William Holden Hutton

“ There was, however, even at the best a great change from the times of Roman rule. For civilisation, literary culture, law, we find substituted in the pages of Gregory of Tours savagery, scenes of brutality, drunkenness, robbery. Law and civilisation seem to sleep. It was in this state of the country, when every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce. ”

“ During the intellectual and moral weakness which the barbarian invasions brought upon the West the Church in Ireland appeared to stand forth resplendent in the security of her faith and virtue and in the cultivation of learning. In the warm Celtic nature the Gospel, so late introduced, had found a natural home. The monasteries which rose all over the land, with the huts of hermits and the cells of anchorites, were the seed-plots of religion and sacred lore. ”

“ A wise answer came from the wise pope, disclaiming all peculiar authority or special sanctity for the use of Rome. "Things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of things." "Select, then," he advises, "from many churches, whatever you have found in Gaul, or in Rome, or in any other church, that is good; make a rite for the new church of the English, such as you think pious and best." ”

“ It confirmed a strong union between Church and State in England, and it witnessed a revival of Christian learning in which Alfred himself and a Welshman, Asser, whom he made bishop of an English see, were the leaders. Alfred was a bright example of what Christianity could do for mankind. Warrior, scholar, saint, pattern king whose heart was given to his people, he bore himself nobly before the world as one who loved and worshipped the Master Christ. Under his sway the Church rose again to instruct and guide the people, and when he died he left the English land a united Christian nation. ”

“ At the close of the tenth century a pope and an emperor of great ideas stand forth from the blackness of an age when, according to the evidence of councils and of monastic chronicles alike, vice was rampant—"the more powerful oppress the weaker, and men are like fishes in the sea, which everywhere in turn devour one another"—and the bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. ”

“ In architecture, indeed, the Byzantine Church of the sixth century was supreme. No more glorious edifice has ever been consecrated to the service of Christ than the Church of the Divine Wisdom at Constantinople; and the arts which enriched it in mosaic, marble, metals, were brought to a perfection which excited the wonder of succeeding centuries. ”

“ He had all a lawyer's passion for definition, and all a theologian's delight in truth. And as year by year he mastered the intricate arguments which had surged round the decisions of the Councils, he came to consider that a rapprochement was not impossible between the Orthodox Church and those many Eastern monks and prelates who still hesitated over a repudiation which might mean heresy or schism. ”

“ Lay power, lay over-lordship or supremacy, extends everywhere, intrudes into the recesses of monastic life, and dictates even in things purely spiritual. And as the new tide of barbarian invasion, Saracen or Norman, sweeps on in Spain or Gaul, the Church, for very physical needs, seeks refuge under the protection of lay barons, princes, and kings. Feudalism is rising. The monastic houses fall often under the arrogant rule of lay abbats. ”

“ It was that when the nationalities of the East,—in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, or even in Mesopotamia—began to resent the rule of the Empire, and struggled to express a patriotism of their own, they sought to express it also on the ecclesiastical side, in revolt from the Church which ruled as a complement to the civil power. Heresy came to be a sort of patriotism in religion. And while there was this of evil, it was not evil that each new barbarian nation, as it accepted the faith, sought to set up beside its own sovereign its patriarch also. ”

“ Missionaries and martyrs had changed the face of Europe, and the fierce tribes which were pouring over the Continent in the fifth century, barbarous and heathen, were now for the most part tamed and converted to the love of Christ. Out of a land which had been wild and barbarous, and where one of the greatest of saints and missionaries had met his death, had come a revival in Christian form of the old imperial idea, and the great men who had been nourished by it had given new health to the central Church of Europe. ”

“ One who would be admitted to the monastery must take oath before the whole community that he intended constantly to remain firm in his profession, to live a life of conversion to God, and to obey those set over him, but the last only "according to the rule." True monks were his followers to count themselves only if they lived by the labours of their hands. Idleness, said Benedict, is the enemy of the soul. The life of the monks was ascetic, but without the extreme rigour of the earlier "religious"—hermits and coenobites. ”

“ That Islam should seem to be more spiritual than Christianity seemed irony indeed, but an irony which seemed to have facts to prove it. An age of superstition, an age of credulous limits after the miraculous, an age when materialism made rapid progress among {159} the courtiers of the great city, was an age, it might well seem, which needed a protest against "iconoduly," as the iconoclasts termed the custom of the Eastern Church. ”

“ As we draw to the close of the long period which, through the conversion of the barbarian races and the growth of a central power in the Church at Rome, so profoundly influenced the future of the world, we are met by some outstanding facts which mark an epoch of crisis and of reformation. They are—the widening breach in matters religious, as earlier in matters political, between East and West; the influences which served to strengthen the theory of the papal monarchy even at the time of its greatest practical weakness ”

“ Brotherhood, charity, compassion, unity, all the great ideas which the Church cherished, were to work in long ages the transformation of the Frankish kingship. And when Chlodowech became king under the blessing of the Church, which had survived all through these centuries since it was planted under the Romans, the fusion of races soon followed. The French nation as we now know it is not merely Celtic, or Gaulish, but Roman too, and lastly Frankish—that is, Teutonic. ”

“ Charles the Great had all the interests of a scholar. He knew Latin well and Greek passably. He delighted to listen to the deeds of the past, or to theological treatises, when he dined, after the fashion of monks. His interest in learning centred in his interest in the teaching and services of the Church. Most reverently, we are told by his biographer, and with the utmost piety did he cultivate the Christian religion with which he had been imbued from his infancy. He was a constant church-goer, a regular worshipper at the mass. ”

“ For the moment, the Empire and the Papacy, Germany and the new temporal State in the hands of the Roman bishop, were united to lead the Christian nations and to convert the heathen on their borders. In the East remained the magnificent fabric of the immemorial Empire, active still in missionary labour and setting an example of the union of Church and State in {203} agreement to which the West could never attain. The eleventh century was to bring to East and West alike, with new responsibilities, new difficulties in action and new problems in thought. ”

“ In 731 a council, at which the archbishops of Ravenna and Grado were present, and ninety-three other Italian prelates, with a large representation of the laity, under Pope Gregory III., ordered that if anyone should stand forth as "a destroyer, profaner, and blasphemer against the veneration of the holy images, that is of Christ and His sinless Mother, of the blessed Apostles and the Saints, he should be excluded from the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and from all the unity and fabric of the Church." ”

“ So when a storm of heathen persecution swept over England and Scotland at the end of the eighth century, when "the ravaging of heathen men lamentably destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne," when the monks of Iona were given to martyrdom, when English prelates and kings gave their lives to hold the land for Christ, the Church still endured, with material loss but with, for the time at least, enhanced glory and virtue. ”

“ We see kings still wondering that God's power could be greater than their own, yet when they were awoke to terror by the thought of death flying in craven fear to the feet of the minister of God. The whole history is a tale of treacheries and murders, of quarrels and of sins among men and women pledged to God; and yet it is evident that behind the cruelty and crime there was a new spirit at work, slowly transforming society by the conversion of individuals. ”

“ It was not until the Saxon Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new life of Gaul and Germany inspired.
The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only ”

“ A famous letter of his to the abbats of monasteries {167} throughout the Empire, written in 787, is a salient example of the close connection between learning and monasticism in his day. He urged that "letters" should be studied, students selected and taught, that all the clergy should teach children freely, and that every monastery and cathedral church should have a theological school. "Although right doing is better than right speaking," he wrote, "yet must the knowledge of what is right go before the doing of it." ”

“ The monastery of Monte Cassino became a pattern of the religious life. S. Benedict was a wise and statesmanlike ruler, to whom men came with confidence from every rank and every race, to be his disciples, or to place their boys under him for instruction. The rule which he drew up was as potent in the ecclesiastical world as was the code of Justinian in the civil. It had its bases in the root ideas of obedience, simplicity, and labour. "Never to depart from the governance of God" was his primary maxim to his monks ”

“ From earliest times the icons have been used not only to give internal dignity and beauty to every Christian church and house, but, which is much more essential, for the instruction and moral education of Christians. For when any Christian looks at the icons, he at once recalls the life and deeds of those who are represented upon them, and desires to conform himself to their example. ”

“ Theodore of the Studium occupies a place in Greek thought which is, perhaps, comparable to that of S. Anselm in the Latin Church. If there never was anything in the East exactly corresponding to the era of the schoolmen in the West, if the theology of Byzantium throughout might seem to be a scholasticism, but a scholasticism apart, still it would not be untrue to describe S. Theodore as the last of the Greek Fathers. He came at a time in Byzantine history when a great crisis was before the Church and State, so closely conjoined in the Eastern Empire. ”

“ Venantius Fortunatus, who dedicated his poems to Gregory the Great, and was "the great man of letters of his age," was a poet, but a Christian poet—a writer of letters, but a close friend of holy souls, and notably of S. Radegund, the exiled princess and saint. [10] We learn from him that even in those days of blood there was a literary society at the Frankish courts, and the savage king Chilperich made pretence to be a writer, a theologian, and even a poet, though Gregory of Tours assures us that he had not the least notion of prosody. ”

“ The long controversy is important in the history of the Church because it so clearly expresses the character of the Eastern Church, so decisively demonstrates its intense devotion to the past, and so expressively illustrates the close attachment, the abiding influence, of the people and the monks, as the dominant factor in the development of theology and religious life. ”

“ In the East the Church was regarded more decisively than in the West as the complement of the State. Constantine had taught men to look for the officials of the Church side by side with those of the civil power. At Constantinople was the centre of an official Christianity, which recognised the powers that be as ordained of God in a way which was never found at Rome. At Rome the bishops came to be political leaders, to plot against governments, to found a political power of their own. ”

“ When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his brother monks to preach to the Teutonic tribes which had made Britain their home, there were already two Churches in the island. There was the Church of the Brythons, gradually separated by the advance of the Saxons into the Churches of Cumbria or Strathclyde, Wales, and West Wales or Cornwall. These stood apart from the English for a long time, were late in accepting the Catholic customs of the West, and had no influence on the progress of English Christianity. And there was the Church founded in North Britain by Celtic missionaries from Ireland. ”

“ Brunichild, whose tenacious adherence to the Catholic faith he knew, while he probably knew but little of her personal character, he wrote to with paternal affection, granted the pallium at her request and that of Gallican bishops to S. Syagrius, Bishop of Autun, and appealed to her as one who had the will as well as the power to reform abuses, remove scandals, and destroy paganism. He set himself determinedly to work against the taint of money which hung over the whole Church. ”

“ Everywhere what was needed seemed to be known to the pope, and everywhere he was planning to remedy evils, to build up the Church, to reform abuses, to convert heretics, to supply new bishops, to encourage the growth of monasticism. This activity extended not only to what were called the suburbicarian provinces but to distant lands, such as Spain, Illyricum, Gaul, Africa, as well as to Northern Italy. ”