Ah! if he is not a son of the Catholic Church in the body, by external union, he is so, perhaps—he is, I hope, in the soul, by invisible union. If he is a son of the Catholic Church neither according to the body nor in the spirit, nor in the letter, he is so at least by preparation in the design of God. If the water of baptism is not on his brow, I grieve to know it; but I see there the blood of Jesus Christ, for Jesus Christ died for all, opening wide his arms to all the world upon the cross! The world belongs to Jesus Christ, therefore the world belongs to the church, if not in act, at least in power. Let me, then, love all men; and you, too, love all men with me—not only in person, not only in their narrow earthly individuality, but in the great Christian community, in the great divine community which summons each and all.
When Moses, founder of the Jewish church, died on the mountain within sight of the land of promise, the Hebrew text says that he died in the kiss of Jehovah. Before dying let us learn to live in the kiss of Jehovah, which is also the kiss of all humanity. O holy Church! thou art more than man and thou art more than God—than God alone in heaven, than man alone on earth. O holy Church! thou art the kiss of God to man, the kiss of man to God; the embrace of all men, all races, all ages, in the flame of universal and eternal love. "He who abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him."
A Sketch Of Leo X. And His Age.
In the annals of literature and art, the name of Florence peers above that of any other Italian city, Rome excepted. Here were the poets who tuned the Italian language and made it the most musical of modern idioms; here was the illustrious astronomer, who was not the discoverer of a planet, but the revealer of the whole celestial machinery; and here, too, were the artist and politician who were not only the first sculptors and statesmen of their time, but the inventors of the very art and craft in which they excelled. Every day the pilgrim scholar arrives at her gates and requests to be shown the monuments of her great men, and every day genius worships at the shrine of genius.
At the time of which we write, the middle ages had seen their palmiest days, when a Charlemagne courteously entertained ambassadors from the Mussulmans of Florence and the Caliphs of Bagdad, and when the flower of chivalry, headed by a valiant Philip, a lion-hearted Richard, and a sainted Louis, rushed to the plains of the east to battle with the Moslem foe; they had presided over the erection of those great Gothic piles whose sublime architecture towered to the clouds, and had beheld the pontiffs of Rome issuing orders for the foundation of universities not only in Italy, but on the very outskirts of the civilized world; [Footnote 169] and finally they had seen the laborious and prolific genius of the schoolmen multiplying inventions and discoveries, fathoming the profound depths of theological science, and disserting on those great metaphysical problems, which, like so many apples of discord, have caused endless dissension and controversy among modern philosophers. [Footnote 170]
[Footnote 169: Gibbon tells us in a foot-note to his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that, "at the end of the fifteenth century, there were about fifty universities in Europe." Though this is indeed a glorious tribute, considering from whom it came, paid to the mediaeval ages, we are, however, more inclined to believe with the New American Cyclopaedia that, "before the year 1500, there were over sixty-four universities in Europe.">[
[Footnote 170: Mackintosh says, "Scarcely any metaphysical controversy agitated among recent philosophers was unknown to the schoolmen." (Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy.)]
But before these great medieval ages had reached their terminus, they again shone forth with brilliant splendor. That, indeed, was a glorious epoch in the world's history, when the most important invention recorded in the annals of mankind came forth from the brain of Guttenberg; when the stormy Atlantic was first ploughed by adventurous keels, and new worlds discovered; when letters, philosophy, and the fine arts were cultivated in such schools as the Medicean palaces, and were patronized by such men as Cosmo and Lorenzo de' Medici.