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the incongruity of its poetic anthropomorphism with the progress of his discursive reason, as well as by his weariness with his unsatisfactory and exhausted philosophy: the Roman was commended by its high moral tone and vigour of character. But each had to abandon temples, rites, diversions, literature, which had the strongest hold on his habits and character, and so utterly incongruous with the primitive Gospel, that until Christianity made some steps towards the old religion by the splendour of its ceremonial, and the incipient paganising, not of its creed, but of its popular belief, there were powerful countervailing tendencies to keep him back from the new faith. And when the Greek entered into the Church, he was not content without exercising the quickness of his intelligence, and the versatilities of his language on his creed, without analysing, discussing, defining everything; or by intruding that higher part of his philosophy, which best assimilated with Christianity, he either philosophised Christianity, or for a time, as under the Neo-Platonists and Julian, set up a partially Christianised philosophy as a new and rival religion. The inveterate corruption of Roman manners confined that vigorous Christian morality, its strongest commendation to the Roman mind, at first within the chosen few, who were not utterly abased by licentiousness or by servility: and even with them in large part it was obedience to civil authority, respect for established law, perhaps in many a kind of sympathy with the lofty and independent sacerdotal dignity, the sole representative of old Roman freedom, which contributed to Christianise the Latin world.

'How much more suited were some parts of the Teutonic character to harmonise at first with Christianity, and to keep the proselytes in submission to the authority of its instructors in these sublime truths; at the same time to strengthen the Church by the infusion of its own strength and independence of thought and action, as well as to barbarise it with that ferocity which causes, is increased by, and maintains, the foreign conquest of ruder over more polished races! Already the German had the conception of an illimitable Deity, towards whom he looked with solemn and reverential awe. Tacitus might seem to speak the language of a Christian father, almost of a Jewish prophet. Their gods could not be confined within walls, and it was degradation to these vast unseen powers to represent them under the human form. Reverential awe alone could contemplate that mysterious being which they called divinity. These deities, or this one Supreme, were shrouded in the untrodden, impenetrable forest. Such seems to have been the sublime conception above, if not anterior to, what may be called the mythology of Teutonic religion.'-Vol. i. pp. 257, 258.

We have not space to follow up this part of the subject, which is very interesting.

The legislation of Justinian might at first sight appear not very much in place; but it is made so by tracing out the extent to which it was modified by Christianity. This it was in but a slight degree; legislation respecting religion was added to the previous body of law; Christianity was taken into the system. It was not, as in our own Anglo-Saxon law, the fountain from which it sprung. The old long-established system continued; Christianity had come in upon a settled civilization. Among the northern tribes, civilization grew out of Christianity.

The age of Gregory the Great was the age of Benedict, the great moulder of Western Monasticism.

'The extension and organization of monasticism in the West owes its principal strength and uniformity to Benedict of Nursia. The life of Benedict, from infancy to death, is the most perfect illustration of the motives which then worked upon the mind of man. In him meet together and combine all those influences which almost divided mankind into recluses or cœnobites, and those who pursued an active life; as well as all the effects, in his case the best effects, produced by this phasis of human thought and feeling. Benedict, it was said, was born at that time, like a sun to dispel the Cimmerian darkness which brooded over Christendom, and to revive the expiring spirit of monasticism. The whole world was desolated by the inroads of the northern conquerors; the thrones of the new western kingdoms were filled by barbarian heretics; the East was distracted with controversy. War had not respected the monastic institutions; and those were fortunate who were shrouded in the mountain glens of the Apennines, or lay hid in some remote and sea-girt island. His age acknowledged Benedict as the perfect type of the highest religion, and Benedict impersonated his age.

In the time of Benedict no man could have made a profound impression or exercised an enduring influence upon the mind of man, without that enthusiasm in himself which would environ him with wonder, or without exciting that enthusiasm in others which would eagerly accept, propagate, and multiply the miracles which avouched his sanctity.

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How perfectly the whole atmosphere was impregnated with this inexhaustible yearning for the supernatural, appears from the ardour with which the monastic passions were indulged at the earliest age. Children were nursed and trained to expect at every instant more than human interferences; their young energies had ever before them examples of asceticism, to which it was the glory, the true felicity of life, to aspire. The thoughtful child had all his mind thus pre-occupied; he was early, it might almost seem intuitively, trained to this course of life; wherever there was gentleness, modesty, the timidity of young passion, repugnance to vice, an imaginative temperament, a consciousness of unfitness to wrestle with the rough realities of life, the way lay invitingly open-the difficult, it is true, and painful, but direct and unerring way, to heaven. It lay through perils, but was made attractive by perpetual wonders; it was awful, but in its awfulness lay its power over the young mind. It learned to trample down that last bond which united the child to common humanity, filial reverence; the fond and mysterious attachment of the child and the mother, the inborn reverence of the son to the father. It is the highest praise of St. Fulgentius that he overcame his mother's tenderness by religious cruelty.

History, to be true, must condescend to speak the language of legend; the belief of the times is part of the record of the times; and, though there may occur what may baffle its more calm and searching philosophy, it must not disdain that which was the primal, almost universal, motive of human life.

'Benedict was born at Nursia, in the province of Spoleto, of respectable parents. He was sent to Rome, according to still-prevailing custom, to be instructed in the liberal arts. But his pure spirit shrunk instinctively from the vices of the capital. He gave up the perilous study of letters, and preferred an holy ignorance. He fled secretly from the society of his dangerous associates, from the house of his parents, who, it seems, had accompanied him, as of old the father of Horace his son, to Rome. His faithful urse alone discovered his design and accompanied his flight. This inciit seems to imply that his flight took place at a very tender age; a cirstance, told at a later period, intimates that it was not before the first

impulses of youthful passion. He took refuge in a small village called Effide, about two miles from Subiaco. The rustic inhabitants, pleased with his modesty and sweetness of disposition, allowed him to inhabit a cell near their church. Here took place his first miracle. The faithful nurse, Cyrilla, had borrowed a stone sieve, commonly used in that part of the country to make bread. It fell from her hands, and broke in two. Benedict, moved by her distress, united the two pieces, prayed over them, and the vessel became whole. The wondering rustics are said to have hung the miraculously restored sieve over their church door. But the sensitive youth shrunk from fame, as he had from vice: he sought a deeper solitude. In the neighbourhood of Subiaco, by the advice and assistance of a monk, named Romanus, he found a wild and inaccessible cavern, into which he crept, and for three years the softly and delicately educated boy lay hid in this cold and dismal dwelling from the sight of men. His scanty food was supplied by Romanus, who took it by stealth from his own small pittance in his monastery. The cave was at the foot of the hill on which the monastery stood, but there was no path down the precipitous rock. The food, therefore, was let down by a rope, and a small bell tied to the rope gave notice of its coming. Once the devil broke the rope; but he could not baffle the inventive charity of Romanus. To an imagination so prepared, what scene could be more suited to nurture the disposition to wonders and visions than the wild and romantic region about Subiaco? The cave of Benedict is still shown as a hallowed place, high on the crest of a toppling rock, with the Anio roaring beneath in a deep ravine, clothed with the densest forest, and looking on another wild, precipitous crag. Half way up the zigzag and laborious path stands the convent of Benedict's sister, St. Scolastica. So entirely was Benedict cut off from the world that he ceased to mark not merely the progress of ordinary time, but even the fasts and festivals of the Church. A certain priest had prepared for himself some food of unusual delicacy for the festival of Easter. A mysterious admonition within his heart reproved him for this luxurious indulgence, while the servant of God was pining with hunger. Who he was, this holy and heaven-designated servant, or where he dwelt, the priest knew not, but he was led through the tangled thickets and over the rugged rocks to the cave of Benedict. Benedict was ignorant that it was Easter, and not till he was assured that it was that festal day, would he share in the heavensent banquet.

The secret of his hiding-place was thus betrayed, and some of the rude shepherds of the country, seeing the hermit in his coarse attire, which was no more than a sheep-skin thrown round him, mistook him at first for a wild beast: but when they approached him, they were so melted by his gentle eloquence, that their hearts yielded at once, and they were subdued to courtesy of manners and Christian belief..

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Three virtues constituted the sum of the Benedictine discipline. Silence with solitude and seclusion, humility, obedience, which, in the strong language of its laws, extended to impossibilities. All is thus concentrated on self. It was the man isolated from his kind who was to rise to a lonely perfection. All the social, all patriotic virtues were excluded: the mere mechanic observance of the rules of the brotherhood, or even the corporate spirit, are hardly worthy of notice, though they are the only substitutes for the rejected and proscribed pursuits of active life.

'The three occupations of life were the worship of God, reading, and manual labour. The adventitious advantages, and great they were, of these industrious agricultural settlements, were not contemplated by the founder; the object of the monks was not to make the wilderness blossom with fertility, to extend the arts and husbandry of civilised

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life into barbarous regions, it was solely to employ in engrossing occupation that portion of time which could not be devoted to worship and to study.

For the divine service the monks awoke at midnight; they retired again, and rose after a brief repose for matins. After matins they did not return to their beds, but spent the time in reading, meditation, or the singing of psalms. From prime to noon, and all after the brief meal, and another period of reading or meditation, was devoted to labour. At particular periods, as at harvest, the labouring brothers did not return home to their religious service; they knelt and performed it in the fields. The mass was not celebrated on ordinary days, only on Sundays and holidays. 'Abstinence from flesh, at least that of four-footed animals, was perpetual and universal; from that of fowls was prescribed with less rigour. The usual food was vegetable broth, bread, and a small measure of wine. From Easter to Pentecost there was no fast. From Pentecost to the ides of September, fasts on two days in the week; the rest of the year to Easter perpetual fast, with one evening meal of eggs or fish. Lent was still more rigorously enforced by abstinence not from food only, but from sleep and from speech. The punishment of delinquents was sequestration from the oratory, the table, and the common meetings; the contumacious and incorrigible were expelled from the community. The monastery contained within its walls the mill, the bakehouse, and everything necessary for life. It was strictly forbidden to partake of food without the walls; all wandering to any distance was prohibited; and if the monk was obliged to be absent during the whole day, he was enjoined to fast rather than partake of food abroad.

"The vision of St. Benedict of the universal diffusion of his order was accomplished with a rapidity wonderful even in those times. In Italy, from Calabria to the Alps, Benedictine monasteries began to rise on the brows of beetling mountains, sometimes in quiet valleys. Their buildings gradually grew in spaciousness and splendour; nor did they absolutely abandon the cities, as dangerous to themselves or beyond the sphere of their exemplary rigour. Few, if any, of the great towns are without their Benedictine convent. Every monastery sent forth its colonies. The monks seem to multiply with greater fecundity than the population of the most flourishing cities, and were obliged to throw off their redundant brethren to some new settlement. They swarmed, according to their language, like bees. Wherever was the abode of men was the abode of these recluses, who had put off the ordinary habits, attire, occupations of men; wherever they settled in the troubled wilderness men gathered around them, as if to partake of their sanctity and security. Maurus, the faithful friend and associate of Benedict, had crossed the Alps even before his death. Bishop Innocent, of Le Mans, who had invited him to Gaul, had died before his arrival; but he was hospitably received in Orleans. The first Benedictine monastery in France rose at Glanfeuille, on the Loire, not far from Angers; it was but the first of many rich and noble foundations-foundations which, as they grew in wealth and splendour, and, in consequence, in luxury and ease, were either themselves brought back by some stern reformer, who wrought them up to their old austere discipline, or rivalled and supplanted by new monasteries, which equalled or surpassed the rigour of Benedict himself. The name of St. Maur is dear to letters. Should his disciples have in some degree departed from the iron rule of their founder, the world, even the enlightened Christian world, will pardon them if their profound and useful studies have withdrawn them from mechanical and automatic acts of devotion. In Spain the monasteries mostly fell in the general wreck of Christianity on the Mahommedan conquest; few scanty and

doubtful records survived, to be gleaned by the industry of their successors, as Christianity slowly won back the land.

'With St. Augustine the rule of St. Benedict passed to England; but there it might seem as if the realm, instead of banishing them, or permitting their self-banishment, to the wild heath or the mountain crest, had chosen for them, or allowed them to choose, the fairest spots in the land for their settlements. In every rich valley, by the side of every clear and deep stream, arose a Benedictine Abbey. The labours of the monks in planting, in cultivation, in laying out the sunny garden, or hanging the hill with trees, may have added much to the picturesque grace of these scenes; but, in general, if a district in England be surveyed, the most convenient, most fertile, most peaceful spot, will be found to have been the site of a Benedictine abbey.

"Their numbers at any one time it may be difficult to estimate. Abbeys rose and fell, like other human institutions; the more favoured, however, handed down the sacred tradition of their foundation, of their endowments, of their saints, of their miracles, of their good deeds to civilisation, till the final wreck of monastic institutions during the last century; and even from that wreck a few have survived, or lifted up again their venerable heads.’— Vol. i. pp. 414-426.

The following passage, at the opening of the pontificate of Gregory the Great, shows the manner in which Dr. Milman regards the Papal power as produced by, and adapted to, the wants of the age:

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'Now was the crisis in which the Papacy, the only power which lay not entirely and absolutely prostrate before the disasters of the times-which had an inherent strength, and might resume its majesty-the power which was most imperatively required to preserve that which was to survive out of the crumbling wreck of Roman civilisation, must re-awaken its obscured and suspended life. To Western Christianity was absolutely necessary a centre, standing alone, strong in traditionary reverence, and in acknowledged claims to supremacy. Even the perfect organisation of the Christian hierarchy might in all human probability have fallen to pieces in perpetual conflict it might have degenerated into a half secular feudal caste, with hereditary benefices more and more entirely subservient to the civil power, a priesthood of each nation or each tribe, and gradually sinking to the intellectual or religious level of the nation or tribe. On the rise of a power both controlling and conservative, hung, humanly speaking, the life and death of Christianity-of Christianity as a permanent, aggressive, expansive, and, to a certain extent, uniform system. There must be a counterbalance to barbaric force, to the unavoidable anarchy of Teutonism, with its tribal, or at the utmost national independence, forming a host of small, conflicting, antagonistic kingdoms. All Europe had been what England was under the Octarchy, what Germany was when her emperors were weak; and even her emperors she owed to Rome, to the Church, to Christianity. Providence might have otherwise ordained it, but it is impossible for man to imagine by what other organising or consolidating force the commonwealth of the Western nations could have grown up to a discordant, indeed, and conflicting league, but still to a league, with that unity and conformity of manners, usages, laws, religion, which have made their rivalries, oppugnancies, and even their long ceaseless wars, on the whole to issue in the noblest, highest, most intellectual form of civilisation known to man. It is inconceivable that Teutonic Europe, or Europe so deeply interpenetrated with Teutonism, could have been condensed or compelled into a vast Asiatic despotism, or succession of despotisms. Immense and interminable

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