So because the work could be done in that way, and (as far as men then, or now, can see) in no other way, Pepin and Carloman gave Boniface the glade of oaks, that they might clear the virgin forest, and extend cultivation, and win fresh souls to Christ, instead of fighting, like the kings of this world, for the land which was already cleared, and the people who were already Christian.
In two months’ time they had cut down much of the forest; and then came St. Boniface himself to see them, and with him a great company of workmen, and chose a place for a church. And St. Boniface went up to the hill which is yet called Bishop’s Mount, that he might read his Bible in peace, away from kings and courts, and the noise of the wicked world; and his workmen felled trees innumerable, and dug peat to burn lime withal; and then all went back again, and left the settlers to thrive and work.
And thrive and work they did, clearing more land, building their church, ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more heathen converts, more and more heathen school-children; and St. Boniface came to see them from time to time, whenever he could get a holiday, and spent happy days in prayer and study, with his pupil and friend. And ten years after, when St. Boniface was martyred at last by the Friesland heathens, and died, as he had lived, like an apostle of God, then all the folk of Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home to their town, because he had been Archbishop there. But he ‘appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and said: “Why delay ye to take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the wilderness which God bath prepared for me?”’
So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,—unless the French Republican armies dug up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier things, to the winds of heaven. And all men came to worship at his tomb, after the fashion of those days. And Fulda became a noble abbey, with its dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads, almshouses, and all the appanages of such a place, in the days when monks were monks indeed. And Sturmi became a great man, and went through many troubles and slanders, and conquered in them all, because there was no fault found in him, as in Daniel of old; and died in a good old age, bewept by thousands, who, but for him, would have been heathens still. And the Aihen-loh became rich corn-land and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough and a principality, where men lived in peace under mild rule, while the feudal princes quarrelled and fought outside; and a great literary centre, whose old records are now precious to the diggers among the bones of bygone times; and at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so developed themselves, that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which I have seen is this, bearing date about 1710:—
‘The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda, Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.’ Developed, certainly: and not altogether in the right direction. For instead of the small beer, which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the world, the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best table too. Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the Aihen-lob, and planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make St. Sturmi hope that he had not read his Bible altogether in vain.
Surely such men as St. Sturmi were children of wisdom, put what sense on the word you will. In a dark, confused, lawless, cut-throat age, while everything was decided by the sword, they found that they could do no good to themselves, or any man, by throwing their swords into either scale. They would be men of peace, and see what could be done so. Was that not wise? So they set to work. They feared God exceedingly, and walked with God. Was not that wise? They wrought righteousness, and were merciful and kind, while kings and nobles were murdering around them; pure and temperate, while other men were lustful and drunken; just and equal in all their ways, while other men were unjust and capricious; serving God faithfully, according to their light, while the people round them were half or wholly heathen; content to do their work well on earth, and look for their reward in heaven, while the kings and nobles, the holders of the land, were full of insane ambition, every man trying to seize a scrap of ground from his neighbour, as if that would make them happier. Was that not wise? Which was the wiser, the chief killing human beings, to take from them some few square miles which men had brought into cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated land, and going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the virgin soil? Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again? And do not tell me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious ends. It is not so. I know well his fanaticism and his superstition, and the depths of its ignorance and silliness: but he had more in him than that. Had he not, he would have worked no lasting work. He was not only the pioneer of civilization, but he knew that he was such. He believed that all knowledge came from God, even that which taught a man to clear the forest, and plant corn instead; and he determined to spread such knowledge as he had wherever he could. He was a wiser man than the heathen Saxons, even than the Christian Franks, around him; a better scholar, a better thinker, better handicraftsman, better farmer; and he did not keep his knowledge to himself. He did not, as some tell you, keep the Bible to himself. It is not so; and those who say so, in this generation, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The monk knew his Bible well himself, and he taught it. Those who learnt from him to read, learnt to read their Bibles. Those who did not learn (of course the vast majority, in days when there was no printing), he taught by sermons, by pictures, afterward by mystery and miracle plays. The Bible was not forbidden to the laity till centuries afterwards—and forbidden then, why? Because the laity throughout Europe knew too much about the Bible, and not too little. Because the early monks had so ingrained the mind of the masses, throughout Christendom, with Bible stories, Bible personages, the great facts, and the great doctrines, of our Lord’s life, that the masses knew too much; that they could contrast too easily, and too freely, the fallen and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries, with those Bible examples, which the old monks of centuries before had taught their forefathers. Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity, because it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries before they had taught them to love and know too well. In a word, the old monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and looked on as a superior being, as they are.
Of course he did not know how far civilization would extend. He could not foretell railroads and electric telegraphs, any more than he could political economy, or sanitary science. But the best that he knew, he taught—and did also, working with his own hands. He was faithful in a few things, and God made him ruler over many things. For out of those monasteries sprang—what did not spring? They restored again and again sound law and just government, when the good old Teutonic laws, and the Roman law also, was trampled underfoot amid the lawless strife of ambition and fury. Under their shadow sprang up the towns with their corporate rights, their middle classes, their artizan classes. They were the physicians, the alms-givers, the relieving officers, the schoolmasters of the middle-age world. They first taught us the great principle of the division of labour, to which we owe, at this moment, that England is what she is, instead of being covered with a horde of peasants, each making and producing everything for himself, and starving each upon his rood of ground. They transcribed or composed all the books of the then world; many of them spent their lives in doing nothing but writing; and the number of books, even of those to be found in single monasteries, considering the tedious labour of copying, is altogether astonishing. They preserved to us the treasures of classical antiquity. They discovered for us the germs of all our modern inventions. They brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and while they taught men to know that they had a common humanity, a common Father in heaven taught them also to profit by each other’s wisdom instead of remaining in isolated ignorance. They, too, were the great witnesses against feudal caste. With them was neither high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor: worth was their only test; the meanest serf entering there might become the lord of knights and vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men may talk of democracy—those old monasteries were the most democratic institutions the world had ever till then seen. ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ was not only talked of in them, but carried out in practice—only not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness: but under those safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military order, without which men may call themselves free, and yet be really only slaves to their own passions. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, in those monasteries was preserved the sacred fire of modern liberty, through those feudal centuries when all the outside world was doing its best to trample it out. Remember, as a single instance, that in the Abbot’s lodging at Bury St. Edmunds, the Magna Charta was drawn out, before being presented to John at Runymede. I know what they became afterwards, better than most do here; too well to defile my lips, or your ears, with tales too true. They had done their work, and they went. Like all things born in time, they died; and decayed in time; and the old order changed, giving place to the new; and God fulfilled himself in many ways. But in them, too, he fulfilled himself. They were the best things the world had seen; the only method of Christianizing and civilizing semi-barbarous Europe. Like all human plans and conceptions, they contained in themselves original sin; idolatry, celibacy, inhuman fanaticism; these were their three roots of bitterness; and when they bore the natural fruit of immorality, the monasteries fell with a great and just destruction. But had not those monasteries been good at first, and noble at first; had not the men in them been better and more useful men than the men outside, do you think they would have endured for centuries? They would not even have established themselves at all. They would soon, in those stormy times, have been swept off the face of the earth. Ill used they often were, plundered and burnt down. But men found that they were good. Their own plunderers found that they could not do without them; and repented, and humbled themselves, and built them up again, to be centres of justice and mercy and peace, amid the wild weltering sea of war and misery. For all things endure, even for a generation, only by virtue of the good which is in them. By the Spirit of God in them they live, as do all created things; and when he taketh away their breath they die, and return again to their dust.
And what was the original sin of them? We can hardly say that it was their superstitious and partially false creed: because that they held in common with all Europe. It was rather that they had identified themselves with, and tried to realize on earth, one of the worst falsehoods of that creed—celibacy. Not being founded on the true and only ground of all society, family life, they were merely artificial and self-willed arrangements of man’s invention, which could not develop to any higher form. And when the sanctity of marriage was revindicated at the Reformation, the monasteries, having identified themselves with celibacy, naturally fell. They could not partake in the Reformation movement, and rise with it into some higher form of life, as the laity outside did. I say, they were altogether artificial things. The Abbot might be called the Abba, Father, of his monks: but he was not their father—just as when young ladies now play at being nuns, they call their superior, Mother: but all the calling in the world will not make that sacred name a fact and a reality, as they too often find out.
And celibacy brought serious evils from the first. It induced an excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the best men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous, visionary; at best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and in raptures. You never get in their writings anything of that manly calmness, which we so deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for ourselves. They are bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking virulence for strength, putting us in mind for ever of the allocutions of the Popes. Read the writings of one of the best of monks, and of men, who ever lived, the great St. Bernard, and you will be painfully struck by this hysterical element. The fact is, that their rule of life, from the earliest to the latest,—from that of St. Benedict of Casino, ‘father of all monks,’ to that of Loyola the Jesuit, was pitched not too low, but too high. It was an ideal which, for good or for evil, could only be carried out by new converts, by people in a state of high religious excitement, and therefore the history of the monastic orders is just that of the protestant sects. We hear of continual fallings off from their first purity; of continual excitements, revivals, and startings of new orders, which hoped to realize the perfection which the old orders could not. You must bear this in mind, as you read mediæval history. You will be puzzled to know why continual new rules and new orders sprung up. They were so many revivals, so many purist attempts at new sects. You will see this very clearly in the three great revivals which exercised such enormous influence on the history of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,—I mean the rise first of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the Jesuits, and lastly of the Port Royalists. They each professed to restore monachism to what it had been at first; to realize the unnatural and impossible ideal.
Another serious fault of these monasteries may be traced to their artificial celibate system. I mean their avarice. Only one generation after St. Sturmi, Charlemagne had to make indignant laws against Abbots who tried to get into their hands the property of everybody around them: but in vain. The Abbots became more and more the great landholders, till their power was intolerable. The reasons are simple enough. An abbey had no children between whom to divide its wealth, and therefore more land was always flowing in and concentrating, and never breaking up again; while almost every Abbot left his personalities, all his private savings and purchases, to his successor.