle was the side which would triumph in the end. Nor were other moral forces wanting to her. It would have been little to the honour of Christendom, if it had slavishly bowed the neck to a yoke which was nothing better than simply a yoke imposed by superior power. Who can doubt that in ages of savagery and violence, ages in which all laws of God and man were so recklessly trampled under foot, it was much, and was felt to be much, that there should be in the world one man, who could, and who sometimes did, rebuke without fear or favour the strongest and proudest of the wrongdoers, the men of the earth, who were willing to persuade them- selves that everything was permitted to them ? Amid all the tyrannies and ojDpressions with which the earth was full, how often the deep cry of an agonizing question must have gone up from the hearts of men, Is there any- where in earth or heaven a Father, one with a Father's heart ? Is there anywhere a King, the sceptre of whose kingdom is a right sceptre ? And here was one claiming to be all this, a King ruling in righteousness, the imme- diate image upon earth of the Universal Father in heaven. And righteous interferences in the world, such as in their measure might justify these titles which he claimed, were not wanting upon his part. Thus, on more than one memorable occasion the sanctity of the marriage tie was upheld and vindicated by him against the wanton caprice of the mighty of the earth, who would fain have made the laws of God to bow to the lusts of men. So too, if the Popes were very far from guiltless in the matter of those hideous and constantly recurring outrages against the Jews, wliich, as we read of them, make us well nigh ashamed of the Christian name, yet from them oftener 160 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. than from any other quarter earnest protests against out- rages wliicli were an especial disgrace of the Middle Ages, proceeded. Much was borne with for the sake of this witness, the one witness, as it often seemed, in all the world to a kingdom of heaven, to the fatherhood of God : and thus the ascent of Eome to those heights which at last she reached, was by no means always that hard and uphill struggle of a power whose claims were everywhere met by incredidity and opposition. There was a time when, upborne by the high tides of popular feeling, she rather took what was brought or came to her of its own accord than went out of her way to seize that which would have willingly been withholden from her. There was a time above all, when the weaker Churches, conscious of their separate helplessness as against the mailed and sceptred robbers and ruffians of the earth, clung to her with the natural gravitation of the weak to the strong, of the help- less to a Helper ; while it was only at a later day that the protector proved to be the worst oppressor, and the mother no mother at all, but a harshest stepmother instead. It is true that this aspect of the medieval Papacy as the redresser of wrongs, the upholder of right, has in our own day sometimes been pressed very much farther than the actual facts of history would warrant. If we would at all arrive at a truthful balance sheet, then over against the interpositions on the side of right must be set others on the side of wrong : the unrighteous wars which Eome fostered or directly brought about ; the subjects whom she released from their allegiance, and invited to re- bellion against their lawful lords ; the sons whom she encouraged to wage unnatural war against their fathers ; the princes, as for instance Charles of Anjou, whom by TEE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 161 some huge bribe she induced to seize what was not hers to give, nor theirs to take ; the Papal mantle of allowance thrown by her over hatefulle&t deeds of cruelty and wrong, as for example the judicial murder of the Templars. Setting these against those, this balance sheet of history will present results very far different from such as we are now sometimes invited to accept ; for indeed the whole notion of Western Christendom as in any age a complex of States, all recognizing the Eoman Pontiff as the umpire of their quarrels, all inviting and all ac- quiescing in his decisions, and indeed the whole dream of a golden age brought by those wicked Eeformers to a violent close, is a tixncy picture, to which the actual facts present no corresponding reality. There never was a golden age for the Church ; and there never will be, till Christ, her Lord, shall come ; but every age will be full of scandals and shames : none were more crowded with such than the ages of which we are treating now. Doubtless in every quarrel it was always w^ell worth the while for either of the contending parties to have Eome on its side; and one or other, and not seldom both, sought to secure this advantage. Where they did not invite interposition, and anything was to be gained by interposing, she would push her way unsolicited, often- times unwelcomed and unaccepted, into the strife ; and demanding to act as arbiter, would throw her weight, often into the right scale, not seldom into the wrong. That from time to time she effected sometliing which no other could have effected, for the maintaining or for the restor- ing of the peace of Christendom, for the substituting of a higher law between nations than the brutal law of the strongest, no one who knows the facts and deals honestly with them will deny ; but all this in a very imperfect, in a very human way, with faults of temper, of greed of M 162 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. gain, of lust of dominion, and other faults innumerable, which continually marred the very best which she did. Let us consider a little the Papacy as Hildebrand left it. It gives some sort of measure of the rapidity with which new claims were pushed ever in advance of old, tliat the Decretals, so effective in their own time, were already felt in his to fall quite behind ; very inadequately to express the rights and prerogatives of him who occupied the throne and inherited the authority of St. Peter ; so that new historical supports had need to be found to sustain the new pretensions ; the same thing happening ao^ain when in turn Innocent III. had filled in much which Gregory had left only in outline. In the finding of these historical supports there was indeed no sort of difficulty. What was wanted was always forthcoming, or, if not forthcoming, there were always the Canonists ready with new law, or with new interpretations of old, whereby anything and everything could be justified. It is true that in one sense the Papacy of Hildebrand was hardly capable of any further development. It was scarcely possible to advance loftier claims than he had advanced. Much however had yet to be made good ; much had been boldly sketched by him, but waited to be filled in by some other hand ; much existed in theory, but had not yet been embodied in practice. Herein lies the difference between his position and that of Innocent III. But so far as claims could go, all was already his own. The Pope, who at first had been content as Vicar of St. Peter to be recognized as the foremost in rank and dignity among the Bishops of the Church, with a primacy of honour, demanded now as Vicar of God to be acknow- ledged as in some sort its only Bishop ; making no scruple to name himself Universal Bishop, a title which Gregory's THE TAPAGY AT ITS HEIGHT. 163 great namesake and predecessor had repudiated as inconsist- ent with the i-ights and prerogatives of the other members of the Episcopate. Not to the collective Episcopate, as was now declared, but to him alone had the government of the Church, with the authority to bind and loose, been confided ; for to Peter alone had it been said, ' Feed my sheep,' ' Feed my lambs.' All other Episcopal autho- rity was but an emanation of his. He might invite others to a participation of the toil, but the plenitude of the power remained still with himself. That the Pope only could canonize — this, claimed first by Alexander III. as his exclusive right, and sometimes charged against him as a usiu-pation — as matters stood, was reasonable enough. If there was to be such a spiritual peerage, and the idea is a very grand one, the creation of it could scarcely be in any other hands save his ; he must be the one fountain of honour. But other and more serious prerogatives he had also made his own. Thus the Pope alone could call Councils ; and even a General Council, when called, could do no more than advise. He could dispense with every law of the Church which was not divine. Somewhat later there were not wanting those who in their frantic sycophancy affirmed that his word, who was as a second God upon earth {quasi alter Deus)^ could make right out of wrong, justice out of injustice ; that he could dispense with every law ; that any concordats or other agreements into which he was pleased to enter were binding on the other party, but were not binding upon him. It was only at a later day that, as against this theory of the Pope as the sole depositary of spiritual power, another theory was advanced, whereof the famous Parisian Doctors, of whom by and bye, were the main upholders. According to this, so far from one man M 2 164 THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. engrossing all Cliurcli autliority in himself, and merely dividing off to others sucli portions of this as he pleased, the parocliial Clergy were in direct snccession from the Seventy, the Bishops from the Apostles, and the Pope from St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles ; all those others having as direct a commission from Christ as he had, and having indeed received a poAver, as it was pointedly de- scribed, under the Pope {sub Papa), bnt by no means from the Pope {a Papa). I shall also have to tell yon before long what little permanent effect these Doctors were able to give to this or any other theory of theirs. It is generally admitted that the medieval Papacy attained its highest pitch of splendonr and power in the time and in the person of Innocent III. ; that he approached nearer to the realizing of that idea after which it was striving than any who preceded him, than any who followed after. True to my scheme of bringing a few of the prominent persons in Church history before yon, rather than seeking to fill the scene with many who are not prominent, and who only serve to obscure those that are, I will rapidly trace some leading features of his Pontificate ; which done, I shall bring this Lecture to a close. Cardinal Lothair, of a noble Eoman family, was only thu'ty-seven when, in view of the struggle with the House of Hohenstaufen, which was only half fought out and presently must revive again, he was called by the unani- mous voice of the Conclave to the post of highest dignity and authority in the Church (1198). If any proof was wanting, there was proof now of the important step which had been taken, when the election of a Pope was with- drawn from the hands of the Eoman Clergy, magistrates, and people, in which at one time it had resided, and was THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 165 transferred to tlie Colleo-e of Cardinals. This significant change was effected in 1059 by Nicolas II., acting nnder the influence of Hildebrand, Pope already in all but name. It is easy to see how much in unity of aim the Papacy must by this have gained, delivered as thus it was from gusts of popular passion and caprice, and able to continue and carry on through long years a policy which had once been determined. If it incurred new and untried dangers through this close election, how many old dangers, of which it had abundant experience, it in this way escaped. On the present occasion there was hereby brought to the front the man fittest for a great emergency whom the Church possessed. There is much to provoke a comparison between him and Hildebrand, who alone among all the Popes is com- parable with him, — points of likeness as of diff'erence. Innocent was quite as strongly the hierarch as Gregory had been ; he advanced claims quite as extravagant. When he said, ' The Lord bequeathed to Peter not merely the government of the Universal Church, but the whole secular estate,' another could not have said more. And on the faith of this he acted. Thus there was hardly a monarch in Europe whom he did not make in one way or another to feel his hand, ' binding their kings with chains and their nobles with links of iron ; ' measuring himself not with petty princes alone, as of Portugal, of Leon, or of Aragon, but with the mightiest potentates on earth. Philip Augustus of France after an obstinate resistance was by him compelled to take back the wife whom on some frivolous pretext he had put away ; and we are all more or less familiar with the shameful story of our own King John, how he acknowledged himself ' the Pope's man,' resigned to him his ci own and sceptre, and re- ceived these back from him to hold, he and his successors, 166 TEE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. as the Pope's vassals henceforward (1207-1213). Of Innocent's part in the struggle with the Hohenstaufens I shall need to speak in my next Lecture. But in him the hierarch did not swallow up the Chief Shepherd. Innocent was diligent in preaching. ' The just shall live by faith ' was the text of his sermon at his own consecration. It may be monldsh piety which his ascetic writings breathe, but piety it is. He had, I am persuaded, the removal of the monstrous scandals in the Church which drove so many into wildest opposition to her, quite as much at heart as any among these ; although his position may have made it many times more chfficult for him than for others to discern the true character of the evils which demanded a remedy. His letters do not deal merely with questions affecting the honour, glory, and worldly prosperity of the Church ; but not seldom with the redressing the wrongs of the humblest ; and attest that, if he regarded himself as the Judge of all the earth, he accepted the toil and responsibilities implied in this name, the terribleness as well as the grandeur of such a preeminence. Pope Innocent's was in outward aspects a splendid Pontificate. He was never tried in the furnace of a fiery trial, submitted to the touchstone of adversity, as Hilde- brand had been. No antipope, challenging his right to the tiara, entangled him in miserable disputes where victory was almost as ignominious as defeat. If once at the beginning of his reign he found it expedient to with- draw from Eome, yet no popular tumult chased him, as it chased so many before and after, from an insurgent city. Magnificent above all was the close of that Pon- tificate, when at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the so-called Twelfth CEcumenic, the representatives of two Emperors, all the Eastern Patriarchs in person or by THE PAPACY AT ITS HEIGHT. 167 proxy (for it was the time of the brief Latin kiDgdom), seventy Primates or Metropolitans, more than four hundred Bishops, and eiglit Innidred other Prelates, all acknowledging him as their head, took counsel with him for the interests of Christendom, or, to speak more accurately, received the law from his hps. Some dim presentiment that this gorgeous pageant was very soon about to dissolve, that the end was very near, may have moved him to appropriate, in his opening address to the Council, words of an infinite solemnity, and such as required not a little boldness even for him to make his own : ' With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer ' (Lukexxii. 16). And the end was near, even at the door. A few months had not elapsed, and all the mighty projects, the new Crusade, the reformation of morals alike in the Clergy and in the laity, the extirpation of heresy, must fall to the ground, or be accomplished by other hands than his. Innocent died in his fifty-fifth year (1216), but not before he had reaped to the full that harvest of greatness which Nicolas I., Gregory VII., Alexander III., with many more, had so patiently and so boldly sown. And yet, let me say in parting from him, that, if time would permit, it might be well worth while, over against all which he accomplished, to set all which either he failed to accomplish ; or which it would have been much better if he had failed to accomplish ; or which, so soon as ever he was withdrawn, reverted at once to its former tracks : even as failure in carrying out an idea such as his was inevitable ; seeing that to realize this idea nothing less than omnipotence, and this wielded by omniscience, was required. In the absence of these it remains ' the grandest and most magnificent failure in human history.' 168 LECTUEE XII. THE POPES AND TEE HOHENSTAUFEN. The antagonism between the spiritual and the secular ruler of Western Christendom, as I have already more than once observed, did more to shape medieval history, and to give it its peculiar character, than any of the other forces which were then working, potent as, no doubt, were some of these. The antagonism itself was inevitable ; and not less inevitable that it should force itself to the front, and refuse to be remitted to the sphere of ab- stract opinions about which men might consent to differ, ' These two powers, the Empire and the Papacy, had grown up with indefinite and necessarily conflicting re- lations ; each at once above and beneath the other ; each sovereign and subject, with no distinct limits of sovereignty or subjection ; each acknowledging the supremacy of the other, but each reducing that supremacy to a name or less than a name. The authority of each depended on loose and flexible tradition, on variable and contradictory precedents, on titles of uncertain signification. Head of the Church, Vicar of Christ ; Patrician, King of Italy, Emperor. The Emperor boasted himself successor to the whole autocracy of the Caesars, to Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne ; the Pope to that of St. Peter, or of Christ Himself (Milman). The contention on the part of the spiritual power, as it uttered itself by him who was the incarnation of this. THE rOPES AND THE nOHENSTAUFEN. 169 was as follows : 'Men's souls are infinitely more precious than their bodies. The heavenly life is immeasurably more important than the earthly. The training of men's souls for that heavenly life has been committed to my charge, and 1 can suffer no interference with it. And first and chiefly the ministers of this kingdom, which is higher than all the kingdoms of this world, must hold of me, must own no allegiance which may compete or interfere with this prior and superior allegiance to me. Touch not my anointed, and do my prophets no harm. If they need correction, let them be remitted for this to me.' We know what the answer was. Our Henry II. uttered it with all clearness ; not without many faults in the manner of his utterance, but with a rightful sense that there must be only one law in the realm, and that to this all, whether priests or laymen, must submit. ' These,' the King rephed, ' whom you claim to belong only to you, belong also to a mundane order of things of which I am chief minister, and if they violate that order they shall suffer for it as any other. You offer indeed to degrade them for any great offence, that so, being deprived of their spiritual character, they may, should they offend a second time, be dealt with and punished, as any other layman would be. But what is this but securing to every clergyman, to not a few who have taken the inferior orders, with no other view than that of making this " bene- fit of Clergy " their own, absolute impunity for their first offence, however atrocious this may be ? Kings are of God as well as Popes ; set to be a terror to all evil-doers ; and criminous clerks shall receive at our hands the due reward of their deeds no less than criminous laymen.' Impossible as it is to gainsay the justice of this answer, or to take our stand where Becket, as embodying the Church's claim, took his, there was in that twelfth 170 TEE POPES AND THE IIOHENSTAUFEN. century more to be urged in tliat claim's behalf than at first sight miglit appear. Licence for the Clergy to do open wrong without being duly punished for it, this assm^edly was not the object for which our great Archbishop con- tended and died. The untenable nature of his demand and of the arguments by which he defended this demand we can now see clearly enough ; but it was very far from being then so clear. If I refrain from entering at full into tliis struggle, from weighing the several rights and wrongs of the chief actors in it, this will not be as underrating its significance ; but it is in truth such a thrice-told tale, has in these last times been told so often and by such masters in the art of nar- ration, that I shrink from going over the ground again. If there are any passages in English history with which it may be taken for granted that you are more or less acquainted, it is those which relate to the conflict between Henry II. and his Archbishop and Chancellor ; on my own part too I shall gladly devote the time thus gained to the setting forth some other less familiar aspects of that same struggle, as it wrought itself out upon a larger stage. Your attention has been already called to the first grand collision which grew out of the irreconcilable pre- tensions of the kingdom and the priesthood, the civil and the spiritual power. You have heard how the quarrel, provoked by Gregory VII., not without a measure of right upon his side, seemed to have found its settlement in the Concordat of Worms. But the compromise which goes by this name was a truce and no more ; the prologue, or perhaps more properly, the first act of a portentous drama, which was not nearly played out. Two other acts were to follow ; the second closing with the Treaty of Con- stance (1183), the third with the final extinction of the THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. 171 House of Holienstaufeii (1268). It is quite true that this struggle, in its second act and its third, was not so pre- dominantly one for spiritual objects as that of the Inves- titures had been. There were fair kingdoms of this world which should prove the prize of the victor, with other earthly things precious, whereon Emperor and Pope had alike set their heart. It will be my task to put before you to-day some of the leading features of the conflict, the several aids and alliances with which the combatants entered upon it, the alternations of victory and defeat, and then the close and what this implied. This conflict, let me say at the outset, had features of its own, wdiich distinguished it alike from some that went before and from others that came after. It was a struggle not for victory upon some one point, but upon all ; such as should for ever determine who should reign and wdio should serve ; and, with all the fair words that from time to time passed between the combatants during the treacherous pauses of the battle, there w^as no self- deception upon either side as to its real meaning, — that it could only end with the complete subjugation of the one or of the other. It has been called, and with a certain jus- tice, the struggle of a hundred years. But you must not be misled by these words as though they implied open hos- tility, the raging of a war without disguise, for all this time. There was nothing of the kind ; but every pos- sible variety of relation, the actual clash of arms being rather the exception. Thus there were times, although these were brief, when, having some identical objects and interests to promote. Emperor and Pope w^ere in real alliance ; when they hunted heretics in couples, and in other ways played into each other's hands. Thus Frederick Barbarossa delivered Arnold of Brescia, a most dangerous innovator, as men esteemed, and that alike in 172 THE POPES AND THE IIOHENSTAUFEN. Church and in State, being the first who had })roposed the entire separation of these two, to the will of the Pope (1155); while the second Frederick, probably believing nothing himself, sent unbelievers and heretics by scores to the stake. There were times of simulated friendship, each watching and waiting his opportunity to do the other a mischief, each in secret correspondence with the other's mortal foes. And lastly there were times when the mask was dropped, and it w as war to the outrance, each of the contending powers rallying all the forces and means of annoyance which it had at command, and bringing these to bear upon the foe. Another mistake you must avoid ; for it would be a mistake to suppose of these two powers, locked as they so often were in a mortal embrace of hate, that either sought the entire destruction of the other. What each sought was the other's submission ; that the grand ques- tion running through all medieval history, ' Which is the greatest ? ' should be decided in its own favour. Neither desired, nor indeed could have so much as conceived, the total disappearance of the other ; the world-king and the world-priest belonging alike to the eternal order of God's moral universe. What, moreover, w^ould have been the value of a Pope's triumph, if there had been no Emperor w^hom he might keep starving in the cold at his gate for days, or on whose neck he might literally or figuratively plant his foot ? What, in like manner, would an Emperor's complete success have been worth, unless there had been still a Pope, whom, as a kind of chief chaplain, he might order about at his will, like any other officer of his Court? It was in the drawing of the boundary hne which separated the several jurisdictions, and in the attempt so to draw it that all substantial power should remain on one side, that the never-dying source of con- tention lay. THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. 173 Mainly, but not exclusively, on Italian soil tliat long struggle whose crisis arrived in the time of the Empe- rors of the Hohenstaufen line was fought out; — Italy, dowered with her fatal gift of beauty, being doomed to suffer unspeakable outrages and wrongs from the rude German hosts, barbarians in her eyes, which trampled upon her as their victim and their prey. But what she suffered in one shape she could inflict in another. In- trigues set on foot at Eome were only too successful in stimulating the anarchy of Germany. The Imperial dignity, tossed from one princely House to another, from Prankish to Saxon, to Suabian, to Bavarian, resisted all attempts to compel it for any length of time to continue in one stay. It was indeed a leading object in the policy of the Eoman Court, and one whereof it never lost sight, to hinder the Empire from becoming hereditary in any single House ; and thus to avert the knitting of the German races into a single nation, as might so easily have ensued if once a ruling family with hereditary rights could have been founded. On more occasions than one this seemed likely ; but in the end by one fatality or another all hopes which tended in this direction inva- riably came to nothing. The task of perpetuating the weakness by maintaining and multiplying the divisions of Germany was only too easy. Each new election might safely be trusted to leave behind it many disappointed ambitions, one or more defeated competitors prepared to head an opposition, sometimes an open revolt against successful rivals, so that an anti-Csesar was never dijEficult to find. Eome, by the very necessities of her position, was in a manner driven to this activity of intrigue against the peace and prosperity, above all against the unity, of Ger- many. But apart from this, it was not a small misfor- 174 THE POPES AND THE HO HE N ST AU FEN. tune that so many among the noblest of the German monarchs, instead of addressing themselves to the re- ducing to some sort of order the anarchy of their own kingdom, should again and again be drawn away to the pursuit beyond the Alps of objects shadowy, remote, unattainable, or having no real worth even if for the moment attained ; that in this same pursuit the flower of German manhood, from generation to generation, should whiten the battle-fields of Italy with their bones, or perish by deadlier though invisible foes, by the fever and the malaria, which tlien as now brooded over the land, and girdled Eome above all as with a very girdle of death. But what the Popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centiu-ies dreaded perhaps even more than German unity, was the meeting of the Imperial Crown and that of the Two SiciHes on a single head. With the Norman adven- turers who had planted their foot in South Italy, and little by little had founded principalities, and in the end a kingdom there, there had been hostile collisions at the first. But the Pope and the Normans had not failed to perceive after a while that they needed and coidd effec- tually help one another, so that these Norman settlements, instead of a menace to the Papacy, had become rather a support and a defence. Should liowever the Crowns meet on one head, the case would be very different. Cooped and confined, — with an enemy, it might be, on either side, — what room would there be for the Pope to breathe ? Or, should matters come to the worst, what avenue of escape from his foes w^ould be open to him ? This union of the two Crowns upon one head, dreaded so much, which should set the Pope as between two fires, actually came to pass, despite of the most earnest Papal resistance, when Henry, son of Frederick Barbarossa, THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. 175 married Constaiitia, the Norman inheritress of those fair southern knds (1186); but was very tar from drawing- after it that accession of strength to the Empire which friends had hoped, and enemies had feared. Let me briefly sketch the course which the actual conflict took. I observed in a former Lecture that the Empire was very poorly represented in the first grand clash of arms between the two powers which divided the world, — Henry IV. being ill to match with Gregory VII. The same could not be now affirmed. If the battle was one of giants, the giants were not all ranged on one side. How grand, and at times how pathetic, is the procession of the chief actors in this long tragedy, as they sweep across the historic stage ; for we are noAV in the heart of the Middle Ages, and tliey are yielding their mightiest and most wondrous births. Of Frederick Barbarossa or Eed Beard, as the Italians, witli their fondness for nick- names derived from personal peculiarities, called him, one of the noblest figures of medieval history, let something first be spoken. ' A magnificent and magnanimous man,' says Carlyle ; ' a terror to evil-doers and a praise to well- doers in this world, probably beyond what was ever seen since ; whom also we salute across tlie centuries, as a choice Beneficence of heaven.' Greatest Emperor since Charles, unless indeed Otto I. should dispute the palm of greatness with him ; great-grandson of Henry IV., inheritor there- fore of an unfinished feud ; he was as profoundly con- vinced that he wore the Imperial Crown by the grace of God, that he was God's second Vicar upon earth, as ever Pope was convinced that he sat by immediate delegation from Christ in the Chair of St. Peter. Frederick, I believe, always meant to be just; but his justice not seldom hardened into severity, — that we call it by no harsher name, — when he had to do with those whom lie 17G THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. counted rebels and revolters from tlie authority by God committed to him. Generous he was, and word-keeping ; of unstained private hfe ; able, when the battle was won, and, harder still, when tlie battle was lost, to forget and to forgive ; so that one does not praise him over- much who has recently styled him ' the noblest tj^e of medieval chivalry in many of its shadows, in all its lights.' ' The Xerxes of the Middle Ages ' Sismondi has called him, but wholly misapprehending the man and his work. It is not merely that there was nothing of the effeminate Sultan in liim, who did not sit upon a tlirone and look on while others were spending their lives for him, but was ever himself found in the ' high places of the field.' Not this, however, but another charge this comparison is pro- bably intended to convey, — namely, that as Xerxes was the lawless invader of Greece, so Frederick of Italy. Such was not the fact. He came thither, no doubt a strong man armed, but in the assertion of strictly legal rights. That as King of Italy and wearer of the Iron Crown he possessed some rights, even those who opposed him the most admitted, only contesting the extent and character of such rights. It might have been better if he had recognized that, in an altered condition of things, those rights were growing, or had grown, into wrongs, and had abstained from pressing them. It is easy enough for us, with the scroll of history unrolled before us, with no pride, no passion, no interests warping our judgment, to see this ; but it is an extravagant injustice when the fact that he did not renounce or let fall those claims of his, is laid against him as a crime. The great commercial and manufacturing cities of Lombardy, rapidly growing into sovereign and indepen- dent commonwealths, could ill brook the resuscitation of claims which seemed to them to belong to a dead past. THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. 177 These cities, or tlie richer, stronger, more populous among them, — Milan above all, — were allies upon whom the Pope, if it came to the worst, could securely rely ; even as he found it well worth his while to appear as the champion of their liberties, and to play the part of chief demagogue of Italy. The inner bonds might be slight between him and them ; but so far as those who have the same enemies are allies and friends, he and they were such ; and it is hardly too much to say that if the Papacy was able to bring this tremendous struggle to a victorious close, it owed this triumph quite as much to the Lombard League as to its own spiritual weapons, excommunication and interdict ; upon which, indeed, it was very far from exclusively relying. When Frederick crossed the Alps, to revive claims which, through the internal troubles of Germany, had been long in abeyance, it might have seemed at first as though all which he demanded would be yielded to him, without his needing to have recourse to arms. The Lombard cities, indeed, stood sullenly aloof, but did not at once make up their minds to resistance. Pope Adrian IV. (1154-1159), — he was the only Englishman who ever sat in the Chair of St. Peter, — accepted with the best grace he could a visit which he was unable to avert, and set the Golden Crown of Empire on Frederick's head. With all this it is curious to note the vein of suspicion which from the first ran through the intercourse of these two, their inability to refrain fi^om petty slights and irritations of each other. Thus the Emperor, according to a custom as old, some averred, as Constantine, did upon certain great occasions lead the palfrey of the Pope, and hold his stirrup when he alighted. The complaints were loud upon Adrian's part that this mark of respect was turned into an insult, Frederick having held the left 178 TEE POPES AND TEE H0IIEN8TAUFEK stirrup when he should have held the right ; to whicli the other thought it enough to reply that the Hohenstau- fens had not much experience in the duties of a groom, and that thus the mistake was not very wonderful. Other complaints too there were, grounded in the main on small breaches of etiquette, although not without their signifi- cance. Nor was the Emperor without his counter-plaints, and his just indignation at a march which the Pope sought to steal upon him ; but on these I cannot enter. Eesistance began in the Lombard cities. They could not accommodate themselves to the new order of things. Pope Adrian, whose griefs were not all so fantastic as one which I have just related, was drawn before long, by the inevitable drift of things, to the taking part with his natural allies ; and thus the long woe began. In this first shock of arms, a shock which lasted for some two and tw^enty years (1154-1176), victory, inclining at the outset to the banners of the Emperor, was not true to these to the end. Seven German armies had crossed the Alps at his bidding ; Milan he had twice taken ; once he had it razed to the ground (1162), but only to see it rise from its ashes more powerful than ever ; while his son's son was destined to learn what a harvest of undying hate he had thus sown in Italian hearts. Defeated at Legnano (1176), one of the battles which are the turning points of history, he accepted the inevitable, renounced by the treaty of Constance (1183) all save a few shadowy and well-nigh nominal rights over the Lombard cities ; and, yet bitterer humiliation, recognized Alexander III. (1159-1181), against whom he had raised up three antipopes in succession, as the rightful spiritual chief of Christendom, With all this Frederick was formidable still, and had by no means renounced his hope of bring- ing back the relations of Pope and Emperor to Avhat they TEE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. 179 had been in the times of Charles and of the Ottos. But his part in story was played. The tidings of the actual fall of Jerusalem (1187) suspended for a little the quarrels of the West. The grand old warrior King girded himself for his latest task, and, drowned in crossing a little river in Asia Minor, died as he would have wished to die, leading a crusading host to the rescue of the Sepulchre where his Lord had lain (1190). His son and successor Henry VI. inherited none of his virtues, but he did inherit his energy of purpose, his far-reaching designs ; and these never seemed nearer their accomplishment than now. Alexander III., — a great pontiff, though he may not quite take rank with the greatest, and we see him at his weakest in his relations to Thomas of Canterbury, — had past away. Against Henry, in the full vigour of his youth, was arrayed a feeble nonagenarian, Cajlestin III. But deaths altogether unex- pected more than once during the course of this struggle brought safety to the Papacy ; and, when the outlook for it was the darkest, changed in an instant the whole aspect of affairs. So was it now ; Henry, dying in his tliirty- second year, left behind him a son of two years old (1197). Pope Caelestin, swiftly following him to the grave (1198), was succeeded by Pope Innocent III. Where there was strencyth before, there was weakness now; and where weakness, there was strength. The infant son of Henry had been already elected King of the Eomans, but this election was now set aside. And yet, strange to say, it was with Innocent's active goodwill and favour, it was furnished with Papal gold and a Papal blessing, that the young Frederick, some fifteen years later, being then only seventeen years old, aspired to the Imperial throne, and took it, so to speak, by storm (1 212). The Pope, confident in his strength, and nothing N 2 180 TEE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. doubting tliat lie could mould to liis will the stripling who had grown up as his ward, little guessed that this second Frederick should prove a more dangerous foe than ever the first had been. It was he whom his wondering contemporaries hailed as the Stupor 3fimdi, the ' Astonish- ment of the World.' This title, or one very closely resembling it, had been already given to Otto III. ; but he, ' inheritor of unfulfilled renown,' died too soon to show how far he deserved it. Poet and scholar, legislator and warrior, busy with manifold speculations about manifold things, Frederick was in many ways far in advance of his age ; which may have resented this superiority of his, and in its judgments of him may possibly have wronged him ; he, if this was so, offering, as it must be owned, not a little provocation for any injustice that it did him. By his mother Constantia's side Italian blood was in his veins ; and all his sympathies were Italian. Not in rugged Germany, but on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, most of aU at Palermo, he loved to keep his Court, so brilliant, dissolute, and refined. Cruel ha was, as voluptuaries so often are, though not as his father had been ; shocking too the pubhc opinion of Christen- dom by the familiar terms on which he lived with his Saracen subjects, — by the mocking words, the shafts of scorn and unbelief, which, as men reported, he launched against holiest mysteries of our faith. Dante, Ghibelline as he was, must have given credit to these reports ; for he places Frederick, and him alone among the Emperors, in hell, and among the heresiarchs there. A sceptic rather than an absolute unbeliever I should take him to have been ; a sharer, that is, in the misgivings about the truth of revealed religion, which were far more widely spread in the ' ages of faith ' than we commonly TEE TOPES AND THE H0HEN8TAUFEN. 181 assume them to have been, and in the thirteenth century- above all. Fair words and friendly offices were exchanged for a season between Innocent and Frederick ; but it was not long before the inborn antagonism between Pope and Hohenstaufen revealed itself once more ; and the open conflict between them, inevitable from the first, was close at hand, when the death of Innocent deferred its out- break for a while. Honorius III. (1216-1227), a man of peace, would have fain patched up the quarrel, but this could not be. Not so Gregory IX. (1227-1241), who on the first provocation, flinging the scabbard away, addressed himself to the conflict with an energy which seventy-seven years, for so many he numbered at his election, could not abate ; no, nor yet the ninety and more to which he had attained when he bequeathed the conflict, still undecided, to his successor. Frederick in an unlucky hour had taken upon him the crusader's vow, which yet he showed no readiness to fulfil, aware, no doubt, of the advantage which his enemies would make of his absence from his dominions. It was a terrible hold which he had given to them, and they did not fail to use it to the uttermost. Excommunicated again and again, for not going to the Holy Land according to his vow, for going without the Papal benediction, for re- turning without the Papal leave ; every place which he profaned with his presence stricken with an Interdict ; heaven and earth fighting against him, — for so in that age it must have seemed to most, sometimes perhaps, as sorrow following sorrow lighted upon him, to himself, there yet were no signs of yielding in him. One deceitful truce caUing itself a peace might follow upon another ; negotiations might go forward even in the midst of arms ; but the distrust on both sides was too 182 THE POPES AND THE HOHENSTAUFEN. profound, the enmity too strong, for these ever to lead to any result. New griefs on either side were urged ; and then presently it thundered and Hghtened from the eccle- siastical heaven ; and new excommunications against Frederick were piled upon the old, as though it had been impossible to curse him enough. But indeed tliere was no weapon which was not on either side snatched at, if only it could work effectual harm to the other. Pope Gregory in a circular to the prelates and potentates of Europe solemnly denounced Frederick as the Beast rising out of the sea, and full of the names of blasphemy. But the Apocalypse was not to be interpreted all on one side ; and the Pope was proclaimed in a counter-manifesto of the Emperor's as the great Eed Dragon, deceiving the whole world ; the second Balaam, speaking lies for reward ; the personal Antichrist ; the Angel from the bottomless pit. To such a white heat of fiercest mutual hate had matters arrived between these two, who accord- ing to the original idea of the kingdom and the priest- hood should have been a mutual strength and support the one to the other. So all-engrossing was the animosity between them that the frightful inroad of the Mongol hordes, whose triumph would have been fatal alike to both, could do nothing to allay or even to suspend it. These Mongols, having wasted the better part of Asia, having conquered China and Hindostan (1206-1227), had now burst upon Eastern Europe, inflicting upon it all of worst which the Hungarians had inflicted three centuries before ; but neither Pope nor Caesar could lend the slightest help to the noble leader who with his scanty host stood in the breach and died there ; and who, vanquished though he seemed, did yet at Liegnitz (April 9, 1241) set bounds to the further advance of this hideous chivalry; — Tartars TEE POPES AND THE UOHENSTAUFEN. 183 indeed, as men in the anguish of their fear proclaimed, for they were the very brood of Tartarus or hell. Whether, if Frederick had hved, he would not have found the Papacy and the Lombard League and the Mendicant Friars, which last never served the Papacy more e^ectually than now, too strong for him ; whether, notwithstanding many partial successes, the conflict that raged in every corner of Italy and in much of Germany was not going against him, may very fairly be a question ; but with his untimely death (1250), — for he had but reached his fifty-sixth year, — the Imperial or Ghibelline cause was lost. The struggle, it is true, did not end for years to come ; it could not end so long as a Hohenstaufen was in life ; but the issues of it were virtually determined. I cannot follow it further ; only I must spare a few words for the epilogue to this long tragedy, itself in some sort more tragic than all which had gone before. Assirredly Eome could not boast that she scorned to war with the dead. She pursued with inextinguishable hatred all of that detested Suabian House. Frederick left several children, legitimate and illegitimate, behind him. But a Aveird was upon him and upon his race. An evil destiny pursues them ; they perish one by one, and by strange dooms ; — until, last male scion of that Imperial strain, comes ' wandering by A shadow like an angel, with bright hair Dabbled in blood.' It is the young and beautiful Conradin, grandson of Frederick, least guilty — humanly speaking, the one un- guilty of a guilty race ; — who yet, as so often happens, gathers up in himself all the curse and the punishment that was due to all, and, paying the things that he never took, attests how impossible it is to dissociate the 184 THE POPES AND THE H0HEN8TAUFEN. members of a family from each other. He was safe in Germany under a mother's wing, but, boy as he was, would fain win back the kingdom of the Sicilies, which by right of inheritance he claimed as his own. Defeated in this attempt by Charles of Anjou, whom in a disastrous hour for Italy Pope Clement IV. had invited to take that kingdom in possession, Conradin stoops his neck to the headsman's axe at Naples (1268). And now the end has come : one sun in the firma- ment, as Dante deplores, has been put out by the other ; the Hohenstaufens have perished from the face of the earth ; and the Papacy issues forth visibly triumphant from this long and terrible struggle — not unscarred, yet never greater, or indeed never so great as now. It has encountered the one power which could pretend to dis- pute with it the dominion of the world, and has overcome it. ' With Frederick fell the Empire. From the ruin which overwhelmed the greatest of its Houses it emerged, living indeed and destined to a long life ; but so shattered, crippled, and degraded that it could never more be to Em:ope or to Germany what it once had been ' (Bryce), What is known as the Long Interregnum succeeded, — three and twenty years of frightful anarchy ; until Eodolph of Hapsburg, at length chosen Emperor (1273), brought some sort of order into Germany again. But now the armed pilgrimage to Eome for the obtaining a coronation at the Papal hands fell so far out of use that more than sixty years elapsed before Henry of Luxemburg attempted to renew it ; and his brief career, so big with unful- iilled promise, being ended (1313), a new interregnum left the Italians ample leisure to dissolve whatever ties still attached them to Germany. Meanwhile the French kings, conscious of the growing power of France, where all was knitting together into a compact military mon- THE POPES AND THE H0HEN8TAUFEN. 185 archy, while in Germany all bands that should bind together were loosening and dissolving, took up the policy of resistance to Papal pretensions, which had dropped from German hands. The grander features of the conflict do not produce themselves again ; but when we reach the times of Boniface VIII. there will be occa- sion to speak of the immense consequences which from this resulted It will then perhaps be seen how ' the art, tlie poHcy, the tyranny of France from this period inflicted deeper wounds upon the dignity and authority of the Papal See than the haughty hostihty of the Hohenstaufens ' (Bryce). 186 TEE EVCHARISTIC CONTROVEBSIES LECTUEE XIII. THE EUCHABISTIG C0NTB0VEB8IES OF THE MIDDLE AGE 8. It was very graciously ordered by Him who orders all things for the good of his Church, that the leading out- lines of its teaching should, in almost all main particulars, have been traced and authoritatively fixed before that general break-up overtook the Western world, of which the invasion by the German tribes was the immediate cause. It thus came to pass that the faithful, notwith- standing the darkness and ignorance of the ages which followed, found themselves in conscious possession of precious results which, with the scantier helps at their own command, they could never have wrought out for themselves. Thing-s which would have been too high for them had not been too high for the well-trained and accomphshed theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries ; and upon the labours of these the Church of the next centiu"ies thankfully entered. Nor can there be any more signal evidence of the completeness with which the Church of the Fathers had done, and not for itself only, the work of defining the truth which it held, had drawn accurate lines of demarcation for the separating of this truth from the errors upon either side which it denied, than this, namely the fewness of the struggles involving questions of doctrine which agitate the Middle Ages. Whatever the early Church had settled, it was OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 187 very rarely that any endeavour was made, or any desire Hhown, to disturb the settlement. There was a feeble effort at the close of the eighth century, on the part of some in Spain, Adoptionists they were called, to revive, though with a difference, the Nestorian heresy ; but this excepted, which was put down at the Council of Frank- fort (794), there was no attempt, and perhaps no inten- tional one here, to recede from the decisions of the Four Great Councils as toucliing those cardinal truths of the Christian faith on which they had definitively pronounced. Gottschalk's baffled endeavour to bring back in all its rigour Augustine's teaching on the matter of Predestina- tion cannot be adduced as another exception, for that was no effort to depart from the teaching of the earlier Church, but to adhere to it more closely. Full of speculative activity as the men of those ages were, the questions which stirred them belonged to their own times, and were not those of an earlier period brought anew into debate. Such were regarded as having received a settlement not to be disturbed any more. But strangely, and, as it proved, most unfortunately, there had been one notable exception. The doctrine of the manner of Christ's Presence in the Holy Eucharist, of the relation in which the consecrated elements and the Body and Blood of Christ stand to one another, had never come into serious and deliberate debate during those times, and thus had never been the subject of authoritative definition. Men had been content with the blessing, and had not cared to define it. The leading Doctors of the Church, it is true, had almost all uttered themselves upon it ; this, however, by the way, and not under the special responsibilities which make themselves so solemnly felt, when some actually existing error needs to be condemned ; nor with that careful weighing of every 188 TEE EUCEABISTIG C0NTB0VEESIE8 word wliich finds its place, when some precious but im- perilled truth demands to be affirmed, and the frontier lines to be traced wliicli shall divide this truth from the error that would fain encroach on its domain, or usurp its room. That Christ was really present in the Sacrament, that in that sacred feast He fed the faithful with the pre- cious food of Iris own most blessed Body and Blood, in this all the Fathers of the early Church were agreed. But, starting from this and always remaining true to this, they expressed themselves further with a grand and care- less boldness : as those upon whom no heresy, watching to make its gain of any random word, had imposed neces- sities of caution ; as those, too, who did not feel that the most rapturous expressions would be too rapturous for a worthy magnifying of that central mystery of the faith, and the gift in it made ours. But matters could not always continue in this state. It was inevitable that sooner or later the Church would have to pronounce what it meant by this Presence, which evidently might mean so much or so little. When men once began to give an account to themselves of this, how near, on one side, lay the peril of refining that Presence away into mere words which, seeming to mean something, yet in fact meant nothing, or assuredly nothing that had any right to so august a name. How near, on the other side, was the danger of a degeneration into a coarse mate- rialism, the supersensual truth which that word embodied being drawn down from its spiritual heights, adapted to the meanest capacity and the least spiritual mind, with all the true mystery gone from it. How certain it was that sooner or later extravagances on this side or on that, if not on both, would need to be repressed and condemned. And so it proved. Paschasius Eadbert (b. 786, d. 8C5 ; but both these OF TEE MIDDLE AGES. 189 dates are doubtful), a learned monk, well skilled in all the theological lore of his age, put forth his world-famous treatise On the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christy with which the conflict may be said to have begun, in 831. It was the first regular and comprehensive treatise on the Holy Eucharist which had ever appeared, at all events the first of which any notice has reached us. Thirteen years later, and having in the mean time recast the book in a more popular form, he issued it again. Coming as it did now from one who occupied a foremost position in the Church of France — he was Abbot of New Corbey, which had left the Old Corbey in Germany very far behind it in importance — it attracted the attention which at first had been denied it. There is nothing won- derful in this. It fell in with many tendencies of the age, with the direction of popular thought and feeling which was more and more craving after an outward and visible embodiment of the inward and spiritual. But more than this. It gave consistency to that which was already the floating belief of multitudes, who were dehghted to find elaborated all round, and with a certain theological justifi- cation, that which hitherto they had obscurely and more or less unconsciously held ; for it cannot be doubted that it was the restless eagerness of a logical age to get theology represented in the form of logic, its impatience of any principle which it could not so represent, this, and not solely that popular craving for a more visible embodiment of the unseen, which wrought for the obtaining of acceptance for the teaching of Paschasius. What he actually taught and claimed to be the Church's doctrine was this, namely that in the Holy Eucharist, by virtue of the priestly consecration and the operation of the Holy Ghost which goes along with this, the substance of bread and wine is changed into the substance of the 13 ody ]90 TEE EUGEARI8TIG CONTROVERSIES and Blood of Christ ; yet so that the accidents, as they were called — in other words, the form, colour, and taste of the elements — still, for the better exercise of faith, remain. The word ' transubstantiation ' does not appear in the book, indeed does not anywhere appear till a much later date ; but all which the word implies is here. The outspokenness of the book was a real power. Many had taught before that Christ feeds the faithfid with his own Body and Blood, but their words had been more or less open to a figurative interpretation, — had not at any rate absolutely excluded this. He was resolved that, if he could help it, there should henceforward be no mistake in the matter. The immense embarrassments which ensued so soon as ever, virtually or formally, such was accepted as the Church's teaching ; the enormous difficulty of weaving this into one coherent and consistent whole with other accepted articles of the faith, of dealing with all the consequences which it involved and which on it must fol- low ; and the infinite ingenuity which has been expended in attempts of the kind ; all these are matters sufficiently familiar to theological scholars. I cannot undertake to treat of them here. Only I will observe that now it might be seen how immense a misfortune it was that the Church had not long since been compelled dogmatically to declare what she held, and what she condemned, in a matter so high and so difficult. The inevitable conflict had not been escaped ; it had only been adjourned, and adjourned from favourable times, those of the great early Doctors, to other far less favourable ; for assuredly it was not the ninth century which one would willingly have chosen for the coming up for discussion of a mystery so sublime. Great as was the favour which this treatise of Pascha- OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 191 sius found with tlie many, there were also not a few who were offended. The theological leaders of the age were divided into opposite camps. Hincmar of Eheims (d. 882) sided with him ; so also did Eatherius of Verona (b. 890, d. 974) ; — names such as these attesting the strength with which the spirit of the age was settino- in this direction. But on the other side was Eabanus Maurus (d. 856), a scholar of Alcuin, and perhaps the most distinguished theologian of his time, and generally the Carolingian Divines. Better known to us now, at least by name, is Eatramn (d. 868) ; Bertram he was often called in the Eeformation times, and is sometimes still, but by mistake ; — his book, which has a Hterary interest no less than a theological, being sometimes ascribed to a greater than he, even to Scotus Erigena, who, as there is reason to suppose, did write against Paschasius, thouoh his work has not reached us. These, and others with them, denounced his teaching on the Eucharist as novel and erroneous. It was for them a violent outrage upon the intel- lect, a reduction of that which is in the highest sense spiii- tual under the laws of the senses. But they did not always in their resistance to it observe the golden mean : they might be sometimes likened to the woodman who, in his eagerness to disengage the oak from the ivy which is strang- ling it, incautiously wounds the tree itself. The conditions of the struggle were, indeed, in every way unfortunate ; above all unfortunate in this, namely that what Paschasius taught of error attached itself closely to what the Church had always held of truth, might only too easily be con- founded with this, or mistaken for it ; even as numbers to this day confound any Eeal Presence with Transub- stantiation, and, in their zeal to get rid of the superstitious accretion, are intolerant of the truth on which this has been superinduced. It is not, as I need hardly remind 192 TBE EUGRABI8TIG G0NTB0VEB8IES you, the verity of Christ's Presence in the Sacrament which our Church in her conflict with Rome denies ; but the rash and peremptory definition of the manner of that Presence. In the two centiu-ies which intervened between Pas- chasius Eadbert and Bereugar of Tours, — among the Dark Ages two of the darkest, — httle or nothing was done for the scientific working out of the immense problems with the sohition of which the Church had burdened herself when she adopted the teaching of Paschasius for her own. In using this language I do not imply that there had been as yet any authoritative allowance of his teaching, or condemnation of that which it excluded ; for there had been no formal Church utterance one way or the other on the subject ; but only tiiat such as would not receive it were growing to be more and more re- garded in the judgment of the many as of questionable rightness of faith ; the popular sentiment wliich antici- pated, and at the same time prepared the way for, ulti- mate dogmatic definition, pronouncing itself ever more strongly against them. But they were not to be silenced without one struggle, one vigorous protest more. When indeed this was made, it did not fail to exemplify the danger which was most to fear. The Charybdis of Tran- substantiation was efiectually avoided ; but in efforts to keep clear of this it was often forgotten that there was a Scylla of mere spiritualism on the other side. From Berengar (born about 1000, and called of Tours to distinguish him from others of the same name), the protest came. Following in the footsteps of Eatramn, but with clearer insight into what he was doing and a more definite purpose, and probably under the spell of a more ruling spirit, that namely of Scotus Erigena, — he renewed the opposition to Paschasius which had well-nigh OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 193 died out. But, while rejecting the gross carnal error of Paschasius, he rejected with it, so it appears to me, a portion of the truth on which that error had fastened itself ; the true doctrine of the Eucharist meanwhile re- treating out of sight, as the woman in the Apocalypse into the wilderness (Eev. xii. 6), there to tarry until better times came round. A letter of Berengar to Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury that should be, and at that time Prior of Bee in Normandy, — a letter which there may fairly be a question whether Lanfranc was justified in allowing others to make use of, — first brought him into trouble. His teaching upon this point was con- ' demned by Pope Leo IX. jii a Council at Eome (1050) ; again in the same year at Vercelli. ' Would God,' ex- claims Luther, ' that all Popes had borne themselves so christianly in all things as this Pope in the matters of Berengar,'^his hatred of sacramentaries proving for the moment stronger than his hatred of Popes. Berengar, though condemned, had many powerful friends ; these, however, by no means all or nearly all agreeing with him. Among them was no less a man than Hildebrand, at this time Cardinal Legate in France, and the coming Pope. Having succeeded hi persuading Hildebrand of the soundness of his faith,— for Berengar was prepared to sign a declaration, ' The bread and wine of the altar after consecration are the Body and Blood of Christ,' — he ventured to appear before a new Synod at Eome, where it was arranged that he should openly clear himself (1059). But, as will often happen where a pubhc assembly has to be reckoned with, matters did not at that Synod take their course according to the programme designed. As many as counted Berengar a heretic, and a shifty one, were resolved there should be no mistake, no evasion for him under shelter of equivocal o 194 THE EUGRAMSTIG C0NTE0VEBSIE8 statements ; and there was put before him for his accep- tance quite another pahnode, with no vague generaUties or convenient creepholes. This, not for a moment be- lieving it (he himself tells us as much), but overborne by multitudes, and in the fear of immediate death, he sought to modify, and, when this might not be, lie signed. No sooner, however, had he put the Alps between himself and his enemies than he recanted his recantation, gave vent to his anger against himself in charges against all who had any share in liis humiliation, while he openly bewailed the weakness out of which he had set his hand to the document forced upon him. Entangled before long in angriest controversy with Lanfranc and with others, he reaffirmed all wliich for the moment he had retracted ; and so filled Western Christendom with his doctrine that Hildebrand, now Pope, had no choice but, however unwillingly, to cite him to Eome, there to make answer for himself (1078). The great Pontiff, who was an eminent Church-ruler rather than a highly trained theologian, and who had no desire that the existing freedom should be restricted by a new dogmatic definition, would fain have helped Berengar again, and by the same means as before. Some corre- spondence, only recently brought to light and published in 1850, reveals how much had passed by letter between them on the subject. Obtaining from Berengar a new and somewhat more explicit confession of faith, Gregory avouched himself at an assembly of Bishops satisfied with it, and would fain have had others satisfied as well. But they were not satisfied, and made him clearly to understand that they were not. And now Gregory, who on occasion could set his face as a flint, evidently did not consider that such an occasion was here. Pre- pared to go far, he yet was not prepared to go all lengths, OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 195 in Berengar's belialf. He liad auotlier mightier work and one far nearer to his heart in hand ; nothinoj less than tlie complete elevation of the spiritual above the temporal, of the successor of St. Peter above the successor of C^Esar. For the putting through of this mighty under- taking it was absolutely necessary that his own ortho- doxy should be above the breath of suspicion. None must be able to cast in liis teeth with any semblance of truth that he was a fautor of heretics. But his enemies and that mortal strife with the Emperor in which he was engaged gave him many enemies — were already makincf use of the evident favour with which he reo-arded the heretic already twice condemned ; and when Berengar was rash enough to appeal to the Pope as in a certain sympathy with himself on the matter in dispute, Gregory at once threw him over, demanding of him instant sub- scription to the form of recantation from which he shrank the most. It was again to be shown that Berengar had not what we have lately learned to call ' the courage of his opinions.' After a faint struggle and endeavour to modify the document in his own direction, he signed ; willing, as he afterwards avowed, to commit himself to the mercy of God rather than to theirs into whose hands, as an obstinate and relapsed heretic, he would otherwise have fallen. Deeply wounded in conscience, feeling that he had secured his safety at the cost of his Christian honour, hkening himself to Aaron and to Peter, they also both of them unfaithful to God through the fear of men, — he spent the long years which yet remained to him (for he did not die till 1088), in retirement ; and owing to the potent protection of Gregory that, despite of a third retractation, he was not molested any further. A word or two more concerning the man and his teaching. And first concerning the rtian. Who is there 2 196 TEE EUGEABISTIG GONTBOVEBSIES that would not fain adopt, if he might, Coleridge's judg- ment of Berengar, so glorious in its charity? Who is there that is not disposed to feel and think somewhat worse of himself, when he is unable to make this judg- ment his own ? And yet such is my condition. I have no choice but to say that, as it seems to me, there has been a disposition to overrate Berengar, and this both intellec- tually and morally. An adroit dialectician, when such were rarer than half a century later they became, a scholar of very various accomplishments, gifted with a singular power of drawing and attaching friends, he was from the beginning restless and vain, ill content to walk in old paths, eager to make a figure in the world, and in the end making one only too notable. Incapable he plainly was of taldng the true measure of himself, for else he would not have twice challenged dangers from which at the decisive moment he shrank. Incapable he also showed himself of taking the true measure of others. When one considers what was the relative mental calibre of Lanfranc and of Berengar, the insolent tone of superiority in which Berengar addresses the Itahan scholar and theolo- gian, and this before any personal antagonism had sprung up between them, can only, as one reads, fill with a pain- ful astonishment. Then too there is a passionate feebleness about him. He scolds like an angry woman. A much smaller man than Abelard, who will presently appear on the scene, lie shares with him in a very unpleasant trait, namely that he cannot conceive of any opposing or even disagreeing with him, except as impelled to this by ignorance, or dishonesty, or personal malice. His adversaries are ' savage wild beasts ; ' a Bislio]! of Padua, who was not on his side, is ' the Paduan buffoon ; ' another is ' the Pisan Antichrist.' If he has to spccik of Pope Leo, OF THE RUDDLE AGES. 197 ' that holy hon of yours,' he takes the occasion of observ- ing, ' is very far from being the Lion of the tribe of Judah.' As the conflict deepens, he over and over again assures Lanfranc, and in every variety of language, that he lies, or, shghtly varying the charge, but assuredly not making it less offensive, that he speaks against the testi- mony of his own conscience. Certainly his own writings leave an impression about him as of one singularly want- ing in self-command, with httle sense of personal dignity, grievously deficient in that unfailing mark of true noble- ness, the power of doing justice to a foe. So much for the man. But his doctrine, was it a timely protest against errors and exaggerations of Pascha- sius which the Chiurch had adopted and virtually made her own ? or was there danger from his teaching lest both should go, the error and the truth, — lest with that which it would be gain to lose, there should be also lost that whose loss would have been irreparable ? As I have said already, it seems to me the last, and that his success would have been a calamity. No doubt the truth of the Sacrament was in his time dangerously overlaid, but it was not lost ; and all experience has shown that in these matters it is far easier to take from the too much than to add to the too little. Superstition sometimes guards the truth which it distorts, caricatures, and in part conceals. Putting all things together, I am unable to share in the sympathy with which this revolt of his against the pre- vaihng; doOTia of his time has often been regarded. It presents itself to me in the light of a feeble and ill-con- certed insurrection, which so mixed up objects desirable and undesirable, that those who could wish its success for some reasons could only deprecate and dread this success for others ; an insurrection which, being presently put down, had for its only conscc|uence the fastening of the 198 THE EUGHABISTIG GONTBOVEBSIES yoke more firmly than ever upon their necks in whose behalf and for whose deliverance it had originally been planned. At the same time it is not easy to affirm what the doctrinal results of a triumph on his part would have been ; neither does an increased acquaintance with his own writings diminish the difficulty. Since Lessing's dis- covery, something more than a century ago, in the library at Wolfenbiittel, of Berengar's latest answer to Lanfranc, and its publication in 1834 by Neander, we are no longer compelled to derive from others, and those generally adversaries or ill-willers, our knowledge of what his doctrine was ; as to a considerable extent was the case before. But the difficulty remains. There are statements of his which satisfy all just demands ; but then again there are others in which he seems ' to hedge,' and which would leave the words of Consecration a trope, and the Sacrament itself little more than a commemorative meal. There will be always, I think, a difference of opinion as to which are the truer voice of the man. A few words before we leave this theme. It is cer- tainly a thought of infinite sadness that this Sacrament, — the very bond of innermost communion of the faithful with their Lord, and through Him with one another, — should have thus proved so often, and, in times which this course of Lectures does not reach will be found to prove still more, a source and spring of strife and debate, dividing Churches, and then dividing again the divided. And yet from the bitter of this thought a sweet may be extracted. There is comfort even here. How priceless it and its benefits must have been felt to be, before men would contend for it as they have done, counting it as the very apple of their eye, so that he who wounded them here wounded them in a part at once the ten- OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 199 clerest and the most vital ; willing to set all upon the hazard, to taste all bitternesses, in exiles, in prisons, on scaffolds, at the fiery stake, for what they felt to be the truth of God in this matter. And no wonder. In the Sacraments, above all in this Sacrament, is the great abid- ing witness in the Church, a witness not in word only but also in act, against all merely rationahstic explanations of our relation to Christ and his to us. We are herein and hereby brought into real and direct contact with the whole Christ, and He with us ; translated out of a spi- rituahstic world of shadows into a true kingdom of reahties. And another comforting thought may abate the sad- ness with which we contemplate the endless differences with which men have learned to regard this hohest mystery of all. No doubt there can be but one truth about it, and all which departs from this is wrong. But those who miss this absolute truth, we are sometimes tempted to think of them as missing the blessing of that which they underrate, or — I will not say overrate, for that is impossible — which they wrongly rate. . Let us be reassured. God is greater than our hearts. Many a one who, under imperfect teaching, has come to this as no more than a commemorative rite with some vague ill-defined solemnity chnging to it, has gone away strengthened and inwardly nourished, as he only shall fully know and understand in that day when Christ shall quicken to hfe and immortality the mortal bodies of his saints. God's purposes of grace are not so hghtly defeated, the ordinances which He has appointed are not so easily robbed of their blessing, as we too often ossume. Let us devoutly thank Him that the condition of receiving the grace of this heavenly feast does not lie in holding what Paschasius Eadbert held about it, or in denying what 200 THE EUGEABISTIG CONTROVERSIES. Pascliasiiis Eadbert held about it; in being a Beren- garian, or in being an anti-Berengarian. There are things whicli may be too high for us, too high for our understanding, but not too high for our using and enjoying ; and of such things this is one, and tlie greatest. 201 _.________.__. \ LIBRA in LECTUEE XIV. TEE EABLIEB SCHOOLMEN. The passion for the Crusades and for the Scholastic Theology may be regarded severally as the outer and inner expression of one and the same movement in the heart and mind of Western Christendom. As by the Crusades men avouched that they would no longer be satisfied merely to hear of that land which the Son of God had hallowed by his presence, by his life, and by liis death, but must have the very land itself in possession, not walking any more in this matter merely by faith when it was free to them to walk also by sight, so fared it after a little in another region as well. There were as adventurous spirits, as chivakous hearts, in the cloister as in the camp. These too will not be content until they have grasped — not by faith only, but with every faculty of their being, and therefore intellectually no less than morally and spiritually, — that entire body of truth taught by Christ and by his Church. What they have taken upon trust, upon the Church's word, they avouch that they have so taken in the fullest assin*ance that it would justify itself to the reason as well. And that it could so justify itself throughout, that the auctoritates and the rationes, as severally they were called, were in perfect harmony with each other, the Schoolmen made it their task and business to show. But the Schoolmen, — what exactly do we mean when y 202 TEE EARLIER SCHOOLMEN. we speak of these ? who were they ? what did tliey pro- pose to themselves ? were they men worthy of praise or blame, of admiration or contempt ? The name, whicli oftentimes implies and reveals so much, does not materi- ally assist us here. A scholasiicus in medieval Latin miglit be a teacher, or he might be a learner ; all which the word affirms is that he has something to do with schools. We must then look further for an explanation of what the Schoolmen were, and what they intended. Persons, some will reply, who occupied themselves with questions like this. How many angels could dance at the same instant upon the point of a needle? or with others of the same character. Totally uninformed of the condi- tions, moral and intellectual, of Western Christendom wdiich gave birth to these Schoolmen, and which at the time left room for no other birth, never having read a line of their writings, they have no hesitation in passing their judgment of contempt upon them. Thus, if Albert the Great is named ; — Albertus Magnus as he is more commonly called (b. 1193, d. 1280), — their ignorance about him may be complete ; they may never so much as have seen the outsides of the twenty-one huge folio volumes which contain his works ; but they will not let him pass without an observation of gratuitous contempt, to the effect that there was nothing great al)out him but his name. This contempt, it is worth remarking, is very far from being shared by the more illustrious thinkers of the modern world, — not, for example, by Hegel, or Alexander Von Humboldt ; the latter characterizing the disquisitions of this same unfortunate Albertus on the subjects with which he, Humboldt, was chiefly conversant, as ' admir- able beyond expression, for the period in which he lived ; ' while Von Kaumer declares, under like reservations, that THE EARLIEB, SCIWOLMEN. 203 ' he might be called the Aristotle or Leibnitz of liis age.' ' To the Schoolmen,' says Sir William Hamilton, 'the vul- gar languages are principally indebted for what precision and analytic subtlety they possess.' And only a few years ago one lost too early to the English Cluirch, wrote as follows : — ' Through two eventful centuries, which wit- nessed, as they passed, the formation of nationalities, the estabhshment of representative government, the birth of vernacular literature, and the grand climacteric of eccle- siastical poAver, the philosophy of the Schools held on its way, not only commanding with an undisputed sway tlie intellect of those restless times, but elaborating its system, extending its influence, and drawing into its service some of the highest minds that the Christian world has pro- duced. For two centuries longer, though spent in vital energy, it continued to rule on, till with the fifteenth century came tlie resistless onslaught, which with the revival of classical letters broke for ever tlie spell of its dominion ' (Shirley). To these names that of Coleridge must be added. I cannot remember that he has expressed himself on the subject anywhere in his writings ; but once, when as a young man I made with Arthur Hallam a pilgrimage to Highgate to have the privilege of hearing Coleridge talk, we were rewarded by a discourse, which must have lasted for nearly an unbroken hour, on the intellectual greatness of the Schoolmen. The revived interest in patristic literature which was so marked a feature of that time suggested his special theme, which was this, namely, the much larger the amount of profit that might even now be gotten from the Schoolmen than from the Fathers, whose frequent ' nugacity,' for I am afraid he used that word, he denounced. The manner in which Aquinas had met as by anticipation nearly all the later 204 TEE EABLIEU SCHOOLMEN. assaults on the miracles, and the greatness of the specu- lative genius of our English Occam, with the perilous lines on which his speculation was travelling at the last, were the special subjects of his discourse, or at all events are those which, after the lapse of so many years, still survive the most clearly in my memory. Let me seek to explain to you, so far as I myself understand, how this Theology arose ; wdiat the objects were which it proposed to itself; and how far it can be said to have accomplished these objects. When in the eleventh century the reviving activity of thought, the fresh life which was everywhere stirring, sought some material on which it might exercise itself, this, with the exception of such as theology and the Church supplied, was nowhere to be found. All other sciences in the troubles and tumults of the centuries preceding had either wholly perished, or had been reduced to the barest and most meagre elements. The classical treasiures of antiquity, though not all or nearly all irrecoverably gone, were mostly hidden out of sight for the time. Papal Canons, decrees of Councils, treatises of the Fathers and such like, w^ere apparently all which had survived the mighty wreck. In these, and in these only, was to be found nourishment for the mental craving of the age. If any new intellectual edifice was to be reared by aid of materials which the past supplied, here and here only w^ere those materials to be obtained. But whatever edifice was reared, it must conform to certain conditions. Thus, there was no general desire at this time to overpass the limits of thought and speculation which the Church imposed. These were felt to be, and, as compared to what any free-thinking in that age was likely to prove, they were, blessed restraints. Whatever intellectual revolt against the Eoman system might bQ THE EARLIER SCHOOLMEN. 205 covertly brooding in other hearts, there was none such among the builders here. With a very few exceptions they wrought in the interests of Eonie ; always intended to be, and for a long time were, her most devoted and her ablest champions. Here then were the causes and conditions of the rise of this Scholastic Theology: — In the first place a great mental activity ; a young world, conscious of its powers, and eager to exert them ; as Bacon has it, ' sharp and strong wits and abundance of leisure ; ' but, as he adds, * small variety of reading.' For indeed tliis was the second condition, tlie absence, namely, of any material on which to exercise a shaping, moulding power, save such as the Church furnished ; — no classical literature, no independent ethics, no natural philosophy ; a comparatively narrow basis which compelled men to build high rather than broad. Fuller expresses this well : ' As such who live in London and like populous places, having but little ground for their foundations to build houses on, may be said to enlarge tlie breadth of their houses in height (I mean increasing their room in many st_Qreys_one above another) ; so the Schoolmen in this age, lacking the latitude of general learning and languages, thought to enlarge their active minds by mounting up ; so improving their small bottom with towering speculations, though some of things mystical that might not — more of things difficult that could not — most of things curious that need not — be known unto us.' ' Their wits,' to come back to the words of Lord Bacon, ' being shut up in the cells of a few authors, cliiefly Aristotle their dictator, as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history either of nature or time, they did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out to us those laborious webs of 206 TEE EARLIER SCHOOLMEN. leiirmnof which are extant in their books.' And thirdly, there was the desire to put forth these activities only within such limits and under such restraints as the Church laid down, without the calling in question, or even the evading, of any dogma or decision of hers. It was tlie ' how ' and the ' why,' never the ' what,' of the Church's teaching which the Schoolmen undertook to I discuss. Doctores they claimed to be, not Patres ; not, as fathers, productive ; not professing to bring out of their treasure things new, but only to justify and establish things old. Under limitations such as these, there was one im- mense work which was possible for the human intellect. It might organize the vast, often unshapely, mass of materials which lay before it into one symmetrical whole ; adjust the relations of the several parts to one another ; reconcile, or put in the way of reconciliation, a])parent or, as they sometimes were, real contradictions ; it might, in short, systematize theology. This w^as a task still waiting to be done. The more illustrious teachers in earlier periods had found each his own special and peculiar work to perform, his own position to make good. Occupied with this, they had not found the inchnation nor the leisure for a deliberate oversight of the whole field of theology ; they had not mapped it out as it demanded to be mapped out. It was to this that the Schoolmen addressed themselves, — to the organizing after a true scientific method of the rude undigested mass which lay before them. But more than this they took in hand. The arranging and marshalling in their due order of the enormous amount of materials which the Medieval Church had inherited or acquired, adjusting parts and proportions, THE EAELIER SCHOOLMEN. 207 bringing in tlie end complete Sums of Theology to pass, this was neither all, nor nearly all, which these new champions of the faith undertook as a task worthy of their hi