Samuel Willoughby Duffield

“ Nothing is thine which thy spirit may lose again—
What this world gave it intendeth to choose again;
Lift up thy thought where the heart hath its treasure-house—
Happy art thou to despise this Earth’s pleasure-house!
We are not to imagine that these stirring verses, whether in Latin or in Italian, went unnoticed. In the various productions of his muse the humble monk enjoyed a popularity like that of Abelard. Numerous manuscripts of his writings were scattered through Italy, France, and Spain, and translations in these different languages helped to increase his fame. ”

“ But neither is there any condescension to beauty in form or color. Everything betokens a rude, uncultivated simplicity—a piety which contented itself with the barest and meagerest representations. It rose high enough to portray the face of Christ, in the ancient cemetery of Domitilla, and in one carving on a sarcophagus of the fourth century. And, remembering how repugnant anything heathenish was to the souls of those who associated pipe and tabret and harp with the bloody arena and the wild revelry of Rome, can we doubt why they mingled only their unassisted voices in these chants of praise? ”

“ To one who is acquainted with the Greek hymns it is instantly suggestive of those pellucid songs—its atmosphere is all peace and its trust is as restful to the tired spirit as the quiet coming of the rising day. It may easily have been a translation from the Greek, or, even more easily, the natural up-gush of melody which was touched into life by the frequent hearing of the Eastern hymns. Hilary never learned it in an Arian church, nor did he find it among controversialists. ”

“ The school at Paris, unlike that at Koeln, being a branch of the university, its lectures were open to all comers, and the renown of the Italian who had been more than a match for the ablest of the secular doctors would draw hearers. And those who came once, if they had any love for the play of pure intelligence and the fearless handling of great questions, would come again. Thomas, with all his orthodoxy, was a pretty thorough rationalist. He had full faith in the capacity of the human understanding to deal fruitfully and safely with the deepest mysteries. ”

“ Bernard must decide between rival popes, and cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade. ”

“ And a man who had resolutely sounded this deepest abyss of self-abandonment was marked for the highest honor that the new society could bestow. We cannot doubt Xavier’s sincerity, but the gigantic horror of this performance is of a sort to place the man who has achieved it upon an eminence apart from less daring minds. It was Loyola’s way of facing human nature and forcing it to concede the supreme self-devotion of his followers. The world looks with amazement upon such actions, but when it sees them, it yields a kind of stupefied allegiance to those who have thus rushed beyond the bounds. ”

“ All, then, that is left us is the Lucis largitor splendide—“Thou splendid giver of the light.” The letter went back from Seleucia to Poitiers and carried this hymn, at least, with it. Hilary had sent this and its companion, ut memor mei semper sis—“that you may always remember me.” And we may fancy the lovely high-born daughter of that earnest and scholarly man as, daily and nightly, she sits at her window—perchance with her gaze wistfully turned to the eastward. There she sang these simple, beautiful hymns—she the first singer of the new hymns of the Latin Church. ”

“ The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new. ”

“ It would be a grievous injustice to a good man if Damiani should only bear with us the character of an ardent zealot and not of a Christian poet. In this last guise he is at his best. Doubtless he often offends by his Mariolatry, but he will as often charm by the music of his verse. He may serve also as a convenient example of this worship of Mary, for in one of his prayers he has given us the pith and core of that peculiar devotion. ”

“ We may from evil cease.
Through thee may we the Father know,
And thus confess the Son;
For thee (from both the Holy Ghost) ,
We praise while time shall run.
Rabanus Maurus, teacher and Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence (Mainz) , was commonly called the “foremost German of his time.” Though the centuries have somewhat obscured the lustre of his renown, they have not deprived him of his place in history, nor have they dissociated his name from that of his instructor, prototype, and model, the great pedagogue Alcuin.
Of the birthplace of Rabanus we have no certain knowledge. ”

“ In those days not to be a warrior was to be—almost of compulsion—a monk. But Abelard’s independence forbade the second as his disputatious spirit had forbidden the first. He would neither risk his neck in the wars nor his opinions in the cloister. Instead of these he preferred the irregular combats of the scholar, and Bayle—with a touch of poetry—beholds him as he comes shining out of Brittany “darting syllogisms on every side.” ”

“ As for those who are not, and who are the gluttons of the Roman curia, or who have no wisdom, it is enough for them to stand like dragons close by the sacred ark, or to drift about like the clouds, to live like idle bellies, given over to the pursuit of sleep, good living, sensual pleasures, and to gather up the money by which they make themselves hucksters in religion and plunderers of the Christian people and practice their deceits upon both gods and men equally, until the vine of the Lord degenerates into a wild plant. ”

“ The mission of Augustine led to far-reaching consequences. One was that the higher classes of Great Britain turned toward Rome as the centre of the world, and one of the remoter consequences of this missionary expedition was the recognition of the papal supremacy. But in his highest flight of authority Gregory the First never assumed nor felt the consciousness of power which caused Gregory the Second to write to Leo, the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed upon our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth.” ”

“ Mary and the saints are the favorite themes; and those two great repositories of perverted praise, the second and third volumes of Mone’s collection, bear emphatic witness to the extent to which the hierarchy of saints and angels had come to eclipse the splendors of the White Throne and even of the Cross. There is not a single hymn of the highest rank which we can ascribe to these centuries of decay, when the 385 Middle Ages were passing to their death, to make way for the New Learning and the Reformation. ”

“ Like these gems, also, they are notable for varieties of crystallization—the Dark Ages showing imperfect angles and crude attempts, and the Renaissance exhibiting again the old sharp-cut classicism of a time anterior even to Hilary and Ambrose.
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From the higher critical standpoint, then, these hymns are not unacceptable as Xavier’s own work. They feel as if they belonged to his age and to his life. They are transfused and shot through by a personal sense of absorption into the divine love, which has fused and crystallized them in its fiercest heat. ”

“ It is that of a man in the prime and pride of life—lofty in stature, handsome in face, captivating in address. He is already a tried debater and an unsurpassed logician. He has Aristotle at the tip of his tongue; he has read much and thought a little, and his ambition is great.
Such a man came one day into the lecture hall of William of Champeaux at Paris. It was in the early part of the twelfth century, and William was the most celebrated teacher of the period, his “doctrine of universals” being accepted almost as though it were inspired. ”

“ This was the power of Loyola—a power which sprang, first of all, from his peculiar constitution, and, second, from his fanatical ambition. It has been the key by which the Jesuit has ever since unlocked the doors of palaces and contrived to whisper in the ears of kings. Its extent has been that of the civilized and uncivilized world. In the matter of organization no human fraternity has ever equalled the Society of Jesus. The germs which we behold at Ste. Barbe in Paris have grown into a tree whose roots have taken hold on every soil, and whose fruit has dropped in every clime. ”

“ This day is illustrious to the Lord; peace is on the earth, lightning to the shades below and light to the saints above; the day of the double baptism of law and gospel.
Christ is the passover to man; while the old passes the new arises; rejoice my heart, freed from ferment, full of the bread unleavened.
Since the enemy are overwhelmed, with stained door-posts eat the sacrifice on the paschal night, at home, with the bitter herb of the field,
Let your loins be girt and your shoes bound on, have the staff in the hand, and eat the head with the legs and the purtenance thereof. ”

“ How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! ”

“ But when we imagine the good monk watching the workmen from the brink of the Goldach, which hurries down through St. Gall toward the Boden-See, we can bring to mind the whole picture. The present bridge is one hundred and sixteen feet long and fully one hundred in height from the swift little stream. It is of wood, and was constructed in 1468. Here, dizzily balancing in mid-air, tradition says that a man, even as Notker gazed, lost his footing and plunged into the abyss. The eternities came together! A spark from the infinite kindled within the poet’s soul. ”

“ And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success. ”

“ And the Histoire Litteraire breaks out into an unusual eulogy; and declares that in his case the title of “Venerable” was no less honorable than that of “Saint.” They did not make “saints” out of such men as Peter—and I don’t quite see why they should. There was too much flesh-and-blood reality about him, too little of musty theology and altogether too little bigotry. But somehow the broad-faced happy sun proves himself to be the “greater light;” while the moon goes palely on, a ghost in an unaccustomed sky. ”

“ The biography is in one of the April volumes of the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandist Fathers—a great white-covered folio which displays the immense research of its editors. For those who are less inclined to the Latin language in its monkish form, there is the admirable abridgment by Baring-Gould, known as the Lives of the Saints—a compilation which must be always distinguished from the work of the same title by Alban Butler. From these sources a great deal of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real record and unreal romance, have flowed forth upon the world. ”