Un lit, des draps blancs,
Une ——
digue daine, bon!
Voila la vie que ces moines font!”
But he may have been a profane fellow who wrote these rude rhymes; and we will no more implicitly trust him, than we will the prose historians of the doings and dealings of the saintly men.
It is not an unusual thing to find wine-bibbers mentioned among the members of holy communities; where wine was generally supposed to be a luxury never employed but for the service of the altar,—and perhaps of the sick. The venerable Bede tells a story of a “brother,” whom he had known, and whom he wishes to God he had never known, and who was given to worship the spigot. Bede does not give his name, but certifies that the too jolly friar lived ignobly in a noble monastery, where he was often reproved for his acts of drunkenness, and only tolerated because of his gifts,—not spiritual, but as a carpenter. He was a terrible tippler, but a hard workman to boot, and would, at any time, rather labour all day and all night at his bench than join the brethren in chapel. Indeed, when he did go, his thoughts were running on something else. He was like the profane Yorkshire farmer, who praised the institution of the Sabbath because it not only brought roast beef with it as a sacred observance, but it authorized him to attend in his pew at church, where, said he, “I puts up my legs and thinks o’ nothing!” Bede’s carpenter was characteristically punished for his bibbing; and the story was made much of, by way of monition to others. It was to this effect:—“He, falling sick, and being reduced to extremity, called the brethren, and with much lamentation, and like one damned, began to tell them that he saw hell open, and Satan at the bottom thereof, and also Caiaphas, with the others that slew our Lord, by him delivered up to avenging flames. ‘In whose neighbourhood,’ said he, ‘I see a place of eternal perdition prepared for me, miserable wretch that I am!’ The brothers, hearing these words, began seriously to exhort him that he should repent even then, while he was in the flesh. He answered in despair,—‘I have no time now to change my course of life, when I have myself seen my judgment passed.’ When he had uttered these words, he died, without having received the saving viaticum; and his body was buried in the remotest part of the monastery; nor did any one dare to say masses, sing psalms, or even to pray for him.” Which seems a very hard case; for if any one needed such service it was he; and the Church’s ability to extricate him could not be denied, when she was duly pre-paid for the service.
Curiously enough, St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustin, ranks among the wine-bibbers. Her pious parents left their children to be brought up by a servant-maid, who had more zeal than discretion, and who would allow none of the children to drink, were they ever so thirsty, except at meal-times, and then only a drop or two of water. “If you cannot restrain your desire to drink now,” she would say, “what will it be when you have wine at command?” Now, the effect of this speech was exactly like that of the confessor to the hostler, when he asked the latter, if he never greased the horses’ teeth in order to prevent them eating their corn. It gave the young Monica a new idea. She was accustomed to draw the wine for her father’s table, and she henceforth began to drink a portion each time that she went to the cellar with her pitcher. And I do not know that Mr. Millais, or any other of the pre-Raphaelite gentlemen, could have a better subject for a picture, than that representing the scene when the horrified nurse-maid beheld her young charge indulging in her cups in the parental wine-vault. The lecture she received worked her conversion, we are told; and she married, and became the mother of St. Augustin, who so far followed the maternal example that, in his earlier years, when, with his eyes upon heaven, his heart was with the good things of the earth, his commonest prayer used to be, “Lord, make me religious, but not just yet.”
The nurse-maid of Monica deserved to have been the wife,—and perhaps she was,—of St. Theodotus, the vintner of Ancyra. He was a teetotaller who kept a tavern, and who passed the live-long day in leaning over his counter and begging his customers not to drink! Well, men have been canonized for less useful service to their kind; and Theodotus was more worthily employed in keeping drunkards from his wine-casks, than St. Pius V. was when, every day before dinner, by way of mocking his appetite, he resorted to the public hospitals, and kissed the ulcers of the patients! Nay, biographers tell us that an English Protestant gentleman was suddenly converted to Romanism, by observing the condescension and affection with which Pius kissed the ulcers on the feet of some poor men! The pope, if he and the convert dined together after this nasty ceremony, might have confessed that he had been sore put to it for an argument that should carry conviction to an English gentleman in search of a religion.
Let us contrast this pope in his pride with a cardinal in his fall. “When Wolsey,” says Mr. Hunter the antiquary, “was dismissed by his tyrannical master to his northern diocese, he passed many weeks at Scrooby. It is a pleasing picture which his faithful servant, Cavendish, gives of him at this period of his life:—‘Ministering many deeds of charity, and attending on Sundays at some parish church in the neighbourhood; hearing or saying mass himself, and causing some one of his chaplains to preach to the people; and that done, he would dine in some honest house of that town, where should be distributed to the poor a great alms, as well of meat and drink, as of money to supply the want of sufficient meat, if the number of the poor did so exceed of necessity.’” Wolsey was no saint certainly, but he was as honest a man as Pius, and a wiser when he fed the poor rather than kiss their ulcers.
But there is no accounting for taste; the Russian Boniface used to roll himself among thorns and nettles, in order to get an appetite, or to punish himself for indulging over much. St. Germanus, on the other hand, commenced every repast by putting ashes into his mouth;—the modern custom of beginning with oysters is certainly better both for taste and stomach. St. Walthen took wine, but then he put spiders in it. St. Dominic, too, was singular in his diet, and he sometimes spent his half-hour before dinner in one of the most curious positions that gentlemen could possibly fix upon. The Abbot of St. Vincent’s one day desired his company at dinner, but at the usual hour the saint was in church, and had forgotten the invitation. In the meantime the turkey and chine were spoiling, and the hungry abbot despatched a monk in quest of the loiterer; the messenger hurried to the church, where, to his very considerable astonishment, he beheld St. Dominic “ravished in an ecstasy,” whatever that may mean, “raised several cubits above the ground, and without motion.” The Saint, on being told that dinner was ready, graciously smiled at the intelligence, and gently descended to the ground.