Das Gold mag in dem Feuer nicht verderben;
Wie möchte ich denn meiner Natur widerstehn?”
In the convents of Helfta and Quedlinburg these songs spread and furthered the great renown of Mechtild. Heinrich von Halle, the famous Dominican, went to see her, and became her friend. But the secular priests did not love her, this Beguine reformer, this new unsanctioned Abbess Hildegard, who saw so clearly and bewailed so explicitly the many corruptions which had crept upon the Church even in that age of faith, even in the century of St. Francis and St. Dominic, of King Louis and Elizabeth of Hungary. Some of these secular priests tried to burn her book; thereupon Mechtild saw a vision and heard the voice of God crying aloud: “Lieb’ meine, betrübe dich nicht zu sehr, die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen.”
Profound and touching phrase, motto of all martyrs and of every cause: No one can burn the Truth! Had the world but learned by heart this one poignant sentence, uttered in the very age which began the persecution of heretics, how many wars, deaths, angers, cruelties, centuries of remorse and hatred had not the world been spared! All honour to this woman, who, six centuries ago, perceived how vain it is to hunt, slay, burn, exterminate an idea. This sentence should be immortal.
Mechtild continued to speak what seemed to her the most necessary truth. “Pope and priests,” she cries, “are going the road to hell. Unless they quit their sensuality, their spiritual negligence, their temporal greed, fearful disasters will overwhelm them.” “In this book,” she says, “I write with my heart’s blood.” She is no unfilial antagonist threatening the power of Rome, but a daughter striving to lead her parent back into the holy way. She has a vision, and sees perverted Christendom lying, “like an impure virgin,” far from the throne of God. She takes it in the arms of her soul, and strives to lift it nearer. “Leave hold!” cries the tremendous voice of God; “she is too great a weight for thee.” And Mechtild looks up and smiles. “Eia, my Lord!” she cries; “I will carry her to Thy feet with Thine own arms that Thou didst outspread upon the cross for her!”
Such is the aim of Mechtild: to bring the over-powerful and worldly Roman hierarchy back to the primitive and democratic ideal of Christianity. She has the courage of her intention, and shrinks not from rebuking error, however high its place. She, the Beguine, the sister of the poor, wrote to the Dean of Magdeburg censuring the notoriously idle and voluptuous lives of his clergy. “Let him sleep upon straw, and his canons take and eat it for their fodder!” Perhaps it is not wonderful the clergy of Magdeburg did not love the prophetess.
Also she wrote to the Pope, to Clement IV., whose tolerance of the murder of Conradine had lost him many loyal German hearts, whose lax and irreligious court was Gomorrah in the sight of Mechtild. And these priests and prelates, this all-powerful Pope, if they do not reform and obey, yet listen they humbly to the words of this unsanctioned nun, this secular sister of Magdeburg.
Never again have the Beguines attained so fine, so pure an eminence. They are indeed still poor, still lowly, still unrecognized, still Beguines. But these negations are become their glory and their distinction. Which life is nearer the ideal life of Christendom, the life of a great prelate or the life of the Beguine? The priests hear and listen, for the moment abashed because of their splendour and their power. The Beguines are poor, unlettered, unprotected; but they are nearer the simplicity of God, that reine heilige Einfalt which the Beguine Mechtild well knows how to praise.
So for thirty years Mechtild preached against error and prophesied punishment, sang of the love of God, and saw visions of a hell where wicked ecclesiastics burn for persecuting the innocent. For thirty years she lived, in her beguinage, the strenuous, earnest, indignant life of the reforming seer, the life of Dante, the life of Savonarola. And then the vigorous frame wore out. In her fifty-third year even Mechtild saw that an end must be put to this unrelaxed endeavour. Fain would she have gone, like Jutta von Schönhausen, into the wild woods to preach to the heathen Prussians. But this could not be; the body was too weak. She retired to the Cistercian cloister of Helfta, the home of the great Abbess Gertrude, and of her sister, the younger Mechtild. But even there she did not rest. “What shall I do in a cloister—I?” she demanded in agonized prayers. “Teach and enlighten,” answered a heavenly voice. And so for twelve years longer Mechtild lives, and teaches the cloister of the great world beyond its walls, and finishes her book on the flowing light of Godhead, till, honoured and loved by all, she ends her eventful life in the year 1277.