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the tale obviously carries with it its own refutation. Renowned equally for her matchless beauty, her rigid asceticism, her profound learning, this saintly virgin gives her weekly lecture to the matrons and maidens of the town. She may be seen by none. The abbess places a veil to guard her from the contaminating glances of women of the world. Under the disguise of a nun, the widow of a senator talks with her and embraces her. The discovery fills her with dismay; the widow makes atonement by taking the veil, and tending Febronia on a bed of sickness. The time of trouble comes. The bishop and clergy, the monks and nuns, fly at the approach of the persecutor, leaving Febronia alone in her cell. She is drawn before the tribunal of Selenus, and stripped of all her raiment. Selenus taunts her because she blushes not. I have never seen the 'face of man before,' she said; but the wrestlers at the Olympic games are not clothed till the strife is ended. I am here for the struggle; do the worst that ye can.' They inflicted a mutilation scarcely to be told, while the abbess, a distant spectator, overwhelmed Selenus with her execrations, and cheered Febronia by her prayers, till the final stroke consummated her peerless martyrdom.

The legend is a mass of inconsistencies: it is not less clearly the ideal of such tales of persecution. One account places the scene at Sibapte, near Palmyra, another at Nisibis. The desertion of Febronia is more incredible than her ready citation of the customs of Olympian wrestlers. If the appearance of the fugitive abbess is perplexing, her unchecked abuse of Selenus to his face is beyond all belief. The instant conversion of his nephews, and their profession as monks, is the necessary ending of a martyrdom which is called into question most of all by its own unrivalled glory.

Febronia by her death multiplied the number of penitents who hurried to the cloister. The great triumph of her life had been her victory over the widow, who was about to contract a second marriage. It is the ever-recurring theme of monastic exultation. The disruption of a family, the crushing of natural affection, the ignoring of all earthly ties, the repudiation of all earthly duty, inspires the monastic biographers with their most fervent thankfulness, their most legitimate pride. The most renowned saints had abandoned the duties of parents or children, of wives or husbands, to work out in the cell the one end of their existence. It is not the judgment of an enemy. Every example of such action is eagerly avowed: in the pain inflicted on others the penitent proves his own superhuman heroism. We are brought at once to the first principles of morality; we have

here the crucial test of that monastic Christianity on which M. de Montalembert has placed the seal of his mature and deliberate approbation. The monk is one who flies from the dangers and pollutions of a secular life for the salvation of his soul. If he breaks up the home of a family, if he inflicts an irreparable wound on the tenderest feelings of kindred, he does so the better to promote his own good and that of others in a life of religion. He goes to sacrifice himself, to crush all evil affections of pride, intolerance, harshness, cruelty; to subdue himself into gentleness of thought and moderation of language; to exercise and to set before others an impartial and unfailing equity, which will repudiate all timeserving policy, and scorn to eulogise a crime. How were these promises fulfilled? Was there no flaw in the equity of Gregory and Hildebrand? no defect in the self-abnegation of Jerome and Benedict? It was the longing of Paulla, the devoted friend of Jerome, to leave to her daughter not the smallest fraction of her vast patrimony. Her success exceeded her hopes. She left a mass of debts and a crowd of penitents to be maintained by her. A father seeks admission into a convent with an only child, whom for the love of Christ he endures with a tearless eye to see clothed in rags, encrusted with dirt, beaten and tormented. The perfection of his Christian sacrifice is shown by his readiness to comply with an order to take his child and hurl him into the lake. At the age of eighteen St. Euphrosynê steals away from her father and her husband, and in male disguise buries herself in a convent of monks, where for eight and thirty years she never left her cell. Her father in utter despair (the husband seems to have taken the loss less to heart) wanders like a troubled spirit over sea and land, till at last before her monastery he begs the prayers of the first monk whom he meets for the assuaging of his inconsolable sorrow. He is speaking to his daughter. One day,' she said, thou 'shalt again see thy child;' but not until the hour of her death

From the sequel of the story this must probably mean the monastic premises, unless we are to understand that the wanderings of the father extended over more than thirty-eight years. Alban Butler (in October 8th) refuses to believe the story told by James of Heliopolis, that St. Pelagia during her penance was disguised in man's clothes, such a practice being contrary to the laws of nature, and condemned as an abomination in the Old Testament, and by fathers and councils of the Church. He thinks that her dress may have suited either sex; but Euphrosynê clearly passes herself off as a man. It is but one of the thousand contradictions to be found in monastic morality.

did she make herself known to her father, who spent the rest of his days in the cell which her piety had hallowed (vol. i. p. 81.).

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No greater insult to every natural feeling could be offered than by this climax of monastic extravagance. The true monk had no affection except for those who had made the same profession. The tears which never flowed for his carnal kinsfolk, gushed in streams on the loss of his spiritual brethren, or for his natural kindred, when, and only when, they were united with him by a higher bond than that of nature. The child, whose thoughts reverted with lingering fondness to his home, is smitten with sudden death; but the loss of his brother, who had taken the vow, interrupts the eloquence of St. Bernard with a burst. of irresistible sorrow. With an indignation not the less inhuman because it was justified by a sound monastic policy, Gregory the Great leaves a monk, who had once tended kindly his own sick bed, to die in solitude, and then, amidst the execrations of the brethren, casts his body on a dunghill because he acknowledged the possession of three pieces of money. same Gregory could call heaven and earth to share his joy at the blood-thirsty usurpation of Phocas, at the most woeful of all royal tragedies. Words failed him to express his thankfulness and exultation. M. de Montalembert, while he fully allows the sin, holds it to be the only stain of his pontifical life but his language of unbounded eulogy to Brunehault is scarcely more decent. Even if we grant the incredible statement that her own life was pure, it is impossible to believe that Gregory could be ignorant of her systematic pandering to the worst vices of her sons for her own political purposes. Clovis murders a man whom he had himself tempted to parricide: Gregory of Tours immediately adds that God subdued his enemies because he walked uprightly and did what was pleasing in his eyes. same corporate spirit which inspired such eulogies as these, led St. Bernard to slander and defame William of York, one of the purest and most single-minded men whom his age produced. He hesitates not to ascribe to him the worst of vices, to lay to his charge the blood of the saints.* It is well matched by the

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The writer of the life of St. William, in the series of 'Lives of 'the English Saints,' attempts to prove that Bernard had direct sources of information in more than one man who was personally acquainted with William. This only makes it the more disgraceful that he should have hunted him down with such persistent malignity for a supposed irregularity in his election. If he knew anything about it, he must have known the statement in which the monks of Fountains (enemies of William) assert that he was 'a man of high birth, adorned with many virtues, and in all respects worthy to pre'side over a cathedral, if his election had been more canonical.'

silence with which St. Thomas of Canterbury passes over the infamous life of Henry II. in his zeal to crush royal rebellion against the immunities of the Church. It agrees with the monastic bitterness which made Peter Damiani class the marriage of clergy amongst the most loathsome forms of sensual vice, and revile Hildebrand himself as an apostate because he surveyed the question in the simple view of ecclesiastical organisation. Damiani is furious in his support of virginity but a more vehement upholder, a more model monk, is to be found in Jerome. With the exception of marriage, Jerome in putting on the robe of a monk had practically renounced and sacrificed nothing. He was still the fiercest of partisans, the most adroit of flatterers, the most shrewd and calculating of politicians. In his war against all the softer and kindlier feelings of humanity, Jerome had succeeded no better than the Stoics in eradicating the darker vices of jealousy and malignity. No fouler fountain of unlimited vituperation can be found than his declamations against Rufinus, Vigilantius, and Jovinian. No pit can be too dark, no torments too horrible, for the man who dared to question the paramount merits of holy virginity, or to insinuate the possibility of reactions against an overstrained and extravagant discipline. Yet that nature, which he had insulted and which he thought that he had banished, had not wholly resigned its power even over Jerome, the austere Jerome, whose personal character even Vigilantius ventured not to asperse. No man had ever a more magic influence over women, none ever lived with them in a closer spiritual intimacy. Matrons and maidens from the most noble families of Rome left their palaces to share his hard life at Bethlehem. They read with him, they conversed with him, they hung with rapt attention on his religious teaching. The affections can live even on a little food: there was abundance here. What woman could resist such flattery as that of Jerome? who would not long to be immortalised in such eulogies as his? Of Marcella he speaks as his final judge in the most subtle difficulties of biblical interpretation. The horrors of the storming of Rome are more than compensated by the constancy with which Demetrias preserved her virginity. Paulla he extols as sprung from the blood of the Scipios, of the Gracchi and of Agamemnon, the true representative of Æmilius Paullus, who left her home, her kinsfolk, and her children, to live in poverty near the cradle of her Lord at Bethlehem.'

There are darker contradictions still. The forbearing tolerance of Cassiodorus, of Gregory, and of Isidore, the noble protest of St. Martin against the execution of the Spanish bishop Priscillian, scarcely relieve the sombre mass of monastic bigotry.

VOL. CXIV. NO. CCXXXII.

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Augustine of Hippo, who could not reconcile himself to the punishment of death for heresy, had not the same reluctance to accept the aid of the temporal power in the infliction of minor penalties. We need not dwell on the ferocious campaigns of Eastern and African monks, on the iniquities of the Alexandrian Cyril, on the apotheosis of Ammonius and the slaughter of Hypatia, on robber synods, and council-chambers polluted with violence and murder, on black-robed monks carrying terror through the streets of cities, and upholding dogmas by the strong arm and the stout club. Not a little of the same morality meets us in the West. Bernard, the general of an order of peacemakers, could urge a crusade against the Moslem with almost a fiercer vehemence than that of the hermit Peter. In his words, The Christian who slays an unbeliever, is sure ' of his reward; more sure if he is slain.' It is no marvel that coarser spirits could take a savage delight in hounding on the armies of the Orthodox against the heretical civilisation of Provence. Yet it is astounding that even monastic ferocity could have produced such atrocious miscreants as the Abbot Arnold, and Peter the monk of Vaux Cernay. It is hard to decide whom we should abhor the more, the detestable zealot who in the battle-field, or amid the carnage of a stormed town, could give the order, Slay all: God will know his 'own,' or the cold-blooded historian who could complacently boast in his cell that he had witnessed and exulted in the unexampled atrocities of the Albigensian war.

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M. de Montalembert remarks that the Merovingian kings passed with a rapidity, which to our modern notions appears incomprehensible, from the most horrible cruelty to passionate demonstrations of contrition and humility, and the devotion of a faith, whose sincerity it is impossible to deny. We do not care to deny it, while we strongly suspect its utterly spurious quality. In these rapid transitions there is nothing to surprise or perplex. Faith and religion, sacrifice and devotion, were to them alike external. The ungodly might be benefited by the prayers of the saints; the discipline of the saints was wholly concentrated on themselves. Religious acts and divine blessings were joined together by a kind of mechanical connexion. The slaughter of an unbeliever was the salvation of his antagonist. What wonder then that the crusaders of Godfrey and Tancred could go from the butchering of men and women and the slaughter of infants to prostrate themselves with tears and groans before the tomb of the Prince of Peace? It is sad that so erroneous an idea of Christianity should have fastened on such a mind as that of M. de Montalembert. It is sad,

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