LESSON XVIII.
UNCONNECTED FACTS.
In 1030, Peter, bishop of Girona, in Spain, came to Rome, and begged leave of the pope (John XIX.) to wear the pall twelve days in the year, promising to redeem thirty slaves then in captivity among the Saracens, provided his holiness granted him this request. It was readily granted. See Bower, vol. v. p. 153.
Shortly after the 30th October, 1051, Pope Leo IX., having visited Vercelli and Augsburg, returned to Rome, and held a council soon after Easter, in which he excommunicated Gregory, bishop of Vercelli, for committing adultery with a widow betrothed to his uncle. The bishop was absent when this sentence was given, but he flew to Rome as soon as he heard of it; and upon his promising to perform the penance that his holiness imposed upon him, he was absolved from the excommunication, and restored to the functions of his office. On that occasion the canons issued by other councils against the incontinence of the clergy were confirmed, and “some new ones were added, and, in order to check more effectually the scandalous irregularity of the Roman clergy in particular, it was decreed, at the request of the pope, that all women who should for the future prostitute themselves to the priests within the walls of Rome should be condemned to serve as slaves in the Lateran palace.” See Herman, ad an. 1051; also Bower, idem, p. 183.
By one of Constantine’s laws, they who ravished virgins or stole them, even with their consent, against the will of their parents, (with the view to make slaves of them or not,) were burned alive. Cod. Theodos. 1. ix. tit. 29, leg. 1. The severity of this law was somewhat mitigated by Constantius, but he still made it a capital offence. Ibid. leg. 2. It was upon this law, Pope Hadrian II. applied to the emperor for redress against Eleutherius, who had carried off his daughter Stephania by force, and married her, although she was betrothed to another. See Bower, idem, p. 11. We have a remarkable letter, written by Gregory VII., in January, 1080, in answer to one he had received from Vratislaus, duke of Bohemia, desiring leave to have Divine service performed in the Sclavonian tongue, that is, in the language of the country. That letter the pope answered in the following words:
“As you desire us to allow Divine service to be performed among you in the Sclavonian tongue, know that by no means can I grant your request, it being manifest to all, who will but reflect, that it has pleased the Almighty that the Scripture should be withheld from some, and not understood by all, lest it should fall into contempt, or lead the unlearned into error. And it must not be alleged that all were allowed, in the primitive times, to read the Scriptures, it being well known that in those early times the church connived at many things, which the holy fathers disapproved and corrected when the Christian religion was firmly established. He cannot therefore grant, but absolutely forbid, by the authority of Almighty God and his blessed apostle Peter, what you ask, and command you to oppose to the utmost of your power all who require it.” Greg. l. vii. ep. ii.; also Bower, idem, p. 279.
On the subject of the above letter, it should be remembered none spoke the Sclavonic at that day except the Sclavonians themselves; that the great mass of that people were slaves, either to some few individuals of their own nation, or to the other European nations, by whom they had been captured, or to whom they had been sold. They were a nation of slaves, and hence the Romans called their language Servian, from servus, a slave. There is still extant among the ancient German archives some account of the physical and moral appearance of this people, representing them as robust, filthy, faithless, and extremely wicked. They called themselves sclava or sclavas, &c., which word, in their language, implied an elevated distinction, and was in common use as a suffix to individual names, indicating that the person was highly elevated among his countrymen, as in this case, Vrati-Slaus—indicating the fact that Vrati was famous, elevated, a man of high and honourable distinction. Such men often held immense numbers of their less elevated countrymen in bondage. From the form and meaning of this suffix, some modern scholars have erroneously supposed it to have come from the Latin, laus. We may form some idea of the feelings of Pope Gregory VII., upon this application, by imagining what would have been the feelings of a Virginia legislature, fifty years ago, had some free African, then there, petitioned to have the laws published in Eboe, for the benefit of the slaves. In the above letter, the meaning of the assertion, “in those early times the church connived at many things which the holy fathers disapproved,” &c., at this late day is very liable to be misconceived. He does not allude to any thing said or done by Jesus Christ or his apostles, but to the action of his predecessors in the pontificate on this very subject. About the year 860, Pope Nicholas I. granted this very privilege to the Sclavonians in Moravia; and about ten years after, the same was renewed by Hadrian II., upon the request of St. Cyril, the apostle of the Moravians. See the Life of Cyril, (Latin,) page 22. And John VIII., in the year 882, confirmed the same, at the request of Sfento Pulcher, prince of Moravia, calling it the license granted by Pope Nicholas, “of saying the canonical hours and celebrating mass in their native language.”
“The Sclavonian language we justly commend,” says the pope in his letter to the prince, “and order the praise and the works of Christ our Lord to be celebrated in that tongue, being directed by Divine authority to praise the Lord, not in three only, but in all languages, agreeably to what we find in holy writ—‘Praise ye the Lord, all ye nations, and bless him, all ye people.’ The apostles announced the wonderful works of God in all languages,” &c., “and he who made the three chief languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Latin, created all the rest for his praise and glory.” See Johan. ep. 247.
The same privilege was granted by the Greek church to the Russians, who speak the Sclavonian language; and they perform, to this day, as well as the Moravians, Divine service in their native language. The pope, however, ordered the gospel to be first read in Latin, and afterwards, for the sake of those who understood not that language, in the Sclavonian. (See Bower, idem, p. 37.) It is not relevant to our subject to inquire what facts presented themselves to the mind of Gregory VII., whereby he apprehended that the Scripture might “fall into contempt,” or they “lead the unlearned into error.” But we have seen, in our own day, a wide deviation from the instruction of St. Paul, in a version of the New Testament in Romaic, or modern Greek, evidently translated from our English version, instead of from the ancient Greek; wherein Paul is made to say, 1 Tim. i. 10, anthropokleptas, which indicates the stealing of a free man—instead of what Paul did say, andrapodistais, which indicates the stealing of a slave. It is true, King James’s translators substituted “men-stealers,” without any further allusion that the men who were to be the things stolen were slaves. It does not appear to have occurred to them that a free man could be stolen, since in no sense could he be property. In said version are other errors of equal magnitude; and we have it from good authority that the Greek patriarch, after an examination of said version, most strictly forbad his people to read it, and, also, to introduce it among them. If such errors were incident to the Sclavonic, Gregory VII. had at least some ground for his apprehensions. But the Sclavonians were of the same colour and physical formation of the northern tribes to whom they were in bondage. There was no physical or moral degradation consequent to an amalgamation with them; and such connection did happen to a very great extent, and at this day has very nearly extinguished all caste between them. But in the days of Gregory VII., and long since, the politer nations of the south of Europe regarded those of the north, whether free or in servitude, as but a mere grade, if at all, above barbarians; and this pope seems to have been disposed to have fed them with “milk,” and not with “strong meat.” Heb. v. 12. We may perceive how the south estimated the north at those early times, by an incident related by D'Aubigne, vol. i. p. 96. Reuchlin, a native of Pforzheim, had made himself a distinguished scholar for any age. In 1498, he found his way to Rome, when Argyropylos, a celebrated Greek professor, was lecturing on the elevated standing in literature to which the Greeks had formerly arrived, &c. Reuchlin, highly delighted with the lecture, visited the professor, and addressed him in Greek. Argyropylos, perceiving him to be a German, says, “Whence come you, and do you understand Greek?” Reuchlin replies, “I am a German, and am not quite ignorant of your language.” He took up Thucydides and read; when Argyropylos said, in grief, tears, and astonishment, “Alas, alas, Greece cast out and fugitive, is gone to hide herself beyond the Alps!” But the funeral fire of Greece and Rome illumed the extreme north, and by its light the savage freeman and his more savage slave were taught their religion, civilization, and science. “It was thus,” says D'Aubigne, “that the sons of barbarous Germany and those of ancient Greece met together in the palaces of Rome; thus it was that the east and the west gave each other the right hand of fellowship in this rendezvous of the world, and that the former poured into the hands of the latter those intellectual treasures which it had carried off in its escape from the barbarism of the Turks. God, when his plans require it, brings together in an instant, by some unlooked-for catastrophe, those who seemed for ever removed from each other.” This improved condition of the northern nations was foreseen, perhaps already felt, by Innocent IV., in 1254, when he permitted Divine service to be performed in the Sclavonic language, which is noticed by Bower, vol. vi. p. 254. At the close of his remarks on Pope Innocent IV., he says—“We have a great number of letters written by this pope on different occasions, and a decree allowing the Sclavonians to perform Divine service in their mother tongue, contrary to a decree of Gregory VII.” We beg to notice Pope Gregory IX.; for, “by this pope was confirmed the religious order of St. Mary de Mercede, as it is called, an order instituted to make gatherings all over the Christian world for the redemption of Christians taken and kept in slavery by the infidels.” Bower, idem, p. 236. This order was instituted by James, king of Arragon, about the year 1223, and was confirmed by Gregory on the 17th of January, 1230. The general of this order resides constantly at Barcelona, where it was instituted by the king of Arragon, under the direction of Raimund de Pennefort, then canon of that city. See Oldoinus in notis ad Ciacon. Bullarium in Greg. IX. constit. 9. About the year 1312, charges of the most wicked and gross nature were had against the Knights Templars. Their chief persecutor was King Philip, who suspected them to have encouraged an insurrection during his war in Flanders. Through his influence the whole order were arrested, not only in France, but in all Christendom. Pope Clement V. took charge of their prosecution. But it appearing that thousands of them had and were ready to defend the Christian religion at the expense of their lives, and that many of their order were then in slavery among the Saracens, from which they might redeem themselves by repudiating Jesus Christ and his religion, yet they preferred rather to live and die in chains than to purchase freedom at so high a price, their judges considered these facts to overbalance the evidence against them. But through Philip’s influence the order was suppressed. See Bower, vol. vi. p. 39. By the laws of Moses, when the Hebrews found it necessary to make war and subdue their enemies in battle, they were directed to put all the men to death, and to make slaves of the women and children. See Deuteronomy xx. 13, 14. The milder treatment of the women and children was in mercy, predicated on the presumption of their being more tractable and less unalterably sunk in sin. We perceive the same state of facts when the Lord commanded the Hebrews to put the Canaanites to death. “Thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them: neither shalt thou make marriages with them,” &c. Deut. vii. 2, 3. Whereas the adjoining and kindred tribes were only devoted to slavery. “Both thy bond-men and thy bond-maids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you: of them shall ye buy bond-men and bond-maids.” Lev. xxv. 44. It is, and ever has been, the universal rule to destroy from the earth, whenever sin has sunk its votary so low in the depths of crime that there is no longer even hope of reform. Whereas, for a less degree of depravity, mercy intercedes for the reformation of the victim, by placing him someway in surveillance, either for life or for a term of years. On the same principle is founded the distinction of punishment between homicide attended with premeditated malice, and that which is not so attended.
“Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig-tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering, said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I may dig about it, and dung it: and if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down.” Luke xiii. 7.