Mâcon

“ MACON, NATHANIEL (1758–1837) , American political leader, was born at Macon Manor, Warren county, North Carolina, on the 17th of December 1758. He studied at the college of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1774 to 1776, when the institution was closed on account of the outbreak of the War of Independence; served for a short time in a New Jersey militia company; studied law at Bute Court-house, North Carolina, in 1777–1780, at the same time managing his tobacco plantation ”

“ Macon is, next to Atlanta, the most important railway centre in the state, being served by the Southern, the Central of Georgia, the Georgia, the Georgia Southern & Florida, the Macon Dublin & Savannah, and the Macon & Birmingham railways. ”

“ Macon’s point of view was always local rather than national. He was essentially a North Carolinian first, and an American afterwards; and throughout his career he was an aggressive advocate of state sovereignty and an adherent of the doctrines of the “Old Republicans.” He at first opposed the adoption of the Federal constitution of 1787, as a member of the faction led by Willie Jones (1731–1801) of Halifax, North Carolina, but later withdrew his opposition. ”

“ But why shouldn’t he marry a stenographer, or an actress, or a shop girl? Or even a model or manicurist or a lady’s maid, if she were square? What had her occupation to do with his happiness?
King was younger than his years, as are most Southerners, but he was sensitive to delicate influences. Without analysis, he knew that this girl had touched an atmosphere of refinement and was educated. And she had traveled. But what was so poor a girl doing in Charleston and Savannah and Macon? ”

“ Ashland is not very far from Hanover Court House, where John Randolph and Patrick Henry, the renewed orator of the Revolution, locked horns in the trial of the famous Parson’s tobacco case, in which the former, Mr. Randolph, came very near putting the great pleader “on the gridiron.” The celebrated college at this place, named after two distinguished men, “Randolph-Macon,” is one of the best and most prosperous institutions of learning in the State, with a corps of professors of ripest scholarship and thoroughly equipped for the respective chairs of instruction which they fill. ”

“ Of the old cathedral of St Vincent (12th and 13th centuries) , destroyed at the Revolution, nothing remains but the Romanesque narthex, now used as a chapel, the façade and its two flanking towers. The hôtel de ville contains a library, a theatre and picture-gallery. Opposite to it stands a statue of the poet Alphonse Lamartine, a native of the town. Mâcon is the seat of a prefecture, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, and a chamber of commerce. There are lycées and training colleges. Copper-founding is an important industry ”

“ It is, however, partially regaining the river trade in consequence of the compulsory substitution of drawbridges for the stationary railway bridges. The city is the seat of the Wesleyan female college (1836) , which claims to be the first college in the world chartered to grant academic degrees to women; Mercer University (Baptist) , which was established in 1833 as Mercer Institute at Penfield, became a university in 1837, was removed to Macon in 1871, and controls Hearn Academy (1839) at Cave Spring and Gibson Mercer Academy (1903) at Bowman ”

“ So they drave on with all diligence. Such was their case; but as regards the monks, on the morrow, as soon as it was day they repaired to Zayn al-Mawasif's lodging, to salute her, but found the place empty, and their hearts sickened within them. So the first monk rent his raiment and improvised these couplets,
"Ho ye, my friends, draw near, for I forthright * From you
depart, since parting is my lot:
My vitals suffer pangs o' fiery love; * Flames of desire in heart
burn high and hot,
For sake of fairest girl who sought our land * Whose charms th'
horizon's full moon evens not. ”

“ And the monk went forth immediately, even as the head of the monastery told him, and pastured swine, and when those who had known him formerly, and those who had heard about him, saw him pasturing swine, they said, “Ye see the great monk about whom we have heard, behold, his heart hath gone mad, and a devil hath seized him, and he is [now] pasturing swine.” Then God, when He saw his humility, and that he was hearing and bearing the reproach of men, set him free so that he might go back where he had been formerly. ”

“ So I, for one, thought little about the general tendency of orthodox writers to claim Bacon by means of the Paradoxes. I knew that, in his "Confession of Faith" [306] he is a Trinitarian of a heterodox stamp. His second Person takes human nature before he took flesh, not for redemption, but as a condition precedent of creation. "God is so holy, pure, and jealous, that it is impossible for him to be pleased in any creature, though the work of his own hands.... ”

“ If a monk can hold fast his belly, and his tongue, and his love for going about as a stranger, thou mayest be sure that he is able to become a monk in very truth, and that he will not die.”
582. A brother asked an old man, and said unto him, “What shall I do? For fornication is killing me.” The old man said unto him, “When a mother is about to wean her son she smeareth aloes over her breasts, and when the child cometh to suck as usual, he shrinketh away and taketh to flight. Do thou also then put bitter aloes in thy heart, and straightway the wicked devils will fly therefrom.” ”

“ But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles of ignorance and despair. With the opening of the twelfth century light began to dawn upon the human mind. The intellectual monk, long accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those subjects which had occupied his thoughts,--on God and His attributes, on the nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the Saviour, on the power of the will to resist evil, and other questions that had agitated the early Fathers of the Church. ”

“ With bitter scorn and mockery the man pronounced these words from the Ritual, in a hoarse croaking voice, imitating, at the same time, to the very life, the postures and gesture of a monk. He turned himself as if before the altar, he kneeled, and rose again. At last he stopped, drew himself up, and assumed a proud look of defiance, stared widely, and cried, "Mine is the world! I am more wealthy, more wise, prudent, and intelligent, than all of ye, ye blind moles! ”

“ And when we talk of the sensuality of the monks, of their gross indulgences and corporeal ease, we surely do so without discrimination; for when we speak of the middle ages thus, our thoughts are [4] dwelling on the sixteenth century, its mocking piety and superstitious absurdity; but in the olden time of monastic rule, before monachism had burst its ancient boundaries, there was surely nothing physically attractive in the austere and dull monotony of a cloistered life. Look at the monk; mark his hard, dry studies, and his midnight prayers, his painful fasting and mortifying of the flesh ”

“ The plan that the monk now devised for coming across to us—and a bold heart was required even to think of this daring enterprise—was that with the two ropes fastened about his body at one end, and held by all of us at the other, he should swing down into the chasm and far under the promontory of rock on which we stood, and then that we should haul him up to us. ”

“ Having assumed the profession of a monk when he was a young man of the age of twenty-three years, he was a soldier of the most high King forty-six years, and gave to the world the fruits of his penetrating genius and deep meditations in metrical poems, eloquent epistles, and other works. I will extract from them, and insert' in this book of mine, an account of one miracle which he learnt when he was at Thorney Abbey in England with Abbot Robert, [4] and committed to writing, at the request of the bishop of Ely [5] and the convent of monks. ”

“ But a monk like this, with a face like a conqueror, set square in its whiteness, and yet so wretched to see in his poor patched frock and his bare feet; a monk, too, not acting love, but really and truly ready to die for a beautiful woman not thirty feet from him in the house; above all, a monk with a voice that speaks like the clarion call of the day of judgment in its wrath, and murmurs more plaintively and sadly in sorrow than ever the poor Peri sighed at the gates of Paradise—such a monk, what could he not make people feel? ”

“ Devil. The monk has already had the start of you, and has so sharpened her feelings, and filled her little soul with so much vanity and self-conceit, and made her piety so carnal, that you have nothing else to do than give one audible tap at the gate of her heart, in order to be admitted. ”

“ Then the monk went back to his place, and he shut himself in, and never again undertook to talk with any man, except him that handed in to him his food through the little window of his cell, and there he remained until the end of his life, and he attained to a most exalted state of perfection. ”

“ A young monk, very desirous of perfection, set his heart upon purifying himself from every fault and therefore kept his eyes upon all his actions, looking at them again and again, before and after their performance and while they were going on----to do them well, and to see whether they had been well done. ”

“ He transformed monachism by uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the bondage of property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and sojourner; not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded haunts of men, to console them, and to do them good. ”

“ A monk, I’ll wager, if I have read past ecclesiastical architecture aright. And all lovers of the quaintly decorative are under great obligations to the unknown monk, for gargoyles offered an irresistible opportunity for the medieval craftsman to outwardly express his inmost fancies and the artistic spirit that consumed his soul, and must somehow be visibly revealed. ”

“ The exceeding beauty of that young girl has cast a spell upon me: I am no longer myself, the cold-hearted and calm-visaged monk, but a jealous and amorous lover. Curse on this robe! which excites only awe and gloom in the hearts of the young and beautiful. When at confession she knelt before me, was it not rapture to obtain those glimpses of her soft and snowy bosom? ”

“ The savage monk, he that has come from the heart of a forest, can only comprehend Him in heathen wise, only fear Him as the wielder of thunder and lightning, while the gentle monk, he that loves the Virgin with a troubadour's timid tenderness, flees from the fear of Him. ”

“ Of all monks and men he was the sweetest and gentlest, and long before he was chosen Prior, when he had charge of the youths who wished to be monks, he never wearied of teaching them to feel and care for all God's creatures, from the greatest to the least, and to love all God's works, and to take a great joy even in stones and rocks, and water and earth, and the clouds and the blue air. ”

“ The king, at this sight, demanded why he stayed so long, and how he came in that condition? "Oh, plague," said he, "take Friar Bacon and all his devils! they have led me a fine dance, to the endangering of my neck. But is the dog here? I'll be revenged on him!" Then he laid his hand on his sword, but Bacon, waving his wand, charmed it in his scabbard, so he could not draw it out, saying, "I fear not your anger; 'tis best for you to be quiet, lest a worse thing befall you." ”

“ CHAPTER V I Fall in Love With Veronique—Her Sister—Plot Against Plot—My
Victory—Mutual Disappointment
I have never liked eating by myself, and thus I have never turned hermit, though I once thought of turning monk; but a monk without renouncing all the pleasures of life lives well in a kind of holy idleness. ”

“ In this monk's and soldier's head there is a mixture of reflection and of good-humour, of resolution and of high spirits, which is infinitely rare; the thinker and good liver melt into each other with quaint harmony. ”

“ Yet it seemed impossible—at least, it seemed impossible for me—to consider this great vital hulk of a man as a monk of one of the oldest religious orders in the world. Every common, academic conception of such a monk he distinctly negatived. ”

“ An old man who had delivered himself unto God used to say, “The monk must have no will of his own, but he whose will is of God continueth to minister to Him unwearyingly; for if thou doest thine own will, thou becomest weary, and thou labourest, and God hearkeneth not to thee.” ”

“ Of the Monk’s Girdle.
As we are going to speak of the customs and rules of the monasteries, how by God’s grace can we better begin than with the actual dress of the monks, for we shall then be able to expound in due course their interior life when we have set their outward man before your eyes. A monk, then, as a soldier of Christ ever ready for battle, ought always to walk with his loins girded. ”

“ Monk was well acquainted with mankind; he saw in the physiognomy of this gentleman all the energy, all the reason, all the circumspection possible; he could therefore only attribute to a magnanimous confidence the revelation the Frenchman had made him, and he showed himself profoundly touched by it. ”

“ I cannot take leave of this good old monk, the influence exercised by whose writings during the whole of the Middle Ages is proved by the numerous transcripts of them executed at different periods, still preserved in most of the chief European libraries, without giving him credit for a pure and liberal philanthropy worthy of imitation in all ages. Nothing can be more dignified and noble than the words in which he concludes the introduction to his work. ”