[53]See page 143.
[53]See page 143.
END OF THE SIXTH CENTURY.
PART I.
We must not suppose that the conversion of the western barbarians was of any very perfect kind. They mixed up a great deal of their own barbarism with their Christianity, and, besides this, they took up many of the vices of the old and worn-out nations, whose countries they had conquered and occupied. Much heathen superstition lingered among them: it was even a common saying in Spain, that "if a man has to pass between heathen altars and God's Church, it is no harm if he pay his respects to both." The clergy were very wealthy and prosperous, but did not venture to interfere with the vices of the great and powerful; or, if they did, it was at their peril. For instance, when a bishop of Rouen had offended the Frankish queen Fredegund, she caused him to be murdered in his own cathedral, at the most solemn service of Easter-day.
Religion became a protection to crime; murderers wereallowed to take refuge in churches, and might not be dragged out until after an oath had been made that their lives should be safe. It had been the ancient custom of the Germans to let all crimes be atoned for by the payment of money: if, for example, a person had killed another, he had no more to do than to pay a certain sum to the dead man's relations. And this way of making up for misdeeds was now brought into the Church; it was thought that men might make satisfaction for their sins by paying money, and that the effect would be the same if others paid for them after their death. We may understand how this worked, from another story of queen Fredegund, who seems to have been a perfect monster of wickedness. She set two of her pages to murder a king, named Sigebert; and, by way of encouraging them, she said that she would honour them highly, if they came off with their lives; but that, if they were slain, she would lay out a great deal of money in alms for the good of their souls!
As might naturally have been expected among such people, it came to be very commonly thought that the observance of outward worship and ceremonies was all that religion required. Pretended miracles were wrought in great numbers, for the purpose of imposing on the ignorant; and all, from the king downwards, were then ignorant enough to be deceived by them. The superstitions which had begun in the fourth century[54]continued to grow on the Church; such as the reverence paid to saints, and especially to the Blessed Virgin, so that people allowed them a part of the honour which ought to have been kept for God alone. Among other such corruptions were the reverence for therelicsof saints (that is, for parts of their bodies, or for things which had belonged to them), and the religious honour paid to images and pictures. These and other evils increased more and more, until, at length, they could be borne no longer, and, in many countries, they caused the great religious change which is called theReformation.
But nearly a thousand years had to pass before the time of the Reformation; and, in the meanwhile, although much was amiss in the Christianity which prevailed, it yet was the means of blessing and of salvation. And there were never wanting good men who, although there were many defects and errors in their opinions, firmly held and clearly taught the necessity of a real living faith in Christ, and of a thoroughly earnest endeavour to obey God's holy will.
PART II.
The state of Italy towards the end of the sixth century was very wretched. Vast numbers of its people had perished in the course of the wars by which Justinian's generals had wrested the country from the Goths, and had again united it to the empire;[55]multitudes of others had been destroyed by famine and pestilence. The Lombards, who had crossed the Alps in the year 568, had obliged the emperors to yield the north, and part of the middle of Italy, to them; and they continually threatened the portions which still remained to the empire. No help against them was to be got from Constantinople; and the governors whom the emperors sent to manage their Italian dominions, instead of directing and leading the people to resist the Lombards, only hindered them from taking their defence into their own hands.
The land was left uncultivated, partly through the loss of inhabitants, and partly because those who remained were disheartened by the miseries of the time. They had not the spirit to bestow their labour on it, when there was almost a certainty that their crops would be destroyed or carried off by the Lombard invaders; and the soil, when left to itself, had in many places become so unwholesome, that it was not fit to live on. Italy had in former times been so thickly peopled, that it had been necessary to get supplies of corn from Sicily and from Africa. But nowsuch foreign supplies were wanted for a very different reason—that the inhabitants of Italy could not, or did not, grow corn for themselves. The city of Rome had suffered from storms, and from repeated floods of the river Tiber, which did a great deal of damage to its buildings, and sometimes washed away or spoiled the stores of corn which were laid up in the granaries. The people were kept in terror by the Lombards, who often advanced to their very walls, so that it was unsafe to venture beyond the gates.
The condition of the Church too was very deplorable. The troubles of the times had produced a general decay of morals and order both among the clergy and among the people. The Lombards were Arians, and religious enmity was added to the other causes of dislike between them and the Romans. In Istria, there was a division which had begun after the fifth general council,[56]and which kept the Church of that country separate from the communion of Rome for a hundred and fifty years. The sunken condition of Christianity in Gaul (or France) has been described in the beginning of this chapter. Spain was just recovered from Arianism,[57]but there was much to be done before the Catholic faith could be considered as firmly established there. In Africa, the old sect of the Donatists began again to lift up its head, and took courage from the confusions of the time to vex the Church. The Churches of the east were torn by quarrels as to Eutychianism and Nestorianism. And the patriarchs of Constantinople seemed likely, with the help of the emperor's favour, to be dangerous rivals to the popes of Rome.
Such was the state of things when Gregory the Great became pope or bishop of Rome, in the year 590.
NOTES
[54]See page 90.
[54]See page 90.
[55]Page 142.
[55]Page 142.
[56]Page 145.
[56]Page 145.
[57]Page 134.
[57]Page 134.
ST. GREGORY THE GREAT.
A.D.540-604.
PART I.
Gregory was born at Rome, of a noble and wealthy family, in the year 540. In his youth he engaged in public business, and he rose to be prætor of Rome, which was one of the chief offices under the government. In this office he was much beloved and respected by the people. But about the age of thirty-five, a great change took place in his life. He resolved to forsake the pursuit of worldly honours, and spent all his wealth in founding seven monasteries. He gave up his family house at Rome to begin a monastery, in which he became at first a simple monk, and was afterwards chosen abbot. A pope, named Pelagius, showed him great favour, by making him his secretary, and employing him for some years as a sort of ambassador at the emperor's court at Constantinople. And when Pelagius was carried off by a plague, in the year 589, the nobles, the clergy, and the people of Rome all agreed in choosing Gregory to succeed him.
Gregory was afraid to undertake the office. It was necessary that the emperor should consent to his appointment; and he wrote to beg that the emperor would refuse his consent. But the governor of Rome stopped the letter, and all the other attempts which Gregory made to escape the honour intended for him were baffled; so that in the end he was obliged to submit, and was consecrated as bishop of Rome in September, 590.
Gregory felt all the difficulties of his new place. He compares his Church to an old ship, shattered by winds and waves, decayed in its timbers, full of leaks, and in continual danger of going to wreck. The vast quantityand variety of business which he went through appears to us from the collection of his letters, of which about eight hundred and fifty still remain. We see from these how he strove to strengthen his Church in all quarters, and what steps he took for the government of it. Some of the letters are addressed to emperors and kings, and treat about the greatest affairs of Church or State. And then all at once we find him passing from such high matters to direct that some poor tenant on one of his estates should be excused from paying a part of his rent, or that relief should be given to some widow or orphan who had written from a distance to ask his help.
The bishops of Rome had by degrees become very rich. They had estates, not only in Italy and Sicily, but in Africa, in France, and even in Asia. And the people who managed these estates were employed by Gregory to carry on his other business in the same countries, and to report the state of the Church to him from all quarters. Very little of his large income was spent on himself. We may have some notion of the plain way in which the great bishop lived from one of his letters to the steward of his estates in Sicily. "You have sent me," says Gregory, "one wretched horse, and five good asses. I cannot ride the horse because he is wretched; nor the good beasts, because they are but asses." He lived chiefly in the company of monks and clergy, employing himself in study with them. And, in the midst of all the business which took up his time, he wrote a number of books, of which some are very valuable. He was also famous as a preacher. Among his sermons are a set of twenty-two on the prophet Ezekiel, which he had meant to carry further. But he was obliged to break off by the attacks of the Lombards, as he told his people in the end of the last sermon—"Let no one blame me," he says, "if after this discourse I stop, since, as you all see, our troubles are multiplied on us. On every side we are surrounded with swords; on every side we dread the danger of death which is close at hand. Some come back to us with their hands cut off; we hear of some as beingtaken prisoners, and of others as slain. I am forced to with-hold my tongue from expounding, since my soul is weary of my life (Jobx. 1). How can I, who am forced daily to drink bitter things, draw forth sweet things to you? What remains for us, but that in the chastisement which we are suffering because of our misdeeds, we should give thanks with weeping to Him who made us, and who hath bestowed on us the spirit of adoption (Rom.viii. 15)—to Him who sometimes nourisheth His children with bread, and sometimes correcteth them with a scourge—who, by benefits and by sufferings alike, is training us for an eternal inheritance?"
Gregory laboured zealously in improving the education of the clergy, and in reforming such disorders as he found in his Church. He founded a school for singing, and established a new way of chanting, which from him has the name of theGregorian Chant, and is used to this day. We are told that the whip with which he used to correct his choristers was kept at Rome as a relic for hundreds of years.
His charities were very great. On the first day of every month he gave out large quantities of provisions to the people of Rome. The old nobility had suffered so much by the wars, and by the loss of their estates in countries which had been torn from them by the barbarians, that many of them were glad to come in for a share of the good pope's bounty. Every day he sent relief to a number of poor persons in all parts of the city; and he used to send dishes from his own table to those whom he knew to be in distress, but ashamed to ask for assistance. Once when a poor man was found dead in the streets, Gregory denied himself the holy communion for some days, because it seemed to him that he must be in some measure to blame. He used to receive strangers and wanderers at his own table, out of regard for our Lord's words—"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (St. Matt.xxv. 40).
PART II.
Having thus seen something of Gregory's life at home, we must now look at his proceedings in other quarters.
He had a sharp dispute with a bishop of Constantinople, on account of the title ofUniversal Bishop, which the patriarchs of the eastern capital had for some time taken to themselves. When we hear such a title, we may naturally fancy that it signified a claim to authority over the whole Church on earth. But, as it was then used, it really had no such meaning. The Greeks were fond of lofty and sounding titles, which seemed to mean much more than they were really understood to mean. This fondness appears in the titles of the emperors and of the officers of their empire, and it was by it that the patriarchs were led to style themselves "Universal Bishop." If the title had been intended as a claim to authority over all Churches, it could only have been given to one person at a time; but we find that the emperor Justinian gave it to the bishops both of Constantinople and of Rome, and that he styled each of them "Head of all the Churches;" and, whatever the patriarchs of Constantinople may have meant by it, they certainly did not make any claim to authority over Rome or the western Church.
But there was an old jealousy between the sees of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the time when the second general council in 381 gave the bishop of Constantinople the second place of honour in the whole Church.[58]This jealousy had grown greater in late times, when there was no very kindly feeling between the emperors and their Italian subjects, and when it seemed not impossible that the bishop of the new capital, backed by the emperor, might even try to dispute the first place with the bishop of Rome. And Gregory, who did not understand the Greek language, or how little the Greeks meant by their fine titles, was ready to take offence at the name of "UniversalBishop." So, when a bishop of Constantinople, John the Faster, styled himself so on an important occasion, Gregory objected strongly;—he wrote to John, to the emperor, and to the bishops of Alexandria and of Antioch, declaring that the title was proud and foolish, that it came from the devil, and was a token of Antichrist's approach, and that it was unfit for any Christian bishop to use. The emperor, however, would not help him against the patriarch. John would not yield, and the other eastern patriarchs (partly from a wish to be at peace, and partly because the words did not seem offensive to them, as they did to Gregory), were little disposed to take up his quarrel. After a time, another emperor, who had special reasons for wishing to stand well with Gregory, forbade the successor of John to call himself "Universal;" but the title was soon restored by the emperors to the bishops of Constantinople, although not until after the death of Gregory. The most curious part of the story, however, is this—that Gregory's successors in the popedom have taken up the very title which he condemned so strongly; and that, instead of using it in the harmless meaning which it had in the east, they have intended it as a claim to power over the whole Church,—that claim of which the very notion filled Gregory with such horror and indignation, and which he declared to be unfit for any bishop whatever to make.
PART III.
Gregory did much to bring over the Lombards from their Arianism, and he succeeded in part, although the work was not completed until after his time. He also laboured earnestly to revive the Church in France and in other countries. But instead of dwelling on these things, I shall content myself with telling of the chief work which he did in spreading the Gospel; and it is one which very much concerns ourselves.
In those days slavery was common throughout all the known world, and, although the Gospel had wrought agreat improvement in the treatment of slaves, by making the masters feel that they and their slaves were brethren in Christ, it yet had not forbidden slavery. But there was a feeling of pity for those who fell into this sad condition by the chances of war or otherwise. It was a common act of charity for good Christians to redeem captives and to set them at liberty. This, indeed, was thought so holy a work, and so agreeable to the words of Scripture—"I will have mercy, and not sacrifice" (Hos.vi. 6;St. Matt.ix. 13), that bishops often broke up and sold even the consecrated plate of their churches in order that they might get the means of ransoming captives whom they heard of. And, although slavery was still allowed by the laws of Christian kingdoms, those laws took care that Christian slaves should not be under Jews, or masters of any other than their own religion.
Gregory, then, while he was yet a monk, went one day into the market at Rome, just after the arrival of some merchants with a large cargo of slaves for sale. Some of these poor creatures, perhaps, had been taken in war; others had probably been sold by their own parents for the sake of the price which they fetched; for we are told that this shocking practice was not uncommon among some of the ruder nations. As Gregory looked at them, his eyes fell on some boys with whose appearance he was greatly struck. Their skin was fair, unlike the dark complexions of the Italians and other southern nations whom he had been used to see. Their features were beautiful, and they had long light flowing hair. He asked the merchants from what land these boys had been brought. "From Britain," they said; and they told him that the bright complexion which he admired so much was common among the people of that island. Perhaps Gregory had never thought of Britain before. It was nearly two hundred years since the Roman troops had been withdrawn from it, and its inhabitants had been left to themselves. And since that time the pagan Saxons had overrun it; the Romans had lost the countries which lay between them and it; and Britainhad quite disappeared from their knowledge. Gregory, therefore, was obliged to ask whether the people were Christians or heathens, and he was told that they were still heathens. The good monk sighed deeply. "Alas, and woe!" said he, "that people with such faces of light should belong to the author of darkness, and that so goodly an outward favour should be void of inward grace." He asked what was the name of their nation, and was told that they wereAngles. "It is well," he said, "for they haveangels'faces, and such as they ought to be joint-heirs with the angels in heaven.—What is the name of the province from which they come?" He was told that it was Deira (a Saxon kingdom, which stretched along the eastern side of Britain, from the Humber to the Tyne). The name of Deira sounded to Gregory's ears like two Latin words, which mean "from wrath." "Well, again," he said, "they are deliveredfrom the wrathof God, and are called to the mercy of Christ.—What is the name of the king of that country?" "Aella," was the answer. "Alleluiah!" (Praise to God!) exclaimed Gregory; "the praises of God their maker ought to be sung in that kingdom."
He went at once to the pope, and asked leave to go as a missionary to the heathens of Britain. But, although the pope consented, the people of Rome were so much attached to Gregory that they would not allow him to set out, and he was obliged to give up the plan. Yet he did not forget the heathens of Britain; and when he became pope, although he could not himself go to them, he was able to send others for the work of their conversion.
An opening had been made by the marriage of Ethelbert, king of Kent, the Saxon kingdom which lay nearest to the continent, with Bertha, daughter of Charibert, a Frankish king, whose capital was Paris (A.D.570). As Charibert and his family were Christians, it had been agreed that the young queen should be allowed freely to practise her religion, and a French bishop, named Luidhard, came to England with her, and acted as her chaplain. Ethelbert by degrees became much more powerful than he was at thetime of his marriage, and in 593 he was chosen Bretwalda, which was the title given to the chief of the Saxon kings. This office gave him much influence over most of the other kingdoms; so that, if his favour could be gained, it was likely to be of very great advantage for recommending the Gospel to others. But Ethelbert was still a heathen, after having been married to Bertha about five-and-twenty years, although we may well suppose that she had sometimes spoken to him of her religion, and had tried to bring him over to it. And perhaps Bertha may have had a share in sending Gregory the reports which he mentions, that the Saxons in England were ready to receive the Gospel, and in begging him to take pity on them.
PART IV.
In the year 596 Gregory sent off a party of monks as missionaries to the English Saxons. The head of them was Augustine, who had been provost (that is, the highest person after the abbot)[59]of the monastery to which the pope himself had formerly belonged. And, at the same time, Gregory directed the manager of his estates in France to buy up a number of captive Saxon youths, and to place them in monasteries, that they might learn the Christian faith, and might afterwards become missionaries to their own countrymen.
When Augustine and his brethren had got as for as the south of France, they heard many terrible stories of the English, so they took fright at the thought of going among such savages, whose very language was unknown to them; and Augustine went back to Rome to beg that they might be allowed to give up their undertaking. But Gregory would not consent to this. He encouraged them to go on, and he gave Augustine letters to some French kings and bishops, desiring them to assist the missionaries, and to supply them with interpreters who understood the languageof the Saxons. Augustine, therefore, returned to the place where he had left his companions. They made their way across France, and in 597 he landed, with about forty monks, in the Isle of Thanet.
Ethelbert lived at Canterbury, the capital of the Kentish kingdom, at no great distance from the place where the missionaries had landed. On receiving notice of their arrival, he sent to desire that they would remain where they were until he should visit them; and within a few days he went to them. The meeting was held in the open air; for Ethelbert had a superstitious fear that they might do him some mischief by magical arts, if he were to trust himself under a roof with them. The missionaries advanced in procession, with a silver cross borne before them, and displaying a picture of the crucified Saviour; and, as they slowly moved onwards, they chanted a prayer for their own salvation and that of the people to whom they had been sent. Ethelbert received them courteously, and desired them to sit down; and then Augustine made a speech, telling the king that they were come to preach the word of life to him and to his subjects. "These are indeed fair words and promises which you bring with you," said Ethelbert; "but, because they are new and uncertain, I cannot at once take up with them, and leave the faith which I and all my people have so long observed. But as you have come from far, and as I think you wish to give us a share in things which you believe to be true and most profitable, we will not show you unkindness, but rather will receive you hospitably, and not hinder you from converting as many as you can to your religion."
He then granted them a lodging in his capital, and ordered that they should be supplied with all that they might need. As they drew near to Canterbury, they again displayed the silver cross, and the banner on which the Saviour was painted; and they entered the city in procession, chanting a litany which Gregory had made for the people of Rome, during the great plague which carried off pope Pelagius.
A little way outside the city they found a small church, which had been built in the days of the old British Christianity, and in which Luidhard had since held his service for Queen Bertha and the Christians of her court. It was called by the name of St. Martin; for even before the Saxon invasion his name had become so famous that many churches were called after it; and we may well believe that Queen Bertha, on arriving from France, was glad to find that the church in which she was to worship had long ago been named in honour of the great saint of her own land. There Augustine and his brethren now held their service; and the sight of their holy, gentle, and self-denying lives soon drew many to receive their instructions. Ethelbert himself was baptized on Whitsunday, 597, and, although he would not force his people to profess the Gospel, he declared himself desirous of their conversion.
Gregory had desired Augustine, if he met with success in the beginning of his mission, to return from Britain into France and be consecrated as a bishop. He now obeyed this direction, and was consecrated at Arles; and without any delay he again crossed the sea, and renewed his labours among the Saxons. Such was his progress in the work of conversion, that at Christmas of the year in which he first landed in Britain ten thousand persons were baptized in one day. Four years later, Gregory made him an archbishop; and he sent him a fresh body of clergy to help him, with a large supply of books, vestments, and other things for the service of the Church. He also gave him instructions how to proceed, so as to advance the true faith without giving needless offence to the prejudices of the heathen.
Augustine's chief difficulties, indeed, were not with the Saxons, but with the clergy of the ancient British Church, whom he could not succeed in bringing to an agreement. We must not lay the blame wholly on either side; if the Britons were somewhat jealous and obstinate, Augustine seems to have taken too much upon himself in his way ofdealing with them. But, whatever his faults may have been, we are bound to hold his memory in honour for the zealous and successful labours by which the Gospel was a second time introduced into the southern part of this island. Before his death, in 604, he had established a second bishop for Kent, in the city of Rochester, and one at London, which was then the capital of the kingdom of Essex. And by degrees, partly by the followers of St. Augustine, and partly by the Scotch monks of Icolumbkill,[60]all the Saxon kingdoms of England were converted to the Christian faith.
In the same year with Augustine, Gregory also died, after long and severe illness, which obliged him for years to keep his bed, but could not check his activity in watching over the interests of religion.
Gregory had intended that Augustine should be archbishop of London, because in the old Roman days London had been the chief city of Britain; and it might seem natural that the chief bishop of our Church should now take his title from the capital of all England. But when Gregory sent forth his missionaries he did not know that England had been divided by the Saxons into several kingdoms. In consequence of this division of the country, Augustine, instead of becoming archbishop of London, fixed himself in the capital of Kent, the first kingdom which he converted, and then the most powerful of all. Hence it is that his successors, the primates of all England, to this day, are not archbishops of London but of Canterbury.
And, although Canterbury be not now a very large town, it is a very interesting place, and is full of memorials of its first archbishop. The noble cathedral, called Christ Church, stands in the same place with an ancient Roman-British church which Augustine recovered from heathen uses and consecrated in honour of the Saviour. Close to it are the remains of the archbishop's palace, built on thesame ground with the palace of Ethelbert, which he gave up to the missionaries. A little church of St. Martin still stands on a rising ground outside the city, on the spot where Bertha and Luidhard had worshipped before the arrival of Augustine, and where he and his brethren celebrated their earliest services. And, although it has been rebuilt since then, we may still see in its walls a number of bricks which by their appearance are known to be Roman,—the very same materials of which the little church was built at first, while the Romans were yet in Britain, fourteen centuries and a half ago; nay, it is even supposed that some part of the masonry is Roman too. Between St. Martin's and the cathedral lay the great monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul, which Augustine began to build. He died before it was finished; but, as soon as it was ready, his body was removed to it, and in it Queen Bertha and her husband were afterwards buried. After a time the name of the monastery was changed to St. Augustine's, and for hundreds of years it was the chief monastery of all England. The Reformation in the sixteenth century put an end to monasteries; and the buildings of St. Augustine's went through many changes, until in the year 1844 the place was turned to a purpose similar to that which Augustine and Gregory had at heart when they undertook the conversion of England; for it is now a college for training missionaries. And, as Gregory wished that Saxon boys should be brought up with a view to converting their countrymen, so there are now at St. Augustine's College young men from distant heathen nations, receiving an education which may fit them hereafter to become missionaries of the Church of England to their brethren.[61]Nor is the good Gregory forgotten in the city which owes so much to him; for within the last few years a beautifullittle church called by his name has been built, close to the college of St. Augustine.
Here this little book must close. It ends with the replanting of the Gospel in our own land. And, if hereafter the story should be carried further, some of its brightest pages will be filled by the labours of the missionaries who went forth from England to preach the faith of Christ in Germany and the adjoining countries.
NOTES
[58]See page 84.
[58]See page 84.
[59]See page 150.
[59]See page 150.
[60]See page 139.
[60]See page 139.
[61]Among those who were at the College when this volume was first printed was Kalli, the Esquimaux, of whom an account has since been written by the Rev. T. B. Murray, and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He afterwards went to the diocese of Newfoundland, where he died of consumption.
[61]Among those who were at the College when this volume was first printed was Kalli, the Esquimaux, of whom an account has since been written by the Rev. T. B. Murray, and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He afterwards went to the diocese of Newfoundland, where he died of consumption.
MAHOMETANISM—IMAGE-WORSHIP.
A.D.612-794.
Within a few years after the death of Gregory the Great, a new religion was set up by an Arabian named Mahomet, who seems to have been honest, although mistaken, at first, but grew less honest as he went on, and as he became more successful and powerful. His religion was made up partly from the Jewish, partly from the Christian, and partly from other religions which he found around him; but he gave out that it had been taught him by visions and revelations from heaven, and these pretended revelations were gathered into a book called the Koran, which serves Mahomet's followers for their Bible. This new religion was calledIslam, which means submission to the will of God; and the sum of it was declared to be that "there is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet."
One point in the new religion was, that every faithful Mahometan (or Mussulman, as they were called) was required once in his life to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, a city which was Mahomet's birthplace, and was considered to be especially holy; and to this day it is visited every year by great companies of pilgrims. Another remarkable thing was, that he commanded his followers to spread their religion by force; and this was done with such success, that within about sixty years after Mahomet's death they had conquered Syria and the Holy Land, Egypt, Persia, parts of Asia Minor, and all the north of Africa. A little later,they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and got possession of Spain, where their kingdom of Granada lasted until 1492, nearly eight hundred years. In the countries which the Mussulmans subdued, Christians were allowed to live and to keep up their religion; but they had to pay a heavy tribute, and to bear great hardships and disgraces at the hands of the conquerors.
I have mentioned that before Gregory the Great's time almost all Europe had been overrun by the rude nations of the north.[62]Learning nearly died out, and what remained of it was kept up by the monks and clergy only. There is but little to tell of the history of those times; for, although in the Greek empire there were great disputes about some doctrines and practices, these matters were such as you would not care to know about, nor would you be much the wiser if you did know.
I may, however, mention that one of these disputes was about images, to which the Christians of those ages, and especially the Greeks, had come by degrees to pay a sort of reverence which St. Augustine and other fathers of older days would have looked on with horror. It had become usual to fall down before images, to pray to them, to kiss them, to burn lights and incense in their honour, to adorn them with gold, silver, and precious stones, to lay the hand on them in taking oaths, and even to use them as godfathers or godmothers for children in baptism. Those who defend the use of images would tell us that the honour is not given to them, but to Almighty God, to the Saviour, and to the saints, through the images. But when we find, for instance, that people paid more honour to one image of the blessed Virgin than to another, and that they supposed their prayers to have a greater hope of being heard when they were said before one image than when they were said before another, we cannot help thinking that they believed the images themselves to have some particular virtue in them.
There were, then, some of the Greek emperors whotried to put down the superstitious regard for images; and they were the more set on this because the Mahometans, who abhorred images, reproached the Christians for using them. These emperors, wishing to do away with the grounds for such reproaches, caused the figures of stone or metal to be broken, and the sacred pictures to be smeared over; and they persecuted very cruelly those who were foremost in defending them. Then came other emperors who were in favour of images; or widowed empresses, who governed during the boyhood of their sons, and took up the cause of images with great zeal; and thus the friends and the enemies of images succeeded each other by turns on the throne, so that the battle was fought, backwards and forwards, for a long time, until at length an agreement was come to which has ever since continued in the Greek Church. By this agreement, it was settled that the figures made by carving in stone or wood, or by casting metal into a mould, should be forbidden, but that the use of religious pictures (which were also called by the name of images) should be allowed. Hence it is said that the Greeks may not worship anything of which one can take the tip of the nose between his finger and his thumb. But in the Latin Church the carved or molten images are still allowed; and among the poorer and less educated people there is a great deal of superstition connected with them.
NOTES
[62]See Part I.,chap XXIII.
[62]See Part I.,chap XXIII.
THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND.
A.D.604-734.
While the light of the Gospel was darkened by the Mahometan conquests in some parts of the world where it had once shone brightly, it was spreading widely among the nations which had got possession of western Europe.In England, the successors of St. Augustine converted a large part of the Anglo-Saxons by their preaching, and much was also done by missionaries from the island of Iona, on the west of Scotland. There, as we have seen,[63]an Irish abbot, named Columba, had settled with some companions about the year 565, and from Iona their teaching had been carried all over the northern part of Britain. These missionaries from Iona to England found a home in the island of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast, which was given up to them by Oswald, king of Northumbria, and from them got the name of Holy Island. Oswald himself had been converted while an exile in Scotland; and, as he had learnt the language of the country there, he often helped the missionaries in their labours by interpreting what they said into the language of his own subjects who listened to them. The Scottish missionaries carried their labours even as far south as the river Thames; and their modest and humble ways gained the respect and love of the people so much that, as we are told by the Venerable Bede, wherever one of them appeared, he was joyfully received as the servant of God. Even those who met them on the road used eagerly to ask their blessing, and, whenever one of them came to any village, the inhabitants flocked to hear from him the message of the Gospel.
But these Scottish missionaries differed in some respects from the clergy who were connected with St. Augustine; and after a time a great meeting was held at Whitby, in Yorkshire, to settle the questions between them and the Roman Church. We must not suppose that these differences were of any real importance; for they were only about such small matters as the reckoning of the day on which Easter should be kept, and the way in which the hair of the clergy should be clipped or shaven. But, although these were mere trifles, the two parties were each so set on their own ways that no agreement could be come to; andthe end was, that the Scottish missionaries went back to their own country, and did no more work for spreading the Gospel in England, although after a while the Scottish clergy, and those of Ireland too, were persuaded to shave their hair and to reckon their Easter in the same way as the other clergy of the West.
In those dark times some of the most learned and famous men were English monks. Among them I shall mention only Bede, who is commonly called the Venerable, and to whose care we owe almost all our knowledge of the early history of the Church in this land. Bede was born about the year 673, near Jarrow, in Northumberland, and at the age of seven he entered the monastery of Jarrow, where the rest of his life was spent. He tells us of himself that he made it his pleasure every day "either to learn or to teach or to write something;" and, after having written many precious books during his quiet life in his cell at Jarrow, he died on the eve of Ascension-day in the year 734, just as he had finished a translation of St. John's Gospel.
NOTES
[63]Part I.,p. 139.
[63]Part I.,p. 139.
ST. BONIFACE.
A.D.680-755.
Although the Church of Ireland was in a somewhat rough state at home, many of its clergy undertook missionary work on the Continent; and by them and others much was done for the conversion of various tribes in Germany and in the Netherlands. But the most famous missionary of those times was an Englishman named Winfrid, who is styled the Apostle of Germany.
Winfrid was born near Crediton, in Devonshire, about the year 680. He became a monk at an early age, and perhaps it was then that he took the name of Boniface,by which he is best known. He might probably have risen to a high place in the church of his own country if he had wished to do so; but he was filled with a glowing desire to preach the Gospel to the heathen. He therefore refused all the tempting offers which were made to him at home, crossed the sea, and began to labour in Friesland and about the lower part of the Rhine. For three years he assisted another famous English missionary, Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht, who wished to make Boniface his successor; but Boniface thought that he was bound rather to labour in some country where his work was more needed; so, leaving Willibrord, he went into Hessia, where he made and baptized many thousands of converts. The pope, Gregory the Second, on hearing of this success, invited him to Rome, consecrated him as a bishop, and sent him back with letters recommending him to the princes and people of the countries in which his work was to lie. (A.D.723.)
The government of the Franks was then in a very odd state. There were kings over them; but these kings, instead of carrying on the government for themselves, and leading their nation in war, were shut up in their palaces, except that once in the year they were brought out in a cart drawn by bullocks to appear at the national assemblies. These poor "do-nothings" (as the kings of the old French race are called) were without any strength or spirit. From their way of life, they allowed their hair to grow without being shorn; and the Greeks, who lived far away from them, and knew of them only by hearsay, believed, not only that their hair was long, but that it grew down their backs like the bristles of a hog. And, while the kings had sunk into this pitiable state, the real work of the kingly office was done, and the kingly power was really enjoyed, by great officers who were called mayors of the palace.
At the time which I am speaking of, the mayor of the palace was Charles, who was afterwards known by the name of Martel, orThe Hammer. Charles had done a great service to Christendom by defeating a vast army of Mahometans, who had forced their way from Spain intothe heart of France, and driving the remains of them back across the Pyrenees. It is said that they lost 375,000 men in the battle which they fought with Charles near Poitiers (A.D.732); and, although this number is no doubt beyond the truth, it is certain that the infidels were so much weakened that they never ventured to attempt any more conquests in western Europe. But, although Charles had thus done very great things for the Christian world, it would seem that he himself did not care much for religion; and, although he gave Boniface a letter of protection, he did not help or encourage him greatly in his missionary labours. But Boniface was resolved to carry on bravely what he believed to be God's work. He preached in Hessia and Thuringia, and made many thousands of converts. He built churches and monasteries, and brought over from England large numbers of clergy to help him in preaching and in the Christian training of his converts, for which purpose he also obtained supplies of books from his own country. He founded bishoprics, and held councils of clergy and laymen for the settlement of the Church's affairs. Finding that the Hessians paid reverence to an old oak-tree, which was sacred to one of their gods, he resolved to cut it down. The heathens stood around, looking fiercely at him, cursing and threatening him, and expecting to see him and his companions struck dead by the vengeance of their gods. But when he had only just begun to attack the oak we are told that a great wind suddenly arose, and struck it so that it fell to the ground in four pieces. The people, seeing this, took it for a sign from heaven, and consented to give up their old idolatry; and Boniface turned the wood of the huge old oak to use by building a chapel with it.
In some places Boniface found a strange mixture of heathen superstitions with Christianity, and he did all that he could to root them out. He had also much trouble with missionaries from Ireland, whose notions of Christian doctrine and practice differed in some things from his; and perhaps he did not always treat them with so much ofwisdom and gentleness as might have been wished. But after all he was right in thinking that the sight of more than one kind of Christian religion, different from each other and opposed to each other, must puzzle the heathen and hinder their conversion; so that we can understand his jealousy of those Irish missionaries, even if we cannot wholly approve of it.
In reward of his labours and success, Boniface was made an archbishop by Pope Gregory III. in 732; and, although at first he was not fixed in any one place, he soon brought the German Church into such a state of order that it seemed to be time for choosing some city as the seat of its chief bishop, just as the chief bishop of England was settled at Canterbury. Boniface himself wished to fix himself at Cologne; but at that very time the bishop of Mentz got into trouble by killing a Saxon, who, in a former war, had killed the bishop's father. Although it had been quite a common thing in those rough days for bishops to take a part in fighting, Boniface and his councils had made rules forbidding such things, as unbecoming the ministers of peace; and the case of the bishop of Mentz, coming just after those rules had been made, could not well be passed over. The bishop, therefore, was obliged to give up his see; and Mentz was chosen to be the place where Boniface should be fixed as archbishop and primate of Germany, having under him five bishops, and all the nations which had received the Gospel through his preaching.
When Boniface had grown old, he felt himself again drawn to Frisia, where, as we have seen,[64]he had laboured in his early life; and at the age of seventy-five he left his archbishopric, with all that invited him to spend his last days there in quiet and honour, that he might once more go forth as a missionary to the barbarous Frieslanders. Among them he preached with much success; but on Whitsun eve, 755, while he was expecting a great number of his converts to meet, that they might receive confirmationfrom him, he and his companions were attacked by an armed party of heathens, and the whole of the missionaries, fifty-two in number, were martyred. But although Boniface thus ended his active and useful life by martyrdom at the hands of those whom he wished to bring into the way of salvation, his work was carried on by other missionaries, and the conversion of the Frisians was completed within no long time. Boniface's body was carried up the Rhine, and was buried at Fulda, a monastery which he had founded amidst the loneliness of a vast forest; and there the tomb of the "Apostle of the Germans" was visited with reverence for centuries.
NOTES