was ferocity--mere coarse, disobedient obstinacy and savagery--as many
do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear, which arises from
the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and
stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly. With
Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than
this mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart
withal, full of pity and love, as, indeed, the truly valiant heart ever
is. The tiger before a _stronger_ foe flies. The tiger is not what we
call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching
than those soft breathings of affection--soft as a child’s or a
mother’s--in this great, wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated
with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance; pure as water welling
from the rock. What, in fact, was all this downpressed mood of despair
and reprobation which we saw in his youth but the outcome of
pre-eminent, thoughtful gentleness, affections too keen and pure? It is
the curse such men as the poor poet Cowper fall into. Luther, to a
slight observer, might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty,
affectionate, shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a
noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into
defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.
In Luther’s “Table-Talk,” a posthumous book of anecdotes and sayings
collected by his friends--the most interesting now of all the books
proceeding from him--we have many beautiful, unconscious displays of the
man and what sort of nature he had. His behavior at the death-bed of his
little daughter--so still, so great and loving--is among the most
affecting things. He is resigned that his little Magdalene should die,
yet longs inexpressibly that she might live--follows, in awe-struck
thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms.
Awestruck--most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere--for, after all
dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know
or can know. His little Magdalene shall be with God, as God wills; for
Luther, too, that is all.
Once he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the castle of Coburg, in the
middle of the night. The great vault of immensity, long flights of
clouds sailing through it--dumb, gaunt, huge--who supports all that?
“None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.” God supports it.
We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we
can not see. Returning home from Leipsic once, he is struck by the
beauty of the harvest-fields. How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on
its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there;
the meek earth, at God’s kind bidding, has produced it once again--the
bread of man! In the garden of Wittenberg, one evening at sunset, a
little bird has perched for the night. That little bird, says Luther;
above it are the stars and deep heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its
little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home. The maker of
it has given it, too, a home! Neither are mirthful turns wanting--there
is a great, free, human heart in this man.
The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness; idiomatic, expressive,
genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels
him to be a great brother man. His love of music, indeed--is not this,
as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild
unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The
devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and
such love of music on the other--I could call these the two opposite
poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had room.
Luther’s face is to me expressive of him. In Kranach’s best portraits I
find the true Luther. A rude plebeian face, with its huge, crag-like
brows and bones--the emblem of rugged energy--at first, almost a
repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild, silent
sorrow; an unnamable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine
affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was
in this Luther, as we said; but tears also were there. Tears also were
appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was sadness,
earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he
expresses himself heartily weary of living. He considers that God alone
can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the
day of judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing--that God
would release him from his labor, and let him depart and be at rest.
They understood little of the man who cite this in discredit of him! I
will call this Luther a true great man; great in intellect, in courage,
affection, and integrity; one of our most lovable and precious men.
Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain; so simple,
honest, spontaneous; not setting up to be great at all; there for quite
another purpose than being great! Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing
far and wide into the heavens; yet, in the clefts of its fountains,
green, beautiful valleys with flowers! A right spiritual hero and
prophet; once more, a true son of nature and fact, for whom these
centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven.
IGNATIUS DE LOYOLA (SAINT), FOUNDER OF THE ORDER OF JESUS.
BY SIR JAMES STEPHEN.
[Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde de Loyola, born in 1491, died in 1556.
The scion of one of the noblest families in Spain, he was courtier
and soldier till he was severely wounded in defending the city of
Pampeluna against the French. A prisoner and a cripple, he became a
religious enthusiast and ascetic, and conceived the idea of forming
a body of religious soldiery for the defense of the Roman hierarchy
against the assaults of its foes. After studying for the priesthood
and taking orders, he went to Rome and with some difficulty
persuaded the pontiff Paul III, who dreaded the fanatical
discipline of such an order as much as he recognized its value, to
issue a bull in sanction of his plan. The Society of Jesus was thus
organized, and soon became, as it has continued to be, the most
powerful bulwark of Romanism, the most active center of aggression
and propagandism. The foundation of this order is recognized by
historians as an epoch in the history of religion.]
Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a
courtier and a cavalier, and, if not a poet, at least a cultivator of
poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the
failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the
prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter’s therapeutic skill was less perfect
than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a
splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and
shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself
literally stretched upon the rack; and expiated by a long confinement to
his couch this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and
sinews. Books of knighthood relieved the lassitude of sickness, and when
these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more
marvelous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier
discovered a new field of
[Illustration: LOYOLA.]
emulation and glory. Compared with their self-conquests and high
rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed
dim. Compared with the peerless damsel for whose smiles Palladius had
fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of female
loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit’s cell and
the path of the way-worn pilgrims!
Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of
the knight of the Virgin Mother beyond the noblest devotion of merely
human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the Church
which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities, and bathe in the
blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of
worldly ambition. Nor were these vows unheeded by her to whom they were
addressed. Environed in light, and clasping her infant to her bosom, she
revealed herself to the adoring gaze of her champion. At that heavenly
vision all fantasies of worldly and sensual delight, like exorcised
demons, fled from his soul into eternal exile. He rose, suspended at her
shrine his secular weapons, performed there his nocturnal devotions, and
with returning day retired to consecrate his future life to the glory of
the _Virgo Deipara_.
To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities; convulsive agonies of
prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments.
Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gabardine with prickly
thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanor of an
idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a
gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil
spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the
storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way.
At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not
to be whelmed beneath the tempest in which so many have sunk, nor was
his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on
the steps of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady,
when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the worshiper.
That ineffable mystery which the author of the Athanasian creed has
labored in vain to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an
object, not of faith, but of actual sight. To his spiritualized sense
was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated,
and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common man to
receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the objects of
immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive
days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while his spirit thus
imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate
language.
Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission not unmeet for
an envoy from the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a
temporary denizen. He returned to earth to establish a theocracy, of
which he should himself be the first administrator, and to which every
tribe and kindred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a
sordid, half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man
distinguished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his designs than by
the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, and
the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. History affords
no more perfect illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the
shrewdness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds of the
heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin reconciling in himself these
antagonist propensities is no monster of the fancy.
Of all the occupations to which man can devote the earlier years of his
life, none probably leaves on the character an impress so deep and
indelible as the profession of arms. In no other calling is the whole
range of our sympathetic affections, whether kindly or the reverse,
called into such habitual and active exercise, nor does any other
stimulate the mere intellectual powers with a force so irresistible
when once they are effectually aroused from their accustomed torpor.
Loyola was a soldier to the last breath he drew, a general whose
authority none might question, a comrade on whose cordiality all might
rely, sustaining all the dangers and hardships he exacted from his
followers, and in his religious campaigns a strategist of consummate
skill and most comprehensive survey. It was his maxim that war ought to
be aggressive, and that even an inadequate force might be wisely
weakened by detachments on a distant service, if the prospect of success
was such that the vague and perhaps exaggerated rumor of it would strike
terror into nearer foes and animate the hopes of irresolute allies. To
conquer Lutheranism by converting to the faith of Rome the barbarous or
half-civilized nations of the earth was, therefore, among the earliest
of his projects.
Though not in books, yet in the far nobler school of active and
especially of military life, Loyola had learned the great secret of
government--at least, of his government. It was that the social
affections, if concentrated within a well-defined circle, possess an
intensity and endurance unrivaled by those passions of which self is the
immediate object. He had the sagacity to perceive that emotions like
those with which a Spartan or a Jew had yearned over the land and the
institutions of their fathers--emotions stronger than appetite, vanity,
ambition, avarice, or death itself--might be kindled in the members of
his order; if he could detect and grasp those mainsprings of human
action of which the Greek and the Hebrew legislators had obtained the
mastery. Nor did he seek them in vain.
Some unconscious love of power, a mind bewildered by many gross
superstitions and theoretical errors, and perhaps some tinge of
insanity, may be ascribed to Ignatius Loyola; but no dispassionate
reader of his writings or of his life will question his integrity, or
deny to him the praise of a devotion at once sincere, habitual, and
profound. It is not to the glory of the reformers to depreciate the name
of their greatest antagonist, or to think meanly of him to whom more
than any other man it is owing that the Reformation was stayed and the
Church of Rome rescued from her impending doom.
From amid the controversies which then agitated the world had emerged
two great truths, of which, after three hundred years’ debate, we are
yet to find the reconcilement. It was true that the Christian
commonwealth should be one consentient body, united under one supreme
head, and bound together a community of law, of doctrine, and of
worship. It was also true that each member of that body must for
himself, on his own responsibility and at his own peril, render that
worship, study that law, and seek the guidance of the Supreme Ruler.
Here was a problem for the learned and wise, for schools, and presses,
and pulpits. But it is not by sages nor in the spirit of philosophy that
such problems receive their practical solution. Wisdom may be the
ultimate arbiter, but it is seldom the immediate agent in human affairs.
It is by antagonist passions, prejudices, and follies that the equipoise
of this most belligerent planet of ours is chiefly preserved, and so it
was in the sixteenth century. The German pointed the way to that sacred
solitude where beside the worshiper himself none may enter; the Spaniard
to that innumerable company which with one accord still chant the
liturgies of remotest generations. Chieftains in the most momentous
warfare of which this earth had been the theatre since the subversion of
paganism, each was a rival worthy of the other in capacity, courage,
disinterestedness, and love of the truth, and yet how marvelous the
contrast!
Unalluring and, on the whole, unlovely as it is, the image of Loyola
must ever command the homage of the world. No other uninspired man,
unaided by military or civil power, and making no appeal to the passions
of the multitude, has had the genius to conceive, the courage to
attempt, and the success to establish a polity teeming with results at
once so momentous and so distinctly foreseen. Amid his ascetic follies
and his half-crazy visions, and despite all the coarse daubing with
which the miracle-mongers of his church have defaced it, his character
is destitute neither of sublimity nor of grace. Men felt that there had
appeared among them one of those monarchs who reign in right of their
own native supremacy, and to whom the feebler will of others must yield
either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was a conviction recorded
by his disciples on his tomb in these memorable and significant words:
“Whoever thou mayst be who hast portrayed to thine own imagination
Pompey nor Cæsar or Alexander, open thine eyes to the truth, and let
this marble teach thee how much greater a conqueror than they was
Ignatius.”
THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public career
as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation
for administrative ability before his patron’s fall. He acquired
the notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal
when all other friends had deserted him. By the king’s favor he
received the highest offices of the state, and was made Prime
Minister, finally becoming earl of Essex. Cromwell was the
political leader of the English Reformation, and the most effective
instrument in concentrating power in the hands of the king. His
impeachment and execution for high treason, however he may have
deserved his fate for his cruelty and unscrupulousness, was gross
ingratitude on the part of Henry.]
The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first instance
of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some time longer it
was to remain the only one. While the great revolution which struck down
the Church was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the
earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal
jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of the Church courts,
even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the clergy,
the nation as a whole had gone with the king. But from the enslavement
of the clergy, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of
the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through
the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the
wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of a whole people.
For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell’s rise and
after his fall from power the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than
the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of
Cromwell’s administration form the one period in our history which
deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It
was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the
king. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with Henry as “one
whose surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as I ever
thought, no less than God.”
But the attitude of Cromwell toward the king was something more than
that of absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was “so
vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons,” adds the primate,
“that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from
the beginning.” Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger,
but tremulously sensitive to the slightest breath of hidden disloyalty.
It was on this inner dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power.
He was hardly secretary before a host of spies were scattered broadcast
over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the
minister. The air was thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and
with the detection and suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold
on the king. And as it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it
was by terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use
the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, “as if a scorpion lay
sleeping under every stone.” The confessional had no secrets for
Cromwell. Men’s talk with their closest friends found its way to his
ear. “Words idly spoken,” the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings
of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his
fall, “tortured into treason.” The only chance of safety lay in silence.
“Friends who used to write and send me presents,” Erasmus tells us, “now
send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this
through fear.”
But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous than
any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England. Not only was
thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal their thoughts on
pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties of treason.
All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as
daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded
into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the
utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If he had
shrunk from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense that they were
the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the
management of judges rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal
will: and where even this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to
bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of
attainder. “He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made,”
was the cry of the council at the moment of his fall, and, by a singular
retribution, the crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even
into the practice of attainder--the condemnation of a man without
hearing his defense--was only practiced on himself.
But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than
the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or
stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were
effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and
the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians,
the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at
the baronage, it was through the Courtenays and the Poles, in whose
veins flowed the blood of kings. If he struck at the New Learning, it
was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal
vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper, indeed, so far as we
can judge from the few stories which lingered among his friends, he was
a generous, kind-hearted man, with pleasant and winning manners which
atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with a constancy of
friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch
either of love or hate swayed him from his course.
The student of Macchiavelli had not studied the “Prince” in vain. He had
reduced bloodshed to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us
with what a business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the
casual “remembrances” of the day. “Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent
down to be tried and executed at Reading.” “Item, to know the king’s
pleasure touching Master More.” “Item, when Master Fisher shall go to
his execution, and the other.” It is indeed this utter absence of all
passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the
most terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is
pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way
through the forest, axe in hand.
His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to
bind England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry
helplessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid
afterward to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression
of his system. “In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that
the king with all his power should not be able to hinder him.” His plans
rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage
of his master. The short-lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in
charges of adultery and treason, and in her death in May, 1536. Her
rival and successor in Henry’s affections, Jane Seymour, died the next
year in childbirth; and Cromwell replaced her with a German consort,
Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He
dared even to resist Henry’s caprice, when the king revolted on their
first interview at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new
bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters “to such a pass” that
it was impossible to recoil from the marriage.