The early dawn; or, Sketches of Christian life in England in the olden time

Front matter

SCHONBERG COTT£ FAMILY.

The name of the autho* of the "Schonberg Cotta Family," and other books, has been published already, but her history is not generally known. Her maiden name was Elizabeth Rundell, and she resided in Plymouth, England. There she became interested in the Roman Catholic faith and was on her way to a convent in France, . v when a young Swiss clergyman made her ^ acquaintance. He was able to reassure her attachment to the faith of her fathers, and to rescue her from the toils of a false religion. In her first joy she wrote at once a beautiful book called "Rest in Jesus," and then " Sketches of Christian Life," and afterwards the " Chronicles," which is doubtless the best of all her works. In the meantime she became the wife of the Rev. Mr. Charles, the clergyman already referred to, and her pen is busy from year to year, producing books that are quite as popular in England as in our own country.

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Introduction

T is the high office of history to restore the Past to a new life. All great events have a twofold life ; once, as they actually occurred, and again, as they are revived upon the historic page for the benefit of after times. The historian must first of all give an accurate record of facts in their just order ; but more than this is needed, if the Past is to speak persuasively to the Present. It must be so reanimated as to bring to view living men and scenes, that the imagination may be enlisted and the pulse quickened. To the sharp outline of fact, fiction may add its embellishments, and thus allure many who would otherwise pass carelessly by the great lessons of human history.

The author of the Chronicles of the Schdriberg-Cotta Family is already well known and loved in many households of our land. In that attractive volume, the story of the Great Reformation, its spiritual conflicts and heroes, were so strikingly described, as to deepen our sense of the great debt we owe to those who then con-

INTRODUCTION.

tended valiantly for the true faith against the corruptions and despotism of the church of the Middle Ages. In the sketches comprised in the present volume the scene is transferred from Germany to England, and thus comes nearer home to some of our sympathies and associations. The Christian Life of England in the Olden Time is here depicted, through several centuries, from its earliest dawn, in its contrasted lights and shadows, down to " the morning star of the Reformation." The Druid is first introduced in converse with the Jew and the Christian. The Two Martyrs of Verulam fall within the period of the Roman domination, full fifteen hundred years ago. The fortunes of an Anglo-Saxon Family are briefly sketched through three generations. The contests of the Saxon and the Norman, and their different traits, are vividly pourtrayed, in the time of the Crusades. And few tales are more interesting and instructive than that in which Cuthbert narrates his experience in the Order of St. Francis and his illumination by the " Everlasting Gospel" of Joachim, and Cicely relates how Dr. Wycliffe, of Oxford, ministered to her spiritual needs and insight.

The undeniable charm of these sketches consists in their simple, truthful adherence to the spirit and traits of these olden times. The author has been a diligent student of the literature, and, through the literature, of the very life of the epochs. This is revealed in many skillful touches of art, in incidental allusions, apt cita-

INTRODUCTION.

tions and graphic descriptions of scenes and persons. But more than this is her rare gift of tracing the workings of the human soul in its needs and aspirations, its human love, its divine longings. The permanent religious wants, which remain the same under all varieties of external fortune, are so truthfully set forth that the Past becomes a mirror for the Present.

It is a good thing, in such company, to review those contests of our ancestors which have enured to the lasting benefit of mankind. It deepens faith in the workings and power of Divine Providence. Our belief in the final triumph of the Gospel, through its manifold contests, is made more firm, when we see it, as in these Lights and Shadows of its early dawn in England, subduing paganism, planting itself firmly among Britons and Saxons, equally professed by Normans and Saxons and shaping their social and civil life, surviving in spite of the corruptions of the times, and breaking forth anew, in clearer light, with evangelic zeal, among the Lollards, who spake in new tongues the words of the old faith, and became the precursors of the Great Reformation. Our youth should be made familiar with these scenes ; for thus may they be helped in their preparation for the great work of life.

H. B. S.

New York, June i$tk, 1864.

Contents

*

I. — Lights and Shadows of The Early Dawn, 11

II — The Two Martyrs op Yerulam, 29

I

ights and Shadows

OF THE

Early Dawn.

I.

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF THE EARLY DAWN.

NE Midsummer Eve, more than seventeen centuries ago, the red gleams of a huge bonfire contended with the pale moonbeams in clothing with fantastic light and shade the gigantic piles of granite which crest, as with a natural fortress, that point of the Cornish coast now called Trerhyn Castle. The wild flickerings of the flames leaped high enough at times even to touch with their fiery glow the edges of the mysterious Logan Rock which crowns the summit.

That it was no mere bonfire of merry-makers might be easily seen in the earnest faces and grave movements of the men gathered round it. They were not mingled in a confused throng, nor scattered in irregular groups, but moved solemnly round the fire from east to west, following the course of the sun, now hidden from their gaze beneath that shoreless ocean whose waves thundered ceaselessly against the base of the cliff on which they were assembled.

Their steps were the slow and measured movements of a sacred mystic dance ; and as thev circled round the

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1 2

THE FAULT DAWN.

blaze they sang a wild monotonous chant, to which the minor intervals gave, not the plaintive tenderness of a major melody broken by a minor fall, but rather the abrupt and savage restlessness of a combined wail and war-cry.

From time to time the song rose with the flames into a defiant shout, and then sank again into the low crooning of a dirge ; the steps of the singers changing with the music from a rapid march to the slow tramp of a funeral procession. The sacred music of that old British race resolved itself into no calm, restful, major close.

Theirs was the worship of a conquered race, and of a proscribed religion. Driven by the Romans from their temples in the interior of the island — temples, whose unhewn and gigantic grandeur not even the persistency of Roman enmity could ruin — this little band of the old lords of the land had met in that remote recess, not yet trodden by the conquerors7 feet, to celebrate the rites of their ancient faith, under the guidance of one of their own proscribed Druid priesthood.

There, under the shadow of that grand natural fortress, to us so like one of their own Druid temples, they had kindled on May Day the sacred " Fire of God ; " and there on Midsummer Eve they now gathered round the " Fire of Peace."

At length the rites, endeared to them as the last relics of their national existence, were finished ; the wild chant was silent, succeeded by the ceaseless roar of the breakers ; and the torches were kindled at the sacred fire, to relight once more, from a sacred source, the household fires that night extinguished.

One by one the little British company dispersed, and

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

could be traced along the cliffs, or inland across the unbroken moorland, by the glare of their torches.

The Druid was left alone. A solemn, solitary figure, he stood on the deserted space by the decaying fire, his fine form still erect, although the long beard, characteristic of his priestly office, was snow-white with age. The fitful glow of the expiring embers threw a mysterious light on the folds of his white robe, and gleamed on the rays of the broad golden circlet which bound his brow. Turning from the fire he looked across the sea, scarcely more solitary or wild than the rugged shore on which he lingered.

It was always a dreary moment to him when the solemn rites were over, and the worshippers were gone. A few minutes since he had stood before the awe-stricken throng as one altogether apart and exalted, a medium of intercourse with the unknown supreme powers, a representative of the majesty so dimly understood, so vividly dreaded ; and their faith had thrown back a reflected reality on his. But now he stood alone, a mortal man to whom the unseen was indeed as invisible as to the meanest of those worshippers ; and he felt he would have gladly borrowed from the meanest and most credulous among them that faith in the invisible which his presence inspired in others, but which he found it so hard to maintain in himself. His people looking with dim and longing eyes into the infinite, at least saw him ; whilst he saw only a blank infinity.

Musing thus, he gazed on that restless, boundless ocean, the broad sweep of whose waves measured the long path of moonlight with their perspective of diminishing curves. Could it be possible, he thought, that at the end of that radiant pathway human eyes (were they

THE EARLY DAWN.

but pure enough) might see the silvery outlines of that "Isle of the Brave," where he taught his people the spirits of their dead were resting ? Could it be that the waves which broke with that wild and wistful music at his feet might sound in human ears (were they but worthy to hear) the echoes of those deathless shores in the far west, where perhaps they had received* their first impulse ?

Thus he stood musing, until his reverie was broken by the sound of footsteps close at hand. Turning hastily round, he saw between him and the fire a dark form wrapped in a Roman mantle.

" Who art thou," he asked abruptly, " that hast tracked us thus to our last refuge ? Thou hast lighted on what may prove to thee a treasure better than any of the mines thy people grudge us. Doubtless, thou seest," he added bitterly, " that I am one of that proscribed Druid priesthood whom, unarmed and defenceless, your Roman armies so much dread. Denounce me to the rulers, if thou wilt. I will follow thee without a struggle. Of what avail to me is life ? And who knows what secrets death may teach ? "

" I am no Roman," said the stranger sadly. " On my people also the wrath of those irresistible legions has fallen. I also am one of the priesthood of a proscribed religion, and of a conquered race. Far in the East my people had once a city beautiful beyond all on earth, and a temple where white-robed priests, mitred with gold, ministered and sacrificed to Him whose name must not be uttered. Our temple is burned with fire, our city is laid waste, and trodden under foot of strangers ; our people are scattered east and west, and I among them. I had lost my way to-night on this wild coast, as I was

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

«5 journeying to the port near this, whither of old our fathers came to traffic, when, seeing the unusual gleam of this fire, I came to learn what it meant. Thou seest no ally of the Romans in me."

The Druid was appeased, and laying aside his priestly vestments, he appeared in the ordinary Celtic plaid worn by his tribe. The two men found a strange link in their isolation from other men ; and, piling up the scattered logs on the dying embers, they agreed to remain together there until the dawn should throw sufficient light on their path to enable them to travel safely along those rugged cliffs against which the waves, now hidden in the shades of night, seemed to roar and chafe, like raging and disappointed beasts of prey.

"Your priestly vestments remind me strangely/' said the Hebrew, when they were reseated by the fire, " of the sacred robes my forefathers wore of old. Whence did your religion come V

" The sources of sacred things are hidden in night," replied the Druid. " Some say our religion was taught direct from heaven ; some, that it was brought, before the memory of man. from a land in the far East, whence after the great flood the father and mother of our race came forth."

" In those distant ages," said the Jew, u doubtless your forefathers and ours were one. Since you had a priesthood, had you then also a temple and sacred rites ?"

M We had many temples," was the reply ; " gigantic circles of stone, as unhewn and* as enormous as these amidst which we stand. Huge reminders of the solemn cliffs and mountains set up in unrivalled majesty on the solitary sweeps of our great inland plains ; roofed by the heavens, and floored by a bare unsmoothed earth. I i6

THE EARLY DAWN.

laugh when I see the pigmy temples in which these Romans bow down before their little men and women gods."

" You had, then, no graven images ?"

" Of old we had none ; and never any in our temples. We have but one image of the Highest j if indeed," he added, in a low and awed voice, " he is only an image ! Our worship is directed to the sun. In his eternal course from east to west our sacred dances move. At his rising we rejoice. When in flowery May his beams once more begin to make the earth fruitful, we kindle in his honour the ' Fire of God/ and begin our year anew. When he has risen in midsummer to his highest seat in the heavens, and reigns in his fullest might, we kindle the sacred ' Fire of Peace/ as to-night, in honour of his peaceful and consummated dominion."

" Since, then, you had temples, had you also sacrifices?"

" We had," was the solemn reply ; " but not such as those of the Romans ; not only the white steer from the herd, or the spotless lamb from the flock. We offered to our gods costlier sacrifices than these, and dearer life."

" What life, then ? " said the Jew, in horror.

" The only life worthy to be accepted for the life of man," was the reply ; " the only life worthy to be offered to the Immortal."

" Your altars were stained with human blood !" said the Jew, with a shudder ; " your people had indeed, then, a different law from mine. But to whom," he continued, after a pause, " did you offer these terrible offerings ? "

" The various tribes of our race had various names for him," said the Druid, in a low voice. " Some called him Hu, and some Dhia or Dhe, and some Be'al, the life of all life, the source of all being."

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

The Jew started as the name, denounced by his prophets, and abhorred by his race, fell on his ear, yet strangely blended with a word like the incommunicable name he might not utter, the mysterious Jah.

" It is very strange ! n he said, at length. " Your words sound to me like an echo of the utterance of the prophets of my people, resounding through the ages as the waves through one of these ocean caverns, and broken into strange discords and wild confusion."

" Had you then no sacred writings ? "

" We have none," said the Druid. Our aged priests teach the sacred words in solemn chants to the priestly neophytes, and initiate them in the sacred rites. So we were taught ; so shall we teach those that follow, if the world or our race is to endure."

" But," said the Jew, " did you never shrink from the sufferings of the victims as you sacrificed them, or think whether there might not be some pity in the Eternal which might revolt from such rites."

" Am I not a man ? " was the reply. " Doubtless my heart often ached at the sufferings of those we sacrificed, especially at first. But the sufferers were, for the most part, criminals, or captives taken in war ; and what was I, to be wiser than the aged who taught me ? "

The remembrance of the sacred name, revealed to the law-giver of his nation, rushed in on the heart of the Jew — of " Jehovah Jehovah Elohim," the eternal and the mighty, " merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abounding in goodness and truth, yet by no means clearing the guilty • " and with it came the recollection of that ritual so stern in its demands for the acknowledgment of sin, and of the forfeited right of the sinner to life, yet so jealous in its guard for that human life it declared forfeit.

i g THE EARLY DA WK

" Are you sure that your god hears you when you thus invoke and sacrifice to him ? " he said, after a pause.

"We assure the people of these things," was the evasive reply ; " and also of rewards and punishments in the world beyond. The people need the barriers of such belief to keep them from crime."

" But you do not teach what you do not believe ?"

" Belief is not so easy for the instructed," was the reply. " Who that has looked into the depth of life can rest and believe like the ignorant ? "

" Our faith," said the Jew, mournfully, " was a faith for all ; our most sacred truths were for the peasant as well as the priest. Among us the seers revealed what they had seen, and the prophets believed what they taught."

The Druid listened long with grave interest as the Hebrew spoke of that God who was revealed to his people as at once so awful and so near ; before whom, the prophet said, " The holy hosts above veil their faces," and yet of whom the shepherd-king could say, " He is my Shepherd."

At length he said, —

" But since you had such revelations, and such a faith, and were a nation so honored by the Highest, how can it be that you are a banished man like me ? Did you not speak of the city of your people as laid waste, and their sanctuary as desecrated ? What does this mean ? "

" I know not, or, at least, I can only partly conjecture," was the sad reply. " Our people had sinned, and our God is one who will not clear the guilty. Once before, our fathers were driven from their homes into that yet further East whence first they came, and our holy and beautiful house was burned with fire. But then, in their

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

*9 exile they had prophets and promises, and a limit fixed to their disgrace, at the end of which they were indeed restored. But now we have no prophets, nor any who can interpret. Scattered hither and thither we lose the record of our linkage. Our glory is all in the past. In all the future I can see no vision of hope. It seems to me, sometimes, almost as if our nation had made shipwreck in the night on some unknown sunken rock. Around us and before us is no shore, nor any light in view, save in that distant past to which the blazing ruins of our temple warn us we may not return."

" Yet," resumed the Druid, " had it been otherwise with your nation, scarcely would your prosperity have brought hope to the world, to other races, or to mine. You say it was to your nation only God spoke ; to your nation alone the promises were made, which in some incomprehensible way you have lost. The world, then, has lost little in your fall."

" I know not," replied the Jew. " Our prophets spoko of the veil being rent from all people, and of all nations coming to the brightness of the rising of a King who was to reign over ours."

" Did this King then never come ? "

"How can he have come?" said the Jew, with a strange impatience. " How should I then be here, an exile without a country ? And was not our King to come as a Conqueror and a Redeemer for our nation, — as a Sun, flashing his unquestionable glory on all nations? There is, indeed," he added, a fanatical sect who sprang from our race, who assert that our King has come, and that it is for rejecting him we are rejected. But who can believe this?"

" It would be terrible, truly, for your people to believe

THE EARLY DAWN.

it," said the Druid. "Those amongst you who think thus must be a mourning and wretched company."

" Nay," was the answer, " they are not. Their delusion leads them to profess themselves the most blessed of men. They think that he whom they call King and Lord, who not much more than a hundred years ago was crucified by the Romans in our city, has arisen from the dead, and lives in heaven. And they say they are glad to die to depart to him."

" Their hope extends then beyond death," said the Druid, abstractedly. " There are then some who think they know of one who has visited the 1 Isle of the Brave/ and has come back to tell what he saw ! "

As they spoke, the dawn began to break over the green slopes of the shore on a promontory of which they sat. One by one the higher points of that magnificent series of rock-bastions which guard our country from the Atlantic, like a fortress of God, caught the early sunbeams. Soon the ocean also was bathed in another ocean of light, broken only by the shadow of the cliffs, or by the countless purple cups of shade, which gave an individual existence to every one of those wonderful translucent green waves.

The two priests of the two religions moved slowly across the pass between the rocks which separate the natural castled bulwark, where they had passed the night, from the green slopes of the coast within.

" See," exclaimed the Druid, " how the fire, which during the hours of darkness was all our light, now lies a faint red stain on the daylight ; whilst the waves, which all night roared around us like angry demons, quietly heave in the sunshine. The earth has her dawns renewed continually. Will no new sun ever rise for man ? Must the golden dawn for us be always in the past ? "

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

Too deep a shadow rested for the Jew on the glorious predictions of his prophets for him to give any answer ; and silently they went along the cliffs.

When they had walked inland thus for some time, they saw before them a labourer, in an earth-stained and common dress, going to his work in one of the mines which of old had tempted the Phoenicians to those very shores.

This miner was evidently young, and had the lithe grace of the South about his form and movements. As he walked he sang, and the tones of his rich Southern tenor rose clear and full through the clear morning air. The cadence was different from any music the Druid had ever heard. There was a repose about the melody, quite foreign to the wild wails or war songs of his people. And as they drew near, the language was to him as strange. They stepped on softly behind the singer, and listened.

" Strange words to hear in such a place," murmured the Jew at length. " They are Greek — the language of a people who dwelt of old, and dwell still, in the East, near the home of my forefathers."

They drew near and greeted the stranger. There was a gentle and easy courtesy in his manner as he returned their salutations, which, in a son of the North, would have betokened high breeding, but in him might be merely the natural bearing of his acute and versatile race. He willingly complied when the Jew asked him to repeat his song, which he translated thus to the Druid : —

Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, Good-will among men.

We praise Thee,

TEE EARLY DAWN.

We bless Thee, We worship Thee For thy great glory, 0 Lord, heavenly King, 0 God the Father ruling all, 0 Lord the only-begotten Son, Saviour, Messiah, With the Holy Spirit.

0 Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,

Who takest away the sins of the world, Receive our prayer.

Thou who sittest at the right hand of the Father,

Have mercy on us,

For Thou only art holy —

Thou only art the Lord,

Saviour, and Messiah —

To the glory of God the Father. Amen.

" Ask him if he has any other such sacred songs," said the Druid ; " the words sound to me beautiful and true, like an echo of half-forgotten music, heard long ago in some former life from which perchance my soul came into this."

" I will chant you our evening hymn," said the miner ; and lie sang again —

Joyful light of heavenly glory, Of the immortal heavenly Father, The holy and the blessed Jesus Christ!

We, coming at tne setting of the sun, Seeing the evening light, Hymn the Father and the Son, And the Holy Spirit, God.

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS.

Worthy art Thou at all times to be praised

With holy voices, Son of God,

Thou who givest light,

Therefore doth the world glorify Thee.

y Wonderful words," said the Jew, after translating them. " They seem almost like a response from heaven to what you said ; like the promise of the dawn for man for which you longed. Friend," he said to the miner, " how earnest thou hither ? Thy learning is above thy calling."

"Not so," replied the other meekly. "I was never other than a poor man. These truths are common to the most unlettered among us."

" To whom does he allude by 1 us V " asked the Druk' when he understood.

" We are the Christians, the men of Christ," said the •stranger, replying to the Druid's question in his own native Celtic language, although with a foreign accent. " I was a vine-dresser on the sunny hills near Smyrna. My father learned the faith from the Apostle John, the Beloved ; and I was exiled hither to work in the mines in the far West because I could not deny my Lord."

" Bitter change," said the Jew, " from those vine-clad southern hills to toil in the darkness on these cold northern shores."

" Where I am going there will be no need of the sun," was the calm reply ; but the ominous hectic flush deepened on his hollow cheek.

" How, then," said the Druid, " is your faith maintained in this life of exile and bondage ? Here you can have no temple and no priest."

" We have a Temple !" was the joyful reply, " not made

THE EARLY DAWN.

with hands ; and a Priest, though not seen now by mortal eyes."

" He speaks in parables," said the Druid.

" I speak no parables," said the Christian, " but simply matters of fact, of which we are all assured."

" Have you then also sacrifices ?" asked the Druid.

" We have a Sacrifice," was the low and reverent reply ; " One, spotless and eternal, never more to be repeated. The Highest gave his Son. The Holy One yielded up himself. God has provided the Lamb. The Lamb of God and the Son of God are one."

" He speaks of the promise made to our father Abraham," exclaimed the Jew.

" Life for life," murmured the Druid, " life of man for life of man.' '

" Nay, it was not man who made the sacirfice," said the Christian, " but God. Not the sinner's life was re quired ; the Son yielded up his own."

" You have then no sacrifices to offer now.'' said the Druid.

" Not so," said the Christian joyfully ; " we have a daily, ceaseless sacrifice to offer — a living sacrifice, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ ; even ourselves, to do and suffer all the holy will of God, — we ourselves, body, soul and spirit, to fulfil the will of Him who loved us and redeemed us with his precious blood to God."

" But," resumed the Druid, " is that holy life, which you say was willingly yielded up for man, extinct for ever? Shall- the holy perish and the guilty live ?"'