“I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need pay only sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph—not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced, in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, and with the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.”—The Mill on the Floss, Book IV., chap. 3.
All true; but less than the truth; for Thomas’s power lies not in these negations, but in his personal relation to “the supreme, invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength,” from whom Marian Evans turned away to fill up her life with “yearnings and strivings and failures,” while her only comfort was in the consideration that she had stilled her pain by no “false anodynes.”
It is a little uncertain at what time the Imitation was written. It seems not improbable that it was begun in Thomas’s youth, when he had assumed or was about to assume the responsibilities of the priesthood. A lofty regard for the sanctity of that office was one of the traditions of the brotherhood. Groote himself, in view of the stains of his earlier life, never would assume it, although his ordination would have enabled him to resume his work of preaching through the Archdiocese of Utrecht. He never was more than deacon, and the order which silenced him merely forbade deacons to preach without especial permission. It is not impossible that in the case of Thomas, as in that of Luther, the responsibility seemed greater than he could bear, and that it drove him into a closer and more consecrated fellowship with his Master, which bore fruit in the first book of this wonderful manual. He was ordained priest in 1414; there seems good reason to believe that this first book—the Imitation proper—was known and read at Windesheim, and even translated into Dutch by Jan Scutken, as early as the year 1420; and that the other three were written, each as an independent work, before 1425, and then united as one manual of devotion.[17] The oldest manuscript of the Latin still in existence bears the date 1425, and testifies to his authorship. The oldest in Thomas’s own handwriting was made in 1441, and forms part of a series of his works, which he then collected probably for the first time.
Of Thomas’s purely poetical works, besides a few hortatory poems and anagrams on the names of the saints, there were known until recently sixteen Cantica Spiritualia, to wit:
Adversa mundi tolera, Agnetis Christi virginis, Ama Jesum cum Agnete, Ave florens rosa, Christe Redemptor omnium, Vere salus, Christe sanctorum gloria, Et piorum, Cives coeli attendite, En virginis Caeciliae, Gaude, mater Ecclesia, De praecursoris, Jesu Salvador seculi, O dulcissime Jesu, O Jesu mi dulcissime, Spes et solamen, O qualis quantaque laetitia, O vera summa Trinitas, Tota vita Jesu Christi, Vitam Jesu stude imitari.
In 1882 Father O. A. Spitzen found in a manuscript in Zwolle ten other Cantica Spiritualia, which he published that year as the work of Thomas à Kempis, to wit:
Angelorum si haberem, Creaturarum omnium merita, Cum sub cruce sedet moerens, Jerusalem gloriosa, Mirum est si non lugeat, Nec quisquam oculis vidit, O quid laudis, quis honoris, Quanta Mihi cura de te, Serve meus noli metuere, Ubi modo est Jesus, ubi est Maria.
Six of these had already appeared in Mone’s collection, and credited to a fifteenth century manuscript found at Carlsruhe, a fact which does not militate against Spitzen’s view of their authorship. The latter found them along with the hymns generally ascribed to Thomas in a MS. which had belonged to the brother-house in Zwolle, and had been written in the latter half of that century, probably between 1477 and 1483. Most of them bear the ear-marks of Thomas’s style, and have a congruity with the matter of his works which lends probability to Father Spitzen’s conjecture.
Of all these hymns two only have attained any recognition as contributions to the sacred songs of Christendom. These two are the
Adversa mundi tolera,