The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

THE VANITY OF EARTH.

Why should this world of ours strive to be glorious

Since its prosperity is not victorious?

Swiftly its power and its beauty are perishing

Like to frail vases which once we were cherishing.

Trust more to letters carved fair on some frostiness

Than to this brittle world’s empty untrustiness.

False in her honors, in semblance of purity,

Never as yet had she time for security.

More should be trusted to glass, which is treacherous,

Than to Earth’s happiness wretched and venturous—

Filled with false vanities, lured by false madnesses,

Worn with false knowledges, sick of false gladnesses.

Where now is Solomon, once so pre-eminent?

Where is that Samson, so valiantly prominent?

Where the fair Absalom, stalwart and beautiful?

Where the sweet Jonathan, lovely and dutiful?

Whither went Caesar, that monarch illustrious?

Or the proud Dives, at table industrious?

Tell me of Tullius, lofty in eloquence;

Or Aristoteles, first in grandiloquence.

So many heroes, such spacious activity,

Dancers and mountebanks, kingdoms and levity;

Rulers of earth who were tyrannous o’er us all—

Swift as a glance they are gone from before us all!

What a short holiday this of Earth’s best estate!

Joys, which to man are like dreams that attest his fate;

Which, the rewards of eternity banishing,

Lead him through paths where his comfort is vanishing.

Food of the worm thou art—clod of the common clay!

O dew! O vanity! Why praise thy common way?

Thou who art ignorant whether the morrow come!

Do good to all ere the time of thy sorrow come.

Much though we value this glory of earthiness,

Scripture declareth, as grass, its unworthiness;

Like the light leaf, by the mighty wind hurried off,

So is this life, by the darkness soon carried off.

Nothing is thine which thy spirit may lose again—

What this world gave it intendeth to choose again;

Lift up thy thought where the heart hath its treasure-house—

Happy art thou to despise this Earth’s pleasure-house!

We are not to imagine that these stirring verses, whether in Latin or in Italian, went unnoticed. In the various productions of his muse the humble monk enjoyed a popularity like that of Abelard. Numerous manuscripts of his writings were scattered through Italy, France, and Spain, and translations in these different languages helped to increase his fame. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries at least eight editions appeared. But for critical purposes they are not so valuable as might be supposed, since there are interpolations by other hands which confuse and deter the investigator. They were supplemented in 1819 by the publication of a number hitherto unknown, which were edited by Alessandro da Mortara.

Of the Latin poetry ascribed to him the Jesu dulcis memoria is certainly Bernard’s, for Morel discovered it in an Einsiedeln MS. “older than 1288.” There are two hymns—Crux te, te volo conqueri and Ave regis angelorum—of which we merely know the opening lines and have no accessible originals. The Verbum caro factum est, the Ave fuit prima salus, and the Cur mundus militat are doubtless his own. The Mater Speciosa I take the liberty to discredit because of its gross Latinity—a point which Ozanam concedes in spite of his belief in its genuine character. The Mater Dolorosa itself has not escaped question, for Benedict XIV. declared it to be the work of Innocent III., to whom, with about the same amount of truth, has also been attributed the Veni, Sancte Spiritus.

In the year 1306, after imprisonment and excommunication had both passed over his head and spent their force harmlessly, the aged Jacoponus drew near his end. His companions urged him to ask for the final sacrament, but he was in no haste. He would wait, he said, for John of Alvernia, his true friend, and from his hands only would he receive it. They considered this another proof of his untamed and rebellious nature, and loudly lamented around his bed. But the dying man gave no heed to their weakness. He raised himself upon his arm and with lifted face began to chant the Anima benedetta—the song of a blessed soul. Scarcely had his voice uttered the closing words ere two men were seen hastening across the field. One was that very John of Alvernia, moved by some strange presentiment to visit his friend. He entered the room and greeted Jacoponus with a kiss of peace. Then he administered the sacrament of the Eucharist. And thereupon the failing singer, his desire being at last fulfilled, sang the Jesu nostra fidanza and relapsed into silence for a time. Then he exhorted those about him to live holy lives, and, lifting his hands toward heaven, gently expired. It was on Christmas eve and, in the neighboring church, the choir had just begun to chant the Gloria in Excelsis.

Two hundred and ninety years after his death his tombstone and its inscription were placed. The words, when rendered from Latin into English, are these:

“The bones of the blessed Jacoponus de Benedictis of Todi, who, a fool for Christ’s sake, deluded the world by a new art and took heaven by force.”

There is in the Lenox Gallery a small picture by Zamacois, which represents a jester leaning against a head of Pan. The rude, broken bust stands on an antique pedestal, its mouth, in its half-tragic, half-comic curves, appearing to whisper into the ear of its companion. He, scarlet-clad and with his bauble swinging idly in his hands, inclines his head toward it and seems in a sad gravity to listen to its words. There, indeed, do I see Jacoponus! The eager heart of the great misunderstood, inconsistent, vain, and empty World tells him of its nothingness—a broken and abandoned deity deserted in its garden of Eden. An inexpressible sadness comes over me. Quietly I put by the Stabat Mater; I do not love it!—but I close the page softly over the poor mad prophet who rests his weary head on the steps of Solomon’s throne.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THOMAS À KEMPIS.

The contributions of Holland to the devotional poetry of Christendom have not been extensive; but in the Middle Ages she could show several Latin hymn-writers. The best known of these, however, is by far more famous for his prose works. Thomas Hemerken, called afterward Thomas à Kempis, was not by birth a Hollander. He was born in 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, a small city in the diocese of Koeln (Cologne), not far from what became the boundary line between the two nations. But in those days, and, indeed, until the Peace of Westphalia, Holland, like Switzerland, was reckoned a part of Germany. His father, John Hemerken, was an artisan of the poorer class, probably a silversmith; and both his parents were devout and God-fearing people. His elder brother John had gone to Deventer to obtain an education, after the fashion of the times, when boys wandered from city to city in search of instruction, and supported themselves by singing, begging, and sometimes by thieving. But at Deventer John had fallen in with some good people who had pity upon these wandering scholars, and had made arrangements to furnish them lodgings and copying-work in addition to what they would earn by singing in the choir.

The chief person in this group was Gerard Groote, a man of wealthy family and some strange vicissitudes in life. He had studied at the universities of Paris and Prague, and had taken minor orders to qualify himself to hold the two canonries family influence secured to him, but without giving any indication of a vocation to the sacred office. He seems even to have led a dissolute life. Then a great change came over him, chiefly through the influence of a friend of his youth named Henry Eger, now the prior of a Cistercian convent at Munkhuisen. Gerard resigned his benefices, and spent five years in a monastic retreat, from which he emerged as a zealous preacher of the Gospel to the clergy and people of what now is Holland, using both Latin and Dutch as occasion served. He especially dwelt on the utter worldliness of that dreary time, when priests, nobles, and tradesmen alike had lost all idea of serving God and men, and had set up gain and pleasure as the recognized ends of life. His sharp rebukes, and his exaltation of humility, simplicity, and poverty, attracted the lower classes, but roused the opposition of both the burghers and the Mendicants against him. After a brief and stormy career he was silenced by the Archbishop of Utrecht, and was obliged to find vent for his zeal in some other channel.

His purity and unworldliness had gathered around him, in his native Deventer, men and women like-minded with him, who, according to the tendency of the time, drifted naturally into a kind of monastic life. Brother-houses and sister-houses were organized, and they became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. They took no vows, and yet practised celibacy, common ownership and labor, and obedience to the rector of the house. They adopted no common dress, but came to wear the simplest gray robe of the same cut. Both laymen and clergy lived together in the brother-houses, and each took his turn in the common services of the brotherhood. They observed no canonical hours beyond what the Church exacted of the priests among them. They assumed none of the professions of the monks, and yet they realized the monkish ideal better than did the monks themselves. The four principles which governed Gerard’s own life and became the four corner-stones of this fraternity, were “contempt of the world and of self, imitation of the lowly life of Christ, good-will, and the grace of devoutness” (contemptus mundi et sui ipsius, imitatio humilis vitae Christi, bona voluntas, gratia devotionis). All this was summed up in the phrase moderna devotio, used both by the brethren and the outside world to designate the distinctive character of the order.

The experience Christendom had had of the results of mendicancy led Groote and his associates to base the new brotherhood on honest labor. The shape this took reflects his own character. He was a great book-lover—semper avarus et peravarus librorum, he says himself. When in peril of his life in a storm by sea, he managed to save the six books he had with him. He possessed a considerable library, and when the brotherhood came to adopt the principle of community of goods, he and the rest put their books into the common stock. And all who were able to write were to labor in copying books for sale—the clergy in Latin, the laymen in Dutch. It was this employment he extended to the poor scholars of the Deventer school. Indeed, it seems not improbable that he began it with them, and that the first brotherhood was composed of young friends of this class, who had grown to manhood in this employment. It is certain that in Deventer, in Zwolle, and for all we know in the other cities where the brotherhood took root, near by the brother-house stood a poor-scholars’ house, in which the boys attending the school of the city were lodged, kept under discipline, and to some degree given work also. But the Brethren of the Common Life were not an educating body, as has been very generally supposed. They aimed only at saving boys from the moral injury which too often attended their homeless life, at keeping good discipline over them, and at imparting moral and religious training. They aimed to do for the school-boys what the founders of colleges in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris tried to do for the myriads of students who lived like vagrants in those seats of learning.

But before Gerard Groote died the question was raised whether it would not be advisable to establish a strictly monastic order of life for those of the brethren who felt a vocation to it. To this he agreed, but dissuaded his friends from adopting the severe rules of the Cistercians and the Carthusians for the new order. Rather he suggested that of the Canons Regular under the rule of St. Augustine as preferable, since it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the brotherhood, and would bind on no one too heavy burdens. This advice marks an advance upon Dominic, Francis, and the “reformers” of the Benedictine and Mendicant orders, in an evangelical direction. They all sought progress to perfection in deeper austerity. In his case the preference perhaps was caused by his friendship for the monastery of Canons Regular at Groenendal, in Flanders, whose prior was Jan Rusbroek, the great Flemish mystic. Gerard made several visits to Groenendal after his conversion, and translated two of his friend’s books into Latin.

Gerard Groote was carried off by the great pestilence of 1384, in his forty-fourth year. But he left the work in good hands, for a Deventer priest named Florens Radewinzoon succeeded him as rector of the brother-house, and proceeded with the building of the new monastery at Windesheim, near Deventer. It was opened in 1386, and John à Kempis, who had become a member of the brotherhood, was one of the six who first assumed the monastic vows.

It was six years later, in 1392, that Thomas set out to seek his brother at Deventer; for although the distance was not much over a hundred miles, he had heard nothing of John’s profession at Windesheim, so uncertain and irregular were the means of communication. On learning what had happened, he proceeded to Windesheim, where his brother welcomed him warmly. But there was no school at Windesheim, and John advised him to return to Deventer to attend the city school and place himself under the care of Florens. He did so and became an inmate of the poor-scholars’ house, which had been given to the brotherhood by a devout matron of the city. Here he lived for six years, attending school under Master Johann Boehme, singing in the choir of the church of which Florens was vicar, and earning a little money by copying books for him. The good rector showed him very great kindness, and in 1398, when his school studies were complete, he received him into the brotherhood. The year before this another pestilence had visited Deventer, carrying off Johann Kessel, the saintly cook of the brother-house, and prostrating Thomas himself, who recovered with difficulty. Indeed, it seemed as though the brotherhood would become extinct, and Florens and six others withdrew for a time from the plague-smitten city to guard against this catastrophe.

In 1399 Thomas, at Florens’s instance, decided to assume the monastic vows. A second house of the order had been established at Agnietenberg (or Mount St. Agnes) near the city of Zwolle. Of this John à Kempis had been made the second prior in 1398, and held that office until 1408. Thither Thomas proceeded in 1399, stopping at Zwolle to obtain the indulgence lately proclaimed by the Pope for the benefit of a new church in that city. After a novitiate of seven years he took the vows in 1406, and in 1414 was ordained to the priesthood.

The monastic life is studiously and intentionally monotonous. It aims at the exclusion of all that gives zest and interest to ordinary existence, and at the reduction of life’s employments to a routine. Its variety and color are to be sought in the inner life of its members, and that of Thomas was not wanting in these elements. If his inner experience be reflected in his Soliloquy of the Soul, he passed through those shifting seasons of gloom and gladness which characterize the experience of an introverted religion. His religious character was formed on the lines of the modern devotion, as defined by Gerard Groote, and as reflected in the lives and the writings of Florens Radewinzoon, Gerard Zerbolt, Johann Mande, Gerlach Peterszoon, and Johann Brinckerinck, the earlier notable men of the brotherhood or of the Windesheim congregation. His was not a bold and originative mind to strike out new paths for himself. He had not even those gifts of practical administration for which Florens, John à Kempis, and others of the order were notable. Even when he had attained recognition as the most eminent man at Agnietenberg, his brethren twice passed him by in selecting their prior, and never gave him any dignity higher than the sub-priorate, which probably was a sinecure. An early biographer goes so far as to describe him as sitting silent whenever ordinary and worldly matters were discussed, because of his ignorance of the very terms used at such times. But this is an exaggeration. His Chronicle of the Monastery of Mt. St. Agnes shows him taking a mild and not unintelligent interest in the secular side of the monastic life, and sharing the joy of his brethren in the fine apple-crop or the large take of fish, and the like. But this Chronicle shows how limited his range of vision and interest. He lived through the Papal Schism, the Asiatic conquests of Timour, the Council of Constance, the Hussite wars, Henry the Fifth’s invasion of France, the exploits of Jeanne d’Arc, the Council of Basle, the rise of the Medici in Florence, and of the Duchy of Burgundy, the Council of Florence, the exploits of Scanderberg and Hunyadi Janos, the Wars of the Roses, the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the fall of Constantinople, the Florentine Academy, the Portuguese discoveries in the Atlantic, and much more that might be thought likely to be discussed even within the walls of a Dutch monastery. But the record is silent as to all these things; for the most part they are part of the doings of that “world” which the disciples of the modern devotion trained themselves to despise.

No doubt the great question of the Papal Schism was of interest at Agnietenberg, and also the two great councils which brought it to an end. At the Council of Constance the Brethren of the Common Life were arraigned by a zealous Mendicant as violating Church law by observing the three rules of the monastic life without belonging to any recognized order. But this Mendicant notion was declared heretical, thanks to two great French doctors, Pierre d’Ailly and John Gerson, the second of whom was to be associated so closely with Thomas in a famous controversy.

In 1427 the troubles of the outside world did reach the convent at Agnietenberg and its associates. There had been a disputed election to the princely diocese of Utrecht, then one of the largest and wealthiest in Latin Christendom. The Pope recognized one candidate and the people of the cities another. To break down their obstinacy the diocese was laid under an interdict, which put an end to every act of public worship. Thereupon the brotherhood and the order were given their choice by the citizens, either to go on with their services as usual in church and chapel, or to leave the diocese. With one consent they chose the latter alternative, and in 1429 they distributed themselves among the associated brother-houses and monasteries outside the diocese. The twenty-four clerical and lay brethren of Agnietenberg found a home at Luvenkerk in Friesland, in a disordered monastery which had been placed under the rule of the Windesheim congregation, and which they used this opportunity to reform. After three years of exile they were allowed to return, a new Pope having yielded to the people. But Thomas did not return so soon, for he had been called away to Arnheim to the death-bed of his brother John, the brother he had found at Windesheim instead of Deventer, and under whose priorship at Agnietenberg he took the vows.

In 1451 Deventer was visited by a great Churchman and notable thinker, the Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, who, like Thomas, was born east of what is now the German frontier, but had received his schooling in Deventer, where he learned to love and honor the Brethren of the Common Life. He came now as papal legate to reform the abuses which had arisen in the churches of Germany during the great schism; and when he came to his loved Deventer he hastened to indicate his especial regard for his old friends. He granted a special indulgence to both the brotherhood and the order, and permitted the Windesheim congregation to establish a second congregation, with equal privileges, to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of convents of Canons Regular.

Thomas survived his brother by nearly forty years. His cloister life moved on through three decades with the external monotony of an existence subjected to rule. Five years of the forty were years of pestilence and popular distress, which he duly chronicles. But the only real interruption of his routine which still has a living interest was his acquaintance with young Johan Wessel, who came to pursue his studies in Zwolle, being drawn by the charm of the Imitation into the neighborhood of its author. This probably was about 1460, when he sought and made Thomas’s acquaintance, and often conversed with him upon the greatest of themes. But the earliest biography of Wessel belongs to the next century, and is by a Protestant pastor in Bremen; so the statements that Wessel found Thomas and his brother monks all too superstitious, and rebuked the Mariolatry of the author of the Imitation, are open to doubt. That Wessel, the forerunner of Luther, influenced Thomas in the writing of the Imitation is a palpable absurdity.

For a short time he was procurator or steward of the monastery, a task which must have been uncongenial to him, but which he would discharge with his best diligence, as his first biographer, Jodocus Badius Ascensius, says he did. Then he was sub-prior a second time in 1448.

The chronicle of Mount St. Agnes ends with January 17th, 1471; its author died July 26th of the same year. His health had been singularly good, but toward the close of his life he suffered from dropsy. His eyesight never failed him, and he retained all his faculties in full vigor to the last. As the end drew near, the sense of all he had been to his brethren as a friend and counsellor deepened in them at the prospect of losing him. All that their love could do and his ascetic principles would permit, they did to lighten the burdens and relieve the pains of his illness. He died in his ninety-second year, after having been sixty-three years in the order and fifty-eight in the priesthood.

He was buried within the cloisters of the monastery. There his bones continued to rest even after the dissolution of the monastery at the Reformation in 1573, and thence they were disinterred in 1672 and placed in a shrine. But no miracles were wrought at his grave or by his bones. Whatever the faults of the Brethren of the Common Life, it was not in the atmosphere of the modern devotion that men learned to crave after such evidence of sanctity in the servants of God. So the brotherhood and its affiliated order have made no contributions to the list of Roman Catholic saints. There is room in that long and motley list for Giovanni da Capistrano, the cruel and implacable inquisitor, whose path across Europe was marked with blood and fire. But none has been found for the gentle and loving Thomas à Kempis, who has wooed millions of souls to a closer communion with his Master, and whose own life preached humility, patience, gentleness, renunciation of the world, conformity to the will of God, and likeness to Christ, as distinctly as does his great book. Well, he is content. Ama nesciri—love to be unknown—was a precept often on his lips and illustrated in his life. Of small matter to him would have been the attempt to deny his authorship of the Imitation, and the controversy of two centuries’ duration it provoked. Of no greater moment the refusal of the name of saint to one whose only miracles were wrought upon the spirits of his brethren. But the Church catholic says of him, “Surely this was a holy man of God.”

While the copying of books was the general employment of the brotherhood and of the order, there was from the first a good deal of independent authorship among them, and always on the lines of the “modern devotion.” Groote himself labored chiefly by preaching and correspondence. But some of his letters are tracts in that form, and had a wide circulation as such. Florens was not much even of a letter-writer, but he wrote one devotional tract which has been discovered. It was in Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, his altera manus, that he found a fit organ for the expression of his ideas in writing. To us Protestants Zerbolt is memorable as the author of a treatise asserting the right and duty of unlearned men to have good books—the Bible and their prayer-books included—in their own tongue. But he was much better known by his writing certain widely circulated books of devotion—modern, of course. Hendrik Mande, the Seer, was a Windesheim monk whose mysticism took the bolder and more ecstatic flight of Rusbroek, and like Rusbroek he found his native tongue more suitable than Latin. Lastly, Gerlach Peterszoon, sometimes called “the second Thomas à Kempis,” although he died in 1411, before Thomas himself had become an author, wrote in both Latin and Dutch sundry works, one of which still is reprinted for edification even by Protestants. Through all this literature runs the same strain of thought and feeling, in spite of personal differences. They all insist on a deeper renunciation of the world than is satisfied by any external monastic compliances. They all hold forth the imitation of Christ’s humility and meekness as the essence of the Christian life. They all insist on devotion to the will of God and good-will to men as the two essential channels in which the Christian life must run.

Thomas à Kempis’s works as a whole fit into the writings of this group of disciples of Gerard Groote, just as his Imitation of Christ fits into the rest of his works. He simply is the best writer they had, as the Imitation is the best thing he ever wrote. If none of the many manuscripts of the Imitation bore his name, as nearly all of them do; and if none of the contemporaries who knew him had certified to his authorship of it, as so many of them do; and if none of the printed editions bore his name, as twenty-one of the fifteenth century and forty of the sixteenth do, we still would have been obliged to ascribe it to him. No other century than his could have produced it. It reflects the ideas of no other group than that of the disciples of Gerard and Florens. The very title, De Imitatione Christi, et de Contemptu Omnium Vanitatum Mundi, expresses the twofold aspect of the moderna devotio of which Gerard and Florens were the sponsors. Among those disciples there is no one but the author of the Soliloquy of the Soul and the Valley of Lilies, to whom we could give it. It differs no more in point of worth from Thomas’s other books than does the Pilgrim’s Progress from Bunyan’s other writings, Grace Abounding always excepted.

While it is by his formal hymns Thomas à Kempis acquires his right to a place here, it is true at the same time that the Imitation itself is a great Christian poem, not only in substance but in form. A Belgian, who was his contemporary, says he had written the book metrice, or in rhythm and rhyme. As it was printed always as prose until our own times, this statement was somewhat puzzling, as was the title, Musica Ecclesiastica, found in some of the manuscripts. But Rev. Karl Hirsche, Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, has vindicated both expressions by showing that Thomas has followed such models as the sequence, Victimae paschali, in the composition of his work. And he has given us an edition based on Thomas’s autograph of the year 1441, in which this peculiarity is made visible.[15] It is true that this way of writing what we may call rhymed and rhythmical prose is not confined to Thomas or to the Imitation among his works. Among others Jan van Schoonhooven, a Belgian disciple of Jan Rusbroek’s, uses this form frequently; and Pastor Hirsche has pointed out its frequency in others of Thomas’s works. But in no other book approaching the Imitation in length is the restriction of rhythm and rhyme so steadily accepted. As an instance, take this brief passage from the fifth chapter of the third book:

“Amans volat, currit, et laetatur;

Liber est, et non tenetur

Dat omnia pro omnibus,

Et habet omnia in omnibus;

Quia in uno summo super omnia quiescit

Ex quo omne bonum fluit et procedit.

Non respecit ad dona

Sed ad donantem se convertit super omnia bona.

Amor modo saepe nescit,

Sed super omnem modum fervescit.

Amor onus non sentit,

Labores non reputat;

Plus affectat quam valet;

De impossibilitate non causatur

Quia cuncta sibi posse et licere arbitrator.”

Or in Rev. W. Benham’s admirable version: “He who loveth flyeth, runneth, and is glad; he is free and not hindered. He giveth all things for all things, and has all things in all things, because he resteth in One who is high above all, from whom every good floweth and proceedeth. He looketh not for gifts, but turneth himself to the Giver, above all good things. Love oftentimes knoweth no measure, but breaketh out above all measure; love feeleth no burden, reckoneth not labors, striveth after more than it is able to do, pleadeth not impossibility, because it judgeth all things which are lawful for it to be possible.”[16]

The Imitation has obtained a place next to the Bible in the devotional literature of Christendom. The fact that the author was a Roman Catholic and that the fourth book is a preparation for the devout reception of the Eucharist in accordance with the Roman Catholic theory of its nature, has not prevented stanch Protestants from translating and commending it. Dr. Chalmers wrote a commendatory preface to a Scotch reprint of John Payne’s translation. And in Germany, Holland, and England the Protestant versions have far exceeded those made by Roman Catholics. The first Protestant version was that from the mediaeval into Ciceronian Latin, by Sebastian Castellio (Basle, 1556); the second was into German by the great and good John Arndt. But the book has achieved a still more notable conquest than this. In Corneille’s metrical version (1651) it was a favorite with Auguste Comte, who recommended it to the Benthamist, Sir William Molesworth, as well worth reading. It has obtained a sort of recognition among Comtists as a canonical work, and selections from it often are read at the Positivist services. And English readers will remember the passage in which George Eliot, writing in Comte’s spirit, describes its effect on the sensitive spirit of Maggie Tulliver:

“She knew nothing of doctrines and systems—of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off Middle Ages was the direct human communication of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.

“I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need pay only sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph—not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced, in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, and with the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.”—The Mill on the Floss, Book IV., chap. 3.

All true; but less than the truth; for Thomas’s power lies not in these negations, but in his personal relation to “the supreme, invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength,” from whom Marian Evans turned away to fill up her life with “yearnings and strivings and failures,” while her only comfort was in the consideration that she had stilled her pain by no “false anodynes.”

It is a little uncertain at what time the Imitation was written. It seems not improbable that it was begun in Thomas’s youth, when he had assumed or was about to assume the responsibilities of the priesthood. A lofty regard for the sanctity of that office was one of the traditions of the brotherhood. Groote himself, in view of the stains of his earlier life, never would assume it, although his ordination would have enabled him to resume his work of preaching through the Archdiocese of Utrecht. He never was more than deacon, and the order which silenced him merely forbade deacons to preach without especial permission. It is not impossible that in the case of Thomas, as in that of Luther, the responsibility seemed greater than he could bear, and that it drove him into a closer and more consecrated fellowship with his Master, which bore fruit in the first book of this wonderful manual. He was ordained priest in 1414; there seems good reason to believe that this first book—the Imitation proper—was known and read at Windesheim, and even translated into Dutch by Jan Scutken, as early as the year 1420; and that the other three were written, each as an independent work, before 1425, and then united as one manual of devotion.[17] The oldest manuscript of the Latin still in existence bears the date 1425, and testifies to his authorship. The oldest in Thomas’s own handwriting was made in 1441, and forms part of a series of his works, which he then collected probably for the first time.

Of Thomas’s purely poetical works, besides a few hortatory poems and anagrams on the names of the saints, there were known until recently sixteen Cantica Spiritualia, to wit:

Adversa mundi tolera, Agnetis Christi virginis, Ama Jesum cum Agnete, Ave florens rosa, Christe Redemptor omnium, Vere salus, Christe sanctorum gloria, Et piorum, Cives coeli attendite, En virginis Caeciliae, Gaude, mater Ecclesia, De praecursoris, Jesu Salvador seculi, O dulcissime Jesu, O Jesu mi dulcissime, Spes et solamen, O qualis quantaque laetitia, O vera summa Trinitas, Tota vita Jesu Christi, Vitam Jesu stude imitari.

In 1882 Father O. A. Spitzen found in a manuscript in Zwolle ten other Cantica Spiritualia, which he published that year as the work of Thomas à Kempis, to wit:

Angelorum si haberem, Creaturarum omnium merita, Cum sub cruce sedet moerens, Jerusalem gloriosa, Mirum est si non lugeat, Nec quisquam oculis vidit, O quid laudis, quis honoris, Quanta Mihi cura de te, Serve meus noli metuere, Ubi modo est Jesus, ubi est Maria.

Six of these had already appeared in Mone’s collection, and credited to a fifteenth century manuscript found at Carlsruhe, a fact which does not militate against Spitzen’s view of their authorship. The latter found them along with the hymns generally ascribed to Thomas in a MS. which had belonged to the brother-house in Zwolle, and had been written in the latter half of that century, probably between 1477 and 1483. Most of them bear the ear-marks of Thomas’s style, and have a congruity with the matter of his works which lends probability to Father Spitzen’s conjecture.

Of all these hymns two only have attained any recognition as contributions to the sacred songs of Christendom. These two are the

Adversa mundi tolera,

which is rather an exhortation in the tone of the Imitation than a hymn; and the

O qualis quantaque laetitia,

better known, through the general omission of its first verse, as the

Adstant angelorum chori.

Dr. Trench well says that the whole of our author’s poetry will not yield a second passage at all to be compared in beauty with this. Indeed, most of Thomas’s poetry lacks the inspiration which characterizes his best prose. He is a poet in prose and a prosy poet, and writes in verse because he has been required to fill up some empty place in the hymn-list of his monastery. His acquaintance with the hymn-writer’s art is bounded by his daily familiarity with the hymns of his breviary, and he betrays the fact by starting from the first lines of well-known hymns in his own work. But in this hymn on the joys of heaven he for once struck the right key, although even here he shows some stiffness of the joints, like a monk more used to a seat in the Scriptorium than to the saddle of Pegasus. The hymn is known to English readers by the admirable version of Mrs. Charles:

“High the angel choirs are raising

Heart and voice in harmony.”

CHAPTER XXVII.
FRANCIS XAVIER, MISSIONARY TO THE INDIES (1506-52).

No man, since the days of the Apostles, has been more commended for his zeal than Xavier. He has been the moon of that “Society of Jesus” of which Ignatius Loyola was the guiding sun. His privations, heroism, and success have been the constant theme of the Roman Catholic Church. And it is impossible to study his life without a conviction that there was in it a devout and gallant purpose to bless the world.

Our limits and our line of thought alike demand of us that we shall not attempt, in any exhaustive form, to treat of Francis Xavier from the theologic or controversial side. He interests us, apart from his personal character, simply because two Latin hymns have been accredited to his pen. These have the same opening line,

“O Deus ego amo Te,”

but, after this exordium, they proceed quite differently. The second of them, as we find it placed in Daniel’s collection, has received the greatest share of esteem, and is known to the entire world of English-speaking Christians by the admirable translation of Mr. Caswall:

“My God, I love thee, not because

I seek for heaven thereby,” etc.

There is good reason to discredit its authorship, if this be a question of accuracy with us. Schlosser’s language (Vol. i., p. 407) would indicate that he regarded it as “generally conceded” to be the “love-sigh [Liebesseufzer] of the holy Francis Xavier.” But no proof has yet been offered which positively identifies this hymn with its reputed composer. Its spirit—and that of its companion lyric—is precisely his own. But so, it may be added, is the spirit of that touching poem,

“I am old and blind—

Men point to me as stricken by God’s frown,”

the same as that of John Milton, its once reputed author. No true student of Milton’s times or of Milton’s language was ever deceived by it; and the innocent and amiable Quaker lady of our own century, who wrote it, was perfectly guileless in this impersonation of his grief. But, nevertheless, it passed current for a long time on the strength of some one’s literary sagacity.

This species of argument is a very common inheritance to the editors of Latin hymns, from Thomasius and Clichtove downward. But it is quite as unsafe as to assign

“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”

to the actual Mark Antony when we know it to have been written by William Henry Lytle, an American, born in 1829 and dying in 1863. Therefore, it is scarcely proper authoritatively to accredit these hymns to Xavier, or, indeed, to any other poet. The utmost that we can say for them is that no one can prove the converse of the proposition, and that their style and form are appropriate to the period at which he lived. He is not known to have written other verses. These may have been the only exudations of that bruised and wounded spirit which have hardened into amber and thus have become precious to us. And we would prefer to believe that he truly appears in these lines in such an exquisite mystic apotheosis rather than to intermeddle with lower questions, and so, perhaps, prevent any discussion of himself in these pages at all.

We have been prohibited by much the same destructive analysis from treating of Augustine, who never wrote a hymn, and to whom the Ad perennis vitae fontem has been wrongly ascribed, for we know it now to be the undoubted composition of St. Peter Damiani. In this and in other similar cases where there is any literary question concerned, it may be worth our while to investigate with great carefulness. As a rule, however, the internal evidence offered in the hymns themselves will set us on the true path. They range in structure from the lowest corundum up to the choicest diamond, and are as various as any gems in their prosodic form and spiritual color. Like these gems, also, they are notable for varieties of crystallization—the Dark Ages showing imperfect angles and crude attempts, and the Renaissance exhibiting again the old sharp-cut classicism of a time anterior even to Hilary and Ambrose.

From the higher critical standpoint, then, these hymns are not unacceptable as Xavier’s own work. They feel as if they belonged to his age and to his life. They are transfused and shot through by a personal sense of absorption into the divine love, which has fused and crystallized them in its fiercest heat. It is proper to inquire, moreover, if Xavier did not write them, who did? Their author must have been as much superior to his own circumstances and surroundings as Xavier was to his; and he must also have been as much possessed by this same holy zeal. It is absolutely incredible that, with these qualities given, he should not have been known to us in other relations, and, sooner or later, identified as the true source of their being. The sixteenth century was a time when literary knowledge was closer and keener than it had been in the twelfth, and a hymn of that period could not be attributed to Heloise without exposing its own fallacy; for in the Requiescat a labore we have such a comparatively modern lyric, which Daniel rightly tests and finds wanting. “It seems to me,” he says, “that this song is the production of a later age.” And he might well say it, for its crystallization, so to speak, is too accurate, too many-sided, for it to belong in the twelfth century and to the sad Abbess of the Paraclete.

One cannot, however, declare this so positively of Xavier’s two hymns. In style and composition the first is inferior to the second; but both have a simplicity and directness of utterance which may easily secure that pardon which their rhythm is faulty enough to require. If one were to assign any special date to them, it would naturally be in the neighborhood of that pathetic little petition which comes from the prayer-book of Mary Queen of Scots. The Domine Deus, speravi in Te is pitched in the same key with these. And as Mary lived from 1542 to 1587, and Xavier from 1506 to 1552, there is certainly room for these two compositions to have been prepared by another hand, in the days of enthusiasm over his triumphant successes and of sorrow over his early death.

With these arguments for and against the authenticity of the hymns, we must rest content. Bartoli and Maffei, in their Life of Xavier, are silent upon the subject; and the careful Königsfeld enters the better hymn in his collection as anonymous. If we retain the reputed authorship ourselves, it must be, therefore, rather as Christians than as scholars.

But, having done so, we are entitled to speak of Francis Xavier, and of his life and his work. The date of his birth is apparently fixed by a manuscript note in Spanish in a family record possessed by the Xaviers, which places it upon April 7th, 1506. His father was Don John Giasso, a man of legal acquirements and of good social position. He was at one time auditor of the royal council under King John III. For a wife he chose Donna Maria d’Azpilqueta y Xavier, and the child Francis was born at the castle of Xavier, a few miles distant from Pampeluna in Navarre, on the southern slope of the Pyrenees. He was the youngest of a large family, and the castle where he saw the light gave to him the patronymic by which he is always known. The family were originally called Asuarez, but altered their name to Xavier when King Theobald gave them this property. The mother’s title was thus perpetuated in one of her sons, but there seems to be some confusion still remaining, for a brother of the missionary was Captain John Azpilqueta, who also apparently had exchanged his father’s name of Giasso for one of the designations borne by his mother.

The biographies of Francis Xavier are naturally of a kind to excite the critical instincts of a scholar. They are, from the original life by Torsellini, to the latest Jesuit compilation, remarkable for their enthusiasm and unlimited credulity. It is only in such calmer treatises as those of Nicolini, Stephen, Venn, and others, that we get the more just conception of his character. But to be entirely fair to him we should take him from the picture painted by his co-religionists, refusing only those things which are manifestly incongruous or absurd. The work of Bartoli and Maffei may, for example, be regarded as entirely safe in its general statements.

From the portraits left to us and preserved in the pages of Nicolini and Mrs. Jameson, we derive a vivid impression of the man’s personal intensity. His eyes are deep and thoughtful; his nose strong, rather blunt, and withal sagacious; and his face is that of a mystic. He is usually represented as gazing upward in religious rapture and his lips are parted. His features are more rugged and forcible than refined. They indicate a rude strength of body and of will rather than a delicate and sensitive nature. Should we have met him personally, he would have given us the impression of an enthusiast, deeply affectionate and profoundly loyal to anything like a military organization. These opinions would have been approved by the fact.

We read that his parents desired to educate him as a cavalier, and that he was at first instructed at home in the usual topics. But as he showed zeal and intelligence he was sent, in his eighteenth year, to the College of Ste. Barbe at Paris. Here he completed the study of philosophy, received the degree of Master, and began to give instruction to others. His most intimate friend was Peter Faber, afterward to become one of the earliest adherents of Ignatius Loyola. And the biographers are unwearied in their eulogy of Xavier’s and Faber’s purity of life and morals in the midst of the great temptations of a corrupt city.

To these two young men, ardent of mind and eager in their ambition, now enters the influence which shapes their destiny. Faber was a Savoyard, poor and of humble birth, while Xavier was well-to-do and possessed the haughty spirit of a Spanish grandee. They were, however, kindling each other up to some scheme of future glory when Ignatius Loyola made his way to Paris. He had been converted a few years before this and had already begun to gather proselytes to his opinions. His purpose in visiting Paris was not merely to avail himself of better facilities for study, but also to secure more followers. It is not strange to us that Loyola, with his great sagacity, should have singled out the two companions and have set himself to win them. Faber’s allegiance, indeed, it was an easy matter to obtain. But Xavier did not so readily fall in with the wishes of the great general of the Jesuits.

Faber’s conversion was rapidly accomplished. He was supplied with the Spiritual Exercises, which is, of all books, the best adapted to produce the proper self-abandonment and plastic condition of soul which befit the neophyte of the Society of Jesus. And this work, composed, say the Roman Catholic authorities, in the cavern of Manresa with the help of the Virgin Mary, may be regarded as the keenest instrument by which men’s lives were ever carved into the patterns designed by a superior will. We have no space for a discussion of Jesuitism further than to indicate its methods when they affect the subject before us, but Faber’s behavior undoubtedly had its weight upon Xavier. The Savoyard took to fasting with a perfect fury. In his debilitated condition he was the fit vehicle for spiritual impressions, for ecstasies, and for mystical dreams. He would kneel in the open court in the snow, and sometimes allow himself to be covered with icicles. His bundle of fuel he made into a bed and slept upon it for the few hours of what one biography “scarcely knows whether to call torture or repose.” In fact, he so outran the instruction of Loyola, that that keen observer checked him and prevented what would have reacted against his own designs. “For,” saith quaint Matthew Henry, speaking of another subject, “there is a great deal of doing which, by overdoing, is altogether undone.”

Xavier was, however, more important to Loyola than Faber. And Xavier was of tougher material and harder to reach. Upon him the intense Loyola bent the blow-pipe flame of his own spirit. He had failed to touch him by texts or by austerities. He therefore changed his tactics altogether and began to soften him by praise, by judicious cultivation of his sympathies, by procuring new scholars for him, and even by attending his lectures and feigning a deep interest in whatever he did. In short, he applied flattery and deference in such a way that he insinuated himself very soon into the confidence of Xavier, and allowed the haughty Don to recognize the high birth and good breeding which he could also claim. This was a master stroke. Faber was after all only a Savoyard; but Loyola was born in a castle, had been a page at the court of Ferdinand, and had led soldiers into the deadliest places of battle. He had also the advantage of being Xavier’s senior by fully fourteen years, for his birth had been contemporaneous with Columbus’s expedition in search of the new world.

Here, then, the influence of this strong, undaunted, unflinching spirit began to focus itself upon the young teacher of philosophy. “Resistance to praise,” says the bitter La Rochefoucauld, “is a desire to be praised twice.” And to so acute a student of human nature as Loyola it soon grew evident that he was making progress. This was proved even by the modesty of Xavier. Therefore he redoubled his energies and utilized that marvellous power of adaptation, which was his chief legacy to his order, in obtaining a definite result. He gained ground so fast that Michael Navarro, a faithful servant of the young scholar, became determined to break off this dangerous fascination, and even attempted to kill Loyola in his private apartments. But he, too, was dealing with a brain which never relaxed its vigilance and with a magnetic personality which felt a danger, and moved safely, cat-like, through the dark. He was halted and challenged by the man he came to kill, and being crushed down in confusion was thereupon treated with magnanimity, and went away revolving many things in his mind.

This was the power of Loyola—a power which sprang, first of all, from his peculiar constitution, and, second, from his fanatical ambition. It has been the key by which the Jesuit has ever since unlocked the doors of palaces and contrived to whisper in the ears of kings. Its extent has been that of the civilized and uncivilized world. In the matter of organization no human fraternity has ever equalled the Society of Jesus. The germs which we behold at Ste. Barbe in Paris have grown into a tree whose roots have taken hold on every soil, and whose fruit has dropped in every clime. The order has invariably employed strategy, intrigue, ingenuity, and perfect combination to secure its ends. It is, as a system, far from being either dead or insignificant. And its real vitality has always sprung from its maxim that its associated members, vowed to celibacy and to the accomplishment of its purposes, should be Perinde ac si cadavera—absolutely subordinate and dead to any other will—in the hands of the “general” who is at the head of its affairs. It has worked, first for itself, second for the Roman Catholic Church, and third for the proselytizing of the heathen and the heretics. It has never neglected to procure in every manner the information it needed to the full extent or to employ its principle that the end to be gained justifies the means that are taken to gain it. Thus it is the legitimate outgrowth of the soldier-courtier-fanatic mind of its founder. And this was the mind which was now spending its splendid resources upon Xavier, playing with him like a trout upon the hook, until it should land him, a completely surrendered man, within its own control.

In another sphere and under other influences, Xavier might have been a far different person. He, at least, was sincere in his devotion to the cause. He identified Jesuitism with Christianity and Loyola with Jesus Himself. Hence his character and labors have blinded many persons to the methods which he used and to the results which he sought.

It must be sufficient for us that Ignatius Loyola had now gotten the mastery of Francis Xavier so perfectly that he could be “applied to the Spiritual Exercises, the furnace in which he [Loyola] was accustomed to refine and purify his chosen vessels.” A sister of the future missionary had become one of the Barefooted Clares, and had aided in dissuading her father from interference. And now we behold Xavier praying with hands and feet tightly bound by cords; or journeying with similar cords about his arms and the calves of his legs until inflammation and ulceration ensued. There were now nine of these converts, but this man outdid the others in his austerities, and finally travelled on foot with them to meet Loyola at Venice in 1537. The society had really been formed on August 15th, 1534, at Montmartre near Paris, and this was but its natural outward movement.

At Venice, on January 8th, 1537, they again met their leader and were assigned for duty to the two hospitals of the city. That of the “Incurables” fell to Xavier’s share, and we read that with the morbid devotion characteristic of a devout student of the Exercises, he determined now to conquer his natural repugnance to disease. In the course of his duties he had an unusually hideous ulcer to dress for one of the patients. And the authentic history relates that “encouraging himself to the utmost, he stooped down, kissed the pestilent cancer, licked it several times with his tongue, and finally sucked out the virulent matter to the last drop.” (Bartoli and Maffei, p. 35.) There could be nothing worse than that certainly. And a man who had resolutely sounded this deepest abyss of self-abandonment was marked for the highest honor that the new society could bestow. We cannot doubt Xavier’s sincerity, but the gigantic horror of this performance is of a sort to place the man who has achieved it upon an eminence apart from less daring minds. It was Loyola’s way of facing human nature and forcing it to concede the supreme self-devotion of his followers. The world looks with amazement upon such actions, but when it sees them, it yields a kind of stupefied allegiance to those who have thus rushed beyond the bounds. And to a close analysis there is as much concealed spiritual pride about this nastiness as there is an unnecessary shock given to the sense of decency. Thus, as Mozoomdar says, in his Oriental Christ, “Instead of abasing self, in many cases it serves the opposite end.” It “imposes a sort of indebtedness upon Heaven” (p. 66). Yet the poor wretch who felt those lips upon his awful wound could not but worship the frightful hero who plunged into such nauseous contact with his loathsomeness.

Yes, this was and is the power of it all. It was and it is the key-note of much that is potent with the world. When Victor Hugo pictures Jean Valjean in the toils of the Thenardiers laying that white, hot, hissing bar of iron upon his arm and calmly standing before them while they shrink—ogres as they are—from the stench and the sight, he merely uses this same element. Whatever, in short, among us brings out the old savage nature; whatever plunges outside of the conventionalities, the proprieties, or even the common decencies of life; whatever defies the lightning, or dares the volcano, or tramples upon the coiled serpent, that is the thing which controls the world.

It is worthy of note that this is not a Christian but a Jesuit act. It is born of that exaggerated sentimentalism which chooses to go beyond Christ and His apostles in its fallacious abnegation of self. But wherever such acts are performed they rank as the marks of saintship and as the stigmata of a crucifixion which proudly places itself on the same Golgotha with another and nobler cross. The records, not merely of Xavier’s life, but of the lives of the saints, swarm with these creeping, slimy frogs of Egypt, raised up by enchanters of the human mind to make Pharaoh believe them to be equal to a far higher Providence. And if we say little in these pages about such strange developments and morbid growths of piety, it need not be forgotten that they existed, and that they have been fostered and encouraged by the Roman Church. The Breviary, for instance, commends a roll of self-flagellators who used the whip upon their naked backs, and Xavier heads the list with his iron flail. Cardinal Damiani, who wrote one of our loveliest hymns, introduced this fashion of scourging in 1056, and the holy nun, St. Theresa, after such exercises and an additional repose upon a bed of thorns, was “accustomed to converse with God.” [Aliquando inter spinas volutaret sic Deum alloqui solita.] This topic, with its allied suggestions, is altogether out of our present scope; but in order to see Xavier as he was, we must appreciate to what extent his spirit was subdued before his belief.

This was the man, tested and edged and tempered, to whom was now committed the “salvation of the Indies.” It was during the papacy of Paul III., the same Pope who excommunicated Henry VIII. of England. And Xavier, who had practised many austerities both in life and in behavior, was at first sent to Bologna, while Loyola, with Faber and Laynez, went to Rome. It was subsequently at Rome that Xavier had his famous vision, in which he awoke crying, “Yet more, O Lord, yet more!” for he fancied that—as the Apostle Paul once did—he had beheld his future career and was glorying in trials and persecutions. Especially did he often have a dream in which he seemed to be carrying an Indian on his shoulders and toiling with him over the roughest and hardest roads. And when at last Govea, the Rector of the College of Ste. Barbe, happened to be in Rome, Ignatius and his companions were brought by him to the notice of John III. of Portugal, and the king desired to have six of them for use in India. The Pope did not show any special desire to secure their services, and when the question came up he referred it to Ignatius to decide it as he pleased. That sagacious general objected to taking six from ten and leaving only four to the rest of the world, for his ambition now extended to the orb of the earth. He accordingly chose Rodriguez and Bobadilla for India, men who were evidently well selected, for the first became a great propagandist in Portugal, and the other was a decided obstacle to the Reformation in Germany. When Rodriguez, however, fell ill with an intermittent fever Xavier naturally occurred to Loyola as the proper substitute. He therefore commissioned him for the service, and the worn and wasted ascetic patched up his old coat, said farewell to his friends, and having craved the Pope’s blessing, set off from Rome with the Portuguese Ambassador, Mascarenhas, on March 16th, 1540. He started in such poverty that Loyola took his own waistcoat and put it upon him, and he left behind him a written paper of consecration to the society, expressing in it his desire that Loyola should be its head, with Faber as alternate, and in which he took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the order under whose auspices he was going forth.

At the Portuguese Court in Lisbon, both Xavier and his companion were diligent in their religious work. The morals of the capital were quite reformed, and when it came time for the ships to sail to the East the king would only spare Xavier and detained Rodriguez, by the advice of Loyola, further to improve the affairs at home.

Xavier now sailed as Nuncio with papal commendation and with a poverty of outfit which had its due effect upon his companions on board the ship. The vessel itself was one of those great galleons of Spanish or Portuguese origin, carrying often a thousand persons, and having from four to seven decks. They were huge, unwieldy constructions and were generally freighted with large amounts of rich merchandise. The course was that pursued by Vasco da Gama—around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean—and the voyage often lasted beyond eight months. It is quaintly related of travellers by these precarious sea-paths that they used to take their shrouds and winding-sheets with them in case they died by the way.

The company on shipboard was as bad as the provisions, which were often execrable. The peninsular sailors never had the art either of discipline or of storing a ship and supplying what was needful for a voyage, as the English sea-kings had it. Hence their vessels were great floating caravansaries of human beings, full of the scum and offscouring of society—with lords and ladies on the quarter-deck, and robbers and murderers, harlots and gamblers down below. The crew was as prompt as that of Jonah’s ship to cry upon their gods whenever the wind blew. Such inventions as the ship’s pump, the chain-cable, and the bowsprit were not known to them. And when we see Sir Richard Grenville in the little Revenge fighting fifteen great Dons for as many hours, or Sir John Hawkins beating his way out of the harbor of Vera Cruz when the Jesus of Lubec was lost by Spanish treachery, we see how utterly cumbrous and awkward these galleons were when compared with English vessels.

Sickness also, in the form of fevers and scurvy, was very frequent. And there was such laxity of discipline that a six months’ voyage generally turned the great hulk into a hell of misery and riot. Here, therefore, Xavier was in his element. He slept on the deck; he begged his own bread, and the delicacies pressed upon him by the captain he divided among the neediest of the poor sufferers; he invented games to amuse those who were inclined toward amusement; and by degrees he commingled his sympathy and friendly offices with the necessities of the crew and passengers until they called him the “holy father.” He constantly preached, taught, and labored in this manner until he finally succumbed to an epidemic fever which broke out when they were not far from Mozambique. Here he was landed and for a time was in hospital, at length completing his voyage to India in a different ship from that in which he had first embarked.

Scattered through his story, both then and afterward, we have accounts of various miracles, of his exhibition of a spirit of prophecy, and eventually of his raising the dead. These demand a moment’s consideration. He is said, for instance, to have predicted the loss of the San Jago, in which he sailed from Portugal and which was wrecked after he left her. He did the same with one or two other vessels and assured several persons of their own impending death or misfortune. Sometimes he was observed to speak as though he were holding conversation with unseen companions, and he was apparently conscious of events which were afterward found to have occurred at the very time in distant places. There is also a series of phenomena connected with the “gift of tongues” in his case, by which this power appears to have been intermittent, or at least dependent to a great degree upon a remarkable intensity of scholarship and keenness of analysis combined with a powerful memory. It is not claimed that he exercised this gift in such a manner as “to converse in a foreign tongue the moment he landed in this foreign country.” And then there is a further class of remarkable experiences connected with fevers and diseases and the raising of the dead.

Of these latter miracles it may be well to treat first. He is said to have raised up Anthony Miranda, an Indian, who had been bitten by a cobra; to have restored four dead persons at Travancore; to have resuscitated a young girl in Japan and a child in Malacca, and to have actually brought to the ship, alive and well, a lad who had fallen overboard and been apparently lost. These incidents are related with great gravity by the biographers and are accepted by the faithful as being strictly true. To impugn them is as if one impugned the Scriptures. Nevertheless there is an opening for scepticism in sundry cases, and it may be that we shall do well to agree with the saint’s own statement made to Doctor Diego Borba. “Ah, my Jesus!” he answered, “can it be said that such a wretch as I have been able to raise the dead? Surely, my dear Diego, you have not believed such folly? They brought a young man to me whom they supposed to be dead; I commanded him to arise, and the common people, who make a miracle of everything, gave out the report that a dead man had been raised to life.” For the rest, we may well believe that the same exaggeration and lack of scientific attention to details have accompanied the various accounts, in some such manner as appears in the little sketch of his personal characteristics which a young Coquimban named Vaz has given to us. This enthusiastic admirer describes his going afoot with a patched and faded garment and an old black cloth hat. He took nothing from the rich or great unless he applied it to the uses of the poor. He spoke languages fluently without having learned them, and the crowds which flocked to hear him often amounted to five or six thousand persons. He celebrated Mass in the open air and preached from the branches of a tree when he had no other pulpit. But of this healing of the sick and raising of the dead we are not offered any better testimonials than the “Acts of his Canonization.” Moreover, in a manner quite contrary to the experiences recorded in the Gospels, these various miracles seem to be looked upon as the decisive stroke of Christian policy. Upon their occurrence tribes and kingdoms bow before the truth—a thing which did not happen at the tomb of Lazarus, or before the walls of Nain, or within the house of Jairus. In those cases the evangelists are content to tell us that the influence was limited and confined to a very moderate area.

Yet when we come to the cures of sick people, to the singular predictions, and to the exalted condition into which Xavier must often have been lifted, we must allow to the man a very high degree of mystical and mesmeric and even clairvoyant power. We are wise enough nowadays to observe the influence of a devoted personality, as when Florence Nightingale traverses the hospital wards at Scutari, or David Livingstone moves through savage tribes, to his dying hour at Lake Lincoln. And when profound Church historians will not altogether discredit the miracles of the Nicene Age which Ambrose and Augustine relate, it causes us to be charitable even toward the miracles of Bernard of Clairvaux, who recorded at large his own sense of uneasiness respecting his power of curing the sick. But it somewhat relieves the mind when the very chapters which relate these experiences of St. Francis Xavier, mention also that a crab came out of the sea and brought him his lost crucifix, and that after he had lived in a certain house two children and a woman fell out of the window at different times and received not so much as a single bruise, though they dropped from an immense height upon the sea-wall. The credulity which includes such palpable absurdities must surely have exposed itself to misstatements and exaggerations in other directions.

It is far pleasanter for us to follow Xavier from his arrival at Goa, May 6th, 1542, to the fisheries of Cape Comorin; thence to Malacca, and so to the Banda Islands, Amboyna, and the Moluccas in 1546; again to Malacca in 1547; to Ceylon and back to Goa in 1548, and finally to Japan. In 1551 he planned a visit to China, but was disappointed, and at the moment when he was hoping to accomplish a great purpose he died on the island of San Chan, December 22d, 1552, at the early age of forty-six years.

Closely studying himself and his methods we find him greatly and always devout, his breviary, however, being his Bible. He prayed much and labored incessantly. His charity to small and great was untiring. He would go through the streets ringing a little bell and calling people to come to religious worship, being frequently attended by a throng of children who seem to have loved him and been beloved by him. He had noble and sweet and modest traits in his character. But we often notice the reliance he places on baptism—sometimes conferring this rite until his arm dropped from weariness. And we observe how much of the wisdom of the serpent can be discerned in his ways with the people whom he desired to secure.

The indefatigable exertions of Xavier are above all praise. He never appears to have slackened in his zeal, nor does he ever show hesitation, doubt, or uncertainty of any kind. On one occasion when roused by a great crisis he displayed a military authority worthy of Loyola himself. He stood once in front of an invading host of Badages and forbade them to attack the Paravans, shouting to them, “In the name of the living God I command you to return whence you came.” No wonder that the semi-barbarous people were affected by this fearless and singular presence, and spoke of Xavier as a person of gigantic stature dressed in black and whose flashing eyes dazzled and daunted them.

But upon other occasions he was gentle and amenable to every agreeable trait in his companions. He could even take the cards from a broken gamester, shuffle them to give him good fortune, and send him back to try his luck with fifty reals borrowed from another passenger. The man’s success is thereupon made a basis for his penitence. And so with the wicked cavalier of Meliapore, whose friendship he gained by being unconscious of his vices until the time for exhortation arrived. In these and similar instances we cannot fail to observe a thorough knowledge of human nature, and a Jesuit’s keen power of using it for his own purposes.

He was not always prospered in his enterprises. Once at least he literally shook off the dust from his shoes against an offending tribe. At another time he was wounded by an arrow. But, as a rule, he had a complete moral victory in whatever he undertook. In one of his letters he speaks of the people being maliciously disposed and ready to poison both food and drink. But he will take no antidotes with him, and is determined to avoid all human remedies whatsoever. It is in such superb examples of his absolute trust in God that he presents to us the really grand side of his character. He did not know what fear was, and as for death, he was too familiar with daily dying to be concerned at it. His personal faith was such as to beget faith in others, as when an earthquake interrupted his preaching upon St. Michael’s Day, and he announced that the archangel was then driving the devils of that unhappy country back to the pit. This was said so earnestly as to produce a profound conviction of its truth and to remove all alarm from his audience.

But when we are asked to believe that the two Pereiras ever beheld him elevated from the earth and actually transfigured, or when it is stated that he lifted a great beam as though it had been a lath, we must be excused for being doubtful of the statement. There is nothing more destructive of religion than superstition, and nothing which kills faith like credulity. Xavier, with all his false notions, was a most sincere and even majestic figure—a hero of the faith, who shows us the power of a thoroughly devoted spirit unencumbered by any earthly tie and unobstructed by any earthly want. The entire self-immolation of this career constitutes its amazing power. It is the missionary spirit carried to its loftiest height.

Perhaps one of his most ingenious ways to secure the good-will of his companions was by endeavoring to excite their benevolence. He would encourage them to little acts of kindness and would repay these by similar favors and services. Particularly he used persuasion rather than denunciation, and personal efforts rather than general harangues. He was “all things to all men,” going “privately to those of reputation,” as Paul, his great model, was wont to do. He once wrote: “It is better to do a little with peace than a great deal with turbulence and scandal.”

On April 14th, 1552, he set sail from Goa for Malacca where a pestilence was raging. This delayed him awhile from China, and he was held back still longer by the envious quarrellings of those who aspired to the honor of attending him on his voyage. Xavier was reduced to the necessity of producing the papal authority which constituted him Nuncio, and of threatening with excommunication Don Alvaro Ataïde, the most troublesome person. In addition to this difficulty he found himself insulted and reviled in the open street, but accepted everything with meekness and patience; which, however, did not prevent his finally excommunicating Ataïde in the regular form. The vessel on which he embarked was manned mostly by those in the pay of Ataïde, but he did not shrink from the voyage. The voyage itself is decorated with many legends, as might be expected. The saint is reported to have changed salt water into fresh; to have rescued a child from death in a miraculous manner, and to have become suddenly so much taller and larger than those about him as to have been compelled to lower his arms when he baptized the converts. They sailed from Chinchoo to San Chan, an island in which the Portuguese had some trading privileges. It was here that Xavier uttered a prediction which may serve to explain other singular occurrences. He would seem to have possessed more than an ordinary amount of medical skill in diagnosis, and looking earnestly upon an old friend named Vellio, he bade him prepare for death whenever the wine he drank tasted bitter. This might easily be from either of two causes—poison, or a disorganized state of the system. And it is recorded that the result fulfilled the prophecy. Nor is there much doubt that Vellio’s entire faith in the prediction helped on his death.

From San Chan Xavier now proposed to cross to China. He arranged to be smuggled thither in a small boat, but the residents of San Chan, English as well as Portuguese, became alarmed at the consequences which they foresaw from this desperate scheme of intrusion into the forbidden empire. And to crown all his woes he fell sick with a fever, from which, however, he convalesced in a fortnight. He was now more anxious than ever to go on with his project. But all the Portuguese ships had sailed back again except the Santa Cruz, on which he had arrived. And now he was truly deserted and neglected. He had scarcely the bare necessaries of life, sometimes being deprived entirely of food. The sailors were mostly in Ataïde’s pay and inimical to his purpose. At length he became convinced that he would himself soon die, and so would often walk in meditation and prayer by the seashore gazing toward the prohibited coast.

At this time the young Chinese Anthony was his only hope as an interpreter; and he was now deprived of the services of the merchant and his son who had agreed to row him over to Canton. They had deserted him, and only Anthony and one more young lad remained true to the dying missionary. On November 20th the fever again seized him after he had celebrated Mass. He was taken to a floating hospital, but being disturbed by its motion he begged to be landed. This was done and he was left upon the beach in the bleak wind. A poor Portuguese named George Alvarez then took pity on him and removed him to his own hut of boughs and straw. Rude medical care was given him, but on December 2d, about two o’clock in the afternoon, he had reached the limit of his life. His latest words were, In te, Domine, speravi—non confundar in aeternum—O Lord, I have trusted in Thee, I shall never be confounded, world without end.

Thus died Francis Xavier, for ten years and seven months a missionary in the most dangerous and deadly regions of the earth. At the date of his death he was of full and robust figure in spite of his privations, with eyes of a bluish-gray, and hair that had changed its dark chestnut color somewhat through his toils and sufferings. His forehead was broad, his nose good, and his expression pleasant and affable. His beard, like his hair, was thick, and his temperament was nearly a pure sanguine.

They buried him first at San Chan, then removed him to Goa, where in solemn procession they conducted his mortal body to its final rest. But his right arm was taken off and it is to be observed that “the saint seems not to have been pleased at the amputation of his arm,” which, however, did not prevent the Jesuit, General Claude Acquaviva, from insisting upon the mutilation.

Down to the present time his memory has received many honors. Churches have been erected, prayers have been offered, and much religious worship has been transacted in his name. But to us who are looking upon him from another angle altogether, there are apparent in him a piety, a zeal, a courage, and a “hot-hearted prudence” (to quote F. W. Faber’s words) which arouse our admiration. And in the two hymns which bear his name we are able to discover that fine attar which is the precious residuum of many crushed and fragrant aspirations, which grew above the thorns of sharp trial and were strewn at last upon the wind-swept beach of that poor Pisgah island from which he truly beheld the distant Land.