Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

"I did not learn my divinity at once," he said, "but was constrained by my temptations to search deeper and deeper; for no man without trials and temptations can attain a true understanding of the Holy Scriptures. St. Paul had a devil that beat him with fists, and with temptations drove him diligently to study the Holy Scriptures. Temptations hunted me into the Bible, wherein I sedulously read; and thereby, God be praised, at length attained a true understanding of it."

He then related to me what some of these temptations were;—the bitter disappointment it was to him to find that the cowl, and even the vows and the priestly consecration, made no change in his heart; that Satan was as near him in the cloister as outside, and he no stronger to cope with him. He told me of his endeavours to keep every minute rule of the order, and how the slightest deviation weighed on his conscience. It seems to have been like trying to restrain a fire by a fence of willows, or to guide a mountain torrent in artificial windings through a flower-garden, to bind his fervent nature by these vexatious rules.

He was continually becoming absorbed in some thought or study, and forgetting all the rules, and then painfully he would turn back and retrace his steps; sometimes spending weeks in absorbing study, and then remembering he had neglected his canonical hours, and depriving himself of sleep for nights to make up the missing prayers.

He fasted, disciplined himself, humbled himself to perform the meanest offices for the meanest brother; forcibly kept sleep from his eyes wearied with study, and his mind worn out with conflict, until every now and then Nature avenged herself by laying him unconscious on the floor of his cell, or disabling him by a fit of illness.

But all in vain; his temptations seemed to grow stronger, his strength less. Love to God he could not feel at all; but in his secret soul the bitterest questioning of God, who seemed to torment him at once by the law and the gospel. He thought of Christ as the severest judge, because the most righteous; and the very phrase, "the righteousness of God," was torture to him.

Not that this state of distress was continual with him. At times he gloried in his obedience, and felt that he earned rewards from God by performing the sacrifice of the mass, not only for himself, but for others. At times, also, in his circuits, after his consecration, to say mass in the villages around Erfurt, he would feel his spirits lightened by the variety of the scenes he witnessed, and would be greatly amused at the ridiculous mistakes of the village choirs; for instance, their chanting the "Kyrie" to the music of the "Gloria."

Then, at other times, his limbs would totter with terror when he offered the holy sacrifice, at the thought that he, the sacrificing priest, yet the poor, sinful Brother Martin, actually stood before God "without a Mediator."

At his first mass he had difficulty in restraining himself from flying from the altar—so great was his awe and the sense of his unworthiness. Had he done so, he would have been excommunicated.

Again, there were days when he performed the services with some satisfaction, and would conclude with saying, "O Lord Jesus, I come to thee and entreat thee to be pleased with whatsoever I do and suffer in my order; and I pray thee that these burdens and this straitness of my rule and religion may be a full satisfaction for all my sins."

Yet then again, the dread would come that perhaps he had inadvertently omitted some word in the service, such as "enim" or "æternum," or neglected some prescribed genuflexion, or even a signing of the cross; and that thus, instead of offering to God an acceptable sacrifice in the mass, he had committed a grievous sin.