“The Barbe of God—who knows it, and says it not, he will lose his soul. There behind thee lies a plank, a little plank that’s long, not broad. The elect pass over it. The lost fall from it and cry and groan, falling into the abyss of hell. Learn the Barbe of God at seven years old. There is no time for repentance when parted are body and soul.”
In a book published at Toulouse in 1673 by the Père Amilha, in the Languedoc patois, entitled “Le Tableau de la bido del parfait Chresten,” a popular book of Christian instruction in faith and morals, is a caution against superstitious practices. Among these are the following questions: “Have you tried to make a denier float on the water, whereby to detect the thief who has stolen your goods? Have you taken off the cross from the rosary, and said the Little Pater and the White Pater?”
These prayers, which were supposed to have a power to save from everlasting death by mere recitation of them, are mentioned by J. B. Thiers, in his “Treatise on Superstition,” as condemned by the Church; and he names among them the Barbe de Dieu as heretical.
Quenot, in his “Statistique de la Charente,” in 1818, gives the form in which the White Paternoster was said in that department of France—
“Dieu l’a fait, je la dit,
J’ai trouvé quatre anges couchés dans mon lit,
Deux à la tête, deux aux pieds,
Et le bon Dieu au milieu.”
The forms in which it is said throughout France are infinitely varied, but the same ideas reign throughout all, and all derived from a common source. That source is apparently Albigensian Manichæism. It seems from the questions put to these heretics that the “Perfect,” the apostle of the sect, taught a fourfold Paternoster, and taught it as a sort of charm, with the assertion, which repeatedly occurs in all these folk rhymed Paters, that they who recited it secured thereby their eternal salvation.
It is certainly—if this fourfold Albigensian Pater be the origin of our “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”—a very curious instance of the underground growth of the heresy throughout Europe, and the hold it obtained on the poor and ignorant.