Robert, King of France, son of the illustrious Hugh Capet, entered the Abbey of St. Denis. Here he became one of the choir of the church, singing hymns and psalms of his own composition. Many of the nobles emancipated their slaves, and bestowed large sums in charity,—benevolence, indeed, which did not, perhaps, require a large exercise of self-denial, if sincere in their belief that the fires were just ready to burst out which were to wrap the world in flames.
As the year 999 drew near its end, men almost held their breath to watch the result. For a whole generation, all the pulpits of Christendom had been ringing with the text,—
“And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more;and, after that, he must be loosed a little season.”[201]
But the dawn of the eleventh century rose, and all things continued as they were from the beginning of the creation. Christians, finding that the world was not coming to an end, rallied for more energetic effort to make the world better. All Christendom combined in the crusades to arrest the progress of Mohammedanism, and to reclaim the Holy Land from Mohammedan sway. The churches were repaired. Stately cathedrals rose,—those massive piles of imposing architecture which are still the pride of Europe.
The impression that the world was to be stable for some centuries longer led to the projection of buildings on the most gigantic scale and of the most durable materials. Architecture became a science which enlisted the energies of the ablest minds; and here originated that Gothic architecture so much admired even at the present day. The foundations of these time-defying edifices were broad and deep; the walls of immense thickness; the roofs steep, effectually to shed rainand snow; the towers square, buttressed to sustain the church, and also to afford means, then so necessary, of military defence.
The castle of the noble rose by the same impulse which reared such majestic sacred edifices. Thus Melrose and Kenilworth, Heidelberg and Drachenfels, came into being.
In France alone, at the beginning of the eleventh century, there were a thousand four hundred and thirty-four monasteries. Poverty was universal. The cottages of the peasants were mere hovels, without windows, damp and airless,—wretched kennels in which the joyless inmates crept to sleep. By the side of these abodes of want and woe the church rose in palatial splendor, with its massive walls, its majestic spire, its spacious aisles, and its statuary and paintings, which charmed the docile and unlettered multitude. The whole population of the village could assemble beneath its vaulted ceiling. It was the poor man’s palace: he felt that it belonged to him. There he received his bride. In the churchyard he laid his dead. The church-bell rang merrily on festal-days, and tolled sadly when sorrow crashed. Life’s burden weighed heavily on all hearts. To the poor, unlettered, ignorant peasant, the church was every thing: its religious pageants pleased his eye; the church-door was ever open for his devotions; the sanctuary was his refuge in danger; its massive grandeur filled his heart with pride; its gilded shows and stately ceremonies took the place of amusements; the officiating priests and bishops presented to his reverential eyes an aspect almost divine.
We see the remains of this deep reverence in the attachment to their forms of religion of nearly all the peasantry of Catholic Europe at the present day. The Church, with its imposing ceremonies, hallowed to them by all the associations of childhood and by the traditions of past generations, still exerts over them a power which seems almost miraculous.
The wonderful vitality which there is in the Church of Christ, and the amazing influence which the teachings of Jesus exert over the human mind, are in nothing more remarkablethan in the stability with which Christianity and its doctrines survive all the ordinary changes of time. Dynasties rise and fall like ocean-waves, leaving no perceptible influence behind them; but Christianity rides over all these storms of time with immortal life. The Roman empire crumbles to dust; the Eastern and Western empires moulder away; the Gothic kingdoms appear, and vanish like a vision of the night; the Vandals and the Huns, the Ostrogoths and the Normans, flit across the scene, each with their brief span of life.
Yet Christianity, like the sun struggling through the clouds of a stormy day, calmly, steadily, surely, continues on its course. Though a storm-cloud may transiently obscure its brightness, nothing can impede its onward progress; and, at the present day, Christianity, triumphant over all the conflicts of centuries, shines brighter, clearer, with more world-wide healing in its beams, than ever before.