The Hermits Part 10

"He thence them led into his hermitage, Letting their steeds to graze upon the green: Small was his house, and like a little cage, For his own term, yet inly neat and clean, Decked with green boughs, and flowers gay beseen Therein he them full fair did entertain, Not with such forged shews, as fitter been For courting fools that courtesies would feign, But with entire affection and appearance plain.

How be that careful hermit did his best With many kinds of medicines meet to tame The poisonous humour that did most infest Their reakling wounds, and every day them duly dressed.

"For he right well in leech's craft was seen; And through the long experience of his days, Which had in many fortunes tossed been, And pa.s.sed through many perilous a.s.says: He knew the divers want of mortal ways, And in the minds of men had great insight; Which with sage counsel, when they went astray, He could inform and them reduce aright; And all the pa.s.sions heal which wound the weaker sprite.

"For whilome he had been a doughty knight, As any one that lived in his days, And proved oft in many a perilous fight, In which he grace and glory won always, And in all battles bore away the bays: But being now attached with timely age, And weary of this world's unquiet ways, He took himself unto this hermitage, In which he lived alone like careless bird in cage."

This picture is not poetry alone: it is history. Such men actually lived, and such work they actually did, from the southernmost point of Italy to the northernmost point of Scotland, during centuries in which there was no one else to do the work. The regular clergy could not have done it. Bishops and priests were entangled in the affairs of this world, striving to be statesmen, striving to be landowners, striving to pa.s.s Church lands on from father to son, and to establish themselves as an hereditary caste of priests. The chaplain or house-priest who was to be found in every n.o.bleman's, almost every knight's castle, was apt to become a mere upper servant, who said ma.s.s every morning in return for the good cheer which he got every evening, and fetched and carried at the bidding of his master and mistress. But the hermit who dwelt alone in the forest glen, occupied, like an old Hebrew prophet, a superior and an independent position. He needed nought from any man save the sc.r.a.p of land which the lord was only too glad to allow him in return for his counsels and his prayers. And to him, as to a mysterious and supernatural personage, the lord went privately for advice in his quarrels with the neighbouring barons, or with his own kin. To him the lady took her children when they were sick, to be healed, as she fancied, by his prayers and blessings; or poured into his ears a hundred secret sorrows and anxieties which she dare not tell to her fierce lord, who hunted and fought the livelong day, and drank too much liquor every night.

This cla.s.s of men sprang up rapidly, by natural causes, and yet by a Divine necessity, as soon as the Western Empire was conquered by the German tribes; and those two young officers whom we saw turning monks at Treves, in the time of St. Augustine, may, if they lived to be old men, have given sage counsel again and again to fierce German knights and kinglets, who had dispossessed the rich and effeminate landowners of their estates, and sold them, their wives, and children, in gangs by the side of their own slaves. Only the Roman who had turned monk would probably escape that fearful ruin; and he would remain behind, while the rest of his race was enslaved or swept away, as a seed of Christianity and of civilization, destined to grow and spread, and bring the wild conquerors in due time into the kingdom of G.o.d.

For the first century or two after the invasion of the barbarians, the names of the hermits and saints are almost exclusively Latin. Their biographies represent them in almost every case as born of n.o.ble Roman parents. As time goes on, German names appear, and at last entirely supersede the Latin ones; showing that the conquering race had learned from the conquered to become hermits and monks like them.

ST. SEVERINUS, THE APOSTLE OF NORIc.u.m

OF all these saintly civilizers, St. Severinus of Vienna is perhaps the most interesting, and his story the most historically instructive. {224}

A common time, the middle of the fifth century, the province of Noric.u.m (Austria, as we should now call it) was the very highway of invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom in which Huns, Alemanni, Rugi, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile province, each tribe striving to trample the other under foot, and to march southward over their corpses to plunder what was still left of the already plundered wealth of Italy and Rome. The difference of race, in tongue, and in manners, between the conquered and their conquerors, was made more painful by difference in creed. The conquering Germans and Huns were either Arians or heathens. The conquered race (though probably of very mixed blood), who called themselves Romans, because they spoke Latin and lived under the Roman law, were orthodox Catholics; and the miseries of religious persecution were too often added to the usual miseries of invasion.

It was about the year 45560. Attila, the great King of the Huns, who called himself-and who was-"the Scourge of G.o.d," was just dead. His empire had broken up. The whole centre of Europe was in a state of anarchy and war; and the hapless Romans along the Danube were in the last extremity of terror, not knowing by what fresh invader their crops would be swept off up to the very gates of the walled towers which were their only defence: when there appeared among them, coming out of the East, a man of G.o.d.

Who he was, he would not tell. His speech showed him to be an African Roman-a fellow-countryman of St. Augustine-probably from the neighbourhood of Carthage. He had certainly at one time gone to some desert in the East, zealous to learn "the more perfect life." Severinus, he said, was his name; a name which indicated high rank, as did the manners and the scholars.h.i.+p of him who bore it. But more than his name he would not tell. "If you take me for a runaway slave," he said, smiling, "get ready money to redeem me with when my master demands me back." For he believed that they would have need of him; that G.o.d had sent him into that land that he might be of use to its wretched people.

And certainly he could have come into the neighbourhood of Vienna at that moment for no other purpose than to do good, unless he came to deal in slaves.

He settled first at a town called by his biographer Casturis; and, lodging with the warden of the church, lived quietly the hermit life.

Meanwhile the German tribes were prowling round the town; and Severinus, going one day into the church, began to warn the priests and clergy and all the people that a destruction was coming on them which they could only avert by prayer and fasting and the works of mercy. They laughed him to scorn, confiding in their lofty Roman walls, which the invaders-wild hors.e.m.e.n, who had no military engines-were unable either to scale or batter down. Severinus left the town at once, prophesying, it was said, the very day and hour of its fall. He went on to the next town, which was then closely garrisoned by a barbarian force, and repeated his warning there: but while the people were listening to him, there came an old man to the gate, and told them how Casturis had been already sacked, as the man of G.o.d had foretold; and, going into the church, threw himself at the feet of St. Severinus, and said that he had been saved by his merits from being destroyed with his fellow-townsmen.

Then the dwellers in the town hearkened to the man of G.o.d, and gave themselves up to fasting and almsgiving and prayer for three whole days.

And on the third day, when the solemnity of the evening sacrifice was fulfilled, a sudden earthquake happened, and the barbarians, seized with panic fear, and probably hating and dreading-like all those wild tribes-confinement between four stone walls instead of the free open life of the tent and the stockade, forced the Romans to open their gates to them, rushed out into the night, and in their madness slew each other.

In those days a famine fell upon the people of Vienna; and they, as their sole remedy, thought good to send for the man of G.o.d from the neighbouring town. He went, and preached to them, too, repentance and almsgiving. The rich, it seems, had hidden up their stores of corn, and left the poor to starve. At least St. Severinus discovered (by Divine revelation, it was supposed), that a widow named Procula had done as much. He called her out into the midst of the people, and asked her why she, a n.o.ble woman and free-born, had made herself a slave to avarice, which is idolatry. If she would not give her corn to Christ's poor, let her throw it into the Danube to feed the fish, for any gain from it she would not have. Procula was abashed, and served out her h.o.a.rds thereupon willingly to the poor; and a little while afterwards, to the astonishment of all, vessels came down the Danube, laden with every kind of merchandise. They had been frozen up for many days near Pa.s.sau, in the thick ice of the river Enns: but the prayers of G.o.d's servant (so men believed) had opened the ice-gates, and let them down the stream before the usual time.

Then the wild German hors.e.m.e.n swept around the walls, and carried off human beings and cattle, as many as they could find. Severinus, like some old Hebrew prophet, did not shrink from advising hard blows, where hard blows could avail. Mamertinus, the tribune, or officer in command, told him that he had so few soldiers, and those so ill-armed, that he dare not face the enemy. Severinus answered, that they should get weapons from the barbarians themselves; the Lord would fight for them, and they should hold their peace: only if they took any captives they should bring them safe to him. At the second milestone from the city they came upon the plunderers, who fled at once, leaving their arms behind. Thus was the prophecy of the man of G.o.d fulfilled. The Romans brought the captives back to him unharmed. He loosed their bonds, gave them food and drink, and let them go. But they were to tell their comrades that, if ever they came near that spot again, celestial vengeance would fall on them, for the G.o.d of the Christians fought from heaven in his servants' cause.

So the barbarians trembled, and went away. And the fear of St. Severinus fell on all the Goths, heretic Arians though they were; and on the Rugii, who held the north bank of the Danube in those evil days. St. Severinus, meanwhile, went out of Vienna, and built himself a cell at a place called "At the Vineyards." But some benevolent impulse-Divine revelation, his biographer calls it-prompted him to return, and build himself a cell on a hill close to Vienna, round which other cells soon grew up, tenanted by his disciples. "There," says his biographer, "he longed to escape the crowds of men who were wont to come to him, and cling closer to G.o.d in continual prayer: but the more he longed to dwell in solitude, the more often he was warned by revelations not to deny his presence to the afflicted people." He fasted continually; he went barefoot even in the midst of winter, which was so severe, the story continues, in those days around Vienna, that wagons crossed the Danube on the solid ice: and yet, instead of being puffed-up by his own virtues, he set an example of humility to all, and bade them with tears to pray for him, that the Saviour's gifts to him might not heap condemnation on his head.

Over the wild Rugii St. Severinus seems to have acquired unbounded influence. Their king, Flaccitheus, used to pour out his sorrows to him, and tell him how the princes of the Goths would surely slay him; for when he had asked leave of him to pa.s.s on into Italy, he would not let him go.

But St. Severinus prophesied to him that the Goths would do him no harm.

Only one warning he must take: "Let it not grieve him to ask peace even for the least of men."

The friends.h.i.+p which had thus begun between the barbarian king and the cultivated saint was carried on by his son Feva: but his "deadly and noxious wife" Gisa, who appears to have been a fierce Arian, always, says his biographer, kept him back from clemency. One story of Gisa's misdeeds is so characteristic both of the manners of the time and of the style in which the original biography is written, that I shall take leave to insert it at length.

"The King Feletheus (who is also Feva), the son of the aforementioned Flaccitheus, following his father's devotion, began, at the commencement of his reign, often to visit the holy man. His deadly and noxious wife, named Gisa, always kept him back from the remedies of clemency. For she, among the other plague-spots of her iniquity, even tried to have certain Catholics re-baptized: but when her husband did not consent, on account of his reverence for St. Severinus, she gave up immediately her sacrilegious intention, burdening the Romans, nevertheless, with hard conditions, and commanding some of them to be exiled to the Danube. For when one day, she, having come to the village next to Vienna, had ordered some of them to be sent over the Danube, and condemned to the most menial offices of slavery, the man of G.o.d sent to her, and begged that they might be let go. But she, blazing up in a flame of fury, ordered the harshest of answers to be returned. 'I pray thee,' she said, 'servant of G.o.d, hiding there within thy cell, allow us to settle what we choose about our own slaves.' But the man of G.o.d hearing this, 'I trust,' he said, 'in my Lord Jesus Christ, that she will be forced by necessity to fulfil that which in her wicked will she has despised.' And forthwith a swift rebuke followed, and brought low the soul of the arrogant woman.

For she had confined in close custody certain barbarian goldsmiths, that they might make regal ornaments. To them the son of the aforesaid king, Frederic by name, still a little boy, had gone in, in childish levity, on the very day on which the queen had despised the servant of G.o.d. The goldsmiths put a sword to the child's breast, saying, that if any one attempted to enter without giving them an oath that they should be protected, he should die; and that they would slay the king's child first, and themselves afterwards, seeing that they had no hope of life left, being worn out with long prison. When she heard that, the cruel and impious queen, rending her garments for grief, cried out, 'O servant of G.o.d, Severinus, are the injuries which I did thee thus avenged? Hast thou obtained by the earnest prayer thou hast poured out this punishment for my contempt, that thou shouldst avenge it on my own flesh and blood?'

Then, running up and down with manifold contrition and miserable lamentation, she confessed that for the act of contempt which she had committed against the servant of G.o.d she was struck by the vengeance of the present blow; and forthwith she sent knights to ask for forgiveness, and sent across the river the Romans his prayers for whom she had despised. The goldsmiths, having received immediately a promise of safety, and giving up the child, were in like manner let go.

"The most reverend Severinus, when he heard this, gave boundless thanks to the Creator, who sometimes puts off the prayers of suppliants for this end, that as faith, hope, and charity grow, while lesser things are sought, He may concede greater things. Lastly, this did the mercy of the Omnipotent Saviour work, that while it brought to slavery a woman free, but cruel overmuch, she was forced to restore to liberty those who were enslaved. This having been marvellously gained, the queen hastened with her husband to the servant of G.o.d, and showed him her son, who, she confessed, had been freed from the verge of death by his prayers, and promised that she would never go against his commands."

To this period of Severinus's life belongs the once famous story of his interview with Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, and brother of the great Onulph or Wolf, who was the founder of the family of the Guelphs, Counts of Altorf, and the direct ancestors of Victoria, Queen of England. Their father was aedecon, secretary at one time of Attila, and chief of the little tribe of Turklings, who, though German, had clung faithfully to Attila's sons, and came to ruin at the great battle of Netad, when the empire of the Huns broke up once and for ever. Then Odoacer and his brother started over the Alps to seek their fortunes in Italy, and take service, after the fas.h.i.+on of young German adventurers, with the Romans; and they came to St. Severinus's cell, and went in, heathens as they probably were, to ask a blessing of the holy man; and Odoacer had to stoop and to stand stooping, so huge he was. The saint saw that he was no common lad, and said, "Go to Italy, clothed though thou be in ragged sheepskins: thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy friends." So Odoacer went on into Italy, deposed the last of the Caesars, a paltry boy, Romulus Augustulus by name, and found himself, to his own astonishment, and that of all the world, the first German king of Italy; and, when he was at the height of his power, he remembered the prophecy of Severinus, and sent to him, offering him any boon he chose to ask.

But all that the saint asked was, that he should forgive some Romans whom he had banished. St. Severinus meanwhile foresaw that Odoacer's kingdom would not last, as he seems to have foreseen many things, by no miraculous revelation, but simply as a far-sighted man of the world. For when certain German knights were boasting before him of the power and glory of Odoacer, he said that it would last some thirteen, or at most fourteen years; and the prophecy (so all men said in those days) came exactly true.

There is no need to follow the details of St. Severinus's labours through some five-and-twenty years of perpetual self-sacrifice-and, as far as this world was concerned, perpetual disaster. Eugippius's chapters are little save a catalogue of towns sacked one after the other, from Pa.s.sau to Vienna, till the miserable survivors of the war seemed to have concentrated themselves under St. Severinus's guardians.h.i.+p in the latter city. We find, too, tales of famine, of locust-swarms, of little victories over the barbarians, which do not arrest wholesale defeat: but we find through all St. Severinus labouring like a true man of G.o.d, conciliating the invading chiefs, redeeming captives, procuring for the cities which were still standing supplies of clothes for the fugitives, persuading the husbandmen, seemingly through large districts, to give even in time of dearth a t.i.the of their produce to the poor;-a tale of n.o.ble work which one regrets to see defaced by silly little prodigies, more important seemingly in the eyes of the monk Eugippius than the great events which were pa.s.sing round him. But this is a fault too common with monk chroniclers. The only historians of the early middle age, they have left us a miserably imperfect record of it, because they were looking always rather for the preternatural than for the natural. Many of the saints' lives, as they have come down to us, are mere catalogues of wonders which never happened, from among which the antiquary must pick, out of pa.s.sing hints and obscure allusions, the really important facts of the time,-changes political and social, geography, physical history, the manners, speech, and look of nations now extinct, and even the characters and pa.s.sions of the actors in the story. How much can be found among such a list of wonders, by an antiquary who has not merely learning but intellectual insight, is proved by the admirable notes which Dr. Reeves has appended to Ad.a.m.nan's life of St. Columba: but one feels, while studying his work, that, had Ad.a.m.nan thought more of facts and less of prodigies, he might have saved Dr. Reeves the greater part of his labour, and preserved to us a ma.s.s of knowledge now lost for ever.

And so with Eugippius's life of St. Severinus. The reader finds how the man who had secretly celebrated a heathen sacrifice was discovered by St.

Severinus, because, while the tapers of the rest of the congregation were lighted miraculously from heaven, his taper alone would not light; and pa.s.ses on impatiently, with regret that the biographer omits to mention what the heathen sacrifice was like. He reads how the Danube dared not rise above the mark of the cross which St. Severinus had cut upon the posts of a timber chapel; how a poor man, going out to drive the locusts off his little patch of corn instead of staying in the church all day to pray, found the next morning that his crop alone had been eaten, while all the fields around remained untouched. Even the well-known story, which has a certain awfulness about it, how St. Severinus watched all night by the bier of the dead priest Silvinus, and ere the morning dawned bade him in the name of G.o.d speak to his brethren; and how the dead man opened his eyes, and Severinus asked him whether he wished to return to life, and he answered complainingly, "Keep me no longer here; nor cheat me of that perpetual rest which I had already found," and so, closing his eyes once more, was still for ever:-even such a story as this, were it true, would be of little value in comparison with the wisdom, faith, charity, sympathy, industry, utter self-sacrifice, which formed the true greatness of such a man as Severinus.

At last the n.o.ble life wore itself out. For two years Severinus had foretold that his end was near; and foretold, too, that the people for whom he had spent himself should go forth in safety, as Israel out of Egypt, and find a refuge in some other Roman province, leaving behind them so utter a solitude, that the barbarians, in their search for the hidden treasures of the civilization which they had exterminated, should dig up the very graves of the dead. Only, when the Lord willed that people to deliver them, they must carry away his bones with them, as the children of Israel carried the bones of Joseph.

Then Severinus sent for Feva, the Rugian king, and Gisa, his cruel wife; and when he had warned them how they must render an account to G.o.d for the people committed to their charge, he stretched his hand out to the bosom of the king. "Gisa," he asked, "dost thou love most the soul within that breast, or gold and silver?" She answered that she loved her husband above all. "Cease then," he said, "to oppress the innocent: lest their affliction be the ruin of your power."

Severinus' presage was strangely fulfilled. Feva had handed over the city of Vienna to his brother Frederic,-"poor and impious," says Eugippius. Severinus, who knew him well, sent for him, and warned him that he himself was going to the Lord; and that if, after his death, Frederic dared touch aught of the substance of the poor and the captive, the wrath of G.o.d would fall on him. In vain the barbarian pretended indignant innocence; Severinus sent him away with fresh warnings.

"Then on the nones of January he was smitten slightly with a pain in the side. And when that had continued for three days, at midnight he bade the brethren come to him." He renewed his talk about the coming emigration, and entreated again that his bones might not be left behind; and having bidden all in turn come near and kiss him, and having received the sacrament of communion, he forbade them to weep for him, and commanded them to sing a psalm. They hesitated, weeping. He himself gave out the psalm, "Praise the Lord in his saints, and let all that hath breath praise the Lord;" and so went to rest in the Lord.

No sooner was he dead than Frederic seized on the garments kept in the monastery for the use of the poor, and even commanded his men to carry off the vessels of the altar. Then followed a scene characteristic of the time. The steward sent to do the deed shrank from the crime of sacrilege. A knight, Anicia.n.u.s by name, went in his stead, and took the vessels of the altar. But his conscience was too strong for him.

Trembling and delirium fell on him, and he fled away to a lonely island, and became a hermit there. Frederic, impenitent, swept away all in the monastery, leaving nought but the bare walls, "which he could not carry over the Danube." But on him, too, vengeance fell. Within a month he was slain by his own nephew. Then Odoacer attacked the Rugii, and carried off Feva and Gisa captive to Rome. And then the long-promised emigration came. Odoacer, whether from mere policy (for he was trying to establish a half-Roman kingdom in Italy), or for love of St. Severinus himself, sent his brother Onulf to fetch away into Italy the miserable remnant of the Danubian provincials, to be distributed among the wasted and unpeopled farms of Italy. And with them went forth the corpse of St.

Severinus, undecayed, though he had been six years dead, and giving forth exceeding fragrance, though (says Eugippius) no embalmer's hand had touched it. In a coffin, which had been long prepared for it, it was laid on a wagon, and went over the Alps into Italy, working (according to Eugippius) the usual miracles on the way, till it found a resting-place near Naples, in that very villa of Lucullus at Misenum, to which Odoacer had sent the last Emperor of Rome to dream his ign.o.ble life away in helpless luxury.

So ends this tragic story. Of its substantial truth there can be no doubt. The miracles recorded in it are fewer and less strange than those of the average legends-as is usually the case when an eye-witness writes.

And that Eugippius was an eye-witness of much which he tells, no one accustomed to judge of the authenticity of doc.u.ments can doubt, if he studies the tale as it stands in Pez. {238} As he studies, too, he will perhaps wish with me that some great dramatist may hereafter take Eugippius's quaint and rough legend, and shape it into immortal verse.

For tragic, in the very nighest sense, the story is throughout. M.

Ozanam has well said of that death-bed scene between the saint and the barbarian king and queen-"The history of invasions has many a pathetic scene: but I know none more instructive than the dying agony of that old Roman expiring between two barbarians, and less touched with the ruin of the empire than with the peril of their souls." But even more instructive, and more tragic also, is the strange coincidence that the wonder-working corpse of the starved and barefooted hermit should rest beside the last Emperor of Rome. It is the symbol of a new era. The kings of this world have been judged and cast out. The empire of the flesh is to perish, and the empire of the spirit to conquer thenceforth for evermore.

But if St. Severinus's labours in Austria were in vain, there were other hermits, in Gaul and elsewhere, whose work endured and prospered, and developed to a size of which they had never dreamed. The stories of these good men may be read at length in the Bollandists and Surius: in a more accessible and more graceful form in M. de Montalembert's charming pages. I can only sketch, in a few words, the history of a few of the more famous. Pus.h.i.+ng continually northward and westward from the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, fresh hermits settled in the mountains and forests, collected disciples round them, and founded monasteries, which, during the sanguinary and savage era of the Merovingian kings, were the only retreats for learning, piety, and civilization. St. Martin (the young soldier who may be seen in old pictures cutting his cloak in two with a sword, to share it with a beggar) left, after twenty campaigns, the army into which he had been enrolled against his will, a conscript of fifteen years old, to become a hermit, monk, and missionary. In the desert isle of Gallinaria, near Genoa, he lived on roots, to train himself for the monastic life; and then went north-west, to Poitiers, to found Liguge (said to be the most ancient monastery in France), to become Bishop of Tours, and to overthrow throughout his diocese, often at the risk of his life, the sacred oaks and Druid stones of the Gauls, and the temples and idols of the Romans. But he-like many more-longed for the peace of the hermit's cell; and near Tours, between the river Loire and lofty cliffs, he hid himself in a hut of branches, while his eighty disciples dwelt in caves of the rocks above, clothed only in skins of camels. He died in A.D. 397, at the age of eighty-one, leaving behind him, not merely that famous monastery of Marmontier (Martini Monasterium), which endured till the Revolution of 1793, but, what is infinitely more to his glory, his solemn and indignant protest against the first persecution by the Catholic Church-the torture and execution of those unhappy Priscillianist fanatics, whom the Spanish Bishops (the spiritual forefathers of the Inquisition) had condemned in the name of the G.o.d of love. Martin wept over the fate of the Priscillianists. Happily he was no prophet, or his head would have become (like Jeremiah's) a fount of tears, could he have foreseen that the isolated atrocity of those Spanish Bishops would have become the example and the rule, legalized and formulized and commanded by Pope after Pope, for every country in Christendom.

Sulpicius Severus, again (whose Lives of the Desert Fathers I have already quoted), carried the example of these fathers into his own estates in Aquitaine. Selling his lands, he dwelt among his now manumitted slaves, sleeping on straw, and feeding on the coa.r.s.est bread and herbs; till the hapless neophytes found that life was not so easily sustained in France as in Egypt; and complained to him that it was in vain to try "to make them live like angels, when they were only Gauls."

Another centre of piety and civilization was the rocky isle of Lerins, off the port of Toulon. Covered with the ruins of an ancient Roman city, and swarming with serpents, it was colonized again, in A.D. 410, by a young man of rank named Honoratus, who gathered round him a crowd of disciples, converted the desert isle into a garden of flowers and herbs, and made the sea-girt sanctuary of Lerins one of the most important spots of the then world.

"The West," says M. de Montalembert, "had thenceforth nothing to envy the East; and soon that retreat, destined by its founder to renew on the sh.o.r.es of Provence the austerities of the Thebaid, became a celebrated school of Christian theology and philosophy, a citadel inaccessible to the waves of the barbarian invasion, an asylum for the letters and sciences which were fleeing from Italy, then overrun by the Goths; and, lastly, a nursery of bishops and saints, who spread through Gaul the knowledge of the Gospel and the glory of Lerins. We shall soon see the rays of his light flash even into Ireland and England, by the blessed hands of Patrick and Augustine."

In the year 425, Roma.n.u.s, a young monk from the neighbourhood of Lyons, had gone up into the forests of the Jura, carrying with him the "Lives of the Hermits," and a few seeds and tools; and had settled beneath an enormous pine; shut out from mankind by precipices, torrents, and the tangled trunks of primaeval trees, which had fallen and rotted on each other age after age. His brother Lupicinus joined him; then crowds of disciples; then his sister, and a mult.i.tude of women. The forests were cleared, the slopes planted; a manufacture of box-wood articles-chairs among the rest-was begun; and within the next fifty years the Abbey of Condat, or St. Claude, as it was afterwards called, had become, not merely an agricultural colony, or even merely a minster for the perpetual wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d, but the first school of that part of Gaul; in which the works of Greek as well as Latin orators were taught, not only to the young monks, but to young laymen likewise.

Meanwhile the volcanic peaks of the Auvergne were hiding from their Arian invaders the ruined gentry of Central France. Effeminate and luxurious slave-holders, as they are painted by Sidonius Appolineris, bishop of Clermont, in that same Auvergne, nothing was left for them when their wealth was gone but to become monks: and monks they became. The lava grottoes held hermits, who saw visions and daemons, as St. Antony had seen them in Egypt; while near Treves, on the Moselle, a young hermit named Wolflaich tried to imitate St. Simeon Stylites' penance on the pillar; till his bishop, foreseeing that in that severe climate he would only kill himself, wheedled him away from his station, pulled down the pillar in his absence, and bade him be a wiser man. Another figure, and a more interesting one, is the famous St. Goar; a Gaul, seemingly (from the recorded names of his parents) of n.o.ble Roman blood, who took his station on the Rhine, under the cliffs of that Lurlei so famous in legend and ballad as haunted by some fair fiend, whose treacherous song lured the boatmen into the whirlpool at their foot. To rescue the s.h.i.+pwrecked boatmen, to lodge, feed, and if need be clothe, the travellers along the Rhine bank, was St. Goar's especial work; and Wandelbert, the monk of Prum, in the Eifel, who wrote his life at considerable length, tells us how St. Goar was accused to the Archbishop of Treves as a hypocrite and a glutton, because he ate freely with his guests; and how his calumniators took him through the forest to Treves; and how he performed divers miracles, both on the road and in the palace of the Archbishop, notably the famous one of hanging his cape upon a sunbeam, mistaking it for a peg. And other miracles of his there are, some of them not altogether edifying: but no reader is bound to believe them, as Wandelbert is evidently writing in the interests of the Abbey of Prum as against those of the Prince-Bishops of Treves; and with a monk's or regular's usual jealousy of the secular or parochial clergy and their bishops.

A more important personage than any of these is the famous St. Benedict, father of the Benedictine order, and "father of all monks," as he was afterwards called, who, beginning himself as a hermit, caused the hermit life to fall, not into disrepute, but into comparative disuse; while the cn.o.bitic life-that is, life, not in separate cells, but in corporate bodies, with common property, and under one common rule-was accepted as the general form of the religious life in the West. As the author of this organization, and of the Benedictine order, to whose learning, as well as to whose piety, the world has owed so much, his life belongs rather to a history of the monastic orders than to that of the early hermits. But it must be always remembered that it was as a hermit that his genius was trained; that in solitude he conceived his vast plans; in solitude he elaborated the really wise and n.o.ble rules of his, which he afterwards carried out as far as he could during his lifetime in the busy world; and which endured for centuries, a solid piece of practical good work. For the existence of monks was an admitted fact; even an admitted necessity: St. Benedict's work was to tell them, if they chose to be monks, what sort of persons they ought to be, and how they ought to live, in order to fulfil their own ideal. In the solitude of the hills of Subiaco, above the ruined palace of Nero, above, too, the town of Nurscia, of whose lords he was the last remaining scion, he fled to the mountain grotto, to live the outward life of a wild beast, and, as he conceived, the inward life of an angel. How he founded twelve monasteries; how he fled with some of his younger disciples, to withdraw them from the disgusting persecutions and temptations of the neighbouring secular clergy; how he settled himself on the still famous Monte Ca.s.sino, which looks down upon the Gulf of Gaeta, and founded there the "Archi-Monasterium of Europe," whose abbot was in due time first premier baron of the kingdom of Naples,-which counted among its dependencies {245} four bishoprics, two princ.i.p.alities, twenty earldoms, two hundred and fifty castles, four hundred and forty towns or villages, three hundred and thirty-six manors, twenty-three seaports, three isles, two hundred mills, three hundred territories, sixteen hundred and sixty-two churches, and at the end of the sixteenth century an annual revenue of 1,500,000 ducats,-are matters which hardly belong to this volume, which deals merely with the lives of hermits.