The three Maries at the sepulchre give the author occasion in the homily on Easter Sunday to link the virtues we ought to practise with the names of the three holy women. From Mary Magdalen, whom, according to the tradition of the time, he identified with Mary the Sinner, he bids us learn “the great diligence and great love with which she sought God the Lord; ... so should we also anoint the feet of Christ with the ointment of contrition and repentance. From Mary Jacobi (Mary the mother of James, or Jacob) we should learn to overcome sin, because Jacob means a fighter and striver.... From the third Mary we should learn to have a true hope of obtaining grace, for Salome means a woman of grace (probably he considered wisdom and grace identical), ... especially the grace to battle against despair.” And this suggests a comparison of the three Maries with the three virtues, faith, hope, and charity. Galilee, again, which he interprets to mean in German Passover, is set as a sign that we must part with sin and cross over to God, die to the world and be detached from its allurements. The commentary on the gospel of Whitsunday, in the older editions (1473-83), contains these words: “If you love God, you will willingly hear his word and diligently say to yourself, What I hear is a token from the great King.” Then follow several Scriptural quotations strengthening and illustrating this truth. The epistle of the day gives rise to an explanation of the appearance “as it were of fiery tongues”: “The fire of the Holy Ghost consumed all fear in their hearts, and so enkindled them that they feared neither king nor emperor. So was fulfilled the saying of the Redeemer, ‘I am come to bring a fire upon the earth,’ and what do I wish but that it should be enkindled?” Then the tongues signify that the word is spread by the tongue; God sent the Holy Ghost in fiery tongues, that they (the apostles) might burn with love and overflow in words. What is the Holy Ghost? He is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, who confirms and establishes all things, and who comes at all times to the heart of every man who makes himself ready to receive him, as says St. Augustine: “It is of no use for a teacher to preach to our outer ears, if the Holy Ghost be not in our hearts and do not give us true understanding.” The likeness of the Holy Spirit to a dove is then ingeniously drawn out in comparisons such as St. Francis of Sales, two centuries later, might have adopted in his Introduction to a Devout Life, and the prayer or aspiration at the end is thus worded: “May the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost help us to hear the word of God and keep it, that our hearts may be enlightened and enkindled by the fire of the Holy Ghost, that we may live with simplicity and joy among the doves, and that the true Dove, the Holy Ghost, may come to us and abide with us for ever.”
The later editions of the sixteenth century have a longer and more complicated homily on the same subjects; they dwell, among other things, on the peace and comfort brought by the Holy Ghost, and distinguish three kinds of peace, that of the heart, that of time, and that of eternity, the second of which alone was not given to the apostles, because their Master also had it not, as is inferred from several texts quoted at length. The suddenness, the force of the wind, and the quickness of the appearance in the upper chamber in Jerusalem are all turned to practical account by the commentator, who also reminds his readers that the grace of God comes soonest to those who lead a life of inner recollection and prayer. The love of God is shown under a sort of parable, that of the scholars of an Athenian philosopher, who begged their master to write them a treatise upon love, and received from him in answer the picture of a lion with a legend round his neck: “Love brings forth nothing which afterwards causes remorse to man.” Thus Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, is spiritually this lion of love, whose works were all for the salvation of man. For Trinity Sunday the glossaries of both the older and the later editions are very short, the mystery being confessedly unfathomable, and the ancient Fathers themselves having but feebly succeeded in throwing any other light than that of faith upon the subject. Both editions contain a warning not to search curiously into the mystery, but believe with simplicity, and the later ones cite the legend of St. Augustine and the child whom he met by the sea-shore trying to bail the sea into a small trench in the sand. On the thirteenth Sunday after Trinity the vision of God by purity of heart, “and by the reading of Holy Scripture and practising its precepts,” is descanted upon in the 1514 Basle edition, and the fate of Lot’s wife is used as a simile for the turning back from God into sin, while the love of our neighbor, as flowing from a true love of God, is strenuously inculcated by Scripture texts and warnings.
The description of the contents of these manuals, however, would not be complete, nor wholly convey the spirit of the age in which they were published and read, without some mention of the miraculous stories printed in them under the head of “useful examples.” Of these Frederick Hurter, in his work on Pope Innocent III., vol. iv. pp. 547-8, says:
“All writers of this time (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and what applies to those applies to later centuries almost as far as the seventeenth) are full of wonder-stories—a proof of how universal and deeply ingrained in man was the belief in wonders. Many of these are simply mythical, others had passed by tradition and literary embellishments from the region of facts into that of myths, while others again must be left uninterpreted by criticism, unless it is disposed to dismiss them with a mere denial. Whatever decision one may come to on this point, one truth certainly underlies this mass of tales: that they cannot have been without influence on the mind of thousands. Many may be looked upon as childish and crude, but from beneath this coating still shines the true gold of a belief in one almighty, ever-present Being, a father and protector of the good, a leader and raiser-up of the fallen or the wavering, an avenger against the evil and oppressing.”
Such stories have to later research appeared as interesting landmarks of the progress of a nation’s mind, and links with all its former beliefs and traditions. Again, they were striking illustrations, fitter to remain in the popular mind as emblems of great truths than the learned doctrinal disquisitions, which were always above the understanding of the masses. They are rather emblems than facts; the condensation of a truth than its actual outcome. We have only room for a single specimen. Whether it was intended to be related as a vision in a dream, or partly as a waking dream, does not appear clearly from the text:
“There was,” says the Basle Plenarium of 1514, on the occasion of Good Friday, “a prior in a monastery, who sat in his cell after his meal and fell asleep. While he slept, one of his brethren died and came to the sleeping prior, and spoke to him: ‘Father prior, with your permission, I am going.’ When the other asked him where, he answered: ‘I am going to God in eternal blessedness, for in this very moment I have died.’ Then said the prior: ‘Since many a perfect man must after death pass through purgatory, and one seldom comes back to earth from it, I ask you how can you go at once to God, and how do you know you have deserved it?’ Then answered the monk: ‘I always had the habit of praying thus at the feet of the crucifix: “Lord Jesus Christ, for the sake of thy bitter sufferings which thou hast endured on the holy cross for my salvation, and especially at the moment when thy blessed soul left thy body, have mercy on my soul when it leaves my body.“ And God mercifully heard my prayer.’ Then the prior asked again: ‘How was it with you when you died?’ and the other answered: ‘I thought at that moment that the whole world was a stone, and that it lay upon my breast, so terrible did death seem to me.’”
The Plenarii were not the only manuals scattered among the rapidly-increasing number of people who, in Germany, could read in their native tongue. Besides the Scriptures, of which nine translations, some partial, some entire, were printed before Luther’s, from 1466 to 1518, and three entire ones after his in the sixteenth century alone,[[66]] there were previous to that period fourteen complete Bibles in High-German and five in Low-German (the University of Freiburg possesses copies of eight of the former), and many psalters and gospels, as well as separate books of Scripture published singly. The psalter was undoubtedly the best-known and most commonly used part of Holy Writ. Panzer mentions the three oldest editions printed in Latin and German, without date or press, in folio; another octavo at Leipsic; others in German, Augsburg, 1492 and 1494; Basle, 1502 and 1503; Spires, 1504; Strassburg, 1506 and 1507; Metz, 1513; and the Book of Job, Strassburg, 1498. Again in the same years, and from the same presses as well as Mayence and Nuremberg, came the epistles and gospels, and the four Passions, divided according to their use on Sundays, while the first popular illustrated “Bibles of the Poor,” condensations and selections, chiefly of the most stirring stories told in the Old and New Testaments, followed each other rapidly after 1470. The wood-cuts were generally very good, and the Latin and German texts printed side by side. “German explanations of the office of the Mass” were also printed, and the devotional writings, meditations, etc., of Tauler, Suso, Thomas à Kempis, Geiler von Keisersperg, and Sebastian Brant. Lives of the saints and martyrologies were also printed, arranged according to the calendar in two parts, winter and summer; but though in the main edifying, these were chiefly reflections of traditions rather than authentic biographies taken from contemporary sources. That style of writing was not known then, and the general example of a holy life was more the object of the writers than the historic details of real life. But even in these traditions some nucleus of undisputed fact might always be found beneath the ivy tracery of legend. Panzer remarks that these editions differed greatly from Jacob of Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, and often contradicted it. Catechisms and manuals for confession and communion were also familiar, and some of the litanies now reprinted in modern prayer-books are of this date, while even the contents of the Breviary were translated into German by a Capuchin, James Wyg, and printed in Venice in 1518. “Little prayer-books” are mentioned by Panzer as printed at Nuremberg, Lübeck (these in Low German), Basle, and Mayence from 1487 to 1518. Two were called the Salus Animæ and the Hortulus Animæ. The latter is as well known now in English as it was then in German; one edition of 1508 has a little versified introduction, interesting as showing how Sebastian Brant’s talents were often practically employed:
“The soul’s little garden am I called.
Known am I yet from my Latin name.
At Strassburg, his fatherland,