They called the wind their brother, the water their sister, and poverty their bride. Incapable by the principle of their foundation of possessing estates, they subsisted on alms and pious remunerations. 'You need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven,' was the scornful reply of Francis to a request for pillows. Only the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them. At night he dreamed that robbers leaped on him, with shouts of 'Kill, kill!' 'I am a Friar,' shrieked the terror-stricken brother. "You lie,' was the instant answer, 'for you go shod.' In disproof he lifted up his foot, saw the shoe, and in an agony of repentance flung the pair out of the window. Says a contemporary: "The Lord added, not so much a new order, as renewed the old, raised the fallen, and revived religion, now almost dead, in the evening of the world, hastening to its end, in the near time of the Son of Perdition. They have no monasteries or churches, no ... fields, or vines, or beasts, or houses, or lands, or even where they may lay their head. They wear no furs or linen, only woolen gowns with a hood; no head-coverings, or cloaks, or mantles, or any other garments have they. If any one invite them, they eat and drink what is set before them. If any one, in charity, give them anything, they keep nothing of it to the morrow.' To Self-sacrificing love, for Christ, was the sum of their lives, food and shelter their reward. The recluse of the cloister was exchanged for the preacher. As the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. In frocks of serge and girdles of rope, they wandered bare-foot on errands of salvation, fixed themselves in haunts where fever and pestilence festered, in huts of mud and timber mean as the huts around them. the burgher and artisan, who had heard the mass-priest in an unknown tongue, spelling out what instruction they might from gorgeous ritual and graven wall, their preaching, fluent and familiar, was a wonder and a delight. Not deviating from the current faith, they professed rather to teach it in greater purity, while they imputed supineness and debasement to the secular clergy. They addressed the crowd in the public streets, with fervid appeal, rough wit, or telling anecdote, and administered the communion on a portable altar, carrying the multitude by their enthusiasm and novelty. Disinterested sincerity is at all times attractive to the popular heart, and, when associated with the hopes and fears of life, is irresistible. These Methodists started a revolution. There will be another such five hundred years hence. Had they been as faithful to their mission as the Wesleys to theirs, it had most loathsome of mortals, found himself in the presence of his Lord. As organized later by St. Benedict, the monastery was the asylum of peaceful industry, the refuge of the flying peasant, the retreat of the timid, the abode of the princely, the portal to knowledge and dignity for the inquisitive and ambitious, a field of civilizing activity to the ardent and philanthropic, the symbol of moral power in an age of turbulence and war, the fountain whence issued far and wide a constant stream of missionaries, often the nucleus of a city, where had been gigantic forests and inhospitable marshes. In the tenth century, when the English Church, inundated by the Danes, had fallen into worldliness and ignorance, Dunstan the reformer saw in vision a tree of wondrous height stretching its branches over Britain, its boughs laden with countless cowls. In the revival of a stricter monasticism, he fancied, lay the remedy for Church abuses. The clergy were displaced by monks, bound by vows to a life of celibacy and religious exercise. Freed ere long by the popes from the control of the bishops, they speedily became ascendant in the Church, and so continued till the Reformation. Parish endowments were transferred to monasteries, of which Dunstan himself established fortyeight, setting an example widely followed in every quarter of the land. Pious, learned, and energetic as were the prelates of William's appointment, they were not English. In language, manner, and sympathy, they were thus severed from the lower priesthood and the people; and the whole influence of the Church was for the moment paralyzed. In the twelfth century a new spirit of devotion woke the slumber of the religious houses, and changed. the aspect of town and country. Everywhere men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order. Their rule was one of the most severe mortification and self-denial. Their lives were spent in labor and prayer, and their one frugal daily meal was eaten in silence. They humbly asked for grants of land in the most solitary places, where they could meditate in retirement, amidst desolate moors and the wild gorges of inaccessible mountains. A hundred years later, when the administration of forms had become the sole occupation of the clergy, came the Friars,-Dominicans and Franciscans, to win back the public esteem and reanimate a waning religion. They called the wind their brother, the water their sister, and poverty their bride. Incapable by the principle of their foundation of possessing estates, they subsisted on alms and pious remunerations. You need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven,' was the scornful reply of Francis to a request for pillows. Only the sick went shod. An Oxford Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them. At night he dreamed that robbers leaped on him, with shouts of 'Kill, kill!' 'I am a Friar,' shrieked the terror-stricken brother. "You lie,' was the instant answer, 'for you go shod.' In disproof he lifted up his foot, saw the shoe, and in an agony of repentance flung the pair out of the window. Says a contemporary: "The Lord added, not so much a new order, as renewed the old, raised the fallen, and revived religion, now almost dead, in the evening of the world, hastening to its end, in the near time of the Son of Perdition. . . . They have no monasteries or churches, no fields, or vines, or beasts, or houses, or lands, or even where they may lay their head. They wear no furs or linen, only woolen gowns with a hood; no head-coverings, or cloaks, or mantles, or any other garments have they. If any one invite them, they eat and drink what is set before them. If any one, in charity, give them anything, they keep nothing of it to the morrow.' To Self-sacrificing love, for Christ, was the sum of their lives, food and shelter their reward. The recluse of the cloister was exchanged for the preacher. As the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. In frocks of serge and girdles of rope, they wandered bare-foot on errands of salvation, fixed themselves in haunts where fever and pestilence festered, in huts of mud and timber mean as the huts around them. the burgher and artisan, who had heard the mass-priest in an unknown tongue, spelling out what instruction they might from gorgeous ritual and graven wall, their preaching, fluent and familiar, was a wonder and a delight. Not deviating from the current faith, they professed rather to teach it in greater purity, while they imputed supineness and debasement to the secular clergy. They addressed the crowd in the public streets, with fervid appeal, rough wit, or telling anecdote, and administered the communion on a portable altar, carrying the multitude by their enthusiasm and novelty. Disinterested sincerity is at all times attractive to the popular heart, and, when associated with the hopes and fears of life, is irresistible. These Methodists started a revolution. There will be another such five hundred years hence. Had they been as faithful to their mission as the Wesleys to theirs, it had the heavens opening upon him as he lies intoxicated, too weak to hold the wine cup he has put to his lips, so dying in his shame: 'What I set before me is to die in a tavern; let there be wine put to my mouth when I am dying, that the choirs of the angels when they come may say, "The grace of God be on this bibber!" Golias' poetry became a fashion, and the earnest man of genius had plenty of co-laborers. We must think of these things if we would understand the deep union that subsists between literature and religion, if we would comprehend the signs of the times and the voices of the future, or interpret the countless crowd of quaint and often beautiful legends which, while they witness to the activity of the time, reveal, better than decrees of councils, what was realized in the imagination or enshrined in the heart. We must think of them, too, if we would understand that grand awakening of reason and conscience which is the Reformation. Every great change has its root in the soul, long preparing, far back in the national soil. Already have we had premonitory throes of the moral earthquake. We shall see the storm gather and pass, once and again, without breaking. The discontent will spread. The welling spring, despite the efforts to repress it, will bubble and leap, till its surplus overflows, bursting asunder its constraint. While men of low birth and low estate are stealing by night along the lanes and alleys of London, carrying some dear treasure of books at the peril of their lives, the finger that crawls around the dial plate will touch the hour, and the mighty fabric of iniquity will be shivered into ruins. But amid the sins and failings of the Church, let us not forget the priceless blessings she bestowed upon mankind. The inundations of barbarian invasion left her a virgin soil, and made her for a long period the chief and indeed the sole centre of civilization, the one mighty witness for light in an age of darkness, for order in an age of lawlessness, for personal holiness in an epoch of licentious rage. She suppressed the bloody and imbruting games of the amphitheatre, discouraged the enslavement of prisoners, redeemed captives from servitude, established slowly the international principle that no Christian prisoners should be reduced to slavery; created a new warrior ideal,-the ideal knight of the Crusades and chivalry, wedding the Christian virtues of humility and tenderness with the natural graces of courtesy and strength, rarely or never perfectly realized, yet the type and model of warlike excellence to which many generations aspired. She imparted a moral dignity to the servile class, by introducing into the ideal type of morals the servile virtues of humility, obedience, gentleness, patience, resignation; and by associating poverty and labor with the monastic life so profoundly revered. When men, awed and attracted by reports of the sanctity and miracles of some illustrious saint, made pilgrimages to behold him, and found him in peasant's garb, with a scythe on his shoulder, sharing and superintending the work of the farm, or sitting in a small attic mending lamps, they could hardly fail to return with an increased sense of the dignity of toil. By inclining the moral type to the servile position, she gave an unexampled impetus to the movement of enfranchisement. The multitude of slaves who embraced the new faith was one of the reproaches of the Pagans. The first and grandest edifice of Byzantine architecture in Italy was dedicated by Justinian to the memory of a martyred slave. Manumission, though not proclaimed a matter of duty or necessity, was always regarded as one of the most acceptable expiations of sin. Clergy and laity freed their slaves as an act of piety. It became customary to do so on occasions of national or personal thanksgiving, on recovery from sickness, on the birth of a child, at the hour of death, in testamentary bequests. In the thirteenth century, when there were no slaves to emancipate in France, caged pigeons were released on ecclesiastical festivals, in memory of the ancient charity, and that prisoners might still be freed in the name of Christ. None of her achievements are more truly great than those she effected in the sphere of charity. For the first time in history, she inspired thousands to devote their entire lives, through sacrifice and danger, to the single object of assuaging the sufferings of humanity. Uniting the idea of supreme goodness with that of active and constant benevolence, she covered the globe with institutions of mercy unknown to pagan Rome and Greece. Through disastrous eclipse and wintry night, we may trace the |