I will now tell you about a very different kind of sermon from Ælfric's—one of the sermons preached by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who was not, like Ælfric, leading a quiet life in an abbey, but throwing himself into the struggles and needs of a most disastrous time. He saw how the Danish inroads had terribly demoralised the English people, and he spoke out as God's preacher, who comes face to face with wrong, must speak.
He begins by telling his "beloved men" how evil will go on increasing till Antichrist's coming; and then will it be awful, and terrible all through the world. "Too greatly has the devil for many years led this folk astray, and little faithfulness has there been among men, albeit they spake well; and wrongs too many have ruled in the land; and not always were there many who thought earnestly about the remedy as they should; but day by day they added one evil upon another and they reared up wrong, and many evil laws all throughout this nation. And therefore have we suffered many losses and shames: and if we shall await any cure then must we deserve it from God better than heretofore have we done. For with great earning have we earned the miseries that oppress us, and with great earning must we obtain the remedy from God if from henceforth it is to grow better." He tells them how in heathen lands they dare not withhold what has been devoted to the worship of idols: "and here we withhold the rights of God. And everywhere in heathen lands none dare injure or lessen within or without any of the things offered to idols: and we have robbed God's houses within and without." And so he goes on pouring out from his very soul the fiery words that tell of the warning of God's laws, and the worsening of folk-laws; and how the Sanctuaries are unprotected, and God's houses are robbed and stripped of their property, and holy orders are despised, and widows forced wrongfully to marry, and too many are made poor and humbled, and poor men are sorely betrayed and cruelly plotted against; and far and wide innocent people are given into the power of foreigners, and cradle-children made slaves through cruel evil laws for a little theft: and freeman's right taken away, and thrall's right narrowed, and alms' right diminished. It goes on and on, the terrible list of wrongs that have brought God's wrath on the land. The sermon is not for the building-up of faithful ones, but for the rousing and stirring up of those whose baptismal vow has been terribly and shamefully broken, His words are clashed out as he brings men face to face with their sin.
And then comes the preaching of the true penance. "Let us do what is needful, bow to the right, and in somewise forsake the wrong, and mend where we have broken." And the preacher's voice now takes the tender tone of entreaty. "Let us creep to Christ and with trembling heart often call upon Him, and deserve His mercy; and let us love God, and obey His laws, and fulfil what we promised when we received baptism; or what those promised who were our sponsors at baptism. And let us rightly order word and work, and earnestly cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, and carefully keep oath and pledge and have honesty among us without weakness, and let us often understand the great judgement which we all must meet, and earnestly protect ourselves against the burning fire of the punishment of hell, and earn for ourselves the glories and the joys which God has prepared for them that do His will in the world. God help us. Amen."
CHAPTER XIII
Love of books is love of part of God's world. In books we commune with the spirit of their writers. The Church the mother of all art and all literature. Catholic literature saturated with Holy Scripture.
A man who made many a man and woman love literature and helped them to study it, the late Professor Henry Morley, has said that one who thinks that a bookroom is not a part of the world; one who thinks that, in leaving his books and going forth to commune with nature he is, as it were, passing from death to life, is one who has not yet learned to read. The good Professor saw that books have souls in them, so to speak, and that to love a book really and truly is to hold communion with that which is living and is a part of the great, beautiful scheme of God's great, beautiful world. To love one part of what Our Father has given us should never lead us to despise, or even undervalue, other parts. And we must remember, too, must we not? how one thing helps us to understand another; how great painters and great poets help us to understand the beauty of nature as we might not have understood it without them, just as they help us also to know men and women, and help us to know better some of the fair things in our great and glorious religion; things which God can and does teach without their help when He chooses, though He graciously and lovingly often uses their help—the help He has given them the power of giving—to teach others of His children. Our Father, being Our Father, not just your Father and my Father and his Father and her Father, but Our Father, the Father of us all as one big family of His, brothers and sisters in Him, wills that we all help one another with the gifts He has given us; and the more we can realise that all separate gifts are parts of one great harmonious whole, the more fully we shall live and feel and enjoy.
There is, of course, a delight in exquisite typography, and hand-made paper, and binding into which the soul of a true artist has gone. People may be willing to give large sums for these things, independently of the value of what is under them; or people may value books for their age, or because they are rare, or because they are records of facts which it is well to know and good to be able to verify.
But there is a better way of love than all of these. One may love the book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer, being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of enquiry, or the spirit of opposition. Is not this the best kind of love, the love by which the thought of man is used by man, the spirit of man holds communion with the spirit of man?
All through the ages, great things have been handed down by written words, and people of all nations have shared one another's national heritage of written thought, and in that sharing made it larger and greater. We are now considering the earlier story of English Catholic literature, and it is surely well that people should know something of what things were said and sung in the olden time; the time when all art, all literature was fed by the great Mother of all Christian art and all Christian literature, the Holy Catholic Church.