, and again varied by dots
.[11] The guardian cross protected a locality; and in England, at the origin of parishes, the cross stood as the hallowed witness which marked the boundaries, and which it had been sacrilege to disturb. It was no unusual practice to place the sign at the head of private letters, however trivial the contents, as we find it in charters and other public documents. In one of the Paston letters, the piety of the writer at a much later period could not detail the ordinary occurrences of the week without inserting the sacred letters I.H.S.; and similar invocations are found in others.[12]
The material symbol of Christianity had thus been indiscriminately adopted without conveying with it the virtues of the Gospel. The cross was a myth—the cross was the Fetish[13] of an idolatrous Christianity—they bowed before it, they knelt to it, they kissed it, they kissed a palpable and visible deity; never was the Divinity rendered more familiar to the gross understandings of the vulgar; and in these ages of unchristian Christianity, the cross was degraded even to a vulgar mark, which conveniently served for the signature of some unlettered baron.
[1] St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly observed, “Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie tournoient au bien public, au profit de l’Etat.” It was when the causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some losses.
[2] I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of the present day.—Nicholls, “History of Leicestershire,” xxxix.
[3] The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.—Selden’s notes to “Drayton’s Polyolbion,” Song ii.
An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.—Journal des Savans, 1838.