Essays in Literature and History Part 11

Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior "on Candlemas-day last past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome where all his bulls were?" Brother Sherborne answered that "his bulls had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were then."

Then there were long and furious quarrels about "my Lord Privy Seal" (Cromwell), to one party the incarnation of Satan, to the other the delivering angel. Nor did matters mend when from the minister they pa.s.sed to the master.

Dan John Croxton being in "the shaving-house" one day with certain of the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do on such occasions, one "Friar Lawrence did say that the King was dead."

Then said Croxton, "thanks be to G.o.d, his Grace is in good health, and I pray G.o.d so continue him;" and said further to the said Lawrence, "I advise thee to leave thy babbling." Croxton, it seems, had been among the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, "Croxton, it maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world." Whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. "Thy babbling tongue,"

Croxton said, "will turn us all to displeasure at length."

"Then," quoth Lawrence, "neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope." "By the ma.s.s!" quoth Croxton, "I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy Prince."

Whereunto the said Lawrence answered, saying, "By the ma.s.s, thou liest! I was never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be." "Then," quoth Croxton, "thou shall be sworn spite of thine heart one day, or I will know why nay."

These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.

His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the Pope; that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the oath to the King, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however, he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies. We have significant evidence of the espionage which was established, over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the Government.

In the summer of 1534, orders came that the Pope's name should be rased out wherever it was mentioned in the Ma.s.s books. A malcontent, by name Robert Salford, deposed that "he was singing ma.s.s before the abbot at St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with his knife the said name out of the canon." The abbot told him to "take a pen and strike or cross him out." The saucy monk said those were not the orders. They were to rase him out. "Well, well," the abbot said, "it will come again one day." "Come again, will it?" was the answer. "If it do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that day." The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command; and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the Pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said, "You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the King to be supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome."

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious English eyes were watching for a turning tide. "Hear you," said the abbot one day, "of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops, abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they be, for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they would never have refused to come to a general council."

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn obedience to the King. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their true allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very different from the outward reaction for which he was looking: a better mind woke in the abbot; he learnt that in swearing what he did not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to Heaven and lied to man: that to save his miserable life he had perilled his soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse, mistaken, as we believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining evasion or subterfuge, chose, with deliberate n.o.bleness, rather to die than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The Pope shook upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants. The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy. But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of the rest acted as a glimpse of the judgment day. Their safety became their shame and terror: and in the radiant example before them of true faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that they might perjure themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry; so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are; and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of concealment.

"At the time," deposed Robert Salford, "that the monks of the Charter-house, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call us into the Chapterhouse, and said these words:--'Brethren, this is a perilous time, such a scourge was never heard since Christ's pa.s.sion. Ye hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our offences.

Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the commandments of G.o.d, so long their enemies had no power over them, but G.o.d took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke G.o.d's commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we.

Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many good men to suffer thus.

Alas, it is a piteous case that so much Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the reverence of G.o.d, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm, "O G.o.d, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great misery. Help us, oh G.o.d of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh, be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen say, Where is now their G.o.d?" Ye shall say this Psalm,' repeated the abbot, 'every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the high altar, and undoubtedly G.o.d will cease this extreme scourge.' And so," continues Salford, significantly, "the convent did say this aforesaid Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at the saying of it, and so it was left."

The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support; even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had walked in the house of G.o.d, had turned against him; the harsh air of the dawn of a new world choked him; what was there for him but to die. But his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February, 1536, the Bill pa.s.sed for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the sub-prior with the whole fraternity united to accuse him, so that the abbot had no one friend remaining.

"He did again call us together," says the next deposition, "and lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us to sing 'Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes,' every day after lauds; and we murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter, and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again with the versicle 'Let G.o.d arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him.' Also he enjoined us at every ma.s.s that every priest did sing, to say the collect, 'Oh G.o.d, who despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart.'

And he said if we did this with good and true devotion, G.o.d would so handle the matter, that it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be now supprest, because 'G.o.d can of these stones raise up children to Abraham.'"

"Of these stones," perhaps, but less easily of the stonyhearted monks, who with pitiless smiles watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon bring him to his ruin.

Time pa.s.sed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more lonely. Lonely and unsupported, he was unequal to the last effort of repentance, but he slowly strengthened himself for the trial. As Lent came on, the season brought with it a more special call to effort, which he did not fail to recognize. The conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coa.r.s.e; and the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the spirit of his Master and theirs. Now, when the pa.s.sions of those times have died away, and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the following. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn chapel, whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one day, and spoke to him. "Sir William," he said, "I hear tell ye be a great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the scripture of G.o.d, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such railing.

Ye call the pope a bear and a banson. Either he is a good man or an ill. Domino suo stat aut cadit.

The office of a bishop is honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone."

But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He grew "somewhat acrased," they said, vexed with feelings of which they had no experience.

He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room, Brother Dan Woburn among the rest, who said that he asked him how he did, and received for answer, "I would that I had died with the good men that died for holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every day for it." Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul?

"If he be disposed to die, for that matter," the insolent Croxton said, "he may die as soon as he will."

All Lent he fasted and prayed; and his illness grew upon him; and at length in Pa.s.sion week he thought all was over, and that he was going away. On Pa.s.sion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, "he exhorted them all to charity," he implored them "never to consent to go out of their monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no wise forsake their habit." After these words, "being in a great agony, he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, 'I would to G.o.d, it would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for they were quickly out of their pain.'" * Then, half wandering, he began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he exclaimed, "Tu quis es. Primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate Moses, judicatu Samuel potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliae ecclesiae habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es."

____

* Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians.

____

Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard for him.

He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not, after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A year before, he had thrown down the cross, when it was offered him.

He was to take it again; the very cross which he had refused. He recovered. He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means of knowing.

To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was high treason. Whether he was constant, and received some conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed him--whichever he did--the records are silent. This only we ascertain of him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But two years later, when the official list was presented to the parliament of those who had suffered for their share in "the Pilgrimage of Grace,"

among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn. To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down, and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated. But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty; and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on earth.

We too can see more distinctly in a slight degree.

At least we will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes some memorial, brief though it be. And although twelve generations of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy--have swept Woburn clear of Catholic a.s.sociations, they, too, in these later days, will not regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.

____

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHRISTIANITY

"We should do our utmost to encourage the Beautiful, for the Useful encourages itself."--GOETHE.

A Moss rose-bud hiding her face among the leaves one hot summer morning, for fear the sun should injure her complexion, happened to let fall a glance towards her roots, and to see the bed in which she was growing.

What a filthy place! she cried. What a home they have chosen for me! I, the most beautiful of flowers, fastened down into so detestable a neighbourhood! She threw her face into the air; thrust herself into the hands of the first pa.s.ser-by who stopped to look at her, and escaped in triumph, as she thought, into the centre of a nosegay. But her triumph was short-lived: in a few hours she withered and died.

I was reminded of this story when hearing a living thinker of some eminence once say that he considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually it was absurd, and practically an offence, over which he stumbled; and it would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they could have kept clear of superst.i.tion, and followed on upon the track of the Grecian philosophy, so little do men care to understand the conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little fis.h.i.+ng village in Galilee, and spread through the whole civilized world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers should have sunk under an absorption of fear and folly, should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral n.o.bleness there was among them; surely there were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's acceptance of it; and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right have we to hope that with the same natures, the same pa.s.sions, the same understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres (bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant; and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed, the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy an idol when another, or the same in another form takes immediate possession of the vacant pedestal?

But it is not so. Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at Ptolemy.

Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have learnt to see in that past, not error but instalment of truth, hard fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pa.s.s over into possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds; we must gather them and bury them, and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph.

If Christianity really is pa.s.sing away, if it has done its work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, not for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverent and patient examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us farewell, and give us G.o.d speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions certain broad phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it.

It grows through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the centre of it survives; a healthy, vigorous, natural life shoots beautifully up out of it. But at last the idea becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while quite new questions rise among the thinkers, and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and superst.i.tion cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful symbolism becomes at last no better than "a whited sepulchre full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."

So it is now. So it was in the era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in the form which it a.s.sumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could offer of the questions which had grown out with the growth of mankind, and on which Paganism had suffered s.h.i.+pwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose men had not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward a coward--the liar a liar--individually hateful and despicable. But in hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire.

There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the G.o.ds. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness of common men offers no a.n.a.logy.

Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena.

But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once a.s.sumed an importance the intensity of which made every other question insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how G.o.d could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation, these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of every thinker. Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be, the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it--whether matter was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. G.o.d would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose.

Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its purity tainted by the pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes of its companion, the fleshly l.u.s.ts which waged perpetual war against it.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to conquer it, or at least how to set free the spirit from its control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of Alexander: but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent by largely accepting the Eastern manner, so philosophy could only make good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised.

The one pure and holy G.o.d whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews, while the Persians who had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent evil being now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle, and many hundred thousand folios were the results of the remarkable fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the h.e.l.lenists, the Therapeute, those strange Essene communists, with the innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics.

Finally, the battle was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the best of the remainder had ranged themselves m Manicheism and Catholic Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian, Catholicism in which the Jewish element most preponderated.

It did not end till the close of the fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle fighting over words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, so far it was a conclusion which both Jew and Persian were ready to accept. The naked Aristotelic view of it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the h.e.l.lenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil crept into matter. He could not allow that what G.o.d had created could be of its own nature imperfect. G.o.d made it very good; some other cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of death, of pain, of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all which was fas.h.i.+oned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a garden of delight of its own free accord, loading itself with fruit and flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.

In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither decay, nor death, nor unruly appet.i.te, nor any change or infirmity, was pure as the pure immortal substance of the unfallen angels. But with the fatal apple all this fair scene pa.s.sed away, and creation as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no matter how--he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease, storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned pa.s.sions of the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of carnage; worst of all, maws animal nature came out in gigantic strength, the carnal l.u.s.ts, unruly appet.i.tes, jealousies, hatred, rapine, and murder; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal change which had pa.s.sed over his person, and every child, therefore, thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the curse which he had incurred. Every material organization thenceforward contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a "possession" by his spirit, and the whole creation from Adam till Christ groaned and travailed under Satan's power. The n.o.bler nature in man still made itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over strong for it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Christianity now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

The carnal doctrine of the sacraments which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom G.o.d had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it pa.s.sed out under His hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, he took a human body, and he kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the limitations of sin.

The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to a.s.sure their senses. But s.p.a.ce had no power over it, nor any of the material obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed and his body obeyed. He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then He was gone, whither who could tell? At last He pa.s.sed away to heaven; but while in heaven, He was still on earth.

His body became the body of His Church on earth, not in metaphor, but in fact. His very material body, in which and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were thenceforth to be their food.

They were to eat it as they would eat ordinary meat.