Historians are often blamed for writing as if the History of Kings and
Princes were the whole history of the world. 'Why do you tell us,' is
said, 'of nothing but the marriages, successions, wars, characters, of a
few Royal Races? We want to know what the people, and not the princes,
were like. History ought to be the history of the masses, and not of
kings.'
The only answer to this complaint seems to be, that the defect is
unavoidable. The history of the masses cannot be written, while they
have no history; and none will they have, as long as they remain a mass;
ere their history begins, individuals, few at first, and more and more
numerous as they progress, must rise out of the mass, and become persons,
with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or less different from
their fellows, and thereby leavening and elevating their fellows, that
they too may become persons, and men indeed. Then they will begin to
have a common history, issuing out of each man's struggle to assert his
own personality and his own convictions. Till that point is reached, the
history of the masses will be mere statistic concerning their physical
well-being or ill-being, which (for the early ages of our race) is
unwritten, and therefore undiscoverable.
The early history of the Teutonic race, therefore, is, and must always
remain, simply the history of a few great figures. Of the many of the
masses, nothing is said; because there was nothing to say. They all ate,
drank, married, tilled, fought, and died, not altogether brutally, we
will hope, but still in a dull monotony, unbroken by any struggle of
principles or ideas. We know that large masses of human beings have so
lived in every age, and are living so now--the Tartar hordes, for
instance, or the thriving negroes of central Africa: comfortable folk,
getting a tolerable living, son after father, for many generations, but
certainly not developed enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.
I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very well
off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for themselves.
They lived in a rough way, certainly: but roughness is not discomfort,
where the taste has not been educated. A Red Indian sleeps as well in a
wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish babies thrive as well among
the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet. Man is a very well constructed
being, and can live and multiply anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and
get pure water and enough to eat. Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have
been comfortably off, or they could not have multiplied as they did. Even
though their numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that
howsoever they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other,
they rose again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever. Again and
again you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and
in a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more
numerous and terrible than before. Never believe that a people deprest
by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered Europe in
the face of centuries of destructive war. Those very wars, again, may
have helped in the long run the increase of population, and for a reason
simple enough, though often overlooked. War throws land out of
cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers find the land
fallow, and more or less restored to its original fertility; and so
begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase. In no other way can I
explain the rate at which nations after the most desolating wars spring
up, young and strong again, like the phoenix, from their own funeral
pile. They begin afresh as the tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too
often with the ashes of burnt homesteads, and the blood of the slain.
Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough
education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived,
while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should
say now, was never overstocked. This is the case with our own gipsies,
and with many savage tribes--the Red Indians, for instance--and accounts
for their general healthiness: the unhealthy being all dead, in the first
struggle for existence. But then these gipsies, and the Red Indians, do
not increase in numbers, but the contrary; while our forefathers
increased rapidly. On the other hand, we have, at least throughout the
middle ages, accounts of such swarms of cripples, lepers, deformed, and
other incapable persons, as to make some men believe that there were more
of them, in proportion to the population, than there are now. And it may
have been so. The strongest and healthiest men always going off to be
killed in war, the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so
an unhealthy population might spring up. And again--and this is a
curious fact--as law and order enter a country, so will the proportion of
incapables, in body and mind, increase. In times of war and anarchy,
when every one is shifting for himself, only the strongest and shrewdest
can stand. Woe to those who cannot take care of themselves. The fools
and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are killed, starved, neglected, or in
other ways brought to grief. But when law and order come, they protect
those who cannot protect themselves, and the fools and cowards, the
weakly and sickly, are supported at the public expense, and allowed to
increase and multiply as public burdens. I do not say that this is
wrong, Heaven forbid! I only state the fact. A government is quite
right in defending all alike from the brute competition of nature, whose
motto is--Woe to the weak. To the Church of the middle age is due the
preaching and the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society
is bound to protect the weak. So far the middle age saw: but no further.
For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine, that
it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to cure,
and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by all and
every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.
Science could not do that in the middle age. But if Science could not do
it, Religion would at least try to do the next best thing to it. The
monasteries were the refuges, whither the weak escaped from the
competition of the strong. Thither flocked the poor, the crippled, the
orphan, and the widow, all, in fact, who could not fight for themselves.
There they found something like justice, order, pity, help. Even the
fool and the coward, when they went to the convent-door, were not turned
away. The poor half-witted rascal, who had not sense enough to serve the
king, might still serve the abbot. He would be set to drive, plough, or
hew wood--possibly by the side of a gentleman, a nobleman, or even a
prince--and live under equal law with them; and under, too, a discipline
more strict than that of any modern army; and if he would not hew the
wood, or drive the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him
flogged soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than
wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at last.
The coward, too--the abbot could make him of use, even though the king
could not. There were, no doubt, in those days, though fewer in number
than now, men who could not face physical danger, and the storm of the
evil world,--delicate, nervous, imaginative, feminine characters; who,
when sent out to battle, would be very likely to run away. Our
forefathers, having no use for such persons, used to put such into a bog-
hole, and lay a hurdle over them, in the belief that they would sink to
the lowest pool of Hela for ever more. But the abbot had great use for
such. They could learn to read, write, sing, think; they were often very
clever; they might make great scholars; at all events they might make
saints. Whatever they could not do, they could pray. And the united
prayer of those monks, it was then believed, could take heaven by storm,
alter the course of the elements, overcome Divine justice, avert from
mankind the anger of an offended God. Whether that belief were right or
wrong, people held it; and the man who could not fight with carnal
weapons, regained his self-respect, and therefore his virtue, when he
found himself fighting, as he held, with spiritual weapons against all
the powers of darkness {214}. The first light in which I wish you to
look at the old monasteries, is as defences for the weak against the
strong.
But what has this to do with what I said at first, as to the masses
having no history? This:--that through these monasteries the masses
began first to have a history; because through them they ceased to be
masses, and became first, persons and men, and then, gradually, a people.
That last the monasteries could not make them: but they educated them for
becoming a people; and in this way. They brought out, in each man, the
sense of individual responsibility. They taught him, whether warrior or
cripple, prince or beggar, that he had an immortal soul, for which each
must give like account to God.
Do you not see the effect of that new thought? Treated as slaves, as
things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as things
and animals. And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere heap of
inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in itself as
distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond, uniting each to
all. The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that state, before the
Revolution of 1793. The 'masses' of our agricultural labourers,--the
'masses' of our manufacturing workmen, were fast falling into that state
in the days of our grandfathers. Whether the French masses have risen
out of it, remains to be seen. The English masses, thanks to Almighty
God, have risen out of it; and by the very same factor by which the
middle-age masses rose--by Religion. The great Methodist movement of the
last century did for our masses, what the monks did for our forefathers
in the middle age. Wesley and Whitfield, and many another noble soul,
said to Nailsea colliers, Cornish miners, and all manner of drunken
brutalized fellows, living like the beasts that perish,--'Each of
you--thou--and thou--and thou--stand apart and alone before God. Each
has an immortal soul in him, which will be happy or miserable for ever,
according to the deeds done in the body. A whole eternity of shame or of
glory lies in you--and you are living like a beast.' And in proportion
as each man heard that word, and took it home to himself, he became a new
man, and a true man. The preachers may have mixed up words with their
message with which we may disagree, have appealed to low hopes and fears
which we should be ashamed to bring into our calculations;--so did the
monks: but they got their work done somehow; and let us thank them, and
the old Methodists, and any man who will tell men, in whatever clumsy and
rough fashion, that they are not things, and pieces of a mass, but
persons, with an everlasting duty, an everlasting right and wrong, an
everlasting God in whose presence they stand, and who will judge them
according to their works. True, that is not all that men need to learn.
After they are taught, each apart, that he is a man, they must be taught,
how to be an united people: but the individual teaching must come first;
and before we hastily blame the individualizing tendencies of the old
Evangelical movement, or that of the middle-age monks, let us remember,
that if they had not laid the foundation, others could not build thereon.
Besides, they built themselves, as well as they could, on their own
foundation. As soon as men begin to be really men, the desire of
corporate life springs up in them. They must unite; they must organize
themselves. If they possess duties, they must be duties to their fellow-
men; if they possess virtues and graces, they must mix with their fellow-
men in order to exercise them.
The solitaries of the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild beasts,
or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed themselves into
lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common abbot or father. The
evangelical converts of the last century formed themselves into powerful
and highly organized sects. The middle-age monasteries organized
themselves into highly artificial communities round some sacred spot,
generally under the supposed protection of some saint or martyr, whose
bones lay there. Each method was good, though not the highest. None of
them rises to the idea of a people, having one national life, under one
monarch, the representative to each and all of that national life, and
the dispenser and executor of its laws. Indeed, the artificial
organization, whether monastic or sectarian, may become so strong as to
interfere with national life, and make men forget their real duty to
their king and country, in their self-imposed duty to the sect or order
to which they belong. The monastic organization indeed had to die, in
many countries, in order that national life might develop itself; and the
dissolution of the monasteries marks the birth of an united and powerful
England. They or Britain must have died. An imperium in imperio--much
more many separate imperia--was an element of national weakness, which
might be allowed in times of peace and safety, but not in times of
convulsion and of danger.
You may ask, however, how these monasteries became so powerful, if they
were merely refuges for the weak? Even if they were (and they were) the
homes of an equal justice and order, mercy and beneficence, which had few
or no standing-places outside their walls, still, how, if governed by
weak men, could they survive in the great battle of life? The sheep
would have but a poor life of it, if they set up hurdles against the
wolves, and agreed at all events not to eat each other.
The answer is, that the monasteries were not altogether tenanted by
incapables. The same causes which brought the low-born into the
monasteries, brought the high-born, many of the very highest. The same
cause which brought the weak into the monasteries, brought the strong,
many of the very strongest.
The middle-age records give us a long list of kings, princes, nobles, who
having done (as they held) their work in the world outside, went into
those convents to try their hands at what seemed to them (and often was)
better work than the perpetual coil of war, intrigue, and ambition, which
was not the crime, but the necessary fate, of a ruler in the middle ages.
Tired of work, and tired of life; tired too, of vain luxury and vain
wealth, they fled to the convent, as to the only place where a man could
get a little peace, and think of God, and his own soul; and recollected,
as they worked with their own hands by the side of the lowest-born of
their subjects, that they had a human flesh and blood, a human immortal
soul, like those whom they had ruled. Thank God that the great have
other methods now of learning that great truth; that the work of life, if
but well done, will teach it to them: but those were hard times, and wild
times; and fighting men could hardly learn, save in the convent, that
there was a God above who watched the widows' and the orphans' tears, and
when he made inquisition for blood, forgot not the cause of the poor.
Such men and women of rank brought into the convent, meanwhile, all the
prestige of their rank, all their superior knowledge of the world; and
became the patrons and protectors of the society; while they submitted,
generally with peculiar humility and devotion, to its most severe and
degrading rules. Their higher sensibilities, instead of making them
shrink from hardship, made them strong to endure self-sacrifices, and
often self-tortures, which seem to us all but incredible; and the lives,
or rather living deaths, of the noble and princely penitents of the early
middle age, are among the most beautiful tragedies of humanity.
To these monasteries, too, came the men of the very highest intellect, of
whatsoever class. I say, of the very highest intellect. Tolerably
talented men might find it worth while to stay in the world, and use
their wits in struggling upward there. The most talented of all would be
the very men to see a better 'carriere ouverte aux talens' than the world
could give; to long for deeper and loftier meditation than could be found
in the court; for a more divine life, a more blessed death, than could be
found in the camp and the battle-field.
And so it befals, that in the early middle age the cleverest men were
generally inside the convent, trying, by moral influence and superior
intellect, to keep those outside from tearing each other to pieces.
But these intellects could not remain locked up in the monasteries. The
daily routine of devotion, even of silent study and contemplation, was
not sufficient for them, as it was for the average monk. There was still
a reserve of force in them, which must be up and doing; and which, in a
man inspired by that Spirit which is the Spirit of love to man as well as
to God, must needs expand outwards in all directions, to Christianize, to
civilize, to colonize.
To colonize. When people talk loosely of founding an abbey for
superstitious uses, they cannot surely be aware of the state of the
countries in which those abbeys were founded; either primaeval forest,
hardly-tilled common, or to be described by that terrible epithet of
Domesday-book, 'wasta'--wasted by war. A knowledge of that fact would
lead them to guess that there were almost certainly uses for the abbey
which had nothing to do with superstition; which were as thoroughly
practical as those of a company for draining the bog of Allen, or running
a railroad through an American forest. Such, at least, was the case, at
least for the first seven centuries after the fall of Rome; and to these
missionary colonizers Europe owes, I verily believe, among a hundred
benefits, this which all Englishmen will appreciate; that Roman
agriculture not only revived in the countries which were once the Empire,
but spread from thence eastward and northward, into the principal
wilderness of the Teuton and Sclavonic races.
I cannot, I think, shew you better what manner of men these
monk-colonizers were, and what sort of work they did, than by giving you
the biography of one of them; and out of many I have chosen that of St.
Sturmi, founder whilome of the great abbey of Fulda, which lies on the
central watershed of Germany, about equidistant, to speak roughly, from
Frankfort, Cassel, Gotha, and Coburg.
His life is matter of history, written by one Eigils (sainted like
himself), who was his disciple and his friend. Naturally told it is, and
lovingly; but if I recollect right, without a single miracle or myth; the
living contemporaneous picture of such a man, living in such a state of
society, as we shall never (and happily need never) see again, but which
is for that very reason worthy to be preserved, for a token that wisdom
is justified of all her children.
It stands at length in Pertz's admirable 'Monumenta Historica,' among
many another like biography, and if I tell it here somewhat at length,
readers must forgive me.
Every one has heard of little king Pepin, and many may have heard also
how he was a mighty man of valour, and cut off a lion's head at one blow;
and how he was a crafty statesman, and first consolidated the temporal
power of the Popes, and helped them in that detestable crime of
overthrowing the noble Lombard kingdom, which cost Italy centuries of
slavery and shame, and which has to be expiated even yet, it would seem,
by some fearful punishment.
But every one may not know that Pepin had great excuses--if not for
helping to destroy the Lombards--yet still for supporting the power of
the Popes. It seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only practical
method of uniting the German tribes into one common people, and stopping
the internecine wars by which they were tearing themselves to pieces. It
seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only practical method for
civilizing and Christianizing the still wild tribes, Frisians, Saxons,
and Sclaves, who pressed upon the German marches, from the mouth of the
Elbe to the very Alps. Be that as it may, he began the work; and his son
Charlemagne finished it; somewhat well, and again somewhat ill--as most
work, alas! is done on earth. Now in the days of little king Pepin there
was a nobleman of Bavaria, and his wife, who had a son called Sturmi; and
they brought him to St. Boniface, that he might make him a priest. And
the child loved St. Boniface's noble English face, and went with him
willingly, and was to him as a son. And who was St. Boniface? That is a
long story. Suffice it that he was a man of Devon, brought up in a
cloister at Exeter; and that he had crossed over into Frankenland, upon
the lower Rhine, and become a missionary of the widest and loftiest aims;
not merely a preacher and winner of souls, though that, it is said, in
perfection; but a civilizer, a colonizer, a statesman. He, and many
another noble Englishman and Scot (whether Irish or Caledonian) were
working under the Frank kings to convert the heathens of the marches, and
carry the Cross into the far East. They led lives of poverty and danger;
they were martyred, half of them, as St. Boniface was at last. But they
did their work; and doubtless they have their reward. They did their
best, according to their light. God grant that we, to whom so much more
light has been given, may do our best likewise. Under this great genius
was young Sturmi trained. Trained (as was perhaps needed for those who
had to do such work in such a time) to have neither wife, nor child, nor
home, nor penny in his purse; but to do all that he was bid, learn all
that he could, and work for his living with his own hands; a life of
bitter self-sacrifice. Such a life is not needed now. Possibly,
nevertheless, it was needed then.
So St. Boniface took Sturmi about with him in his travels, and at last
handed him over to Wigbert, the priest, to prepare him for the ministry.
'Under whom,' says his old chronicler, 'the boy began to know the Psalms
thoroughly by heart; to understand the Holy Scriptures of Christ with
spiritual sense; took care to learn most studiously the mysteries of the
four Gospels, and to bury in his heart, by assiduous reading, the
treasures of the Old and New Testament. For his meditation was in the
Law of the Lord day and night; profound in understanding, shrewd of
thought, prudent of speech, fair of face, sober of carriage, honourable
in morals, spotless in life, by sweetness, humility, and alacrity, he
drew to him the love of all.'
He grew to be a man; and in due time he was ordained priest, 'by the will
and consent of all;' and he 'began to preach the words of Christ
earnestly to the people;' and his preaching wrought wonders among them.
Three years he preached in his Rhineland parish, winning love from all.
But in the third year 'a heavenly thought' came into his mind that he
would turn hermit and dwell in the wild forest. And why? Who can tell?
He may, likely enough, have found celibacy a fearful temptation for a
young and eloquent man, and longed to flee from the sight of that which
must not be his. And that, in his circumstances, was not a foolish wish.
He may have wished to escape, if but once, from the noise and crowd of
outward things, and be alone with God and Christ, and his own soul. And
that was not a foolish wish. John Bunyan so longed, and found what he
wanted in Bedford Jail, and set it down and printed it in a Pilgrim's
Progress, which will live as long as man is man. George Fox longed for
it, and made himself clothes of leather which would not wear out, and
lived in a hollow tree, till he, too, set down the fruit of his solitude
in a diary which will live likewise as long as man is man. Perhaps,
again, young Sturmi longed to try for once in a way what he was worth
upon God's earth; how much he could endure; what power he had of helping
himself, what courage to live by his own wits, and God's mercy, on roots
and fruits, as wild things live. And surely that was not altogether a
foolish wish. At least, he longed to be a hermit; but he kept his
longing to himself, however, till St. Boniface, his bishop, appeared; and
then he told him all his heart.
And St. Boniface said: 'Go; in the name of God;' and gave him two
comrades, and sent him into 'the wilderness which is called Buchonia, the
Beech Forest, to find a place fit for the servants of the Lord to dwell
in. For the Lord is able to provide his people a home in the desert.'
So those three went into the wild forest. And 'for three days they saw
nought but earth and sky and mighty trees. And they went on, praying
Christ that He would guide their feet into the way of peace. And on the
third day they came to the place which is called Hersfelt (the hart's
down?), and searched it round, and prayed that Christ would bless the
place for them to dwell in; and then they built themselves little huts of
beech-bark, and abode there many days, serving God with holy fastings,
and watchings, and prayers.'
Is it not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see
now;--so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet it
may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim ages,
like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry. But
the old monster was good in his place and time. God made him and had
need of him. It may be that God made those three poor monks, and had
need of them likewise.
As for their purposes being superstitious, we shall be better able to
judge of that when we have seen what they were--what sort of a house they
meant to build to God. As for their having self-interest in view, no
doubt they thought that they should benefit their own souls in this life,
and in the life to come. But one would hardly blame them for that,
surely?
One would not blame them as selfish and sordid if they had gone out on a
commercial speculation? Why, then, if on a religious one? The merchant
adventurer is often a noble type of man, and one to whom the world owes
much, though his hands are not always clean, nor his eye single. The
monk adventurer of the middle age is, perhaps, a still nobler type of
man, and one to whom the world owes more, though his eye, too, was not
always single, nor his hands clean.
As for selfishness, one must really bear in mind that men who walked away
into that doleful 'urwarld' had need to pray very literally 'that Christ
would guide their feet into the way of peace;' and must have cared as
much for their wordly interests as those who march up to the cannon's
mouth. Their lives in that forest were not worth twenty-four hours'
purchase, and they knew it. It is an ugly thing for an unarmed man,
without a compass, to traverse the bush of Australia or New Zealand,
where there are no wild beasts. But it was uglier still to start out
under the dark roof of that primaeval wood. Knights, when they rode it,
went armed cap-a-pie, like Sintram through the dark valley, trusting in
God and their good sword. Chapmen and merchants stole through it by a
few tracks in great companies, armed with bill and bow. Peasants
ventured into it a few miles, to cut timber, and find pannage for their
swine, and whispered wild legends of the ugly things therein--and
sometimes, too, never came home. Away it stretched from the fair
Rhineland, wave after wave of oak and alder, beech and pine, God alone
knew how far, into the land of night and wonder, and the infinite
unknown; full of elk and bison, bear and wolf, lynx and glutton, and
perhaps of worse beasts still. Worse beasts, certainly, Sturmi and his
comrades would have met, if they had met them in human form. For there
were waifs and strays of barbarism there, uglier far than any waif and
stray of civilization, border ruffian of the far west, buccaneer of the
Tropic keys, Cimaroon of the Panama forests; men verbiesterte, turned
into the likeness of beasts, wildfanger, huner, ogres, wehr-wolves,
strong thieves and outlaws, many of them possibly mere brutal maniacs;
naked, living in caves and coverts, knowing no law but their own hunger,
rage, and lust; feeding often on human flesh; and woe to the woman or
child or unarmed man who fell into their ruthless clutch. Orson, and
such like human brutes of the wilderness, serve now to amuse children in
fairy tales; they were then ugly facts of flesh and blood. There were
heathens there, too, in small colonies: heathen Saxons, cruelest of all
the tribes; who worshipped at the Irmensul, and had an old blood-feud
against the Franks; heathen Thuringer, who had murdered St. Kilian the
Irishman at Wurzburg; heathen Slaves, of different tribes, who had
introduced into Europe the custom of impaling their captives: and woe to
the Christian priest who fell into any of their hands. To be knocked on
the head before some ugly idol was the gentlest death which they were
like to have. They would have called that martyrdom, and the gate of
eternal bliss; but they were none the less brave men for going out to
face it.
And beside all these, and worse than all these, there were the terrors of
the unseen world; very real in those poor monks' eyes, though not in
ours. There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in the caves, and
Tannhauser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the Christian man, and
would lure him to his death. There were fair swan-maidens and
elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias the dancer, with all
their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to sin, and having made him
sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in hell. There was Satan and
all the devils, too, plotting to stop the Christian man from building the
house of the Lord, and preaching the gospel to the heathen; ready to call
up storms, and floods, and forest fires; to hurl the crag down from the
cliffs, or drop the rotting tree on their defenceless heads--all real and
terrible in those poor monks' eyes, as they walked on, singing their
psalms, and reading their Gospels, and praying to God to save them, for
they could not save themselves; and to guide them, for they knew not,
like Abraham, whither they went; and to show them the place where they
should build the house of the Lord, and preach righteousness, peace, and
joy in the Holy Spirit to the heathen round. We talk still, thank
heaven, of heroes, and understand what that great word should mean. But
were not these poor monks heroes? Knights-errant of God, doing his work
as they best knew how. We have a purer gospel than they: we understand
our Bibles better. But if they had not done what they did, where would
have been now our gospel, and our Bible? We cannot tell. It was a wise
old saw of our forefathers--'Do not speak ill of the bridge which carries
you over.'
If Sturmi had had a 'holy longing' to get into the wild wood, now he had
a 'holy longing' to go back; and to find St. Boniface, and tell him what
a pleasant place Hersfelt was, and the quality of the soil, and the
direction of the watershed, and the meadows, and springs, and so forth,
in a very practical way. And St. Boniface answered, that the place
seemed good enough; but that he was afraid for them, on account of the
savage heathen Saxons. They must go deeper into the forest, and then
they would be safe. So he went back to his fellow-hermits, and they made
to themselves a canoe; and went paddling up and down the Fulda stream,
beneath the alder boughs, 'trying the mouths of the mountain-streams, and
landing to survey the hills and ridges,'--pioneers of civilization none
the less because they pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and
heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed
St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called
Ruohen-bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not.
So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray once more.
St. Boniface sent for Sturmi after awhile, probably to Maintz, to ask of
his success; and Sturmi threw himself on his face before him; and
Boniface raised him up, and kissed him, and made him sit by his
side--which was a mighty honour; for St. Boniface, the penniless monk,
was at that moment one of the most powerful men of Europe; and he gave
Sturmi a good dinner, of which, no doubt, he stood in need; and bade him
keep up heart, and seek again for the place which God had surely
prepared, and would reveal in His good time.
And this time Sturmi, probably wiser from experience, determined to go
alone; but not on foot. So he took to him a trusty ass, and as much food
as he could pack on it; and, axe in hand, rode away into the wild wood,
singing his psalms. And every night, before he lay down to sleep, he cut
boughs, and stuck them up for a ring fence round him and the ass, to the
discomfiture of the wolves, which had, and have still, a great hankering
after asses' flesh. It is a quaint picture, no doubt; but let us respect
it, while we smile at it; if we, too, be brave men.
Then one day he fell into a great peril. He came to the old road (a
Roman one, I presume; for the Teutons, whether in England or elsewhere,
never dreamed of making roads till three hundred years ago, but used the
old Roman ones), which led out of the Thuringen land to Maintz. And at
the ford over the Fulda he met a great multitude bathing, of Sclavonian
heathens, going to the fair at Maintz. And they smelt so strong, the
foul miscreants, that Sturmi's donkey backed, and refused to face them;
and Sturmi himself was much of the donkey's mind, for they began to mock
him (possibly he nearly went over the donkey's head), and went about to
hurt him.
'But,' says the chronicler, 'the power of the Lord held them back.'
Then he went on, right thankful at having escaped with his life, up and
down, round and round, exploring and surveying--for what purpose we shall
see hereafter. And at last he lost himself in the place which is called
Aihen-loh, 'the glade of oaks;' and at night-fall he heard the plash of
water, and knew not whether man or wild beast made it. And not daring to
call out, he tapped a tree-trunk with his axe (some backwoodsman's sign
of those days, we may presume), and he was answered. And a forester came
to him, leading his lord's horse; a man from the Wetterau, who knew the
woods far and wide, and told him all that he wanted to know. And they
slept side by side that night; and in the morning they blest each other,
and each went his way.
Yes, there were not merely kings and wars, popes and councils, in those
old days;--there were real human beings, just such as we might meet by
the wayside any hour, with human hearts and histories within them. And
we will be thankful if but one of them, now and then, starts up out of
the darkness of twelve hundred years, like that good forester, and looks
at us with human eyes, and goes his way again, blessing, and not unblest.
And now Sturmi knew all that he needed to know; and after awhile,
following the counsel of the forester, he came to 'the blessed place,
long ago prepared of the Lord. And when he saw it, he was filled with
immense joy, and went on exulting; for he felt that by the merits and
prayers of the holy Bishop Boniface that place had been revealed to him.
And he went about it, and about it, half the day; and the more he looked
on it the more he gave God thanks;' and those who know Fulda say, that
Sturmi had reason to give God thanks, and must have had a keen eye,
moreover, for that which man needs for wealth and prosperity, in soil and
water, meadow and wood. So he blessed the place, and signed it with the
sign of the Cross (in token that it belonged thenceforth neither to
devils nor fairies, but to his rightful Lord and Maker), and went back to
his cell, and thence a weary journey to St. Boniface, to tell him of the
fair place which he had found at last.
And St. Boniface went his weary way, either to Paris or to Aix, to Pepin
and Carloman, kings of the Franks; and begged of them a grant of the
Aihen-loh, and all the land for four miles round, and had it. And the
nobles about gave up to him their rights of venison, and vert, and
pasture, and pannage of swine; and Sturmi and seven brethren set out
thither, 'in the year of our Lord 744, in the first month (April,
presumably), in the twelfth day of the month, unto the place prepared of
the Lord,' that they might do what?
That they might build an abbey. Yes; but the question is, what building
an abbey meant, not three hundred, nor five hundred, but eleven hundred
years ago--for centuries are long matters, and men and their works change
in them.
And then it meant this: Clearing the back woods for a Christian
settlement; an industrial colony, in which every man was expected to
spend his life in doing good--all and every good which he could for his
fellow-men. Whatever talent he had he threw into the common stock; and
worked, as he was found fit to work, at farming, gardening, carpentering,
writing, doctoring, teaching in the schools, or preaching to the heathen
round. In their common church they met to worship God; but also to ask
for grace and strength to do their work, as Christianizers and civilizers
of mankind. What Christianity and civilization they knew (and they knew
more than we are apt now to believe) they taught it freely; and therefore
they were loved, and looked up to as superior beings, as modern
missionaries, wherever they do their work even decently well, are looked
up to now.
So because the work could be done in that way, and (as far as men then,
or now, can see) in no other way, Pepin and Carloman gave Boniface the
glade of oaks, that they might clear the virgin forest, and extend
cultivation, and win fresh souls to Christ, instead of fighting, like the
kings of this world, for the land which was already cleared, and the
people who were already Christian.
In two months' time they had cut down much of the forest; and then came
St. Boniface himself to see them, and with him a great company of
workmen, and chose a place for a church. And St. Boniface went up to the
hill which is yet called Bishop's Mount, that he might read his Bible in
peace, away from kings and courts, and the noise of the wicked world; and
his workmen felled trees innumerable, and dug peat to burn lime withal;
and then all went back again, and left the settlers to thrive and work.
And thrive and work they did, clearing more land, building their church,
ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more heathen converts,
more and more heathen school-children; and St. Boniface came to see them
from time to time, whenever he could get a holiday, and spent happy days
in prayer and study, with his pupil and friend. And ten years after,
when St. Boniface was martyred at last by the Friesland heathens, and
died, as he had lived, like an apostle of God, then all the folk of
Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home to their town, because he had been
Archbishop there. But he 'appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and
said: "Why delay ye to take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the
wilderness which God bath prepared for me?"'
So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,--unless the French Republican armies dug
up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier things, to the
winds of heaven. And all men came to worship at his tomb, after the
fashion of those days. And Fulda became a noble abbey, with its
dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads, almshouses, and all
the appanages of such a place, in the days when monks were monks indeed.
And Sturmi became a great man, and went through many troubles and
slanders, and conquered in them all, because there was no fault found in
him, as in Daniel of old; and died in a good old age, bewept by
thousands, who, but for him, would have been heathens still. And the
Aihen-loh became rich corn-land and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough
and a principality, where men lived in peace under mild rule, while the
feudal princes quarrelled and fought outside; and a great literary
centre, whose old records are now precious to the diggers among the bones
of bygone times; and at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so
developed themselves, that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which
I have seen is this, bearing date about 1710:--
'The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda,
Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and
Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.' Developed, certainly: and
not altogether in the right direction. For instead of the small beer,
which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the world,
the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best table too.
Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the Aihen-lob, and
planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make St. Sturmi hope
that he had not read his Bible altogether in vain.
Surely such men as St. Sturmi were children of wisdom, put what sense on
the word you will. In a dark, confused, lawless, cut-throat age, while
everything was decided by the sword, they found that they could do no
good to themselves, or any man, by throwing their swords into either
scale. They would be men of peace, and see what could be done so. Was
that not wise? So they set to work. They feared God exceedingly, and
walked with God. Was not that wise? They wrought righteousness, and
were merciful and kind, while kings and nobles were murdering around
them; pure and temperate, while other men were lustful and drunken; just
and equal in all their ways, while other men were unjust and capricious;
serving God faithfully, according to their light, while the people round
them were half or wholly heathen; content to do their work well on earth,
and look for their reward in heaven, while the kings and nobles, the
holders of the land, were full of insane ambition, every man trying to
seize a scrap of ground from his neighbour, as if that would make them
happier. Was that not wise? Which was the wiser, the chief killing
human beings, to take from them some few square miles which men had
brought into cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated
land, and going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the
virgin soil? Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again? And do not
tell me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious
ends. It is not so. I know well his fanaticism and his superstition,
and the depths of its ignorance and silliness: but he had more in him
than that. Had he not, he would have worked no lasting work. He was not
only the pioneer of civilization, but he knew that he was such. He
believed that all knowledge came from God, even that which taught a man
to clear the forest, and plant corn instead; and he determined to spread
such knowledge as he had wherever he could. He was a wiser man than the
heathen Saxons, even than the Christian Franks, around him; a better
scholar, a better thinker, better handicraftsman, better farmer; and he
did not keep his knowledge to himself. He did not, as some tell you,
keep the Bible to himself. It is not so; and those who say so, in this
generation, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The monk knew his Bible
well himself, and he taught it. Those who learnt from him to read,
learnt to read their Bibles. Those who did not learn (of course the vast
majority, in days when there was no printing), he taught by sermons, by
pictures, afterward by mystery and miracle plays. The Bible was not
forbidden to the laity till centuries afterwards--and forbidden then,
why? Because the laity throughout Europe knew too much about the Bible,
and not too little. Because the early monks had so ingrained the mind of
the masses, throughout Christendom, with Bible stories, Bible personages,
the great facts, and the great doctrines, of our Lord's life, that the
masses knew too much; that they could contrast too easily, and too
freely, the fallen and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries,
with those Bible examples, which the old monks of centuries before had
taught their forefathers. Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity,
because it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries
before they had taught them to love and know too well. In a word, the
old monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as
our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and looked on
as a superior being, as they are.
Of course he did not know how far civilization would extend. He could
not foretell railroads and electric telegraphs, any more than he could
political economy, or sanitary science. But the best that he knew, he
taught--and did also, working with his own hands. He was faithful in a
few things, and God made him ruler over many things. For out of those
monasteries sprang--what did not spring? They restored again and again
sound law and just government, when the good old Teutonic laws, and the
Roman law also, was trampled underfoot amid the lawless strife of
ambition and fury. Under their shadow sprang up the towns with their
corporate rights, their middle classes, their artizan classes. They were
the physicians, the alms-givers, the relieving officers, the
schoolmasters of the middle-age world. They first taught us the great
principle of the division of labour, to which we owe, at this moment,
that England is what she is, instead of being covered with a horde of
peasants, each making and producing everything for himself, and starving
each upon his rood of ground. They transcribed or composed all the books
of the then world; many of them spent their lives in doing nothing but
writing; and the number of books, even of those to be found in single
monasteries, considering the tedious labour of copying, is altogether
astonishing. They preserved to us the treasures of classical antiquity.
They discovered for us the germs of all our modern inventions. They
brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and while they taught men
to know that they had a common humanity, a common Father in heaven taught
them also to profit by each other's wisdom instead of remaining in
isolated ignorance. They, too, were the great witnesses against feudal
caste. With them was neither high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor:
worth was their only test; the meanest serf entering there might become
the lord of knights and vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men
may talk of democracy--those old monasteries were the most democratic
institutions the world had ever till then seen. 'A man's a man for a'
that,' was not only talked of in them, but carried out in practice--only
not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness: but under those
safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military order, without which
men may call themselves free, and yet be really only slaves to their own
passions. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, in those monasteries was
preserved the sacred fire of modern liberty, through those feudal
centuries when all the outside world was doing its best to trample it
out. Remember, as a single instance, that in the Abbot's lodging at Bury
St. Edmunds, the Magna Charta was drawn out, before being presented to
John at Runymede. I know what they became afterwards, better than most
do here; too well to defile my lips, or your ears, with tales too true.
They had done their work, and they went. Like all things born in time,
they died; and decayed in time; and the old order changed, giving place
to the new; and God fulfilled himself in many ways. But in them, too, he
fulfilled himself. They were the best things the world had seen; the
only method of Christianizing and civilizing semi-barbarous Europe. Like
all human plans and conceptions, they contained in themselves original
sin; idolatry, celibacy, inhuman fanaticism; these were their three roots
of bitterness; and when they bore the natural fruit of immorality, the
monasteries fell with a great and just destruction. But had not those
monasteries been good at first, and noble at first; had not the men in
them been better and more useful men than the men outside, do you think
they would have endured for centuries? They would not even have
established themselves at all. They would soon, in those stormy times,
have been swept off the face of the earth. Ill used they often were,
plundered and burnt down. But men found that they were good. Their own
plunderers found that they could not do without them; and repented, and
humbled themselves, and built them up again, to be centres of justice and
mercy and peace, amid the wild weltering sea of war and misery. For all
things endure, even for a generation, only by virtue of the good which is
in them. By the Spirit of God in them they live, as do all created
things; and when he taketh away their breath they die, and return again
to their dust.
And what was the original sin of them? We can hardly say that it was
their superstitious and partially false creed: because that they held in
common with all Europe. It was rather that they had identified
themselves with, and tried to realize on earth, one of the worst
falsehoods of that creed--celibacy. Not being founded on the true and
only ground of all society, family life, they were merely artificial and
self-willed arrangements of man's invention, which could not develop to
any higher form. And when the sanctity of marriage was revindicated at
the Reformation, the monasteries, having identified themselves with
celibacy, naturally fell. They could not partake in the Reformation
movement, and rise with it into some higher form of life, as the laity
outside did. I say, they were altogether artificial things. The Abbot
might be called the Abba, Father, of his monks: but he was not their
father--just as when young ladies now play at being nuns, they call their
superior, Mother: but all the calling in the world will not make that
sacred name a fact and a reality, as they too often find out.
And celibacy brought serious evils from the first. It induced an
excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the best
men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous, visionary; at
best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and in raptures. You
never get in their writings anything of that manly calmness, which we so
deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for ourselves. They are
bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking virulence for strength, putting
us in mind for ever of the allocutions of the Popes. Read the writings
of one of the best of monks, and of men, who ever lived, the great St.
Bernard, and you will be painfully struck by this hysterical element. The
fact is, that their rule of life, from the earliest to the latest,--from
that of St. Benedict of Casino, 'father of all monks,' to that of Loyola
the Jesuit, was pitched not too low, but too high. It was an ideal
which, for good or for evil, could only be carried out by new converts,
by people in a state of high religious excitement, and therefore the
history of the monastic orders is just that of the protestant sects. We
hear of continual fallings off from their first purity; of continual
excitements, revivals, and startings of new orders, which hoped to
realize the perfection which the old orders could not. You must bear
this in mind, as you read mediaeval history. You will be puzzled to know
why continual new rules and new orders sprung up. They were so many
revivals, so many purist attempts at new sects. You will see this very
clearly in the three great revivals which exercised such enormous
influence on the history of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,--I
mean the rise first of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the
Jesuits, and lastly of the Port Royalists. They each professed to
restore monachism to what it had been at first; to realize the unnatural
and impossible ideal.
Another serious fault of these monasteries may be traced to their
artificial celibate system. I mean their avarice. Only one generation
after St. Sturmi, Charlemagne had to make indignant laws against Abbots
who tried to get into their hands the property of everybody around them:
but in vain. The Abbots became more and more the great landholders, till
their power was intolerable. The reasons are simple enough. An abbey
had no children between whom to divide its wealth, and therefore more
land was always flowing in and concentrating, and never breaking up
again; while almost every Abbot left his personalities, all his private
savings and purchases, to his successor.
Then again, in an unhappy hour, they discovered that the easiest way of
getting rich was by persuading sinners, and weak persons, to secure the
safety of their souls by leaving land to the Church, in return for the
prayers and masses of monks; and that shameful mine of wealth was worked
by them for centuries, in spite of statutes of mortmain, and other checks
which the civil power laid on them, very often by most detestable means.
One is shocked to find good men lending themselves to such base tricks:
but we must recollect, that there has always been among men a public and
a private conscience, and that these two, alas! have generally been very
different. It is an old saying, that 'committees have no consciences;'
and it is too true. A body of men acting in concert for a public purpose
will do things which they would shrink from with disgust, if the same
trick would merely put money into their private purses; and this is too
often the case when the public object is a good one. Then the end seems
to sanctify the means, to almost any amount of chicanery.
So it was with those old monks. An abbey had no conscience. An order of
monks had no conscience. A Benedictine, a Dominican, a Franciscan, who
had not himself a penny in the world, and never intended to have one,
would play tricks, lie, cheat, slander, forge, for the honour and the
wealth of his order; when for himself, and in himself, he may have been
an honest God-fearing man enough. So it was; one more ugly fruit of an
unnatural attempt to be not good men, but something more than men; by
trying to be more than men, they ended by being less than men. That was
their sin, and that sin, when it had conceived, brought forth death.