Short Studies on Great Subjects ... Series 2-4

Preface

. Most of the Essays in this volume have already appeared in English or American journals. The Essay on ' Divus Cæsar ' and the ' Leaves from a South African Journal' are published for the first time. CONTENTS. PAGE Annals of an English Abbey 1 Revival op Romanism 90 Sea Studies 144 Society in Italy in the Last Days of the Roman Republic 182 Lucian 207 Divus Cæsar 237 i >n the Uses of a Landed Gentry 275 Party Politics 304 Leaves from a South African Journal 33* i. Human history, say the philosophers, is the evolution of events which lie already in their causes, as the properties of geometrical figures lie in the scientific definition of those figures. The qualities which Euclid proves to belong to the circle, exist in the circle eternally. There is no before and no after, and the sense of sequence is only in the suc cessive steps by which proposition after proposition is made known to the limited understanding of man.

In like manner the unnumbered multitude of living things, the animated throng of beings which fill the air, and crowd the water and the earth, lie potentially in the elemental germs out of which they seem to be developed ; and the life of the individual man, the long sequel of the acts and fortunes of his race, and all that he has done and is to do, till the type is exhausted and gives place to other com binations, is governed by laws as inherent and as necessary as those through which the mathematician develops his inferences from the equation of an ellipse. Were the equation of man constructed out of elements as few and simple, we should know all that has been, and all that is to be, without moving from our library chairs ; but with the knowledge we should lose the uncertainty which gives life its purpose and its interest.

The pleasure of existence depends upon its anxieties, and if we are III. *S B indeed but the automata spiritualia which Leibnitz defines us to be, then, of all the gifts which God has bestowed upon us, the choicest is the trick which He has played upon our understandings — which makes the certain appear as uncertain, which cheats us with the belief that the future is in our hands, to mould either for good or ill. Of the dynamic forces of humanity the most powerful is for ever concealed from us. The acorn has produced the oak, and the oak the acorn, from the time when oaks first began to be, and one oak, for practical purposes, is identical with another. Man produces man ; but each individual brings into the world a character and capabilities differing from those of his fellows, and incalculable till they have had room to display themselves.

An idea generated in a single mind penetrates the circle of man kind, and shapes them afresh after its likeness. We talk of a science of history — we dream that we can trace laws of causation which governed the actions of our fathers, and from which we can forecast the tendencies of genera tions to come. The spontaneous force in the soul of a single man of genius will defeat our subtlest calculations : — and of all forecasts of the future, there is but one on which we can repose with confidence, that nothing is certain but the unforeseen. So long as the rules of our sph-itual navigation were supposed to be definitely known; so long as conscience was believed to be the voice of God in us, and there were celestial constellations to which we could appeal to correct its variations, it mattered little whether we comprehended to what port we were bound.

Our course had been laid down for us by the Master Navigator of the Universe, and we could sail on without misgivings over the ocean of untried possibilities. From a combination of many causes we are passing now into a sea where our charts fail us, and the stars have ceased to shine. The tongue of the prudent speaks stammeringly. The fool clamours that he is as wise as the sage, and the sage shrinks from saying that it is not so. Authority is mute. One man, we are told, is as good as another : each by Divine charter may think as he pleases, and carve his actions after his own liking. Institutions crumble ; creeds resolve themselves into words; forms of government disintegrate, and there is no longer any word of command. In place of the pilots who stood once at the helm, gave their orders and com pelled obedience, we have crews now, all equal, who decide by the majority of votes.

We have entered on an age of universal democracy, political and spiritual, such as the world has never seen before; and civilised mankind are broken into two hundred million units, each thinking and doing what is good in his own eyes. Experience of the past forbids the belief that anarchy will continue for ever. Man is a gregarious animal, and, as the earth fills up, the flocks must be packed more densely. Fresh combinations are inevitable — and com binations cohere only when formed on definite principles to which individual inclinations must bend. Strong minds have a natural tendency to direct weak minds. Majorities vote wrongly. The wrong course runs the ship upon the rocks; and the fool, when his folly issues in practical disaster, understands in some degree that he is a fool. The universal sand-heap will and must once more organise itself; though in what shape politically, or round what kind of spiritual conviction, it were waste of labour to conjecture.

Meanwhile the results of life as they appear in advanced countries like England and America were never less interesting. Each Englishman, each American, left to his own guidance and compelled by the restlessness of his nature to aspire to something, turns to the one direction plainly open to him, and sets himself with might and main to make money. Money is power; money com- B mands a certain kind of enjoyment ; the excessive want of it is palpable disenjoyment. We desire to succeed; to make ourselves considerable among our fellows; and money is the best standard of measurement readily appre ciable. But when we have got it we are still unsatisfied. The pleasures which money will buy are soon exhausted. The chief delight has been in the getting; the thing got becomes a weariness : and we must either throw our in clinations into chains and determine to desire nothing but what the dollar will purchase for us, or else to escape vacuity we fling ourselves into dilettante sciences, study the anatomy of shells and beetles, or find a spurious interest in the fictitious world of novel-writers, which reality denies us in our own.

On these terms the better sort of men and women find existence grow tedious. So long as they are obliged to work they are in contact with facts, and retain their moral health. When money is provided in sufficient quantities, and work has become unnecessary, they cast about for occupation. The new order of things has none to give them of a noble kind, and in despair they fling themselves into the past. They see in the old world what the modern world fails to provide. The Catholic Church, which their fathers broke with, tells them tha.t the disease from which they suffer is the natural fruit of apostasy. The Catholic Church alone can fill the void in their hearts. The noble employment for which they pine the Church holds out with ever-open hands— employment in which the companies of the saints earned the aureoles around their brows — and many and many a high-souled man and woman among us is taking the Church at its word, and trying the experiment.

The Eeformers led them out into the wilderness, but in that wilderness was no Sinai with the revelation of a new law— only a sandy desert strewed with nuggets of gold. There was no Jordan, with a promised land beyond it — only a deluding mirage with gold-dust for water. Thus, among other strange phenomena of this waning century, we see once more rising among us, as if by enchantment, the religious orders of the Middle Ages ; Benedictines, Carmelites, Dominicans : houses of monks and nuns, to which American and English ladies and gentlemen are once more gathering as of old, flying n> longer from a world of violence or profligacy, but from a world of emptiness and spiritual death. In Spain and Italy, where the continuity of Catholicism has been unbroken, and the conventual life has been too long familiar to seek to disguise its true features, it is regarded with the same hatred with which it was abhorred by our fathers ; it denotes nothing but sensuality, ignorance and sin.

The Italian Government is rooting out the whole system as ruthlessly as Henry VIII. Royalists and Republicans may make their alternate revolutions in the Spanish peninsula; the provinces submit indifferently, knowing that to them it matters little whether they be ruled by king or president ; but suggest a restoration of the cowled fraternities, and the paving-stones of Valladolid and Burgos would rise up in mutiny. In England, where the past is obscured by sentimental passion ; in America, where there is no past, or where the lessons of the old world are supposed to have no application ; in France, where the entire nation is swimming in a sea of anarchy, and the vessel of the State is shattered and the drowning wretches cling to each floating plank which the waves drift within their reach, conventual institutions are spring ing up as mushrooms after an autumn rain.

As mushrooms is it to be ? growing as fast, and as soon to perish ? Or are we really witnessing the revival of an order of things which, after a violent overthrow, is recommencing a second period of enduring energy and power ? Time will answer. It depends on whether the Catholic form of Christianity can recover its hold on the convictions of educated men. Meanwhile it will not be uninteresting to look particularly at the history of one of these founda tions as it actually existed in ancient England. As in science, if we would know the nature of any animal or plant, we can learn much, if not the whole, of its character from a single specimen, so the career of a distinguished abbey, from its beginning to its end, can hardly fail to resemble what other abbeys are likely to be, if we are again to have them among us.

Planted in the same soil of human life, surrounded by the same temptations, and nourished by the same influences, the idea will naturally develop in the same direction. The old English records, in the course of publication under the Master of the Rolls, provide an exceptional opportunity for a study of this kind ; and without further preface I shall introduce the reader to the Abbey of St. Albans, in Hertfordshire, the wealthiest and most brilliant of all the religious houses of Great Britain, the annals of which have been lately edited by the accomplished and learned Mr. Riley.1 The surviving ruins convey a more imposing sense of the ancient magnificence than Melrose, or Fountains, or Glastonbury. The moral ruin which preceded the suppres sion — not magnificent, but shameful and ignominious — ■ has the advantage of being attested to us by evidence to which the most passionate admirer of the ages of faith can make no exception.

But to this we shall be more properly led by pursuing the course of the story. The town of St. Albans, famous in English history for two battles fought there in the Wars of the Roses, stands 1 [1. Gesta Abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani. A Tliorna Walsingham compilala, regnamte Ricardo Secundo. 2 Johannis Amundesham Annales Mon. S. Albani. 3. Registrant Abbatiw Johannis Whethampsted. Edited by Henry Thomas Kiley, Barrister-at-Law.] on the great North Road, twenty miles from London, on the site of the Roman Verulam. The aboriginal British village was a military post in the time of the Emperor Nero. Destroyed by Boadicea, the works were recon structed when Britain was finally subdued, and Verulam grew into a municipal town of wealth and consequence. The preachers of Christianity followed in the track of the legions ; and in the Hertfordshire colony was shed the blood of the first English martyr to the new faith.

Albanus, a citizen of Verulam, was called under the Dio clesian persecution to give account for his apostasy from the religion of the masters of the world, and, preferring Christ to the emperor, was sent to join his Lord by the sword of the executioner. Legend embellished the death scene with miracles which it is needless to repeat. The general fact that a person bearing the name Albanus was killed at this spot because he was a Christian may be accepted as true. When the persecution ceased the mar tyrdom was commemorated by an inscription on the wall of the town. A church was built on the site where the blood had fallen. It acquired a special sanctity, and during the Pelagian controversy was the scene of a pro vincial council. St.' German of Auxerre, the champion of orthodoxy against Pelagius, preached and paid his orisons at St. Alban's tomb.

A more dangerous enemy than a theorist on the freedom of the will appeared upon the scene immediately after ; Britain was overwhelmed by a flood of Saxon heathens ; Roman civilisation disappeared in smoke and ruins ; and of Verulam and all that it contained, there was nothing left by the middle of the sixth century but a green rounded hill, sloping up from the little river Ver, where sheep browsed on the undulating ridges which clothed and concealed the wreck of street and market place. There, for generation after generation, lay unthought of and undisturbed the bones of England's Pro torn artyr. The fame of his suffering was revived when Augustine brought back Christianity. But Alban himself still slept in his unknown grave, and three hundred and fifty years of rain and sunshine, and gathering mould and springing herbage, had effaced the last traces of his tradi tional resting-place.

Somewhere under those turf-mounds he was still lying. Piety forbade the belief that remains so precious could have perished like common bones. But there was no divining-rod to detect the buried treasure. Only God could reveal where it was deposited ; and devout souls could but wait and pray that in time the mystery might be made known. Miracle like that which restored the cross on which the Saviour had suffered to the adoration of the Christian world, discovered in the fulness of time the relics of His servant. In the year 758, Mercia, the central kingdom of the Saxon Heptarchy, was shaken by civil disorder. Ethel bald, the king, was killed. Beornred, who snatched at the throne, was defeated and had to fly for his life. The Thanes, unanimi consensu, elected as their sovereign a youth named Offa, brave in battle and noble in blood, for he was seventeenth in descent from Odin himself.

The seven kingdoms were already tending to become one. Offa was no sooner in the saddle than he begun to extend his borders at the expense of his neighbours, fell into correspondence with Charlemagne — aspired, perhaps, to imi tate Charlemagne on a smaller scale, and become monarch of a united England. Aiming especially at securing a sea-board, he coveted the Eastern counties, and he proposed a match for one of his daughters with Ethelbert of East Anglia. The proposition was well entertained, and Ethel bert paid a visit to the Mercian court to make acquaint ance with his bride. The mind of Offa was set rather on the territories than the person of his intended son-in-law. His own queen was ambitious like Lady Macbeth for her husband's greatness, and as little scrupulous to the means that she used.

She suggested that Ethelbert was in his power, and that there was a shorter road than marriage towards the annexation of the coveted province. Offa, a professing Christian, started in horror at the hint of mur der. Ethelbert, nevertheless, having entered Offa's castle, never left it alive. Feasted in splendour, and placed to rest in a gorgeous bed hung with gold and purple, he was let down through a trap-door and smothered below with pillows. Offa seized East Anglia and obtained his desires ; but the ghost of the murdered Ethelbert haunted his slumbers and made night hideous to him. He shut him self up in his chamber. He refused to touch food. Awake he was haunted by his crime — when exhaustion brought sleep, it was to exchange the pain of remorse for the more fearful anguish of imagination.

At length in a dream, or from the suggestions of his confessor, he learnt the condi tion on which he might be pardoned. He must discover the bones of St. Alban, and raise an abbey in his honour. The sceptical reader will have his private thoughts on the mode in which the adventure was achieved. In the legend which passes as history, King Offa sent to the Bishop (or Archbishop as he was then called) of Lichfield to meet him with his brother prelates on the site of Verulam. It was a summer day, August 1, 793, a year after the murder. Offa, then a grey-haired man of sixty or thereabouts, appeared on horseback attended by his son and his thanes. The prelates marched in procession with banners and crosiers, and long files of priests and monks chanting their Litanies. Lightning flashed suddenly out of the sky and struck the ground before their feet with blinding splendour.

The bishops threw themselves on their knees and prayed. The king and his lords prayed. The spectators who had gathered in a crowd joined in expectant adoration. At length, trembling with excitement, terram percutiunt, ' they strike the earth.' ' There was no need of long search when Heaven had pointed to the spot.' St. Alban's skeleton, or the bones composing it, was found entire. Evidence of an earthly kind to identify them as really those of Alban there was none — but none was needed. The celestial indication was itself proof conclusive. Weak believers, if any such were present, had their doubts dispelled by the powers which the sacred things at once displayed. Lame men leapt upon their feet, deaf ears heard, and blind eyes were opened. A band of gold was fastened about the skull with Alban's name inscribed upon it.

The relics were deposited tenderly in a loculus or box inlaid with gold and set with sapphires, and Offa set out instantly for Rome to impart his discovery to Pope Adrian the First. He confessed his guilt for the murder of Ethelbert. He related his dream and the result of it. Adrian admitted the Protomartyr at once on the roll of the Saints, gave Offa power to found his monastery in tuorum peccatorum remissionem, and promised that it should be the peculiar charge of himself and his successors. No bishop, archbishop, or even legate should have authority to meddle with it. On the king's return to England a great council of thanes and bishops was held at Verulam, for the ceremony of laying the first stone ; a number of monks were collected from the best ordered existing houses ; and endowed with broad lands, fenced round with privileges and liberties, and exempt from fees and taxes to king or pontiff, St. Alban's Abbey began to be a fact.

Of Willegod, the first Abbot, little survives but the name. This much only is distinctly visible, that about the year 793 there was established here, as in so many other places, a community of persons who had bound themselves by the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, men and women (for a separate convent of sisters formed part of the foundation) who had forsworn all earthly ties, all earthly interests and ambitions, and had determined to spend their lives in devotional exercises, in attending the poor and sick, in meditation and interces sory prayer. In this conception, the monasteries were to be ever-burning lamps, from which Divine grace should perennially radiate. Reality, in this world of ours, falls generally too short of theory. The shortcomings at St. Alban's became visible scandalously soon.

The first care of the monks should have been for their founder. Offa died soon after the abbey was set going. The ungrateful Willegod allowed the king's body to be consigned by unknown hands to an unknown grave. It was uncertain whether the burial was so much as Christian. Willegod was punished for his negligence by an illness of which he died. The brethren could but hope that Offa's soul might not be suffering for it in purgatory. The sapling, planted, as it was, full grown, was slow in taking root. Eadric, the second abbot, a relation of Offa's, showed the same carelessness, and ended soon also an equally undistinguished rule. Wulsig, the next, was actively objectionable. He was of the blood royal, and, erectus est in superbiam, was lifted up with pride. Thinking more of his descent from Odin than of his bondage to Christ, Wulsig dressed in silks, spent his time in hunting field and banquet,- — was a politician and a courtier.

With these expensive tastes he was accused of wasting the Church's treasures, and, worst crime of all, he invited ladies to dine with him in the abbot's parlour, and lodged the nuns too near his private chamber. Was it for this that lightning had come from heaven to discover the relics of the Protomartyr? The scandalised brethren rose in mutiny against their Camalis Abbas. Wulsig, too, closed his career prematurely. He died, as was said, by poison, — ut dieitur potionatus, — and was followed to his grave by the curses of the community. Slightly, very slightly, matters now mended. Abbot Wulnoth, who succeeded, shifted away the nuns, established discipline, and recovered lands which Wulsig had alienated. But Wulnoth too was far from a saint. Too often he was to be met afield in buff jerkin, with horn and hunting-knife, when he ought to have been at chapel.

He preferred hawk and hound to mass-book and breviary. St. Alban's Abbey seemed likely to be a failure after . all. Eadfrith, fifth abbot, was no better. Eadfrith was nobly born, but filius hujus sœculi, a child of this world, who set a pernicious example to the weaker brethren. Clearly enough, the tree which Offa had planted so carefully needed to be watered afresh or it would wither away. Help came when it was least looked for. Uneasy times had dawned for Saxon England. Each summer brought fleets into the Channel of plundering Danes. They landed in force. Half the country was overrun and wasted by them. Their chiefs were heathens, who spared neither shrine nor altar, monk nor nun. St. Alban's, far inland as it was, had not escaped a visit from them, and half the treasures of the Church had been carried off.

From these stones was raised up a saviour. Wulfa, a Danish rover, whose heart was penetrated, became, on one of these marauding visits, converted to Christianity. He carried his fervid spirit into his faith, turned hermit, settled him self down in St. Alban's woods to crusts and watercresses ; and so famed among the degenerate Saxons became the pirate recluse, that high prelates went to him to confess their sins and be absolved ; while Abbot Eadfrith, shamed by such an example at his door, laid down his crosier, took to the woods at Wulfa's side, and the community, inspired with fresh enthusiasm, mended their ways. A series of abbots followed who brought St. Alban's into the average condition of Saxon monasteries. They were neither devout especially nor especially undevout. They were wholesome churchmen, of solid, substantial type, who carried on their business with propriety and decency.

As the country became more settled, a town sprang up under the abbey's shadow, with a market and a parish church. Marshes were drained, woods were cleared. The abbey itself was enlarged. In laying the foundations for the new buildings the ruins were exposed of the ancient Roman city : walls and pave ments, cellars and vaults, and arched passages which became the dens of thieves and highwaymen. The bricks were used again for modern houses. The vaults and caves were filled in and levelled. Inside the abbey and outside chaos was reduced to order, and life became rational and human. As at present, in the disinterment of the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments there is an eagerness to discover connecting links with the sacred Hebrew history, so at St. Alban's pious eyes were on the watch for traces of the martyred saint.

Imagination, and possibly invention, came to the assistance of fact. In the debris of a Roman house were found urns of pottery and glass, containing, as was assumed, ashes of men and women. Both urns and ashes, as belonging to unbaptized heathen, were carefully destroyed. Old scrolls and books were said to have been discovered also, which the learned declared to be books of religion, or rituals of devils, and which, therefore, were consigned to the fire. A crumbling box, however, was turned up, with a parchment in it in ancient British, and this on examination proved to be a life of St. Albanus him self, agreeing in all particulars with the account given of him by Bede. It was part of the duty of monks to learn by heart the biographies of their patron saints. The minuteness of agreement, therefore, throws suspicion on the independence of the testimony.

The British version was, nevertheless, at once translated into Latin, and appointed to be read in the church, and further curious inquiry was cut short by miracle. The translation was no sooner complete than the parchment crumbled to dust. Monkish fraud ! the modern reader exclaims im patiently. Rather, perhaps, without more fraud or thought of fraud than has been displayed by some en thusiastic decipherers of the arrow-head inscriptions. A veritable record of some kind or other, in a half-known language, may easily have been construed into a precon ceived meaning by an over-credulous imagination, without any dishonesty at all. When the balance is eventually struck between the opposing tendencies which evolve between them the spiritual history of mankind, an over readiness to believe in a cause generally honourable will be found to have been less mischievous than the scepticism which creates nothing, and is content to sneer and to destroy.

So long as the Saxon monastery continued, the prelacy of the abbey continued to run in the great Saxon families. Two nobly-born brethren, Leofric, and Alfric who was afterwards Primate, ruled successively at St. Alban's, — both men of distinguished piety, both of them a perplexity to the monastic community, which knew not whether most to praise or blame their administration. Those abbots found most favour with the brethren who most enriched the corporation. Large land grants fell in under Leofric and Alfric, and therefore they were admired and honoured ; but the monks considered that they were them selves the first object of Christ's care, and that the increased wealth should show itself in increase of comfort. The two brothers regarded the poor and miserable as having a superior claim, and lavished Christ's patrimony in relieving the necessities of the neighbourhood.

Even the jewels intended for St. Alban's shrine were sacrificed in a severe famine — Abbot Leofric daring to say that the true temples of Christ were the bodies of his suffering members. Whether the abbot did well or ill in this judgment of his, snuffled a discontented brother, Noverit ille qui nihil ignorat — ' Let Him determine who knoweth all things.' The apostle who thought most about the poor was the traitor Judas. The poor we had always with us, and pious monks of St. Alban's were not to be met with every day. There was open mutiny at last, and the secular arm had to be called in. Leofric, excellent as he was, proved rebellibus austerus — a severe master to rebellious servants. Rough policemen came down from London and chained up the most refractory in their cells. The rest were left to grumble in private over their shortened rations.

Under Abbot Alfric the monotony of ordinary life was broken by a curious episode. The special distinction of the abbey was the possession of the genuine relics of the great Protomartyr. No one questioned that they had been really discovered by Offa. A doubt was raised, how ever, and it will be seen with reason, whether the shrine at St. Alban's continued to hold them. The abbey had been plundered by the Danes. The Danes, it was asserted, were not likely to have left behind the greatest treasure that it possessed ; and tradition so far admitted the argument that in the current story the relics were said to have been actually carried away to Denmark, and to have been recovered by the adventurous ingenuity of a member of the convent. That a band of pagan warriors should have burdened themselves with a box of bones is not very probable.

It is likely enough that they stripped the gold from the shrine. It is just possible that, seeing the extraordinary importance attached to such things by the monks, they might have taken them away intending to ransom them. The Danish business, at any rate, whether real or imaginary, is a necessary feature of the story which is now to be told, and a better illustration could not be found of the respect with which the remains of saints were regarded. They were more precious and more coveted than any other form of property, yet the ordinary rules of property did not apply to what it was held permissible and even com mendable to steal. A pretension was suddenly set up by the monks of Ely that they and only they possessed the genuine skeleton of the martyr of Verulam, and they had come by it in the following manner : In Abbot Alfric's time half England had become Danish, and other fleets of Danes were going and coming.