Francis Aidan Gasquet

“ I pray you, ought not men above all things to mind the health of our souls? Ought not we to see the wills of our forefathers fulfilled? Falleth it not to you to pray for our forefathers that are passed out of this life? And did not our fathers give you our temporalities right plentifully, to the intent that you should pray for them and spend it all to the honour of God? And ye do nothing so; but ye spend your temporalities in sinful deeds and vanities, which temporalities ye should spend in works of charity, and in alms-deeds to the poor and needy. ”

“ No devotion is so pleasing to Mary as when you imitate her humility; no religion is so acceptable to the saints and so proper in itself as striving to copy their virtue. Do you wish to merit the patronage of Peter and Paul? Imitate the faith of the one and the charity of the other and you will do more than if you had made ten journeys to Rome. Do you wish to do something to show high honour to St. Francis? You are proud, you are a lover of riches, you are quarrelsome ”

“ Now, [132] “as to praying, it appears indeed that they do this; and that so much that they daily pray, as some of us lay men think it a pain (to do) once a week; to rise so soon from sleep and to wait so long fasting, as on a Sunday to come and hear out their matins. And yet the matins in every parish is neither begun so early nor so long in the saying as it is in the Charter house you know well; and yet at the sloth and gluttony of us, who are lay people, he can wink and fan himself asleep. But as soon as the lips of the clergy stop moving he quickly spies out that they are not praying.” ”

“ No less clearly is the full doctrine of responsibility taught in the lament of the Pope, who is represented as having lost his soul by an evil life, and as being condemned to eternal punishment. The mere fact of a pope being so represented was in itself, when the Office was held in the highest regard, a lesson of the highest importance in the teaching of the true principles of holiness. In a word, these mystery plays provided a most useful means of impressing upon the minds of all the facts of Bible history, the great truths of religion, and the chief Christian virtues. ”

“ But, on the whole, there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth which have excited the astonishment of philanthropists and are exciting the indignation of workmen. The age, it is true, had its discontents, and these discontents were expressed forcibly and in a startling manner. But of poverty which perishes unheeded, of a willingness to do honest work and a lack of opportunity there was little or none. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that every one knew his neighbour, and that every one was his brother’s keeper. ”

“ I have not hesitated to say, what I also take for the very truth, that as this realm of England has, God be thanked, as good and praiseworthy a temporality, number for number, as any other Christian country of equal number has had, so has it had also, number for number, compared with any other realm of no greater number in Christendom, as good and as commendable a clergy. ”

“ What exceptional learning! What singular courtesy does he not extend to all! What gaiety and geniality at interviews! so that he never sends people away from him sad. Added to this, how great and how prompt is his liberality! He alone seems to be ignorant of his own great qualities and the height of his dignity and fortune. No one can be more true and faithful to his friends; and, in a word, he is truly a Primate, not only in dignity, but in everything worthy of praise.” [160]
Erasmus returns to this same subject in writing to a Roman Cardinal about this time. ”

“ Thomas to explain the exact meaning of this honour. “The Church in Lent, in the Passion time,” he continues, “worships it, singing, ‘O crux ave, spes unica,’ ‘Hail, holy cross, our only hope.’ That is to be understood as ‘Hail, blessed Lord crucified, Who art our only hope’—for all is one worship and act. Christ, our Maker and Redeemer, God and man in one person, is of duty worshipped with the high adoration only due to God, called latria. His image also, or his similitude, called the crucifix, is to be worshipped, just as the Blessed Sacrament is adored with the worship of latria.” ”

“ Many would rather feel that they have a father than a tyrant: who would like to see the tables of the money-changers in the temple overthrown, and the barefaced granting of indulgences and trafficking in dispensations and papal bulls repressed: who would not object to have ceremonies simplified, and solid piety inculcated: who would like to insist on the sacred Scriptures as the true and only basis of authoritative teaching, and would not give to scholastic conclusions and the mere opinions of schools the force of an infallible oracle. ”

“ ENGLAND AND THE POPE
Nothing is more necessary for one who desires to appreciate the true meaning of the English Reformation than to understand the attitude of men’s minds to the Pope and the See of Rome on the eve of the great change. As in the event, the religious upheaval did, in fact, lead to a national rejection of the jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, it is not unnatural that those who do not look below the surface should see in this act the outcome and inevitable consequence of long-continued irritation at a foreign domination. ”

“ Sir Thomas More, when Chancellor in 1532, attributed the rapid spread of what to him and most people of his day in England was heresy, to the flood of literature which was poured forth over the country by the help of printing. “We have had,” he writes, “some years of late, plenteous of evil books. For they have grown up so fast and sprung up so thick, full of pestilent errors and pernicious heresies, that they have infected and killed, I fear me, more simple souls than the famine of the dear years have destroyed bodies.” ”

“ Would to God I might (for there is nothing I do long for more) once see it brought to pass that the Pope were only the Vicar of Christ and not also the Vicar of the Emperor, and that this horrible saying may no longer be heard: ‘the Church fighteth and warreth against the Perugians, the Church fighteth against the people of Bologna.’ It is not the Church that fights and wars against Christian men; it is the Pope that does so. The Church fights against wicked spirits in the regions of the air. ”

“ Those who will read below the surface and will examine for themselves into the social life of that time must admit, however much they feel bound to condemn the existing religious system, that it certainly maintained up to the very time of its overthrow a hold over the minds and hearts of the people at large, which nothing since has gained. Religion overflowed, as it were, into popular life, and helped to sanctify human interests, whilst the affection of the people was manifested in a thousand ways in regard to what we might now be inclined to consider the ecclesiastical domain. ”

“ Christian people that have reason in their heads, and therefore the light of faith in their souls, would think that the image of our Lady were our Lady herself. Nay, they be not so mad, I trust, but that they do reverence to the image for the honour of the person whom it represents, as every man delights in the image and remembrance of his friend. ”

“ Yet, over all his efforts, the preacher sweated blood and water to rival Cicero. In brief, my Roman preacher spoke Roman so well that I heard nothing about the death of Christ. [204] If Cicero had lived in our days,” asks Erasmus, “would he not think the name of God the Father as elegant as Jupiter the almighty? Would he think it less elegant to speak of Jesus Christ than of Romulus, or of Scipio Africanus, of Quintus Curtius, or of Marcus Decius? Would he think the name of the Catholic Church less illustrious than that of ‘Conscript Fathers,’ ‘Quirites,’ or ‘Senate and people of Rome’? ”

“ These are they who are so favourable to Luther’s cause that they neither know nor care to examine what Luther teaches. They only have the Gospel on their lips; they neglect prayer and the Sacraments; they eat what they like; and they live to curse the Roman Pontiff. These are the Lutherans.” From such material spring forth tumults that cannot be put down. “It is generally in their cups,” adds Erasmus, “that the Evangelical league is recruited.” They are too stupid to see whither they are drifting, and “with such a type of mankind I have no wish to have anything to do.” ”

“ It expresses truthfully neither our wants nor our feelings, and we ought not to be surprised how very unsatisfactory every modern building really is, even when executed by the most talented architects as compared with the productions of our village mason or parish priest at an age when men sought only to express clearly what they felt strongly, and sought to do it only in their natural mother tongue, untrammelled by the fetters of a dead or familiar foreign form of speech. ”

“ It is impossible to study the century which preceded the overthrow of the old religious system in England without coming to the conclusion that as a body the Lollards had been long extinct, and that as individuals, scattered over the length and breadth of the land, without any practical principle of cohesion, the few who clung to the tenets of Wycliffe were powerless to effect any change of opinion in the overwhelming mass of the population at large. ”

“ There was no working-class in our modern sense: if by that is meant a class the greater portion of which never rises. In the fourteenth century, a few years of steady work as a journeyman meant, in most cases, that a workman was able to set up as a master craftsman. Every hardworking apprentice expected as a matter of course to be able to become in time a master. The collisions between capital and labour to which we are so much accustomed had no place in the middle ages. ”

“ If he called charity sometimes by the bare name love, I would not stick at that. But since charity signifies in Englishmen’s ears not every common love, but a good virtuous and well-ordered love, he that will studiously flee from the name of good love, and always speak of ‘love,’ and always leave out ‘good,’ I would surely say he meant evil. And it is much more than likely. For it is to be remembered that at the time of this translation Huchins (or Tyndale) was with Luther in Wittenberg, and put certain glosses in the margins, made to uphold the ungracious sect.”... ”

“ The idolator nowadays, if he set a candle before an image and idol, he says he does not worship the image, but God it represents. For say they, who is so foolish as to worship an image? The third cause of your good intent is that the profit of your goods may come to the priests; as though they were the peculiar people of God and only beloved; as indeed to those who preach the Gospel the people are bound to give sufficient living ... but not that their prayers can help the dead no more than a man’s breath blowing a sail can cause a great ship to sail. ”

“ For when we reckon we are better heard by our Lord in Kent than at Cambridge, at the north door of Paul’s than at the south door, at one image of our Lady than at another,” is it not made plain that we “put our trust and confidence in the image itself, and not in God and our Lady,” and think of the image and not of what the image represents. ”

“ Thorold Rogers, than whom no one has ever worked so diligently at the economic history of England, and whom none can suspect of undue admiration of the Catholic Church, has also left it on record that during the century and a half which preceded the era of the Reformation the mass of English labourers were thriving under their guilds and trade unions, the peasants were gradually acquiring their lands and becoming small freeholders, the artisans rising to the position of small contractors and working with their own hands at structures which their native genius and experience had planned. ”