He grew to be a man; and in due time he was ordained priest, ‘by the will and consent of all;’ and he ‘began to preach the words of Christ earnestly to the people;’ and his preaching wrought wonders among them.
Three years he preached in his Rhineland parish, winning love from all. But in the third year ‘a heavenly thought’ came into his mind that he would turn hermit and dwell in the wild forest. And why? Who can tell? He may, likely enough, have found celibacy a fearful temptation for a young and eloquent man, and longed to flee from the sight of that which must not be his. And that, in his circumstances, was not a foolish wish. He may have wished to escape, if but once, from the noise and crowd of outward things, and be alone with God and Christ, and his own soul. And that was not a foolish wish. John Bunyan so longed, and found what he wanted in Bedford Jail, and set it down and printed it in a Pilgrim’s Progress, which will live as long as man is man. George Fox longed for it, and made himself clothes of leather which would not wear out, and lived in a hollow tree, till he, too, set down the fruit of his solitude in a diary which will live likewise as long as man is man. Perhaps, again, young Sturmi longed to try for once in a way what he was worth upon God’s earth; how much he could endure; what power he had of helping himself, what courage to live by his own wits, and God’s mercy, on roots and fruits, as wild things live. And surely that was not altogether a foolish wish. At least, he longed to be a hermit; but he kept his longing to himself, however, till St. Boniface, his bishop, appeared; and then he told him all his heart.
And St. Boniface said: ‘Go; in the name of God;’ and gave him two comrades, and sent him into ‘the wilderness which is called Buchonia, the Beech Forest, to find a place fit for the servants of the Lord to dwell in. For the Lord is able to provide his people a home in the desert.’
So those three went into the wild forest. And ‘for three days they saw nought but earth and sky and mighty trees. And they went on, praying Christ that He would guide their feet into the way of peace. And on the third day they came to the place which is called Hersfelt (the hart’s down?), and searched it round, and prayed that Christ would bless the place for them to dwell in; and then they built themselves little huts of beech-bark, and abode there many days, serving God with holy fastings, and watchings, and prayers.’
Is it not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see now;—so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet it may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry. But the old monster was good in his place and time. God made him and had need of him. It may be that God made those three poor monks, and had need of them likewise.
As for their purposes being superstitious, we shall be better able to judge of that when we have seen what they were—what sort of a house they meant to build to God. As for their having self-interest in view, no doubt they thought that they should benefit their own souls in this life, and in the life to come. But one would hardly blame them for that, surely?
One would not blame them as selfish and sordid if they had gone out on a commercial speculation? Why, then, if on a religious one? The merchant adventurer is often a noble type of man, and one to whom the world owes much, though his hands are not always clean, nor his eye single. The monk adventurer of the middle age is, perhaps, a still nobler type of man, and one to whom the world owes more, though his eye, too, was not always single, nor his hands clean.
As for selfishness, one must really bear in mind that men who walked away into that doleful ‘urwarld’ had need to pray very literally ‘that Christ would guide their feet into the way of peace;’ and must have cared as much for their wordly interests as those who march up to the cannon’s mouth. Their lives in that forest were not worth twenty-four hours’ purchase, and they knew it. It is an ugly thing for an unarmed man, without a compass, to traverse the bush of Australia or New Zealand, where there are no wild beasts. But it was uglier still to start out under the dark roof of that primæval wood. Knights, when they rode it, went armed cap-à-pie, like Sintram through the dark valley, trusting in God and their good sword. Chapmen and merchants stole through it by a few tracks in great companies, armed with bill and bow. Peasants ventured into it a few miles, to cut timber, and find pannage for their swine, and whispered wild legends of the ugly things therein—and sometimes, too, never came home. Away it stretched from the fair Rhineland, wave after wave of oak and alder, beech and pine, God alone knew how far, into the land of night and wonder, and the infinite unknown; full of elk and bison, bear and wolf, lynx and glutton, and perhaps of worse beasts still. Worse beasts, certainly, Sturmi and his comrades would have met, if they had met them in human form. For there were waifs and strays of barbarism there, uglier far than any waif and stray of civilization, border ruffian of the far west, buccaneer of the Tropic keys, Cimaroon of the Panama forests; men verbiesterte, turned into the likeness of beasts, wildfanger, hüner, ogres, wehr-wolves, strong thieves and outlaws, many of them possibly mere brutal maniacs; naked, living in caves and coverts, knowing no law but their own hunger, rage, and lust; feeding often on human flesh; and woe to the woman or child or unarmed man who fell into their ruthless clutch. Orson, and such like human brutes of the wilderness, serve now to amuse children in fairy tales; they were then ugly facts of flesh and blood. There were heathens there, too, in small colonies: heathen Saxons, cruelest of all the tribes; who worshipped at the Irmensul, and had an old blood-feud against the Franks; heathen Thuringer, who had murdered St. Kilian the Irishman at Wurzburg; heathen Slaves, of different tribes, who had introduced into Europe the custom of impaling their captives: and woe to the Christian priest who fell into any of their hands. To be knocked on the head before some ugly idol was the gentlest death which they were like to have. They would have called that martyrdom, and the gate of eternal bliss; but they were none the less brave men for going out to face it.
And beside all these, and worse than all these, there were the terrors of the unseen world; very real in those poor monks’ eyes, though not in ours. There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in the caves, and Tannhäuser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the Christian man, and would lure him to his death. There were fair swan-maidens and elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias the dancer, with all their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to sin, and having made him sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in hell. There was Satan and all the devils, too, plotting to stop the Christian man from building the house of the Lord, and preaching the gospel to the heathen; ready to call up storms, and floods, and forest fires; to hurl the crag down from the cliffs, or drop the rotting tree on their defenceless heads—all real and terrible in those poor monks’ eyes, as they walked on, singing their psalms, and reading their Gospels, and praying to God to save them, for they could not save themselves; and to guide them, for they knew not, like Abraham, whither they went; and to show them the place where they should build the house of the Lord, and preach righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit to the heathen round. We talk still, thank heaven, of heroes, and understand what that great word should mean. But were not these poor monks heroes? Knights-errant of God, doing his work as they best knew how. We have a purer gospel than they: we understand our Bibles better. But if they had not done what they did, where would have been now our gospel, and our Bible? We cannot tell. It was a wise old saw of our forefathers—‘Do not speak ill of the bridge which carries you over.’
If Sturmi had had a ‘holy longing’ to get into the wild wood, now he had a ‘holy longing’ to go back; and to find St. Boniface, and tell him what a pleasant place Hersfelt was, and the quality of the soil, and the direction of the watershed, and the meadows, and springs, and so forth, in a very practical way. And St. Boniface answered, that the place seemed good enough; but that he was afraid for them, on account of the savage heathen Saxons. They must go deeper into the forest, and then they would be safe. So he went back to his fellow-hermits, and they made to themselves a canoe; and went paddling up and down the Fulda stream, beneath the alder boughs, ‘trying the mouths of the mountain-streams, and landing to survey the hills and ridges,’—pioneers of civilization none the less because they pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, ‘the rough brook,’ to see if it would suit; but it would not. So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray once more.