Similar passages may also be gathered from the letters of St. Basil and St. Gregory,[[5]] fathers of the Greek Church. And still earlier instances of this Christian view of the earth are quoted from the writings of a Roman lawyer, Minucius Felix, who lived in the beginning of the third century; his evening rambles on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the neighborhood of Ostia, were very feelingly described in pages which have been preserved to our own time. The Christian Church possessed a most rich inheritance in the Hebrew literature; and the constant use of the Psalms of the Temple in her public services would alone suffice to produce in the minds of the people a deep impression of the goodness and majesty of the Divine Creator as revealed in his works. The Canticle of the Three Children, composed before the foundation of Rome, and which from the early ages of Christianity to the present hour has formed a portion of public worship, is an exalted offering of praise with which we are all familiar: “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever!” And in the sublime anthem of the Te Deum we have another earnest, unceasing expression of a feeling inseparable from Christianity: “We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!” It is, indeed, revealed truth only which has opened to the human mind views of the creation at all worthy of its dignity. It is from her teaching that we learn to appreciate justly the different works of the Deity, in their distinctive characters, to allot to each its own definite position. There is no confusion in her views. She shows us the earth, and the creatures which people it, in a clear light. She tells us positively that all things are but the works of His holy hands—the visible expression of an Almighty wisdom, and power, and love; and as she speaks, the idle phantoms of the human imagination, the puerile deities of the heathen world, the wretched fallacies of presumptuous philosophy vanish and flee away from the face of the earth, like the mists and shadows of night at the approach of the light of day. Not one of the thousand banners of idolatry, whether unfurled on the mountain-tops, or waving in the groves, or floating on the streams, but falls before her. She points out to man his own position, and that of all about him; he is lord of the earth and of all its creatures. The herb of the field, the trees of the wood, the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea—every living thing that moveth upon earth—all have been given into his hand—all are subject to his dominion—all are the gifts of Jehovah.
But, ere time had enabled Christian civilization and its ennobling lessons to make any positive progress, or to produce any lasting impression on the character of general literature, the Empire was overwhelmed by races wholly barbarous. A period of darkness and disorder ensued, during which the very art of writing seems to have been all but forgotten. A few rude, unfinished sketches were all that could be expected from such an age, and in these man himself would naturally engross the attention. In societies only half civilized, man, as an individual, must always fill a bolder and more prominent position than in those where order, and knowledge, and truth are more widely diffused; he has in such a state of things far greater power for evil over his fellows; every step becomes of immediate importance, for it is associated with a thousand perils; every turn of private passion, unchecked by vital vigor of law or religion, may work out a fatal tragedy, and consequently the individual, either as tyrant, or victim, or champion, excites unceasing fear and flattery, or pity and commiseration, or gratitude and admiration. Wild legends, now warlike, now religious in spirit, naturally belonged to those centuries. No doubt the birds of heaven sang, and the flowers of the field bloomed in those ages; but we have scanty record of their existence; the eye of man was fixed on darker objects; his ear was filled with fiercer sounds.
Slowly, however, civilization and social order—those natural accessories of the Christian faith—were making progress; but the most striking efforts of reviving intelligence at this period did not assume the shape of letters. That latent poetical spirit, never wholly extinct in the human heart, sought for development during those ages through other channels. Under the hand of the religious architect, pious, though lamentably superstitious, the dignity of the forest was once more embodied in novel and imposing labors of art; scarce a fine effect of the branching woods which was not successfully repeated with great richness of detail in Gothic stone. The beauty of the vegetation, in its noblest forms, must have been deeply impressed on the hearts of the men who, with Teutonic patience, raised those magnificent piles. Every American familiar with the beautiful and varied effects of old forests of blended growth, where fir and pine cross their evergreen branches amid the lighter tracery of deciduous trees, may have often noted some single fir, rising tall and spire-like far above the lesser grove, into the light of sun and star; some similar evergreen, rooted in the soil of Europe, was doubtless the original of that most beautiful of Christian architectural forms, the church spire of the Middle Ages:
* * * * “Preacher to the wise,
Less’ning from earth her spiral honors rise,
Till, as a spear-point rear’d, the topmost spray,
Points to the Eden of eternal day.”[[6]]
It was about the time when those mediæval churches were rising from the towns of central Europe—slow in their stately growth as the forest whence their forms were drawn—that Troubadour and Trouvère, Minstrel and Minnesinger, began their wanderings in the same region; and amid the strange medley of human passion and religious superstition to which they gave utterance, some strains of great natural sweetness were heard. It was then that the returning cuckoo was greeted in England with song:
“Sumer is ycumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!”