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Alfred. In Peterborough, under a Norman abbot, horns are heard at dead of night, and spectral huntsmen are seen to ride through the woods. The following extracts are fair specimens:

449. In this year Martian and Valentinian succeeded to the empire and reigned seven winters. And in their days Hengest and Horsa, invited by Wyrtgeorn, king of the Britons, sought Britain, on the shore which is named Ypwines fleot; first in support of the Britons, but afterwards they fought against them.

463. In this year Hengest and Esc fought against the Welsh and took countless booty; and the Welsh fled from the Angles as fire.

509. In this year St. Benedict the abbot, father of all monks, went to heaven.
661. In this year was the great destruction of birds.

792. Here Offa, king of Mercia, commanded that King Ethelbert should be beheaded; and Osred, who had been king of the Northumbrians, returning home after his exile, was apprehended and slain on the 18th day before the Calends of October. His body is depos ited at Tinemouth. Ethelred this year, on the 3d day before the Calends of October, took unto himself a new wife whose name was Elfreda.

793. In this year dire forwarnings came over the land of the Northumbrians, and miserably terrified the people: there were excessive whirlwinds and lightnings, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these tokens; and a little after that, in the same year, on the 6th of the Ides of January, the havoc of heathen men miserably destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne, through rapine and slaughter. And Sicga died on the 8th of the Cal. of March.'

Centuries will pass before history, which thus begins in romance and babble, will end in essay; before this enfeebled intellect will be able to rise from particular facts to discover the laws by which those facts are governed, exhibiting by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, the orderly progress of society and the nature of man.

Theology. It was a favorite saying among the ancients, that death is 'a law and not a punishment.' It was a rootdoctrine of the early Christians that disobedience—the fruit of the forbidden tree-'brought death into the world and all our woe.'

The first represented man as pure and innocent till his will has sinned; the second, as under sentence of condemnation at the moment of birth. Plutarch had said that no funeral sacrifices were offered for infants, 'because it is irreligious to lament for those pure souls who have passed into a better life and a happier dwelling-place.' 'Be assured,' writes a saint of the sixth century, 'that not only men who have obtained the use of their reason, but children who have begun to live in their mother's womb and have there died, or who, just born, have passed away without the sacrament of holy baptism administered in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, must be punished by eternal tor

ture.' The opinion so graphically expressed by a theologian who said 'he doubted not that there were infants less than a span long crawling about the floor of hell,' was held with great confidence in the early Church. Some, indeed, imagined that a special place was assigned to them, where there was neither suffering nor enjoyment. This was emphatically denied by St. Augustine, who declared that they descended into 'everlasting fire.' According to a popular legend, the redbreast was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to them to relieve their consuming thirst, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames.

Belief in a personal devil, as we have seen, was profound and universal. Sometimes he is encountered as a grotesque and hideous animal, sometimes as a black man, sometimes as a fair woman, sometimes as a priest haranguing in the pulpit, sometimes as an angel of light. He hovers forever about the Christian; but the sign of the cross, a few drops of holy water, or the name of Mary, can put him to immediate and ignominious flight.

Doubt was branded as a sin. To cherish prejudice was better than to analyze it. Those who diverged from the orthodox belief were doomed. Avenues of inquiry were painted with images of appalling suffering and malicious demons. An age which believes that a man is intensely guilty who holds certain opinions, and will cause the damnation of his fellows if he propagates them, has no moral difficulty in concluding that the heretic should be damned. A law of the Saxons condemned to death any one who ate meat in Lent, unless the priest was satisfied that it was a matter of absolute necessity. Gregory of Tours, recording 'the virtues of saints and the disasters of nations,' draws the moral of the history thus:

'Arins, the impious founder of the impious sect, his entrails having fallen out, passed into the flames of hell; but Hilary, the blessed defender of the undivided Trinity, though exiled on that account, found his country in Paradise. King Clovis, who confessed the Trinity, and by its assistance crushed the heretics, extended his dominions through all Gaul. Alaric, who denied the Trinity, was deprived of his kingdom and his subjects, and, what was far worse, was punished in the future world.' At the close of the twelfth century, among the measures devised to suppress heresy, the principal was the Inquisition. The function of the civil government was to execute its sentence. Placed in the hands of Dominicans and Franciscans, it was centralized

1 I am persecuted,' Arins plaintively said, because I have taught that the Son had a beginning and the Father had not.'

by the appointment of an Inquisitor-General at Rome, with whom all branches of the tribunal — wherever the new corporation was admitted - were to be in constant communication. Its bloody success might seem to fulfil the portent of Dominic's nativity. Legend relates that his mother, in the season of childbirth, dreamed that a dog was about to issue from her womb, bearing a lighted torch that would kindle the whole world. We shall see its officers branding the disbeliever with hot irons, wrenching fingers asunder, shattering bones,- doing it all in the name of the Teacher who had said, 'By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another,'- yet doing it perhaps in devotion to the truth as, in their human frailty, they conceive it.

The pagan philosopher fixed his eye upon virtue; the Christian, upon sin. The former sought to awaken the sentiment of admiration; the latter, that of remorse. The one, powerless to restrain vice, was fitted to dignify man; the other, to regenerate him. Those who are insensible to the nobleness of virtue, may be so convulsed by the fear of judgment as to renew the tenor of their lives.

The pagans asserted the immateriality of the soul, because they believed that the body must perish forever. The Fathers, with the exception of Augustine, maintained that the soul was simply a second body. The material view derived strength from the firm belief in punishment by fire. This was the central fact of religion. Its ghastly imagery left nature stricken and forlorn. The agitations of craters were ascribed to the great press of lost souls. In the hush of evening, when the peasant boy asked why the sinking sun, as it dipped beneath the horizon, kindled with such a glorious red, he was answered, in the words of an old Saxon catechism, 'because it is then looking into hell.' The pen of the poet, the pencil of the artist, the visions of the monk, sustained the maddening terror with appalling vividness and minuteness. Through the vast of hell rolled a seething stream of sulphur, to feed and intensify the waves of fire. In the centre was Satan, bound by red-hot chains, on a burning gridiron. But his hands are free, and he seizes the damned, crushes them like grapes against his teeth, then sucks them down the fiery cavern of his throat. Hideous beings, of dreadful aspect and fantastic

form, with hooks of red-hot iron, plunge the lost alternately into fire and ice. Some of the souls are hung up by their tongues, others are sawn asunder between flaming iron posts, others gnawed by serpents, others with hammer and anvil are welded into a mass, others boiled and then strained through a cloth. A narrow bridge spans the abyss, and from this the shrieking souls are plunged into the mounting flames below.

But in every age there are some who stand upon the heights, above the ideal of their generation, and forecast the realized conceptions of the distant future. One of the most rationalistic minds of the fourth century was Pelagius, a British prelate. His persecutors were wont to say, 'Speak not to Pelagius, or he will convert you.' His principal tenets may be thus epitomized: 1. Adam was created mortal, and would have died whether he had sinned or not.

2. Adam's transgression affected only himself, not his posterity.

3. Mankind neither perish through Adam, nor are raised from the dead through Christ.

4. The law, as well as the Gospel, leads men to heaven.

5. Divine grace is conditioned on human worthiness.

6. Infants are in the same state as Adam before his fall. He would not, however, venture to deny the necessity of infant baptism. Severely pressed on this point by his opponents, he replied that baptism was necessary to wash away the guilt of the child's pettishness! One striking example of a bold free spirit in the tenth century was the famed Erigena. Alone in the middle ages, he maintained the figurative interpretation of hell-fire.

In 1277, propositions like the following were professed by philosophers' at Paris: God is not triune and one, for trinity is incompatible with simplicity; the world and humanity are eternal; the resurrection of the body must not be admitted by philosophers; the soul, when separated from the body, cannot suffer by fire; theological discourses are based on fables; a man who has in himself moral and intellectual virtues, has all that is necessary to happiness.

It is gratifying to know that St. Augustine, in answering this argument, declared distinctly that the crying of a baby is not sinful, and therefore does not deserve eternal damnation.

It may be needless to add explicitly-what the theology of the past so plainly suggests in the changed atmosphere of the present that every age creates its image of God; and the image, conforming to the conceptions of its creator, is the measure of its civilization. This child shall one day grow up to manhood, and sing lofty psalms with noble human voice.

Ethics.-A nation or an age may be without moral science, but never without moral distinctions. The languages and literature of the world indicate that at all times, among all peoples, the idea of right and wrong has been recognized and applied. We shall find ethical notions, ethical life, powerfully operative, in mediæval England, but no ethical system. When society is semibarbarous, the inculcation of morality devolves avowedly and exclusively upon the priests. Motives of action require to be materialized. Theology is the groundwork of morality. The moral faculty, too weak of itself to be a guide of conduct, must be reënforced by the rewards and punishments of religion,— the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell. The propensity to evil, in consequence of original sin, is itself sin. The foundation of the moral law is the Divine will. Thus Scotus asserted that the good is good, not by its own inherent nature, but because God commands it. But there appear from time to time men who, rising above surrounding circumstances, anticipate the moral standard of a later age, and inculcate principles before their appropriate civilization has dawned. Thus Abelard, emphasizing the subjective aspect of conscience, represents that moral good and evil reside not in the act but in the intention. It is only the consenting to evil which is sin. The pure hate sin from love of virtue, not from a slavish fear of pain inflicted. The good is good, not because God commands it; but He commands it because it is good. God is the absolutely highest good, and that, through virtue, should be the aim of human endeavor. The civilizations of the future may estimate their relative excellence by their nearness to this eminence of thought!

Science. Before the Conquest, in the popular series of Solomon and Saturn, it was asked, as a question that engaged English curiosity, 'What is the substance of which Adam, the first man, was made?' and the answer was:

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