Part 10 (2/2)

She was not querulous, nor malevolent; She loved not the fierce wrangling of women; She was not a backbiting serpent, or a liar; She sold not the Son of G.o.d for that which pa.s.ses away.

She was not greedy of the goods of this life; She gave away without gall, without slackness; She was not rough to wayfaring men; She handled gently the wretched lepers.

She built her a town in the plains (of Kildare); And dead, she is the patroness of many peoples.'

I might comment much on this quotation. I might point out how St.

Bridget is called the mother of the Lord, and by others, the Mary of the Irish, the 'Automata coeli regina,' and seems to have been considered at times as an avatar or incarnation of the blessed Virgin. I might more than hint how that appellation, as well as the calling of Christ 'the best of the sons of the Lord,' in an orthodox Catholic hymn, seems to point to the remnants of an older creed, possibly Buddhist, the transition whence towards Catholic Christianity was slow and imperfect. I might make merry over the fact that there are many Bridgets, some say eleven; even as there are three or four St. Patricks; and raise learned doubts as to whether such persons ever existed, after that Straussian method of pseudo-criticism which cometh not from above, from the Spirit of G.o.d, nor yet indeed from below, from the sound region of fact, but from within, out of the naughtiness of the heart, defiling a man. I might weaken, too, the effect of the hymn by going on with the rest of it, and making you smile at its childish miracles and portents; but I should only do a foolish thing, by turning your minds away from the broad fact that St. Bridget, or various persons who got, in the lapse of time, ma.s.sed together under the name of St. Bridget, were eminently good women.

It matters little whether these legends are historically correct. Their value lies in the moral of them. And as for their real historical correctness, the Straussian argument that no such persons existed, because lies are told of them, is, I hold, most irrational. The falsehood would not have been invented unless it had started in a truth.

The high moral character ascribed to them would never have been dreamed of by persons who had not seen living instances of that character. Man's imagination does not create; it only reproduces and recombines its own experience. It does so in dreams. It does so, as far as the moral character of the saint is concerned, in the legend; and if there had not been persons like St. Bridget in Ireland, the wild Irish could never have imagined them.

Therefore it matters little to a wise man, standing on the top of Croagh Patrick, the grandest mountain perhaps, with the grandest outlook, in these British isles, as he looks on the wild Irish there on pattern days, up among the Atlantic clouds, crawling on bare and bleeding knees round St. Patrick's cell,--it matters little, I say, to the wise man, whether St. Patrick himself owned the ancient image which is wors.h.i.+pped on that mountain peak, or the ancient bell which till late years hung in the sanctuary,--such a strange oblong bell as the Irish saints carried with them to keep off the demons--the magic bells which appear (as far as I am aware) in the legends of no country till you get to Tartary and the Buddhists;--such a bell as came (or did not come) down from heaven to St.

Senan; such a bell as St. Fursey sent flying through the air to greet St.

Cuanady at his devotions when he could not come himself; such a bell as another saint, wandering in the woods, rang till a stag came out of the covert, and carried his burden for him on his horns. It matters as little to the wise man whether that bell belonged to St. Patrick, as whether all these child's dreams are dreams. It matters little to him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which a.s.sembled at the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old Greece, but by the spiritual force of which (so the text was then applied) it is written, 'This kind cometh not out but by prayer and fasting,' till he smote the evil things with 'the golden rod of Jesus,' and they rolled over the cliff, in hideous rout, and perished in the Atlantic far below. But it matters much to a wise man that under all these symbols (not childish at all, but most grand, to the man who knows the grand place of which they are told), there is set forth the victory of a good and beneficent man over evil, whether of matter or of spirit. It matters much to him that that cell, that bell, that image are tokens that if not St. Patrick, some one else, at least, did live and wors.h.i.+p on that mountain top, in remote primaeval times, in a place in which we would not, perhaps could not, endure life a week. It matters much to him that the man who so dwelt there, gained such a power over the minds of the heathen round him, that five millions of their Christian descendants wors.h.i.+p him, and G.o.d on account of him, at this day.

St. Ita, again. It matters little that she did not--because she could not--perform the miracles imputed to her. It matters little whether she had or not--as I do not believe her to have had--a regularly organized convent of nuns in Ireland during the sixth century. It matters little if the story which follows is a mere invention of the nuns in some after- century, in order to make a good t.i.tle for the lands which they held--a trick but too common in those days. But it matters much that she should have been such a person, that such a story as this, when told of her, should have gained belief:--How the tribes of Hy-Connell, hearing of her great holiness, came to her with their chiefs, and offered her all the land about her cell. But she, not wis.h.i.+ng to be entangled with earthly cares, accepted but four acres round her cell, for a garden of herbs for her and her nuns. And the simple wild Irish were sad and angry, and said, 'If thou wilt not take it alive, thou shalt take it when thou art dead. So they chose her then and there for their patroness, and she blessed them with many blessings, which are fulfilled unto this day; and when she migrated to the Lord they gave her all the land, and her nuns hold it to this day, the land of Hy-Connell on the east Shannon bank, at the roots of Luachra mountain.'

What a picture! One hopes that it may be true, for the sake of its beauty and its pathos. The poor, savage, half-naked, and, I fear, on the authority of St. Jerome and others, now and then cannibal Celts, with their saffron scarfs, and skenes, and darts, and glibs of long hair hanging over their hypo-gorillaceous visages, coming to the prophet maiden, and asking her to take their land, for they could make no decent use of it themselves; and look after them, body and soul, for they could not look after themselves; and pray for them to her G.o.d, for they did not know how to pray to Him themselves. If any man shall regret that such an event happened to any savages on this earth, I am, I confess, sorry for him.

St. Severinus, again, whom I have mentioned to you more than once:--none of us can believe that he made a dead corpse (Silvinus the priest, by name) sit up and talk with him on its road to burial. None of us need believe that he stopped the plague at Vienna by his prayers. None of us need attribute to anything but his sagacity the Divine revelations whereby he predicted the destruction of a town for its wickedness, and escaped thence, like Lot, alone; or by which he discovered, during the famine of Vienna, that a certain rich widow had much corn hidden in her cellars: but there are facts enough, credible and undoubted, concerning St. Severinus, the apostle of Austria, to make us trust that in him, too, wisdom was justified of all her children.

You may remark, among the few words which have been as yet said of St.

Severinus, a destruction, a plague, and a famine. Those words are a fair sample of St. Severinus's times, and of the circ.u.mstances into which he voluntarily threw himself. About the middle of the fifth century there appears in the dying Roman province of Noric.u.m (Austria we now call it) a strange gentleman, eloquent and learned beyond all, and with the strangest power of melting and ruling the hearts of men. Who he is he will not tell, save that his name is Severinus, a right n.o.ble name without doubt. Gradually it oozes out that he has been in the far East, through long travels and strange dangers, through many cities and many lands; but he will tell nothing. He is the servant of G.o.d, come hither to try to be of use. He certainly could have come for no other reason, unless to buy slaves; for Austria was at that time the very highway of the nations, the centre of the human Mahlstrom, in which Huns, Gepiden, Allmannen, Rugen, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down round the starving and beleaguered Roman towns of that once fertile and happy province. A man who went there for his own pleasure, or even devotion, would have been as wise as one who had built himself last summer a villa on the Rappahannock, or retired for private meditation to the orchard of Hougoumont during the battle of Waterloo.

Nevertheless, there Severinus stayed till men began to appreciate him; and called him, and not unjustly, Saint. Why not? He preached, he taught, he succoured, he advised, he fed, he governed; he turned aside the raids of the wild German kings; he gained a divine power over their hearts; he taught them something of G.o.d and of Christ, something of justice and mercy; something of peace and unity among themselves; till the fame ran through all the Alps, and far away into the Hungarian marches, that there was a prophet of G.o.d arisen in the land; and before the unarmed man, fasting and praying in his solitary cell on the mountain above Vienna, ten thousand knights and champions trembled, who never had trembled at the sight of armed hosts.

Who would deny that man the name of saint? And who, if by that sagacity which comes from the combination of intellect and virtue, he sometimes seemed miraculously to foretell coming events, would deny him the name of prophet also?

If St. Severinus be the type of the monk as prophet, St. Columba may stand as the type of the missionary monk; the good man strengthened by lonely meditation; but using that strength not for selfish fanaticism, but for the good of men; going forth unwillingly out of his beloved solitude, that he may save souls. Round him, too, cl.u.s.ter the usual myths. He drives away with the sign of the cross a monster which attacks him at a ford. He expels from a fountain the devils who smote with palsy and madness all who bathed therein. He sees by a prophetic spirit, he sitting in his cell in Ireland, a great Italian town destroyed by a volcano. His friends behold a column of light rising from his head as he celebrates ma.s.s. Yes; but they also tell of him, 'that he was angelical in look, brilliant in speech, holy in work, clear in intellect, great in council.' That he 'never pa.s.sed an hour without prayer, or a holy deed, or reading of the Scriptures (for these old monks had Bibles, and knew them by heart too, in spite of all that has been written to the contrary), that he was of so excellent a humility and charity, bathing his disciples' feet when they came home from labour, and carrying corn from the mill on his own back, that he fulfilled the precept of his Master, 'He that will be the greatest among you, let him be as your servant.'

They also tell of him (and this is fact and history) how he left his monastery of Derm Each, 'the field of oaks,' which we call Derry, and went away at the risk of his life to preach to the wild Picts of Galloway, and founded the great monastery of Iona, and that succession of abbots from whom Christianity spread over the south of Scotland and north of England, under his great successor Aidan.

Aidan has his myths likewise. They tell of him how he stilled the sea- waves with holy oil; how he turned back on Penda and his Saxons the flames with which the heathen king was trying to burn down Bamborough walls. But they tell, too (and Bede had heard it from those who had known Aidan in the flesh) of 'his love of peace and charity, his purity and humility, his mind superior to avarice or pride, his authority, becoming a minister of Christ, in reproving the haughty and powerful, and his tenderness in relieving the afflicted, and defending the poor.' Who, save one who rejoiceth in evil, instead of rejoicing in the truth, will care to fix his eyes for a moment upon the fairy tales which surround such a story, as long as there s.h.i.+nes out from among them clear and pure, in spite of all doctrinal errors, the grace of G.o.d, the likeness of Jesus Christ our Lord?

Let us look next at the priest as Tribune of the people, supported usually by the invisible, but most potent presence of the saint, whose relics he kept. One may see that side of his power in Raphael's immortal design of Attila's meeting with the Pope at the gates of Rome, and recoiling as he sees St. Peter and St. Paul floating terrible and threatening above the Holy City. Is it a myth, a falsehood? Not altogether. Such a man as Attila probably would have seen them, with his strong savage imagination, as incapable as that of a child from distinguis.h.i.+ng between dreams and facts, between the subjective and the objective world. And it was on the whole well for him and for mankind, that he should think that he saw them, and tremble before the spiritual and the invisible; confessing a higher law than that of his own ambition and self-will; a higher power than that of his brute Tartar hordes.

Raphael's design is but a famous instance of an influence which wrought through the length and breadth of the down-trodden and dying Roman Empire, through the four fearful centuries which followed the battle of Adrianople. The wild licence, the boyish audacity, of the invading Teutons was never really checked, save by the priest and the monk who wors.h.i.+pped over the bones of some old saint or martyr, whose name the Teutons had never heard.

Then, as the wild King, Earl, or Comes, with his wild reiters at his heels, galloped through the land, fighting indiscriminately his Roman enemies, and his Teutonic rivals--harrying, slaughtering, burning by field and wild--he was aware at last of something which made him pause.

Some little walled town, built on the ruins of a great Roman city, with its Byzantine minster towering over the thatched roofs, sheltering them as the oak shelters the last night's fungus at its base. More than once in the last century or two, has that same town been sacked. More than once has the surviving priest crawled out of his hiding-place when the sound of war was past, called the surviving poor around him, dug the dead out of the burning ruins for Christian burial, built up a few sheds, fed a few widows and orphans, organized some form of orderly life out of the chaos of blood and ashes, in the name of G.o.d and St. Quemdeusvult whose bones he guards; and so he has established a temporary theocracy, and become a sort of tribune of the people, magistrate and father--the only one they have. And now he will try the might of St. Quemdeusvult against the wild king, and see if he can save the town from being sacked once more. So out he comes--a bishop perhaps, with priests, monks, crucifixes, banners, litanies. The wild king must come no further. That land belongs to no mortal man, but to St. Quemdeusvult, martyred here by the heathen five hundred years ago. Some old Kaiser of Rome, or it may be some former Gothic king, gave that place to the saint for ever, and the saint will avenge his rights. He is very merciful to those who duly honour him: but very terrible in his wrath if he be aroused. Has not the king heard how the Count of such a place, only forty years before, would have carried off a maiden from St. Quemdeusvult's town; and when the bishop withstood him, he answered that he cared no more for the relics of the saint than for the relics of a dead a.s.s, and so took the maiden and went? But within a year and a day, he fell down dead in his drink, and when they came to lay out the corpse, behold the devils had carried it away, and put a dead a.s.s in its place.

All which the bishop would fully believe. Why not? He had no physical science to tell him that it was impossible. Morally, it was in his eyes just, and therefore probable; while as for testimony, men were content with very little in those days, simply because they could get very little. News progressed slowly in countries desolate and roadless, and grew as it pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, as it did in the Highlands a century ago, as it did but lately in the Indian Mutiny; till after a fact had taken ten years in crossing a few mountains and forests, it had a.s.sumed proportions utterly fantastic and gigantic.

So the wild king and his wild knights pause. They can face flesh and blood: but who can face the quite infinite terrors of an unseen world?

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