The doctrine of purgatory was said to arise from the feelings expressed by St. Gregory at the following incident in the life of Trajan. That Emperor was once hastening at the head of his legions, when a poor widow flung herself in his way, crying aloud for justice and vengeance over the innocent blood of her son, killed by the son of the Emperor. Trajan promised to do her justice when he returned from his expedition. The widow then exclaimed, “But, sire, if you are killed in battle, who then is to do me justice?” Trajan answered, “My successor.” She then retorted, “But what will it signify to you, Emperor, if it is left to some other person to do me justice? Is it not better that you should do this honourable action and receive the reward yourself?” Trajan, moved by her piety and her reasoning, then alighted, and having examined into the matter, he gave up to her his own son in place of her son, and also bestowed on her likewise a liberal pension. Now it came to pass that one day, as Gregory was meditating in his daily walk, this action of the Emperor Trajan came into his recollection, and he wept bitterly to think that a man so just should be condemned as a heathen to eternal punishment. And entering a church, he prayed most fervently that the soul of the good Emperor might be released from torment. And a voice said to him: “I have granted thy prayer, and I have spared the soul of Trajan for thy sake; but because thou hast supplicated for one whom the justice of God had already condemned thou shalt choose one of two things: either thou shalt endure for two days the fires of purgatory, or thou shalt be sick and infirm for the remainder of thy life.” Gregory chose the latter, and this accounted for the many bodily infirmities of the saint during the rest of his life.
LEGEND OF ST. BEGA.
In Cumberland, on a promontory of the Irish Sea, stood the monastery of St. Bees, named after St. Bega, who was one of the nuns under the great abbess St. Hilda of Whitby. St. Bega was the daughter of an Irish king, the most beautiful woman of her time, and was sought in marriage by a prince of Norway. But she had vowed to live a nun, and had received from an angel a bracelet marked with the sign of the cross, as the seal of her high calling. On the night before her wedding day, while her father’s retainers were carousing, she escaped alone with nothing but the bracelet, and in a skiff landed on the western shore of Northumbria, and took refuge in a cell in a wood, and then joined St. Hilda till she could build a monastery of her own. During the building she prepared with her own hands the food of the masons and waited on them. Her bracelet was long preserved as a relic. She was celebrated for her austerity, her fervour, and her kindness to the poor, and remained the patron saint for six hundred years after her death of the north-west coast of England.
ST. FRUCTUOSUS AND THE DOE.
Fructuosus, who died about 665, displayed when a mere child a genius for monkery. When a boy he had already fixed on a site for a monastery; and when he had carried out his enterprise and gathered a large body of followers, and was praying in a secluded spot in a forest, a labourer took him for a fugitive slave, and put a rope round his neck and brought him to a place where he was recognised. Another time he was wandering covered with a goat skin, and a huntsman thinking him a wild beast shot an arrow at him, and only then discovered that it was a man perched on the top of a rock with his hands extended in prayer. On another day a hind pursued by the hunters threw itself into the folds of the monk’s tunic, and he was so pleased at this mark of confidence that he took the wild creature home and treated it kindly. They soon became mutually attached. The simple doe followed him everywhere, slept at the foot of his bed and bleated incessantly if he was out of her sight. He tried to send her back to the woods, but she soon returned to his cell and haunted it as before. At last a brutal fellow, who was supposed to have no goodwill to the monks, one day killed her while Fructuosus was on a journey. On his return his eyes searched in vain for a welcome from his faithful friend, and when informed of her death he fell prostrate on the floor of the church, quivering with agony. The bystanders thought he was asking of God some punishment for this brutality. Soon after the murderer fell sick, and begged urgently this monk to go to his aid. The monk avenged himself nobly; he went and healed his greatest enemy, and at the same time made him repent of his sins.
POPE JOAN (A.D. 854).
The story that there was once a female Pope, who succeeded Leo in 854, and reigned two years and five months, was first told three hundred years later by a chronicler named Stephen, a French Dominican, who died in 1261. She concealed her sex, but on her way to the Lateran she was delivered of a child in the street, and died shortly afterwards. Others say the child was born as she was celebrating High Mass. The story was embellished as time advanced. But it has been in modern times treated as a fable devised and kept up by the Protestant reformers in order to discredit the Papacy. Some added that Joan was the daughter of an English missionary, and fell in love with a monk; that she dressed herself in male attire in order to pursue her studies, became celebrated for her learning, and at last arrived at the high dignity of Pope. Others say she was an Athenian woman celebrated for her learning, who had come to Rome as an adventuress. Others say she was a native of Mayence, who fell in love and went in man’s attire to Rome, and after many adventures succeeded to the highest dignity.
BISHOP HATTO DEVOURED BY RATS.
Bishop Hatto had a castle on a little rock in the Rhine. In 970 a famine existed in Germany, and the famishing people asked the bishop for help, and he invited them to go into a large barn. He set fire to the barn, and they were all consumed. Soon afterwards an army of rats collected and moved towards the palace, and on seeing them the bishop fled to his tower in the Rhine, thinking they could not follow him. But they swarmed through the river and climbed up into the holes and windows and ate up the bishop. This story was told for the first time at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and a similar legend is found in the records of Poland and Bavaria.
ST. CONRAD SWALLOWING A SPIDER.