William Richard Wood Stephens

“ The sickness came; he sent for the abbot and implored him, as one who was about to die, to make him a monk without delay. The abbot, however, dreading the displeasure of Anselm's father, still refused; and the lad recovered. A period of reaction followed; his longing for the religious life, and even his ardour for study, cooled; he began to devote himself more to youthful sports, and after the death of his mother, being like a ship parted from its anchor, he drifted yet more completely into a worldly course of life (Eadmer, Vita, i. 3, 4) . ”

“ The almost feminine tenderness of Anselm's nature appeared in his treatment of the lower animals, which he regarded with respect as the product of God's hand. And, as in the love of animals for their offspring he saw an emblem of the love of God for man, so in any cruelty to animals on the part of man he saw a figure of the devil's malice and his hatred to all God's creatures. ”

“ At Rome he found his old opponent William of Warelwast come to act as the king's advocate. William pleaded so skilfully that he made a great impression on some of the pope's councillors, and boldly wound up an harangue by saying, ‘Know all men present that not to save his kingdom will King Henry lose the investiture of the churches.’ ‘And before God, not to save his head will Pope Paschal let him have them,’ was the answer. ”

“ When Anselm heard it he trembled and turned pale, and when the bishops tried to drag him to the king to receive the pastoral staff at his hands he resisted with all his force. The bishops took him aside and remonstrated with him. Anselm pleaded that he was an old man, unused to worldly affairs, and unfitted for the duties of so burdensome an office. Moreover, he was the subject of another realm, and he owed allegiance not only to the Duke of Normandy but to the archbishop of Rouen, and to the chapter of his own abbey. ”

“ For the sake of his own soul, for the sake of religion, and for the king's own honour and profit, it was needful he should go, and if the king would not grant leave he must go without it, obeying God rather than man. The bishops again urged submission. ‘You have spoken well,’ said Anselm; ‘do you go to your lord, and I will cleave to my God.’ The lay barons also were now against him. He had sworn to observe the customs of the realm, and it was contrary to those customs for any man in his position to go to Rome without the king's license. ”

“ In the midst of the banquet given by the pope, the doors of the hall being suddenly thrown open a clown entered seated upon a jackass and presented a humble petition that he might be made archbishop of Canterbury. Considering the European reputation of Bradwardine for learning and piety, the joke was remarkably unsuitable; the pope rebuked the offender, and the rest of the cardinals marked their displeasure by vying with one another in the respect which they paid to the new archbishop. ”

“ In boldness, indeed, and originality of thought, Anselm was too far ahead of the intellectual standard of his day to be thoroughly understood or appreciated. The aim of the ‘Cur Deus Homo?’ is to prove the necessity of the incarnation as the only means whereby the debt of obedience due from man to God could be discharged, an adequate reparation made for his offences, and the immortality of body and soul recovered for which he was originally destined. ”

“ At Placentia they were joined by William of Warelwast, who travelled with them over the Alps and then hastened to England, while Anselm went to Lyons to spend Christmas with his old friend the archbishop. Before they parted William told him that he had been bidden by the king to say that he felt the warmest regard for Anselm, and if Anselm would only be to the king all that his predecessor had been to Henry's predecessors he would be right gladly welcomed. ‘Have you no more to say?’ asked Anselm. ‘I speak to a man of understanding,’ was the reply. ”

“ Only let the king and the primate unite their authority, and this new and monstrous growth of evil may be rooted out.’ But the heart of the Red King was hardened, and he only asked, ‘And what good will come of this matter for you?’ ‘For me, perhaps, nothing,’ replied Anselm, ‘but something, I hope, for God and for thyself.’ ‘Enough!’ rejoined the king ”

“ Starting from the contemplation of sensible objects, he propounds the question whether the goodness in all good things, although known by different names, such as justice in a man, strength or swiftness in a horse, and so on, comes from one source or divers. All varieties of excellence, by whatever name they may be called, are resolvable at last into a few simple elements—the good, the beautiful, the great, the useful. ”

“ William, however, maintained that Anselm could not obey the pope against the king's will consistently with the allegiance due to himself. He had not yet acknowledged Urban, and it was neither his custom nor his father's to let any one in England acknowledge any pope without his leave. Anselm felt that the king had no right to force any one into renouncing a choice made before he became a subject. The conflict, however, between the claims of the king and of the pope on his obedience was one which he rightly thought could be settled only by the great council of the nation. ”

“ After a while, however, he was stricken with a mortal illness. Anselm watched him by day and night. As the end drew near, Anselm charged him, if it were possible, to reveal himself to him after death. Osbern promised and passed away. When the body was placed in the church and the brethren were chanting the psalms, Anselm retired to a corner of the building to weep and pray in secret, and at length, overpowered by weariness and sorrow, he fell asleep. ”

“ Anselm mildly replied that they did ill to withdraw their allegiance from him because he refused to withdraw his own from the successor of the chief of the apostles. Although the king withdrew all protection from him, he would not cease to care for the king's soul; retaining the title, power, and office of archbishop, whatever oppression it might be his lot to suffer. William now tried to make the lay lords abandon the archbishop, saying, ‘No one shall be my man who chooses to be his,’ to which the nobles replied that as they never were the archbishop's men, they had no fealty to withdraw ”

“ Some were for still insisting on the old custom, but Pope Paschal had conceded the question of homage, and so the king on his part was the more willing to concede the right of investiture. In the presence, therefore, of Anselm and a great multitude of witnesses, the king granted and decreed that thenceforth no man in England should be invested with bishopric or abbey by staff and ring either by the hand of the king or any other layman, and Anselm on his side promised that no one elected to a prelacy should be debarred from consecration on account of having done homage to the king. ”

“ In the schools of the philosophers I rarely heard a word said concerning grace, but we were continually told that we were the masters of our own free actions, and that it was in our own power to do well or ill.' He endeavours to prove, with much logical force and mathematical precision, that human actions are totally devoid of all merit, that they do not deserve grace even of congruity, that is as being meet and equitable - the most specious form of Pelagianism, and one which was most commonly entertained in that day. ”

“ He still journeyed everywhere on foot, and out of ‘zealous love of pious toil’ resisted the bidding of Archbishop Theodore, who ordered him to ride when he had a longer circuit than usual to make. The primate, however, insisted on having his way, and on one occasion with his own hand helped Ceadda to mount; because, as Bede says (iv. 3) , he had ‘assuredly discovered him to be a holy man.’ Bede relates several beautiful instances of this ‘holy man's’ habits of simple piety as described to him by one who had been brought up and trained in Ceadda's monastery at Lastingham. ”

“ On Anselm's side were his old friend and companion Baldwin of Bec, and Alexander, a monk of Canterbury; on the side of the king were Gerard, archbishop of York, who also went to get his pallium, Herbert, bishop of Thetford, and Robert, bishop of Chester. The envoys found Paschal as inflexible as before. A letter in the same determined strain was sent to the king, and another to Anselm bidding him to persevere in his present attitude. On the return of the envoys an assembly of the great men of the realm was convened in London. An unconditional surrender was again demanded from Anselm. ”

“ He maintains that human nature is absolutely incapable of conquering a single temptation without a supply of divine grace, and that this grace is the free and unmerited gift of God, whose knowledge and power are alike perfect. ”

“ It was Hook's custom for many years to preach not only each Sunday but every day in Lent. His sermons were always learned and forcible, and full of fervid piety. The whole number of communicants when he became vicar was little more than fifty, and among these there were no young men, and very few men of any age. But in the course of two or three years four or five hundred persons communicated on Easter day, and before he left Leeds this number was often doubled. At the same time his published sermons, pamphlets, and other occasional writings extended his influence far beyond his parish. ”

“ Meanwhile the midwinter gemot, held at Gloucester, had passed a resolution that the king should be asked to allow prayers to be offered in all churches that God would put it into his heart to appoint some worthy man to the long vacant see. The king assented, but contemptuously remarked, ‘Pray what ye will; no man's prayer shall shake my purpose.’ Anselm was compelled to frame the prayer. After the gemot the king went to a royal seat at Alvestone, near Gloucester. ”

“ His protest was ineffectual, but his courage and ability won the admiration of his opponents. When the English deputies returned home in the spring of 1619, the Dutch States, besides paying the expenses of their voyage and presenting each with a gold medal, sent a letter to the king in which a special commendation is made of Carleton as the foremost man of the company and a model of learning and piety. He was translated to Chichester in the same year, probably in recognition of the ability and spirit with which he had upheld the honour of the church of England in the synod. ”

“ If you planted a young shoot in your garden, and then confined it on all sides, so that it could not put forth its branches, would it not turn out a strange misshapen thing when at last you set it free, and all from your own fault? ”

“ If God did not bestow His grace freely, He could not foresee how He would confer His gifts, and therefore His fore-knowledge would not be absolute; so that the doctrine of God's foreknowledge and free grace are linked together. Underlying all the hard and dry reasoning, however, of this treatise, there is a deep vein of warm and genuine piety which occasionally breaks out into fervent meditation and prayer, full of love, humility, and thankfulness.
The estimation in which Thomas Bradwardine was held as a theologian in his own century is indicated by the way in which Chaucer refers to him. ”

“ BROWNE, ANTHONY, first Viscount Montague (1526–1592) , was the eldest son of Sir Anthony Browne (d. 1548) [q. v.] and Alys his wife, daughter of Sir John Gage. He succeeded his father in 1548, inheriting with other property the estates of Battle Abbey and Cowdray in Sussex. Like his father he was a staunch Roman catliolic, yet his loyalty to the crown was above suspicion, and he enjoyed the confidence and favour alike of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. ”

“ Camden, the antiquary, was much attached to Carleton, and speaks of him (Brit. in Northumb. p. 816) as one 'whom I have loved in regard of his singular knowledge in divinity and in other more delightful literature, and am loved again of him.' Anthony à Wood (Athenae Ox.) describes him as 'a person of solid judgment and various reading, a bitter enemy to the papists, and a severe Calvinist.' His views, however, upon the subject of election were not nearly so rigid as those of the majority in the synod of Dort, and his theology does not seem to have affected the amiability of his disposition. ”

“ If he heard a loud blast of wind, he would pause in his reading, or whatever he was doing, and pray God to be merciful to mankind; and if the gale waxed louder, he would close his book and fall upon his face in prayer. ”

“ The archbishop stayed at Canterbury, the care of the city, and apparently of Kent, being committed to him under the king's writ and seal, against an expected attack from Normandy. So faithful was he to this trust that he refused to leave Canterbury even for a day to confer with the papal legate upon the reforms in the church which he had so much at heart (Epist. iii. 35, 36) . He attended the Christmas gemot at Windsor, where his bitter adversary, William of St. Calais, died. Anselm received his confession and tended him in his dying hours with affectionate care. ”

“ The parish was an onerous charge at the time; there was great depression of trade, and the spirit of churchmanship was at a low ebb. But the new vicar soon poured new life into the place. He began evening services—rare in those days—in the summer of 1830, and his church was the first in Coventry to be lighted with gas. He introduced frequent celebrations of holy communion, services on saints' days, and lectures in Lent. In 1834 he gave a series of lectures on the liturgy, and his Sunday evening sermons were generally an expository course upon some book of holy scripture. ”

“ If the wax be too hard or too soft, it will not take a clear impression. Youth, being between the two, was an apt compound of softness and hardness, which could receive lasting impressions and be turned to any shape. Similar good sense in the education of the young is manifested in his advice to an abbot who complained of the difficulty of teaching the boys brought up in his monastery. They were incorrigibly perverse, the abbot said, and although beaten continually day and night they only grew worse. ‘Beat them, do you?’ said Anselm ”

“ William the Conqueror received his death-wound in 1087. In the presence of Anselm we are told that he who to most men seemed harsh and terrible became so mild that bystanders looked on with amazement (Eadmer, Vit. Ans. i. 47) . And when he lay dying in the abbey of St. Gervase at Rouen he sent for Anselm to hear the confession of his burdened conscience. Anselm came from Bec. William, however, put off seeing him for a few days, deeming that he should get better. Meanwhile Anselm himself fell ill, and before he had recovered the king died (Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 1, 17 C) . ”

“ So Anselm, by Henry's advice, avoided Normandy on his journey to Whitsand, from which port he crossed to Dover. He landed on 23 Sept., and his return, after nearly three years' absence, was welcomed with transports of joy by the whole country. The hopes of the nation revived. But as regarded the relations between the king and the primate they speedily received a check. Anselm had returned, pledged, as he conceived, to obey the canons of the councils of Clermont, Bari, and Rome, which forbade clerics to receive investiture at the hands of laymen, or do homage to them for their benefices. ”

“ He was so diligent in his exhortations to the king and the soldiers that many attributed the successes of the English arms to the favour of Heaven obtained through the wholesome warnings and the holy example of the royal chaplain. ”

“ The total number of clergy was eighteen. The town churches were mere chapels of ease to the parish church; no districts were assigned to them, the patronage of nearly all was vested in the vicar, and most of the baptisms, marriages, and funerals were performed at the parish church, functions which consumed nearly all the time of the clerical staff, consisting of the vicar, one curate, and a clerk in orders. The agitation against compulsory church rates was in progress when Hook arrived in Leeds. ”