THE BLUE-BIRD’S NOTE.
I.
Not Philomel, ’mid dark of night, unseen,
Pipes sweeter notes unto the listening heart
Than from the adventurous blue-bird start
That sings amid the cedars’ dusky green
When March doth fleck the sky with windy clouds,
When sodden grass is gray as naked boughs
Along whose length no touch of summer glows—
Folded the buds within their spicy shrouds,
Waiting the coming of their Easter morn,
When the up-risen sun their bonds shall break,
Earth’s alleluia in the forests wake,
Wherein no voice more glad than this is born
That fills the farewell hours of winter gloom
With skies of blue and fields knee-deep in bloom.
II.
Who hears the music of the blue-bird’s song,
And sees not straightway cloudy skies grow fair
With softened light pale April kindleth there?
Who heareth not the swollen, rippling throng
Of loosened streams that trip the roads beside,
That wear soft channels in the meadow grass,
And peaceful grow to uphold the crisp-leaved cress?
Who sees not o’er the marsh-pools, dark and wide,
Rise tasselled willow and the later glow
Of sturdy marigolds’ broad, golden bloom,
Dim light of violets; while fresh perfume
From every budding twig doth overflow?
Such world a song can build of shivering air—
Earth’s miracles unfolding everywhere.
III.
Singeth the dreamy nightingale of love,
Unsevered still the thrush from Paradise,
The lark’s swift aspiration to the skies
Is faith that sees in perfect light above;
And type doth seem spring’s blue-winged herald’s song
Of that calm faith Eternal Wisdom blessed,
Believing things unseen with quiet breast,
Not asking first to see the angels throng.
Faith meet for earth, filling the storm-rent skies
With cheerful song of trust and heavenly grace,
Softening with joys to come earth’s rugged face,
Tinting life’s gray with heaven’s rainbow dyes—
Thy note, O fearless blue-bird! stainless scroll
O’er writ with love and hope for earth and soul.
GERMAN GLOSSARIES, HOMILIES, AND COMMENTARIES ON SCRIPTURAL AND LITURGICAL SUBJECTS.[[60]]
A diligent and impartial German bibliographer, Dr. John Geffcken, Protestant pastor of St. Michael’s, Hamburg, in his learned work on catechetical treatises of the fifteenth century, has pointed out the almost complete forgetfulness of present scholars of a branch of literature important in the theological and controversial history of Germany before the Reformation. He says of his own researches in this field:
“There was a lost, or at any rate a forgotten, literature to be discovered step by step, and its spirit grasped in all the branches thus brought together and compared. The following information will show how little light the fragmentary notices of Langemack in his Historia Catechetica (vol. i.), or of Köcher, in his Catechetical History of the Papal Church, threw upon the times to which I have devoted my attention. The worst, however, was that even these scanty notices were often false or misleading, and that, instead of pointing out the right track, they not seldom led into error. They consist mostly of lists of titles of books, without a hint of the contents of such books, and not seldom an uncertain or fanciful title is interpreted as denoting contents utterly different from the reality. The spirit of controversial prejudice in which these works were written impelled the authors, whenever they had to deal with ante-Reformation times, to paint the historical background in the darkest possible colors, in order to bring out in corresponding relief the brightness of the new dawn of the sixteenth century.”
If this is true of such works as those to which Geffcken refers, it is equally so of the German Plenarii, or glossaries, commentaries, homilies, and various devotional manuals in the vulgar tongue published in the last half of the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth. The inquiry into the publication, contents, and diffusion of these books is as interesting from an antiquarian as from a theological point of view. They are little known even to cataloguists of acknowledged merit. Brunet, in his Manuel du Libraire,[[61]] etc., under the heading Plenarium, vol. iv., mentions only one, as the Plenarium, or Book of the Gospels, printed at Basle by Peter von Langendorff in 1514; while under the heading of Gospels (vol. ii.) he mentions in general terms several “Evangelia.” Hain, in his Repertorium Bibliographicum (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1826-1828), in which he claims to have collected the names of all the books printed from the time of the discovery of printing to the year 1500, is a little more explicit as to the gospels and epistles under the heading of that name, but has nothing to say of any Plenarium; although the name stands as a separate heading, it is followed by no details or examples. Graesse, in his Trésor de livres rares et précieux, ou nouveau dictionnaire bibliographique (Dresden, 1859-1869), mentions only five of these works, giving the dates and presses but no hint of the contents of the books. Earlier scholars, however, had not so wholly lost the tradition of the existence of these manuals; for instance, Nicholas Weislinger, in his Armamentarium Catholicum Argent., 1749 fol. sub anno 1488 (pp. 412-415), and Panzer, in his Annals of Ancient German Literature; or, notices and descriptions of those books which, since the invention of printing till the year 1520, were printed in the German tongue (Nuremberg, 1788), mentions a fact which Dr. Alzog says he has not yet found proved by other documents—the existence of similar manuals in other countries than Germany. The French have Les Postilles et Expositions des Epistres et Evangiles Dominicales, etc. (Troyes, 1480 and 1492, and Paris, 1497), and the Italians the same in 1483, press and date not mentioned, and Epistole e Evangeli per tutto l’anno, per Annibale da Parma (Venice, 1487). No doubt research among the libraries of ancient Italian cities, colleges, and monasteries would discover many copies of such manuals, and the same may be said of French glossaries. The fact that they have but recently come to light in Germany argues equally in favor of their being at some future time discovered in other countries, certainly not less enlightened at the time whence date the German manuals.
It seems that hitherto no satisfactory etymology of the name of this class of books has been found; the explanation of Du Cange[[62]] being rather bald, that the books “wholly contain the four gospels and the canonical epistles.” Whatever the origin of the title, the books themselves multiplied rapidly from 1470 to 1522. They were invariably in the vulgar tongue, often in dialect. They were meant as emphatically popular hand-books, guides to the liturgy, and interpreters of the Latin offices of the church, while they also supplied the place of sermons, homilies, and meditations by their glossaries and explanations of the gospels, lessons, and epistles. Some of these are much in the style of the commentaries of the early Fathers on Scriptural subjects. The translations from the Vulgate are generally original, and do not follow strictly any of the authorized versions of the day. In some of the later Plenarii the Collects and Prefaces are given, in others the Graduals and Communions; in a few the whole liturgy is translated and the ceremonies explained. None of these books was ever published in Latin, and, unlike our modern missals, they very seldom, and then sparingly, included the Latin text with that in the vulgar tongue. Hymns and sequences were also often printed. Dr. Alzog was drawn to the study of this branch of church literature by his researches for a hand-book of universal church history, and by his opportunities in the University Library of Freiburg in Breisgau, which alone contains six editions of Plenarii of 1473, press unknown, five respectively of 1480 (Augsburg), of 1481 (Urach), of 1483 (Strassburg), of 1514 and 1522 (Basle), and several others without authors’ or publishers’ names, as well as the kindred works of a famous preacher of that time, Geiler von Keisersperg, printed at Strassburg. The reproach sometimes made to the fifteenth century, of being destitute of sufficient religious and moral instruction in printed form, is much neutralized by the opposite reproach of a contemporary whose name is famous in literature as that of the author of the Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant. This powerful satire, the work of a priest, begins with these words in German rhyme:
“All the land is now full of holy writings
And of what touches the weal of souls,
Bibles, and the lore of holy fathers,
And many more such like,
In measure such that I much marvel
No one grows better on such cheer.”
Alzog names thirty-eight manuals, including five by Keisersperg, with his sermons and expositions of doctrine, and seven in Low Saxon dialect, interesting as showing the peculiarities of spelling in certain districts at that time. The form of the title is almost unvaried in all: “In the name of the Lord. Amen. Here follows a Plenarium according to the order of the holy Christian Church, in which are to be found written all epistles and gospels as they are sung and read in the ceremony of the holy Mass, throughout the whole year, in order as they are written in the following.” The two earliest mentioned by Alzog are of 1470-1473. They are adorned with title-pages or frontispieces, Scriptural or allegorical subjects. In the University Library of Freiburg is a small folio with a wood-cut of our Lord, his right hand uplifted in the act of blessing, and his left carrying an imperial globe, the ball surmounted by a cross, such as may be seen in pictures of the old German emperors. Round the four sides of the print runs the following curious inscription, unfortunately clipped short in part by the binder: “This portrait is made from the human Jesus Christ when he walked upon the earth. And therefore he had hair and a beard, and a pleasant countenance. Also a ... He was also a head taller than any other man on the earth.” The first edition mentioned by Panzer and Hain as containing a glossary on the Sunday gospels is of the year 1481, printed at Augsburg, but the four editions between 1473 and 1483 all had uniform glossaries.
The mention is worded thus: “A glossary will be found of each Sunday gospel—that is, a good and useful teaching, and an exposition of each gospel, very useful for every Christian believer (or believer in Christ) to read.” In 1488 Weislinger and Panzer point to a book printed at Baden by Thomas Ansselm, called Gospels with Glossaries and Epistles in German, for the whole year; also the beginning; the Psalm (the “Judica” and Introit) and the Collect of each Mass according to the order of the Christian Church. Another book of 1516, printed at Dutenstein, has the same title with this addition: “for the whole year, with nothing left out.” A very elaborate manual, of which a copy (1514) is in the University Library of Freiburg and is mentioned in Panzer’s catalogue, is called
“The Plenarium, or gospel book. Summer and Winter parts, through the whole year, for every Sunday, Feria, and Saints’ days. The order of the Mass, with its beginning or Introit. Gloria Patri, Kyrie Eleyson, Gloria in Excelsis, Collect or prayer, Epistle, Gradual or penitential song, Alleluia or Tract, Sequence or Prose. Gospel with a glossary never yet heard by us, and ended by fruitful and beautiful examples.[[63]] The Patrem or Creed, Offertorium, Secreta, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Communion, Compleno and Ite Missa est or Benedicamus Domino, etc. And for every separate Sunday gospel a beautiful glossary or Postill, with its example, diligently and orderly preached by a priest of a religious order, to be seriously noticed and fruitfully applied for the greater use of the believer, who in this quickly-passing life can read nothing more useful....” At the end are these words: “To the praise and worth of Almighty God, his highly-praised Mother Mary and all saints, and to the use, bettering, and salvation of men.... Printed by the wise Adam Peter von Langendorff, burgher of Basle. 1514. In folio.”
The book contains four large wood-cuts of some artistic merit, Christ crucified, with a landscape in the background, and two groups, one of four women on one side, the other of four men on the other, and the following legend beneath, taken from Notker’s famous hymn Mediâ Vitæ, which “wonderful anthem or sequence,” says an Anglican writer, is “so often mistaken for a psalm or text”[[64]]: “In the midst of life we are in death: whom shall we seek to help us, and to show us mercy, but thou alone, O Lord, who by our sins art righteously enwrathed? Holy Lord God, holy strong God, holy, merciful, and eternal God, suffer us not to taste the bitterness of death.” The other wood-cuts, respectively indicating Christmas day, Easter eve, and Whitsunday, represent the Adoration of the Infant Jesus by Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, with a landscape in the background; the Resurrection; and the Descent of the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues. The book contains many smaller wood-cuts.
Another Plenarium (Strassburg, 1522) boasts of being “translated from the Latin into better German,” and another, of the same year (Basle), announces “several other Masses, never hitherto translated into German,” as well as a register with blank leaves. Keisersperg’s sermons “in the last four years of his life, taken down word for word from his own mouth,” are printed at Strassburg in 1515, and are qualified in the title-page as “useful and good, not only for the laity, and never hitherto printed.” His Postill, or “Commentaries on the Four Gospels,” is printed in four parts in Strassburg in 1522, also his Lenten sermons, and some additional ones on a few saints’ days, “written down from his own mouth by Henry Wessmer”; but the most curious work mentioned is a folio volume of his sermons, without title, and containing other treatises with fanciful titles and bearing on mysterious subjects. “The Book of Ants, which also gives information concerning witches, ghostly appearances, and devilish possession, very wonderful and useful to know, and, further, what it is lawful to hold and believe touching them”; also, “the little book, ‘Lord, whom I would gladly serve,’ in fifteen parts of fine and useful doctrine; finally, the book of ‘Pomegranate,’ in Latin Malogranatus, containing much wholesome and sweet doctrine and advice.” This dates from 1517 (Strassburg, John Greinninger). For the sake of the language the manuals printed in Low Saxon, chiefly in Lübeck, are among the most interesting specimens. The titles are much the same as the German, but generally more concise. Panzer remarks of one of them, printed by Stephen Arndes at Lübeck in 1496, and adorned with several fine wood-cuts, that he has seen three other editions, printed in 1488, 1493, and 1497. A few of the peculiarities of spelling, and of the indifferent use of various forms of one word, will be seen in the following examples: book, in the contemporary High-German, spelt buch or buoch, is here spelt boek, boeck, bok, and boke, this last a form often found in Old English writers; holy, heylig, heilig, or hailig, is here spelt in five different ways: hilgen, hylgen, hylligen, hilligen, and hyllyghen; and birth, geburt, is bort and borth. Das (the) becomes dat; endigt (ends) is turned to ondighet; and the o’s and n’s are in general used the reverse way to that common in High-German.
The contents of the Plenarii show the peculiarities of the liturgy as used at that time. The same epistle and gospel sung or read on Sunday was repeated on Monday, Tuesday (which the oldest manuals call After-Monday), and Thursday. Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year had separate epistles and gospels, and Saturday is not mentioned, unless it is indicated by the “third day,” which the later editions speak of as “having a separate epistle and gospel throughout the year.” Each day of Lent had a separate one. Some of the books of 1473 contained special Masses—that of the Wisdom of God for Mondays, the Holy Ghost for Tuesdays, the Holy Angels for Wednesdays, the Love of God for Thursdays, the Holy Cross for Fridays, and the Blessed Virgin for Saturdays. There followed Masses for rain, for health, for sinners, for fair weather, and for “all believing souls.” The glosses on the gospels in the earlier editions are interesting from their simplicity and directness. Even the preface of the Basle Plenarium of 1514, though less simple, is a good specimen. It is noteworthy that the Immaculate Conception is implied in the text. The heading is from Luke xi. 28: “Blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.” The preface runs thus:
“Jesus Christ is the Word of the Eternal Father; the Word is made flesh (understand by that, man) in the womb of the immaculate, holy, and pure Virgin Mary, that we too may be saved. From this Word, as from Christ the Son of God, flows Holy Scripture, which is the life-giving flow of the blessed paradise of the highest heaven, penetrating and making fruitful on this earth the paradise of the holy church to the use of all believers. And in order that man may better know and acknowledge his Lord, he has at hand the help of Holy Scripture, which is the source of all knowledge and wisdom, of whom all knowledge is the servant and follower, and which teaches and admonishes us, through the wonderful works of God, to worship the Maker of all; for Christ the Son of God is the wisdom of the Eternal Father, and in him and through him are all creatures made, and, indeed, so wonderfully made and hidden that no human wisdom can fully penetrate into these secret recesses. Such is the teaching of Holy Writ.
“To confess God, to avoid sin, to do good, and to show ourselves diligent in the love of God and our neighbor—this is a spiritual pharmacy of all sweet-smelling and precious medicine. Although many prophets and other saints have written Holy Scripture and divine truth, each one according as it was given to him by the Holy Ghost, yet are the strength and truth of the holy gospels above every other Scripture, as says St. Augustine in his Concordance of the Gospels. And Holy Scripture is so fruitful, wise, and unfathomable that we can never fathom it till the end of this passing life on earth, and till we come to the place whence Scripture itself floweth ... and ourselves read in the great Bible—that is, the Book of Life.
“And because many men do not understand Latin, and yet can read German, therefore this book of the gospels, with its belongings, has been translated into German, to the glory of God and the use of such as shall feed their souls on it. For man liveth not on material bread alone, but on the spiritual bread which is the Word of God, as Christ says by the mouth of the evangelist Matthew, in the fourth chapter.”
Much more follows; for instance, an enumeration of the nine graces that a diligent reader of Scripture receives, in which much good but rather trite advice is given, and of the five kinds of men who read Holy Writ, only two of whom do it to advantage. These conceits belonged to the age, and, indeed, survived the age, as we find in the Presbyterian sermons of two centuries later in Scotland and the Puritan sermons of New England. Keisersperg was profuse of them, and some of the quaint and rather strained combinations and coincidences which he imagined are a curious illustration of the sort of pulpit eloquence popular in the fifteenth century. The prominence given among saints to the four evangelists grew naturally out of the reverence paid to the four gospels as the noblest part of Scripture. The Plenarii often contained allegorical representations of them under the conventional figures known to art, and undertook to explain the reason of these figures being applied to them, connecting them with the four living creatures of Ezechiel’s vision and those of the Apocalypse. But, beyond the constantly-received explanations, they sometimes contained details calculated to astonish readers of a later day. Such is the idea of the fitness between St. Mark and the symbolic lion, derived from the belief that lion whelps were awakened the third day, by the roaring of their mother, from the sleep or trance in which they had been born, which was interpreted to refer to the fact that St. Mark chiefly dwells on the resurrection of the Lord on the third day after his death. The Basle manual from which the foregoing preface is quoted has special prayers in honor of the evangelists, chiefly to the end that they would help the faithful to a better understanding of, and acting up to, the principles of the Gospel. The wood-cuts which distinguish these as well as the Latin missals took the place of the illuminations of the older books in manuscript, and, though wanting in the finish and delicacy of the latter, were designed on the same models and in the same spirit. The Latin missals now in the University Library of Freiburg, of 1485 and 1520, are rich in this kind of ornamentation, the latter having as title-page the Crucifixion, with a group of many figures, and around the illustration representations of the seven sacraments, whose grace flows from the atonement of Christ. The same idea is conveyed in the often-repeated allegorical representation in mediæval pictures of two angels collecting in golden cups the blood that flows from the outstretched hands of the Saviour on the cross.
Freiburg has many treasures in the department of illuminated manuscripts, the chief one being a Codex of the tenth century, with the Sacramentarium Gregorianum. It contains two hundred and ten pages of parchment, and begins with a calendar of twelve pages on purple ground with arabesque borders. The Ordinary of the Mass is written on a similarly colored ground, and has three illuminated pictures—a portrait of Pope Gregory the Great, an angel uplifting the Host, and an elaborate Byzantine crucifix. Five thousand francs were offered for it by a French archæological society, and refused by the university. Among the peculiarities set forth by the German manuals is the order of Sundays throughout the year, which, before the Council of Trent, were reckoned from Trinity instead of Whitsunday, and, in the case of Easter falling early, were supplemented by a “twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity,” as the editions of 1473 to 1483 have it, “if another Sunday is needed.” The later editions and the Latin missals simply call it, without comment, “the twenty-fifth Sunday.” As time went on, the German Plenarii contained more and more, sometimes additional votive Masses, and the Passions and Prophecies of Holy Week, sometimes the whole of the liturgy, including the minor parts, sometimes even more than the Latin books themselves—as, for instance, the thirteenth to the fifteenth chapters of St. John, inclusive, for the edification of their readers on Maundy Thursday. The glossaries or homilies also grew longer and more serious after 1514, and among explanations of undoubted moral worth and pious intent—due, Alzog thinks, greatly to the influence of the Swiss “Friends of God,” a brotherhood devoted to popular teaching and the propagation of practical piety among the masses—we often come upon those naïvely-propounded conceits which were common to earnest and ingenious men of that day. For instance, the word alleluia, whose etymology was probably wholly unknown to the author, is thus dissected and explained in one of the Basle editions of the sixteenth century:
“The word has four syllables—that is, four meanings: the first, al—that is, altissimus, or Most High and Almighty; the second, le, levatus in cruce, or uplifted on the cross; the third, lu, lugentibus apostolis, or the apostles have mourned and all creation bemoaned him; the fourth, ja, or jam surrexit—that is, he is now risen from the dead, wherefore we should rejoice with all our strength and sing alleluja.”
On the other hand, some of the prayers and meditations of these now obscure books of devotion were beautiful, dignified, and worthy of imitation. The language often reminds one of the Following of Christ:
“Consider, O my soul! with thorough devotion, the gifts and benefits of God wherewith he has so abundantly blessed thee. He has created thee out of nothing and in his image. He has given thee wisdom and understanding, that thou mayest distinguish good from evil. He has also given thee reason beyond that of all other creatures, and made them subject unto thee. He has put the sun and the moon in heaven to give light to the world. He causes all green things to grow and ripen on the earth to thy use, that thou mayest be fed and clothed therewith. Consider also, O my soul! with great devotion, how inestimable are the gifts of the holy sacraments, so sweetly prepared for thee. How clean should be thy hands from all evil works, how chaste thy lips, how holy thy body, how spotless thy heart, to which the Lord Almighty, the God of purity, humbles himself so lovingly! How great should be thy thankfulness to God thy Creator, who gives himself to thee so freely, not for any good he derives therefrom, but only that he may cleanse thee, in thy misery and sickness, from sin, and give thee eternal life. Amen.”
The manuals also made typographical progress corresponding to that of their contents, and, after 1483, began to have their pages both numbered and headed, while the spelling became a little more uniform, but the odd comparisons and arbitrary combinations in the text developed themselves as freely as ever. Indeed, they had one merit—that of fixing a thing in the minds of hearers less likely to be impressed by generalities; and, unlike the sensational devices of the present day, they were not resorted to as mechanical means by men to whom they were themselves indifferent, but came from the “abundance of the heart” of authors fully penetrated by their meaning and proud of having originated this particular form of it. For instance, a panegyric on St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, is résumed in the seven letters of the German word Bischof, each standing for the initial of a word describing some quality of the saint; and the same happens with the seven letters of the name of Matthew, Matheus (seven was, from obvious causes, a favorite number in the mystical mind of those ages), which are thus interpreted: Magnificentia in relinquendo (magnanimity in relinquishing), Auscultatio in obediendo (hearing in obeying), Tractabilitas in non resistendo (tractability in not resisting), Humilitas in sequendo (humility in following), Evangelisatio in prædicando (evangelization in preaching), Virtuositas in operando (efficiency in working), Strenuitas in patiendo (fortitude in enduring).
The glossaries on the epistles and gospels contain many passages remarkable as setting forth the reverence for Holy Writ of which those times have been too hastily pronounced deficient. The four oldest editions (from 1473 to 1483) have the same commentary for the first Sunday in Advent, on which the gospel of Palm Sunday, pointing to preparation for the coming of the Lord, was then read. The whole is filled with texts and allusions to the prophets; the preparation is asserted to consist in being “washed clean of evil thoughts,” in laying aside the torn garments of sin, that bind us to the darkness where we have hidden ourselves that we may not be seen, ... in hating the garments of impurity and those of pride.... It is not seemly to stand in the hall of the King clothed in mean garments, as we find in the Book of Esther, cap. iii., and therefore no one should enter the holy time of Advent while yet burdened with sin and so on through a host of Scriptural quotations in which moral virtues only are inculcated, and of ceremonial observances there is no mention. The edition of 1514 (Basle) on the same occasion says that this gospel is read twice in the year, on the anniversary of the day when our Lord entered Jerusalem, and on the first Sunday in Advent, which commemorates his spiritual coming and his assuming human nature. The various kinds of advents or comings are represented by the gospels of the four Sundays, the last being the entry into the heart of every sinner when he repents of his sin and is converted. “As the Jews asked John the Baptist, ‘Who art thou?’ so should every man ask himself, Who am I? If we examine honestly we must needs acknowledge that we are but poor sinners. Of this advent St. John speaks in the Apocalypse: ‘Behold I stand at the door of thy heart and knock with my gifts; and whoever opens unto me, to him will I go in, and give him bread from heaven, and a new stone in his hand, that is the new joy of everlasting life.’“[[65]] Of this advent St. Augustine speaks:
“Lord, who shall give it to me that thou shouldst come into my heart, sweet Jesus, and fill it, and that my soul should forget all evil and all sin?... ‘This is everlasting life (John xvii. 3), that men know thee, Father in heaven, and confess thee alone the living and true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.’ This raises a question—namely, Why did the Lord Jesus not come earlier? why delay his coming so long? For this reason: that Adam transgressed God’s command on the sixth day, and the coming of Christ was therefore deferred till the sixth age of the world.... If you turn to the Lord in truth, he will answer you through the prophet Ezechiel: ‘In whatsoever hour the sinner repents of his sins and forsakes them, and is turned from his unrighteousness, I will remember his sins no more, saith the Lord.”
The commentary on the gospel of the first Mass on Christmas night in the Basle edition of 1514 contains glimpses of legends which long kept their hold on the popular and even the scholarly mind of that age. The story of the Sibyllic prophecies is outlined:
“The Emperor Augustus, when he had conquered the whole world for the Roman Empire, was about to be adored by the Romans as a god. But he resisted and asked for a delay of three days, during which he sent for the wise woman, the Sibyl of Tibur, and asked her advice. When she shut herself up with the emperor and prayed to God to tell her how to advise the emperor, she saw close by the sun a shining ring of light, and within the ring a beautiful Virgin with a fair Child upon her knees. Then the Sibyl showed the Virgin and Child to the emperor, and said: “This Child upon the knees of a Virgin must thou adore, for he is God and Lord of the whole world, and the Child that is to be born of a Virgin shall be for the consolation and salvation of mankind.’ So when the emperor saw this he refused to let himself be adored....
“We read also that once the Romans built a fine temple, large and grand, which they meant to call the Temple of Peace. While they were building it they asked the Sibyl how long the temple should stand. She answered and said: ‘Until a Virgin shall bear a Child.’ ‘Then,’ said the Romans, ‘as that can never happen, the temple will stand for ever, and shall be called the Temple of Eternity.’ Then came the night when our Lord Jesus Christ was born, and a great part of the temple fell suddenly in ruins, and many who have been in Rome say that every Christmas night a portion of this temple still crumbles into ruin, as a sign that on this earth nothing is eternal.”
The three Maries at the sepulchre give the author occasion in the homily on Easter Sunday to link the virtues we ought to practise with the names of the three holy women. From Mary Magdalen, whom, according to the tradition of the time, he identified with Mary the Sinner, he bids us learn “the great diligence and great love with which she sought God the Lord; ... so should we also anoint the feet of Christ with the ointment of contrition and repentance. From Mary Jacobi (Mary the mother of James, or Jacob) we should learn to overcome sin, because Jacob means a fighter and striver.... From the third Mary we should learn to have a true hope of obtaining grace, for Salome means a woman of grace (probably he considered wisdom and grace identical), ... especially the grace to battle against despair.” And this suggests a comparison of the three Maries with the three virtues, faith, hope, and charity. Galilee, again, which he interprets to mean in German Passover, is set as a sign that we must part with sin and cross over to God, die to the world and be detached from its allurements. The commentary on the gospel of Whitsunday, in the older editions (1473-83), contains these words: “If you love God, you will willingly hear his word and diligently say to yourself, What I hear is a token from the great King.” Then follow several Scriptural quotations strengthening and illustrating this truth. The epistle of the day gives rise to an explanation of the appearance “as it were of fiery tongues”: “The fire of the Holy Ghost consumed all fear in their hearts, and so enkindled them that they feared neither king nor emperor. So was fulfilled the saying of the Redeemer, ‘I am come to bring a fire upon the earth,’ and what do I wish but that it should be enkindled?” Then the tongues signify that the word is spread by the tongue; God sent the Holy Ghost in fiery tongues, that they (the apostles) might burn with love and overflow in words. What is the Holy Ghost? He is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, who confirms and establishes all things, and who comes at all times to the heart of every man who makes himself ready to receive him, as says St. Augustine: “It is of no use for a teacher to preach to our outer ears, if the Holy Ghost be not in our hearts and do not give us true understanding.” The likeness of the Holy Spirit to a dove is then ingeniously drawn out in comparisons such as St. Francis of Sales, two centuries later, might have adopted in his Introduction to a Devout Life, and the prayer or aspiration at the end is thus worded: “May the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost help us to hear the word of God and keep it, that our hearts may be enlightened and enkindled by the fire of the Holy Ghost, that we may live with simplicity and joy among the doves, and that the true Dove, the Holy Ghost, may come to us and abide with us for ever.”
The later editions of the sixteenth century have a longer and more complicated homily on the same subjects; they dwell, among other things, on the peace and comfort brought by the Holy Ghost, and distinguish three kinds of peace, that of the heart, that of time, and that of eternity, the second of which alone was not given to the apostles, because their Master also had it not, as is inferred from several texts quoted at length. The suddenness, the force of the wind, and the quickness of the appearance in the upper chamber in Jerusalem are all turned to practical account by the commentator, who also reminds his readers that the grace of God comes soonest to those who lead a life of inner recollection and prayer. The love of God is shown under a sort of parable, that of the scholars of an Athenian philosopher, who begged their master to write them a treatise upon love, and received from him in answer the picture of a lion with a legend round his neck: “Love brings forth nothing which afterwards causes remorse to man.” Thus Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, is spiritually this lion of love, whose works were all for the salvation of man. For Trinity Sunday the glossaries of both the older and the later editions are very short, the mystery being confessedly unfathomable, and the ancient Fathers themselves having but feebly succeeded in throwing any other light than that of faith upon the subject. Both editions contain a warning not to search curiously into the mystery, but believe with simplicity, and the later ones cite the legend of St. Augustine and the child whom he met by the sea-shore trying to bail the sea into a small trench in the sand. On the thirteenth Sunday after Trinity the vision of God by purity of heart, “and by the reading of Holy Scripture and practising its precepts,” is descanted upon in the 1514 Basle edition, and the fate of Lot’s wife is used as a simile for the turning back from God into sin, while the love of our neighbor, as flowing from a true love of God, is strenuously inculcated by Scripture texts and warnings.
The description of the contents of these manuals, however, would not be complete, nor wholly convey the spirit of the age in which they were published and read, without some mention of the miraculous stories printed in them under the head of “useful examples.” Of these Frederick Hurter, in his work on Pope Innocent III., vol. iv. pp. 547-8, says:
“All writers of this time (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and what applies to those applies to later centuries almost as far as the seventeenth) are full of wonder-stories—a proof of how universal and deeply ingrained in man was the belief in wonders. Many of these are simply mythical, others had passed by tradition and literary embellishments from the region of facts into that of myths, while others again must be left uninterpreted by criticism, unless it is disposed to dismiss them with a mere denial. Whatever decision one may come to on this point, one truth certainly underlies this mass of tales: that they cannot have been without influence on the mind of thousands. Many may be looked upon as childish and crude, but from beneath this coating still shines the true gold of a belief in one almighty, ever-present Being, a father and protector of the good, a leader and raiser-up of the fallen or the wavering, an avenger against the evil and oppressing.”
Such stories have to later research appeared as interesting landmarks of the progress of a nation’s mind, and links with all its former beliefs and traditions. Again, they were striking illustrations, fitter to remain in the popular mind as emblems of great truths than the learned doctrinal disquisitions, which were always above the understanding of the masses. They are rather emblems than facts; the condensation of a truth than its actual outcome. We have only room for a single specimen. Whether it was intended to be related as a vision in a dream, or partly as a waking dream, does not appear clearly from the text:
“There was,” says the Basle Plenarium of 1514, on the occasion of Good Friday, “a prior in a monastery, who sat in his cell after his meal and fell asleep. While he slept, one of his brethren died and came to the sleeping prior, and spoke to him: ‘Father prior, with your permission, I am going.’ When the other asked him where, he answered: ‘I am going to God in eternal blessedness, for in this very moment I have died.’ Then said the prior: ‘Since many a perfect man must after death pass through purgatory, and one seldom comes back to earth from it, I ask you how can you go at once to God, and how do you know you have deserved it?’ Then answered the monk: ‘I always had the habit of praying thus at the feet of the crucifix: “Lord Jesus Christ, for the sake of thy bitter sufferings which thou hast endured on the holy cross for my salvation, and especially at the moment when thy blessed soul left thy body, have mercy on my soul when it leaves my body.“ And God mercifully heard my prayer.’ Then the prior asked again: ‘How was it with you when you died?’ and the other answered: ‘I thought at that moment that the whole world was a stone, and that it lay upon my breast, so terrible did death seem to me.’”
The Plenarii were not the only manuals scattered among the rapidly-increasing number of people who, in Germany, could read in their native tongue. Besides the Scriptures, of which nine translations, some partial, some entire, were printed before Luther’s, from 1466 to 1518, and three entire ones after his in the sixteenth century alone,[[66]] there were previous to that period fourteen complete Bibles in High-German and five in Low-German (the University of Freiburg possesses copies of eight of the former), and many psalters and gospels, as well as separate books of Scripture published singly. The psalter was undoubtedly the best-known and most commonly used part of Holy Writ. Panzer mentions the three oldest editions printed in Latin and German, without date or press, in folio; another octavo at Leipsic; others in German, Augsburg, 1492 and 1494; Basle, 1502 and 1503; Spires, 1504; Strassburg, 1506 and 1507; Metz, 1513; and the Book of Job, Strassburg, 1498. Again in the same years, and from the same presses as well as Mayence and Nuremberg, came the epistles and gospels, and the four Passions, divided according to their use on Sundays, while the first popular illustrated “Bibles of the Poor,” condensations and selections, chiefly of the most stirring stories told in the Old and New Testaments, followed each other rapidly after 1470. The wood-cuts were generally very good, and the Latin and German texts printed side by side. “German explanations of the office of the Mass” were also printed, and the devotional writings, meditations, etc., of Tauler, Suso, Thomas à Kempis, Geiler von Keisersperg, and Sebastian Brant. Lives of the saints and martyrologies were also printed, arranged according to the calendar in two parts, winter and summer; but though in the main edifying, these were chiefly reflections of traditions rather than authentic biographies taken from contemporary sources. That style of writing was not known then, and the general example of a holy life was more the object of the writers than the historic details of real life. But even in these traditions some nucleus of undisputed fact might always be found beneath the ivy tracery of legend. Panzer remarks that these editions differed greatly from Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, and often contradicted it. Catechisms and manuals for confession and communion were also familiar, and some of the litanies now reprinted in modern prayer-books are of this date, while even the contents of the Breviary were translated into German by a Capuchin, James Wyg, and printed in Venice in 1518. “Little prayer-books” are mentioned by Panzer as printed at Nuremberg, Lübeck (these in Low German), Basle, and Mayence from 1487 to 1518. Two were called the Salus Animæ and the Hortulus Animæ. The latter is as well known now in English as it was then in German; one edition of 1508 has a little versified introduction, interesting as showing how Sebastian Brant’s talents were often practically employed:
“The soul’s little garden am I called.
Known am I yet from my Latin name.
At Strassburg, his fatherland,
Did revise me Sebastian Brant,
And industriously me corrected,
And into German much translated,
That now is to be found in me
Which will give joy to every reader;
Now, who uses me aright,
And plants me well, reward shall have.”
The prayer Anima Christi is found in some editions. A book called The Mirror of the Sinner went through five editions from 1480 to 1510, which Pastor John Geffcken has most impartially and fully criticised in his history of catechetical instruction in the fifteenth century. The Ten Commandments was the title of two books printed at Venice by an Augsburg printer in 1483, and Strassburg in 1516, and a Manual for Preparation for Holy Communion, several times reprinted at Basle, has suggested this praise from Herzog, the biographer of John Œcolampadius: “It breathes the purest and noblest devotion (mystik); we shall seldom find a communion-book penetrated with such a glow of devotion”; if we had any room left for quotation, this judgment would be found fully deserved. Manuals for the sick and dying were also widely used; three of 1483, 1498, and 1518, and one without date, are given in Panzer’s catalogue. The Garden of the Soul also contains a long passage on the fit preparation for death; and other books have special prayers for the same circumstances. That we are apt to see but one side of any question, and that false impressions unluckily in the popular mind chiefly avail themselves of the axiom that “possession is nine points of the law,” Jacob Grimm very appositely complains in the preface to his Antiquities of German Jurisprudence. “What is the use,” he says, “of the poetry being now discovered which presents the joyous vitality of life in that time (the middle ages) in a hundred touching and serious representations? The outcry about feudalism and the right of the strongest is still uppermost, as if, forsooth, the present had no injustice and no wretchedness to bear.”
DANTE’S PURGATORIO.
TRANSLATED BY T. W. PARSONS.
CANTO SIXTEENTH.
‘Drizza (disse) ver me l’acute luci
Dello Intelletto, e fieti manifesto
L’error de’ ciechi, chi si fanno duci.’
—Purg. xviii. 16.
Turn thy sharp lights of intellect towards me
And many errors will be manifest,
In many a volume by the world possessed,
Of men called leaders, and who claim to be.
Blackness of hell, and of a night unblest
By any planet in a barren sky
Which dunnest clouds to utmost gloom congest,
Could not with veil so gross have barred mine eye
Nor so austere to sense as now oppressed
Us in that fog which we were folded by.
Its sharpness open eye might not abide,
Therefore my wise and faithful escort lent
His shoulder’s aid, close coming to my side,
And, thus companioned, close with him I went
(Like a blind man who goes behind his guide,
Lest he go wrong or strike him against aught
To kill him haply or his life impair)
On through that sharp and bitter air, in thought
My duke observing, who still said: ‘Beware
Lest thou be separate from me!’ Anon
Voices I heard, and each voice seemed in prayer
For peace and pity to the Holy One
Of God, the Lamb who taketh sins away;
Still from them all one word, one measure streamed,
Still Agnus Dei prelude of their lay,
So that among them perfect concord seemed.
‘Those, then, are spirits, Master, that I hear?’
I asked. He answered: ‘Rightly hast thou deemed
They go untangling anger’s knot severe.’
‘Now who art thou discoursing at thy will
Of us? Who cleavest with thy shape our smoke
As time by calends thou wert measuring still?’
So said a voice, whereat my Master spoke:
‘Ask him if any mounteth hence, up there.’
And I: ‘O being, who dost make thee pure
Unto thy Maker to return as fair
As thou wert born! draw near me, and full sure
Thou shalt hear something to awake thy stare.’
‘Far will I follow as allowed,’ he said;
‘And if the smoke permit us not to see,
Our sense of hearing may avail instead
Of sight, and grant me to converse with thee.’
Then I began: ‘With that same fleshly frame
Which death dissolveth, I am bound above:
Here through the infernal embassy I came,
And if God so enfold me in his love
That his grace grants me to behold his court
In manner diverse from all modern wont,
Keep not from me the knowledge, but report
Who thou wast, living, and if up the mount
My course is right: thy word shall us escort.’
‘Lombard I was, and Mark the name I bore;
I knew the world, and loved that sort of worth
At which men bend their bows not any more.
Thy course is right: climb on directly forth.’
He answered, adding: ‘Pray for me when thou
Shalt be up there.’ I answered him: ‘I bind
Myself in good faith by a solemn vow
To grant thy wish; but with one doubt my mind
Will burst within unless I solve it now.
The simple doubt which I had formed before
From others’ words is doubled now by thine,
Which, joined with those words, make my doubt the more.
The world in sooth, as I may well divine
From what thou say’st, is wicked at the core
And clothed with evil; of all virtue bare:
Show me, I pray, that I may tell again
Others, the cause of this; for some declare
That Heaven is cause of ill, and some say men.
A deep-drawn sigh which anguish made a groan
First giving vent, to ‘Brother’ spake he then:
‘The world is blind; sure thou of them art one.
Ye who are living every cause refer
Still to high Heaven, as though necessity
Moved all things through Heaven’s[[67]] motion. If this were,
Freedom of will impossible would be,
Nor were it just that Goodness should for her
Sure meed have joy, and Badness misery.
Heaven to your actions the first movement gives—
I say not all; but granted I say all,
For good or evil each his light receives,
And a free will which, if it do not fall,
But win Heaven’s first hard battle, then it lives,
And, if well trained, is never held in thrall.
‘To greater power and to a higher soul
Free, ye are subject; and that power in you
Creates the mind, which no stars can control:
Hence if the present world go wrong, ’tis due
To your own selves; and of this theme the whole
I will expound as an informer true.
Forth from His hand (before its birth who smiled
On his new offspring) into being goes
A little weeping, laughing, wanton child;
The simple infant soul that nothing knows,
Save that, by pleasure willingly beguiled,
She turns to joy as her glad Maker chose.
Taste of some trifling good it first perceives,
And, cheated so, runs for the shining flower,
Unless a rein or guide its love retrieves.
Hence there was need of Law’s restraining power;
A king there needed, that at least some one
Of God’s true city might discern the tower.
The laws exist, but who maintains them? none;
Because the Shepherd, Sovereign of the fold,
Though he may ruminate, no cleft hoof bears:
The people then, seeing their Guide so fond
Of what they crave, and with like greed as theirs,
Pasture with him, and seek no good beyond.
’Tis plain to see that what hath made mankind
So bad is evil guidance, not your own
Corrupted nature. Once of old there shined
The twofold splendors of a double sun
In Rome, which city brought the world to good;
One showed the way of earth to men, and one
Gave them to see the other way, of God.
One hath destroyed the other, and the sword
Is with the crosier joined, that neither fears
The other’s check; so joined they ill accord.
If thou dost doubt me, think what fruit appears
In the full blade, since every plant we know
For good or evil by the seed it bears.
Once in that goodly region by the Po
And Adige watered, valor used to dwell
And courtesy, ere Frederic’s trouble came:
Now one might journey through that country well
Secure from meeting (if it gave him shame
To speak with good men) any that excel.
Three old men yet dwell there in whom the old
Chides the new age, and time seems slow to run
To them till God replace them in his fold;
Currado da Palazzo, he is one,
Gherardo likewise, of the life unblamed,
And Guido da Castello, who perchance
Simply the Lombard might be better named,
After the fashion of their speech in France.
Say thou this day, then, that the Church of Rome,
Confounding human rule and sway divine,
Sinks with her charge beluted in the loam?’[[68]]
‘Thou reasonest well,’ I said, ‘O Marco mine,
And I perceive now why the sacred tome
The sons of Levi bars from heritage.
But who is that Gherardo who, thou say’st,
Remaineth in rebuke of this rough age
From those who formerly the realm possessed?’
‘Either thy tongue misleads me or thou show’st
A wish to try me,’ he to me replied,
‘That, using Tuscan speech, thou nothing know’st
Of good Gherardo. No surname beside
I know, unless unto that name he bore
One from his daughter Gaia be supplied:
Go thou with God! I follow thee no more.
See! raying yonder through the fog a gleamy
Splendor that whitens it; I must away
(It is the Angel there!) before he see me.’
Thus turned he, nor would hear me further say.