"Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini."[1] Again and again the words of the old Latin hymn echoed through the aisles of the Minster.
It was the dusk of a short winter's day in the year of our Lord One Thousand.
The shadowed spaces were filled with a vast crowd; all the city had gathered together to hear the stranger monk. He had come into the city yesterday, and was to leave to-morrow.
It was reported that he came from an island beyond the seas, of an ancient race, rich in saints when the Teutons were still wild heathen tribes; from the borders of the sea without a shore.
All was mystery about him. He flitted through the land like a wandering voice, a voice crying in the wilderness. No man knew certainly whence he came or whither he went. He came not so much to teach or to preach, as to utter a great "cry," and be gone.
It was the old cry, that the generations of men are as the crops of grass, mown down surely by the mower; and the glory of man as the flower of the grass, scattered before the mowing-time by any passing wind.
But the old cry would scarcely have gathered the people together and riveted them in breathless, awe-struck attention as this voice gathered and fixed them.
To the old cry was added a new cry, "an exceeding great and bitter cry."
"The mowers are at hand, the harvest is come. It may not be to-day or to-morrow. But this year it will be.