SAINTLY WORKERS.
 
 SAhN 7 TLY WORKERS 
 
 ftit f mtm f Minns 
 
 DELIVERED IN ST. ANDREWS. HOLBORN, 
 MARCH AND APRIL, 1878 
 
 FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., 
 
 Canon of Westminster, 
 
 CJiaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, 
 
 Rector of St. Rlargare? s, Westminster, 
 
 Late Master of Marlbnrtmrh Col/eg* , Hulscan Lecturer. a>ui FMoi 
 Trinity College, Cambridge 
 
 JTonbott 
 M A C M I L L A N A N D C O. 
 
 iP 7 8 
 
 [77te Right oj Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.}
 
 LONDON ! 
 
 K. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOB 
 BREAD STREET HILL, B.C.
 
 DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 MY DEAR CANON WESTCOTT, 
 
 Ten years ago, when I had the happiness 
 of being your colleague at Harrow, you preached 
 in the School Chapel a sermon which exercised 
 a very powerful influence not only on my ima- 
 gination, but also, I hope, by God's blessing, on 
 my views of life. At the request of some who 
 heard it, you printed although you did not 
 consent to publish that sermon. But even 
 after the lapse of ten years I should not require 
 the printed page to recall the outline of the 
 thoughts about " Disciplined Life " which you 
 then wished to impress upon your youthful 
 audience. 
 
 2015239
 
 vi D ED 1C A TOR Y LE TTER. 
 
 To that sermon is mainly due the present 
 little volume. If by the blessing of Him 
 without whose blessing all efforts are vain, any 
 good results have followed from the delivery 
 of these Lectures, or should follow from their 
 publication, you will perhaps be reminded of 
 the ancient promise, "Cast thy bread upon 
 the waters : for thou shalt find it after many 
 days. " 
 
 This is the reason why I could not do other- 
 wise than ask you to let me allow myself the 
 pleasure of connecting your name with a volume 
 in no way worthy of such an honour, except 
 from the fact that it breathes sincere convic- 
 tions on the subjects with which it deals, and 
 that those convictions are, at any rate in their 
 main outlines, in sympathy with your own. 
 
 It would be presumption on my part to speak 
 of the debt of gratitude which, in common with 
 the whole Church, I owe to your writings ; but 
 let me here thankfully record the yet deeper 
 personal debt which I owe to your influence
 
 DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 and example during the years when we worked 
 together. You then sowed the germ from which 
 this little book has sprung, and you, at least, 
 will receive with kindness any portion, however 
 trivial, of ripened grain. If the ears be thin, 
 and if there be scarlet poppies amid the corn, 
 others will set it down, not to the sowing, but 
 to the inherent poverty of the soil on which 
 the good seed fell ; 
 
 ' ' Grandia saepe quibus mandavimus hordea sulcis 
 Infelix lolium et steriles nascuntur avenne." 
 
 I am, 
 My dear Westcott, 
 
 Very sincerely yours, 
 
 F. W. FARRAR.
 
 ' ' The old order changeth, giving place to the new, 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 
 
 TENNYSON, Morte <T Arthur. 
 
 "As princes, after certain periods, change the emblems on 
 their coins, choosing sometimes the lion, at others stars or angels, 
 for the die, and endeavouring to give a higher value to the gold 
 by the striking character of the impression, so God has made 
 piety assume these novel and varied forms of life, like so many 
 new characters, to awaken the admiration not only of the 
 disciples of the faith, but also of the unbelieving world." 
 THEODORET. Hist. Rel, 25 (ap. NEANDER, Ch. Hist. iii. 345).
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THIS little book is of the humblest and most 
 unpretending character. 
 
 Since my own church was closed for restora- 
 tion I was able to accept an invitation from 
 my kind friend the Rev. H. J. S. Blunt, Rector 
 of St. Andrew's, Holborn, to deliver some of 
 the Thursday Evening Lent Lectures in that 
 church. 1 The audience consisted largely of 
 men, and especially of young men from some 
 of the neighbouring city firms. As it was 
 
 1 I cannot let this book appear without offering to the Rector 
 of St. Andrew's my warm thanks for the advice and sympathy 
 which enable me to look back with so much happiness to those 
 five evenings spent in his Church and Rectory.
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 understood that entire latitude was permitted 
 in the choice of the subject, and as Canon 
 Barry had delivered a course the year before 
 on Ecclesiastical History, I gladly seized the 
 opportunity of saying a few simple words upon 
 the lessons which we may learn from past ideals 
 of holiness. The Lectures excited some interest, 
 and friends on whose judgment I could rely 
 were so decidedly of opinion that their publica- 
 tion would be useful to those who heard them, 
 and to many more who did not, that after a 
 little natural reluctance I decided to place 
 them in the hands of Messrs. Macmillan. 
 They will, I hope, be the last sermons which 
 I shall publish for some time to come. 
 
 It ought to be needless for me to say that 
 these Lectures were not suggested by any 
 sympathy for the peculiar features of mediaeval 
 religion. I desired to call attention to the 
 lives of men preeminent for goodness ; but
 
 PREFACE. xiii 
 
 yet I have repeatedly warned my readers to 
 beware of their intellectual errors, and to see 
 that the attempt to reproduce the mere ex- 
 ternal aspects of their lives would be at once 
 impossible and pernicious. 
 
 I must beg all readers to regard the following 
 pages as nothing more than Lenten Sermons, 
 written and delivered from week to week 
 lectures which aim solely at Christian edifica- 
 tion, and which are in no wise intended for 
 historical disquisitions. That Christian bio- 
 graphy should sometimes be introduced on such 
 occasions into the pulpit is surely desirable, 
 and others may be able to handle it more 
 ably and successfully than has been possible 
 to me. 
 
 I have indicated in the footnotes the books 
 to which I referred in writing the Lectures, and 
 I here mention a few of those which are most 
 easily procurable, for the sake of any who may
 
 xiv PREFACE. 
 
 desire to read further on the subjects on which 
 I have touched. Neander's and Gieseler's Eccle- 
 siastical Histories, Montalembert's Monks of the 
 West, Dean Milman's History of Christianity 
 and Latin Christianity, Archbishop Trench's 
 Medieval Church History and Kenan's Etudes 
 Religieuses, were useful for all the Lectures, 
 and especially for the first. For the second little 
 more was needed than Canon Kingsley's ad- 
 mirable volume on the Hermits, in which he 
 translates large parts of the lives of St. Antony 
 by St. Athanasius, and of the Hermit Saint Paul 
 by St. Jerome. For the third I consulted, 
 among other books, the charming pictures of 
 monastic life in Dean Church's St. Anselm and 
 Mr. Morison's St. Bernard, Froude's Short 
 Studies, Mrs. Jameson's Art Legends of the 
 Monastic Orders, Mr. Kenelm Digby's Mores 
 CatJiolici, and Broad Stone of Honour, and the 
 Lives of Lacordaire by Foisset, Montalernbert
 
 PREFACE. X v 
 
 Miss Green well and Father Chocarne. For 
 the fourth I read the tenth, eleventh, and 
 twelfth cantos of Dante's Paradiso, Mrs. Oli- 
 phant's St. Francis of Assissi, and Ozanam's 
 Etudes Germaniques and Les Poctes Fran- 
 ciscains. For the fifth Sir J. Stephen's Lectures 
 on Ecclesiastical Biography, Maclear's Apostles 
 of Medieval Europe, Miss Yonge's Pioneers 
 and Founders, and the biographies of Dr. 
 Livingstone, Bishop Mackenzie, and Bishop 
 Coleridge Patteson. 
 
 I have here touched on subjects respecting 
 which all Christians are, I trust, agreed; and 
 I pray that God's blessing may attend words 
 written with the sole desire to promote sim- 
 plicity of life and sincerity of heart If from 
 the perusal of the following pages any reader 
 should be led to see how deep a moral and 
 spiritual benefit he may derive from study- 
 ing in a right and humble spirit the lives
 
 xvi PREFACE. 
 
 of the "heroes of unselfishness" in every age 
 of Christianity, my object will have been 
 well fulfilled. It will have been still more 
 amply and blessedly fulfilled if any youth- 
 ful reader become better prepared to face the 
 trials and temptations of future years by 
 learning that 
 
 " Self -reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
 These three alone lead life to sovereign power ; " 
 
 and that these can only be attained by follow- 
 ing God's blessed saints, in all virtuous and 
 godly living, along that way of the cross 
 which was pointed out to us by the " King 
 of Saints " Jesus Christ our Lord. 
 
 ST. MARGARET'S RECTORY, WESTMINSTER, 
 Easter, 1878.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 PAGE 
 THE MARTYRS I 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 THE HERMITS 33 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 THE MONKS 69 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 THE EARLY FRANCISCANS 115 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 THE MISSIONARIES 155 
 
 APPENDIX 193 
 
 INDEX 197 
 
 b
 
 SAINTLY WORKERS. 
 
 "Sanctis qui sunt in terra ejus ; mirincavit omnes voluntates 
 meas in eis." PSALM xvi. 3.
 
 SERMON I. 
 THE MARTYRS. 
 
 ernrc M^x^'pAc erryc Oeof. 
 
 IGNATIUS, ad Smyrn. 4.
 
 THE MARTYRS. 
 
 6t?oi ndprvpes of vvv roC Xpwrov TrdpeSpoi Kal 
 /as avrov KOLVWVO'I. DlONYS. ALEX. ap. Euseb. \i. 42. 
 
 " Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, 
 it profiteth me nothing." I COR. xiii. 3. 
 
 " And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are 
 these that are arrayed in white robes ? and whence came they ? 
 And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, 
 These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have 
 washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the 
 Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve 
 Him day and night in His temple : and He that sitteth on the 
 throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, 
 neither thirst any more ; neither shall the sun light on them, nor 
 any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne 
 shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of 
 waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'' 
 REV. vii. 13-17. 
 
 B 2
 
 SERMON I. 1 
 
 THE MARTYRS. 
 
 MATT. x. 39. 
 He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it. 
 
 I HAVE been asked on these Lenten evenings 
 to bring before you some of the past ideals of 
 holy work and noble testimony in the history 
 of the Christian Church, and I wish, with 
 God's blessing, to do so in a very plain and 
 simple manner ; and this evening we shall 
 speak about martyrs. 
 
 i. You all know, my brethren, that the three 
 days which immediately follow Christmas Day 
 are dedicated to the memories of martyrs. It 
 might at first glance seem strange, but it is 
 a fact of which we soon catch the meaning, 
 that after the brightness, the joy, the festivities 
 
 1 Preached at St. Andrew's, Ilolborn, Thursday, March 14.
 
 6 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 of so glad a commemoration, we should pass 
 at once, and without pause, to thoughts of 
 agony and persecution. The 26th, 27th, and 
 28th of December are commemorations of 
 martyrdom ; first, the day of St. Stephen, 
 martyr both in will and deed ; then of St. 
 John the Evangelist, of whom legend says that 
 he was saved from a caldron of burning oil 
 at the Latin Gate, and who was thus a martyr 
 in will, though not in deed ; then of the Holy 
 Innocents, " flowers of the martyrs whom on 
 the very threshold of the light Christ's perse- 
 cutor swept away as the whirlwind sweeps away 
 the budding rose" 1 martyrs "not by speaking, 
 but by dying " martyrs in deed, but not in 
 will. But the fact ceases to be strange when 
 we recall Christ's own words : " Suppose ye that 
 I am come to give peace on the earth ? I came 
 not to send peace, but a sword ; " and those 
 
 "Salvete, floras marty rum, 
 Quos lucis ipso in limine 
 Christi insecutor sustulit 
 Ceu turbo nascentes rosas." 
 
 PRUDENT. De S. S. Innocentt.
 
 SERM. i.j THE MARTYRS. 
 
 other words attributed to Him by early Christ- 
 ian writers : " He who is near me, is near the 
 fire ; " " Near God, near the sword." l Christ 
 had lived and died ; but how should men hear 
 of Him without a preacher, and how should 
 they preach except they were sent ? " Ye are 
 witnesses of these things," " Ye shall be wit- 
 nesses unto Me," He said to His disciples ; 
 and the word martyr originally meant witness, 
 and nothing more. 2 It was only afterwards 
 that it came to mean a witness to Christ by 
 death. But the essence of all martyrdom is 
 witness to the truth of God ; and though the 
 wild beast bounds no longer upon its victim 
 in the crowded amphitheatre, and the flames 
 feed not on human limbs at the kindled stake, 
 we shall see, I trust, that there are martyrdoms 
 of life no less than of death, and in modern as 
 well as in ancient times. 
 
 1 Luke xii. 51 ; Matt. x. 34; Orig. Horn, in Jerem. iii. 778; 
 Ignat. Ad Symrn. 4 (Wescott, Introd. to Gospels, p. 430). 
 
 - Luke xxiv. 48; Acts i. 8. In Acts xxii. 20; Heb. xii. i, 
 we can see the gradual transition of the word to its secondary 
 meaning.
 
 SAINTL Y WORKERS. [SER.M. i. 
 
 2. The quality which St. Stephen displayed 
 in eminence was courage, and courage is essen- 
 tially the martyr's virtue. But it was not by 
 his death only that this courage was manifested. 
 The mere physical courage which faces death 
 without a shudder is not rare ; it is found 
 in thousands of the most ordinary men. Take 
 a common ploughboy from the hillside and 
 train him as a soldier, and so strong are the in- 
 fluences upon him of the discipline of his life, 
 the presence of his comrades, the eye of his 
 officer, that he will advance unflinching upon 
 the batteries that vomit their cross-fire upon 
 him, though he well knows that not his will be 
 the glory of victory, and that where he falls 
 there will he lie, unknown and unnoticed, on the 
 crimson sod. 1 Far loftier is the courage which 
 knows no other training than the instincts of 
 
 " But tak' him from his native hill, 
 Say, ' Such is royal George's will, 
 
 And there's the foe ; ' 
 His only thought will be to kill 
 
 Twa at ae blow." BURNS. 
 
 There is a similar passage in one of Kossuth's speeches.
 
 THE MARTYRS. 
 
 a manly heart ; and above all the courage which 
 holds out in utter loneliness. Almost any man 
 will confront peril with a multitude; scarcely one 
 in a thousand will stand alone against a multi- 
 tude when they are bent on wrong. Thousands, 
 again, will risk all for a hoary prejudice : only 
 the true martyr souls have the battle-brunt 
 which will abide to the death by a new or a 
 forgotten truth. And this was the courage of 
 St. Stephen. Though only a Hellenist among 
 Hebrews only a deacon among Apostles he 
 had seen deeper into Christianity than any of 
 his brethren. He saw, with perfect clearness, 
 two great principles which dawned but slowly 
 and dimly upon their minds. One was that the 
 Law of Moses as a system was doomed to pass 
 away fading even as the glory faded from his 
 once-illuminated face : the other was that Christ- 
 ianity was to be a free revelation not to Jews 
 only, but to all the world ; that henceforth all 
 mankind was to be a brotherhood, with equal 
 privileges, in the great family of God; that 
 in Christ Jesus there was to be neither Greek
 
 10 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 nor Jew, neither barbarian, Scythian, bond nor 
 free, but Christ all and in all. And since it 
 had been given him to see these truths, and 
 their infinite importance, he was ready even to 
 die for them. It did not damp his ardour to 
 stand utterly alone amid the raging contro- 
 versies of hostile synagogues. His was no mere 
 flaring enthusiasm which smouldered at the 
 breath of danger. He did not even quail when 
 he found himself face to face with the stern 
 menace of the Jewish Sanhedrim. They bent 
 on him their fierce frowns ; they glared on him 
 with angry eyes ; but still his face was as the 
 face of an angel, and his upward gaze saw Jesus 
 standing at the right hand of God. And so he 
 delivered his glowing testimony, uttered his 
 bold rebuke; and, not flinching when they 
 seized him to drag him to his doom even 
 when he lay in anguish under the heaped 
 stones, he struggled to his knees, 1 and praying 
 
 1 Acts vii. 60, 0elr Se T yovara. There is a great beauty 
 (as Bishop Wordsworth points out) in the sonorous epitrite, 
 eKoifji^Qri, with which St. Luke ends the narrative.
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 
 
 for his murderers, " Lord, lay not this sin to their 
 charge," he fell asleep. 
 
 3. So died Christ's earliest martyr ; nor was 
 it long before others followed him. James the 
 son of Zebedee was slain with the sword. James, 
 the Lord's brother, was hurled down from the 
 Temple summit. 1 One by one the Apostles 
 passed to their unrecorded dooms. Thirty 
 years after the death of Christ, Rome was 
 burnt down, and being falsely accused of the 
 crime, the Christians were tied to the stake 
 in the gardens of Nero's Golden House, and 
 while he drove about among the multitude in 
 the guise of a charioteer, the flames were lit, 
 and the ghastly darkness illuminated by living 
 torches, of which each was a martyr in his 
 shirt of flame. 2 St. Peter, it is said, died in 
 the amphitheatre : St. Paul was, perhaps, be- 
 headed on the Appian Way. Slowly, through 
 
 1 Euseb. ii. 23. 
 
 2 A.D. 64. " Ut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies, in 
 usum nocturni luminis, urerentur. " Tac. Ann. xv. 44; cf. 
 Mart. x. 25 ; Juv. i. 155 ; viii. 235 ; Sen. Ep. 14; Tert. Adi'. 
 Nat. 1. 18 ; Ad Mart. 5, &c.
 
 12 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 the cities of Asia, a prisoner chained in turns 
 to ten rough and cruel soldiers, whom he 
 compared to ten leopards, the aged Ignatius 
 journeyed on to be thrown to the wild beasts 
 before the assembled multitudes of Rome. 1 
 To St. Polycarp at Ephesus, as the flames 
 arched over him, the Spirit of God was as 
 a moist whistling wind amid the fire. 2 Chris- 
 tianas ad leones, " The Christians to the lions," 
 became a common cry of the Pagan mob. 
 Old men like Pothinus, young maidens like 
 Blandina, mere boys like St. Pancrasius, cheer- 
 fully, nay, triumphantly, bore torture rather 
 than deny their Lord. St. Perpetua was young, 
 and delicate, and a mother. " Have mercy on 
 thy babe," they said to her : " Have pity on the 
 white hairs of thy father and the infancy 
 of thy child." "I will not." "Art thou then 
 a Christian ? " they said, and she answered, 
 " ' Yes ; ' and " since my father would have led 
 
 1 Ignat. Ad Rom. 5. 
 
 2 Song of the Three Children, v. s. 27. For the incident see 
 Martyr. Polyc, and Milman, History of Christianity, ii. 184 segq.
 
 SKRM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 13 
 
 me away, Hilarianus ordered him to be driven 
 off. . . . Then sentence was pronounced, and 
 we were condemned to the wild beasts; and 
 with hearts full of joy returned to our pri- 
 son." l " Condemned to the wild beasts, and witli 
 Jiearts full of joy returned to our prison ! " Is 
 it not strange ? as though the mention of joy 
 were to a Christian the most natural thing in 
 the world in connection with an imprisonment 
 of terrible cruelty and a death of nameless 
 horror. " Whence," it has well been asked, 
 " came this tremendous spirit, caring, nay, 
 offending the fastidious criticism of our deli- 
 cate days ? " What was it that inspired St. Igna- 
 tius to say, "Now I begin to be a disciple. 
 Whether it is fire, or the cross, or the assault 
 of wild beasts, or the wrenching of my bones, 
 the crunching of my limbs, the crushing of 
 my whole body, let the tortures of the devil 
 all assail me, if I do but gain Christ Jesus." 
 
 1 ActaSS. Perpetuoe et Felicitatis (see Tert. De Anima,'$S). 
 " Magis damnati quam absoluti gaudemus." Tert. Ad Scap. i ; 
 Milman, History of Christianity, ii. 216. 
 
 2 Newman, Grammar of Assent, p. 472.
 
 14 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 Why does Tertullian so boldly write, "Call 
 us Sarmenticii and Semaxii, names derived 
 from the fagots wherewith we are burned and 
 the stakes to which we are tied, these are 
 our robe of victory, our triumphal chariot ! " l 
 You must not think that the martyrs had any 
 spell which secured them an immunity from 
 pain. " They shrank from suffering like other 
 men, but such natural shrinking was incom- 
 mensurable with apostasy." No intensity of 
 torture could affect a mental conviction, and 
 so adequate a support and consolation to them 
 in death was the sovereign thought in which 
 they lived ; so perfect the holy beauty of the 
 maiden as she knelt to await the tiger's leap ; 
 so peaceful the sleep of the young boy, beside 
 his wooden cross, as the morn dawned grey on 
 the grim circle where he was to meet his end ; 
 so radiant was the old man's countenance as he 
 lifted heavenward his trembling hands out of 
 the flame that often and often would the by- 
 standers have taken their places, and far more 
 
 1 Tert. Apolog. 50.
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. I5 
 
 gladly have shared their martyrdom than have 
 sat in guilty glory beside the tyrants who 
 sentenced them to death. 1 
 
 4. And thus, taking Christ at His word, in 
 spite of every agony which they were called 
 on to endure, they found His promise true. 
 In losing their lives they found them ; by 
 giving up all, they received back more than 
 all. There is no proof of this more remarkable 
 than the absence of all gloomy or distressing 
 subjects in the catacombs of Rome. " For a 
 long time peopled with martyrs, ornamented in 
 times of persecution and under the dominion 
 of melancholy thoughts and painful duties, 
 nevertheless," says a modern writer, "they 
 represent in the historic parts only heroic 
 traits, and in the decorative parts only what 
 is pleasing and graceful " the Good Shepherd, 
 the Vintage, fruits and flowers, lambs and 
 doves, nothing but what excites emotions of 
 innocence and joy. In death, even in execution, 
 
 1 Such incidents frequently occur in the narratives of the 
 martyrs.
 
 16 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 early Christians saw only a path to celestial 
 happiness ; and far from associating a dreadful 
 end with horror, they delighted to enliven it 
 with smiling colours, and adorn it with palms 
 and vine-leaves. ..." In the Christian cata- 
 combs there is no sign of mourning, no token 
 of resentment, no expression of vengeance ; all 
 breathes softness, benevolence, charity." 1 To 
 the Christian martyrs to live was Christ, and 
 therefore to die was gain. 
 
 5. But if this was their personal gain, their 
 individual bliss, you will ask, What good end 
 for us and for the world did the martyrs 
 accomplish by their supreme self-sacrifice ? 
 I will try to tell you. I stood once in a 
 little church in Rome, dedicated to St. 
 Stephen, and opened once a year only on 
 his day. It is a circular church, and on its 
 frescoed walls, all round, are painted the grim 
 scenes of centuries of martyrdom. Here, visibly 
 pictured before you, you see how they were 
 stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, 
 
 1 M. d'Agincourt, ap. Milman, History of Christianity, iii. 514.
 
 THE MARTYRS. i 7 
 
 were slain with the sword, wandered about in 
 sheepskins and goatskins, in dens and caves 
 of the earth, being destitute, afflicted, tor- 
 mented : and the writer of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, who thus speaks of them, tells us 
 also and is not the existence of such a 
 church in such a place a pre-eminent witness 
 that so it was? how, through faith, these 
 martyrs subdued kingdoms, wrought righteous- 
 ness, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched 
 the violence of fire, out of weakness were 
 made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to 
 flight the armies of the aliens. One answer 
 indeed to the question " What good they did ? " 
 and an answer of infinite importance to them- 
 selves, would be, as we have seen, that they 
 gained Christ ; that they possessed their own 
 souls in patience ; that they were tortured, not 
 accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a 
 better resurrection. But I do not think that this 
 would have been the thought most immediately 
 prominent in the hearts of the greatest of the 
 martyrs. If St. Paul could say that he could 
 
 C
 
 !8 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 have wished himself accursed from Christ for the 
 sake of his brethren after the flesh, I do not 
 think that his greatest followers looked merely 
 on the world as a great sea of fire, in which, amid 
 the universal shipwreck, they had nothing to do 
 but to seize for safety their individual plank. 
 No ! I think that they knew well that there 
 is " nothing fruitful but sacrifice ; " that the 
 blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church ; 
 that by their death and by their constancy, 
 they were securing the victory of the cause they 
 loved. And so it was. " The angels of martyr- 
 dom and victory," says Mazzini, " are brothers : 
 both extend their protecting wings over the 
 cradle of future life." 1 It was the martyrs \vho 
 mainly won the victory of Christianity, and 
 when " Rome at last found that she had to 
 deal with a host of Scaevolas, the proudest of 
 earthly sovereignties, arrayed in the completest 
 of material resources, humbled herself before a 
 power which was founded on a mere sense of 
 the unseen." 2 Nor did it shake them that they 
 1 Works, vi. 746. a Newman, Grammar of Assent, \. 472.
 
 SERM. i.j THE MARTYRS. 19 
 
 were to die not having seen the victory, as 
 Moses died before his feet had touched the 
 Holy Land. They walked by faith, and not 
 by sight ; and trusting in God, they knew that 
 in due time the victory would come. 
 
 And when Christianity had triumphed in- 
 deed, but grown corrupt, there was still room 
 for martyrs. It was to keep pure the faith of 
 Christ that Savonarola, the great reformer of 
 Florence, faced agony and shame. It was this 
 that nerved John Huss, the great reformer of 
 Bohemia, wearing his cap painted all over with 
 devils, to walk so calmly to the stake. It was 
 this which sustained Martin Luther in his life 
 of stormy conflict against cardinals and kings. 
 It was this that enabled Latimer and Ridley 
 to play the men amid the flames, and to light 
 a candle in England which, thank God, is not 
 yet put out. A mere holiday opinion will 
 never inspire the enthusiasm of conviction ; 
 but mankind will ever yield due honour to a 
 cause for which men are ready to suffer and 
 to die. 
 
 C 2
 
 20 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 6. This then was one good thing which the 
 martyrs did for all the world, they changed the 
 cross of Christ from an emblem of horror and 
 infamy to the proudest of all symbols, to be 
 woven in gold on the banners of armies and 
 set in gems on the crowns of kings. And 
 another grand thing they did was to set the 
 loftiest of all examples ; to bear witness to 
 the most necessary of all truths, a truth to 
 which in these lectures we shall have again 
 and again to recur, and the only truth which 
 can purify a corrupt society or ennoble a selfish 
 world, that there is, in life, something better 
 than ease and comfort, more delightful than 
 pleasure, " more golden than gold," that the life 
 is more than meat, and the body than raiment ; 
 and that man's life consisteth not in the 
 abundance of things which he possesseth. 
 Such men, as has well been said, "create an 
 epidemic of nobleness." 1 Men become better 
 and greater from gazing at their example ; 
 more ready to do and dare ; more willing to 
 
 1 Froude, Short Studies, ii. 15.
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 2 l 
 
 lift their eyes out of the mire of selfishness 
 and the dust of anxiety and toil ; more brave 
 to try whether they too cannot "scale the 
 toppling crags of duty," and hold converse with 
 these their loftier brethren upon the 
 
 " Shining tablelands 
 To which our God himself is moon and sun." 
 
 Through the darknesses and disappointments 
 of life, amid the wars and miseries of history, 
 these high examples glide ever before us 
 like a pillar of fire. And this their power of 
 example by death becomes a power of in- 
 fluence in life. It is with good men as with 
 evil. Evil, as we all know to our cost, at- 
 tracts by its sympatl ies, and those who have 
 once been overcome by it, add, alas ! even 
 unconsciously to its power of attraction. Just 
 as every spark, however small, has its effect, 
 and glows, and gleams, and involves a danger 
 or a possibility of conflagration, even so a 
 spark of evil in the heart of a fellow-man 
 betrays itself to us through the mere power of
 
 22 SAINTLY WORKERS, [SERM. i. 
 
 its existence, and can, even without words, 
 make itself intelligible. Well, so is it also, 
 thank God, with good. "The heroic self- 
 sacrifice of one single man may not only rally 
 a whole wavering host, but may even flash 
 like lightning through the centuries, and kindle 
 in a whole nation a flame of holy enthusiasm." 1 
 You have heard the story of the battle of 
 Sempach. The Swiss were fighting the 
 Austrians, and strove in vain to break at any 
 single point the serried, impenetrable phalanx 
 of Austrian spears. Then one man, Arnold 
 of Winkelried, unknown till then, shouted to 
 his comrades to take care of his wife and 
 children, and that he would break the ranks; 
 and so, rushing forwards, clasped a whole 
 armful of spears into his brawny arms, and 
 dragged them down with him, and fell dead 
 as he received their points into his heart, but 
 broke the line. Over his dead body his 
 comrades charged to victory. It is even thus 
 that many a martyr has burst a path of 
 
 1 Lange, Life of Jesus, ii. 39, E. Tr.
 
 SKRM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 23 
 
 triumph for others into the serried ranks of 
 wrong. It was thus that the obscure monk 
 Telemachus, determining to denounce in the 
 face of guilty myriads the detestable butcheries 
 of the amphitheatre, leapt into the arena before 
 them all, and faced the angry, yelling mob of 
 20,000 spectators and forbade the gladiators 
 to fight, and was struck down and stabbed, 
 and trampled on, and braved the death ; but 
 by that witness and that martyrdom, put an 
 end for ever to those disgusting and cruel 
 shows. 1 It was thus, to take modern instances, 
 that in the face of furious insulting slave- 
 owners, who heaped upon him every form of 
 abuse and calumny, William Wilberforce fought 
 out in the House of Commons the battle of 
 the slave, and, by a life of struggle, put an 
 end for ever to. the infamous traffic in human 
 flesh. It was thus that, in self-sacrifice and toil, 
 spending his whole fortune in the cause of 
 the prisoner and captive, John Howard visited 
 
 1 Theodoret, v. 26. In the martyrologies of Bede, c., he is 
 called St. Almachus.
 
 24 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 the prisons of Europe, and restored them to 
 humanity, and wiped from the sword of justice 
 its most polluting stain. It is thus that even 
 now, in the teeth of angry clamour and sneering 
 prejudice, good men are fighting God's great 
 battle of temperance against that degrading 
 vice of drunkenness which disgraces, defiles, 
 and if the plague be not stayed, will one day 
 ruin our land. In such causes, under such 
 conditions, by such sacrifices, "men become 
 magnetic." They flash in upon guilty nations 
 and slumbering consciences the light of truth. 
 Even in the most corrupt ages there are always 
 more than we suppose, who, in their hearts, 
 rebel against the prevailing fashions ; and of 
 these one takes courage from another, one 
 supports another. Thus there rally round these 
 Elijahs the 7,000 who have not bowed the 
 knee to Baal; communities are formed with 
 higher principles of action and purer intellec- 
 tual beliefs ; and, as their numbers multiply, 
 "they catch fire with a common idea, and a 
 common indignation, and ultimately burst out
 
 SERM. i.l THE MARTYRS. 
 
 into open war with the lies and iniquities 
 of men." l 
 
 7. I could add much more on this subject, 
 but I must not weary you. What I have tried 
 to make you see is that there is some good to 
 the world in the results of martyrdom, in the 
 example of martyrdom ; that the martyrs have 
 been, in fact, the salt of the earth. Have been 
 nay, they are ! For martyrdom is not one, 
 but manifold ; it is often a battlefield where no 
 clash of earthly combatants is heard ; it is often 
 a theatre no wider than a single nameless home. 
 Sometimes it is passive endurance ; sometimes 
 it is active opposition ; sometimes it is the 
 decided warfare against a tyranny : sometimes 
 it is the stout declaration of a truth : but it is 
 always a firm belief in the eternal distinctions 
 between right and wrong ; an evidence of con- 
 viction that there are worse evils in life than 
 pain, and poverty, and persecutions ; and higher 
 blessings than pleasure, and success, and wealth ; 
 worse evils by far than those which the world 
 
 1 See Froude, Short Studies, ii. 15.
 
 26 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM..I. 
 
 dreads, and higher blessings by far than those 
 for which it toils. To have the spirit of a 
 martyr and he who has it will be, in the highest 
 sense, a martyr is to be true at all costs to the 
 best and highest things you know. He who 
 willingly, and with no thought of reward, risks 
 his life to save others ; he who cheerfully 
 braves loss rather than do what he deems dis- 
 honourable ; he who faces persecution rather 
 than abandon what he feels to be right, he 
 has the martyr's heart. The Russian serf who, to 
 save the life of his master's children, leapt out 
 from the sledge among the wolves, into the 
 snow he was a martyr. The American pilot 
 of Lake Erie, who to bring his burning steamer 
 safe to the jetty's side, clung on to the tiller till 
 he fell a blackened corpse, he was a martyr. 
 During the last Chinese war, a private of the 
 Buffs with some Hindoos fell into the hands of 
 the Chinese, and was ordered to perform the 
 kotow ; the Sikhs obeyed, but the soldier, saying 
 that he would not prostrate himself before any 
 Chinaman alive, was killed.
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 2 ; 
 
 "Poor, reckless, rude, lowborn, untaught, 
 
 Bewildered and alone, 
 A heart, with English instincts fraught, 
 
 He yet could call his own. 
 Ay ! tear his body limb from limb, 
 
 Bring cord, or axe, or flame, 
 He only knows that not through him 
 
 Shall England come to shame. 
 Yes ! honour calls, with strength like steel, 
 
 He puts home visions by, 
 Let dusky Indians whine and kneel, 
 
 An English lad could die; 
 And thus, with eyes that would not shrink, 
 
 With knee to man unbent, 
 Unfaltering on its dreadful brink, 
 
 To his red grave he went." 1 
 
 He, too, was a martyr. And every man has 
 some gleam of the martyr-spirit, who encounters 
 any serious peril to save others. Six years ago, 
 on the coast of Scotland, seven young boys 
 rowed out to sea to fish. The boat was too 
 small, and the boys having suddenly gone to 
 one side, she was upset, and all the seven were 
 plunged into the sea, not far from land. One 
 little fellow alone could swim, a boy not yet 
 thirteen years old let his name be recorded 
 
 1 Sir F. II. Doyle.
 
 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 Alexander Sutherland. One after another that 
 boy saved five of his companions. In trying to 
 save the sixth he became himself exhausted 
 and sank to rise no more. The five whom he 
 had rescued were restored to their weeping 
 parents, but the brave little swimmer who had 
 saved his fellows, sank and was drowned, and 
 they laid him in his grave upon the shore. And 
 he, too, was, in his way, a martyr. 
 
 "He dares, and sinks, and dies alone 
 
 With all the saved in view, 
 A Christ among the fisher-lads, 
 
 The ransom of his crew ; 
 Oh ! great young heart, all goodness fence 
 
 Thy grave by yon rough sea ! 
 "Who says the race is dwindling down, 
 
 That owns a lad like thee?" 1 
 
 Let us learn, then, my friends, practically this 
 one lesson. If the hour of martyrdom, of wit- 
 ness, comes to you, will you be ready for it ? 
 It may come in very humble, in very unexpected 
 
 1 These verses, by the Rev. W. Griffiths, are quoted by the 
 Hon. and Rev. W. H. Lyttelton in his Aids to Christian 
 Education.
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 29 
 
 ways. The late chaplain-general of the forces 
 tells us that once a young soldier came to 
 him, and said, that when in his first night in 
 the barracks he knelt down to say his prayers, 
 the others all laughed at him, and flung 
 their boots at him. The chaplain advised 
 him to say his prayers in bed. Next time 
 he met the young soldier, he asked him how 
 the plan had succeeded ? " I did it for a 
 night or two," said the soldier, "but then I 
 thought that it looked like being ashamed of 
 Jesus Christ, and I knelt down again to say my 
 prayers by my bed, but none of the others laugh 
 at me now. On the contrary, they kneel down 
 themselves and say their own prayers." Was 
 not the chaplain wrong ? was not the soldier 
 right ? was not he, too, in his way, a martyr ? 
 Will not you, too, try, each in such ways as 
 God may require your witness, to be a martyr ? 
 If not in proclaiming good, will you not at 
 least try to be God's witnesses in resisting 
 evil ? Will you not feel, will you not say, I 
 too will try, like Stephen, to bear my witness
 
 3 o SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. i. 
 
 to Christ? Tradesman or merchant, tempted 
 by false weights, or gambling speculations, or 
 adulterated goods, will you not go home, and 
 at any cost bear your witness that " It is 
 better to die than to lie ! " You, who, to your 
 own great loss, are tempted by any usage of 
 society to adopt a low, or a base, or a worldly 
 standard, will you not bear witness that at all 
 costs it is better to obey God than to do that 
 which cannot bring God's blessing with it ? 
 Young man, who art assailed by evil passions 
 or evil temptations, when those passions are 
 running riot in your heart, or when your com- 
 panions are trying to make you walk in the way 
 of sinners or sit in the seat of the scornful, will 
 not you bear your testimony that it is better to 
 bear ridicule than to be a blasphemer ; better to 
 face craving than to be a drunkard ; better to 
 suffer anything than to pollute or injure a soul 
 for which Christ died ? O the applications are 
 a thousandfold ! Only be true to your God ; be 
 true to your Saviour ; be true to yourselves ; be 
 true to the highest that you know, and you, too,
 
 SERM. i.] THE MARTYRS. 3 1 
 
 each in your turn, each in your measure, shall 
 have the high honour of helping forward by 
 your example the cause of God, the cause of 
 good you, too, shall be Christ's witnesses you 
 too, shall join the glorious army, and even if 
 you be never called upon to taste the martyr's 
 agony, yet, without resisting unto blood, through 
 the mercy and merit of your Lord and Saviour 
 your hands shall wave the martyr's palm-branch 
 and your brows shall bear the martyr's crown.
 
 SERMON II. 
 THE HERMITS.
 
 THE HERMITS. 
 
 " Solitude is the mother-country of the strong ; silence is 
 their prayer." RAVIGNAN. 
 
 "Solitude, the audience-chamber of God." W. S. LANDOR. 
 rpby fi.6vov &tbv yei/fffOat." FLOTIN. 
 
 " And Wisdom's self 
 Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude ; 
 Where, with her best nurse, contemplation, 
 She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, 
 That in the various bustle of revolt 
 Were ail-to ruffled, and sometimes impaired." 
 
 MILTON, Camus. 
 
 "Non beatum faciunt hominem secreta silvarum, cacumina 
 montium, si secum non habet solitudinem mentis, sabbatum 
 cordis, tranquillitatem conscientiae, ascensiones in corde, sine 
 quibus omnem solitudinem comitantur mentis acedia, curiostas, 
 vana gloria, periculosae tentationis procellae." Yvo DE CHAR- 
 
 TRES, Ep. 192 (MONTALEMBERT, i. 22). 
 
 a.1 t/\i-u ur fj.iv T(Js fv &ffTti SiaTpiftcts ws fjivpluv KaKwv 
 if 8e oSirea d.Tro\mw ij5w7]0r/'." BASIL, Ep. 2. 
 
 D 2
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 THE HERMITS^ 
 
 JER. ix. 2. 
 
 " Oh thai I had in the -wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring 
 men ; that I might leave my people, and go from them I for they 
 be all adulterers ; an assembly of treacherous men" 
 
 THIS cry, wrung from the sad and timid prophet 
 by the desperate iniquities of a decadent people, 
 has in all ages found its counterpart. Four 
 hundred years earlier, amid the voices of the 
 enemy, and the oppression of the wicked, it had 
 been the cry of David, " Oh that I had wings 
 like a dove ! for then would I flee away and 
 be at rest. Lo, then would I wander far off, 
 and remain in the wilderness. I would haste to 
 escape from the stormy wind and tempest." 2 
 
 1 Preached at St. Andrew's, Holborn, Lent, 1878, March 21. 
 
 2 Ps. Iv. 6.
 
 3 8 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 More than twenty centuries later, amid the con- 
 fusions and depravities of the eighteenth century 
 it was the cry of our own despairing and tender- 
 hearted poet, 
 
 "Oh ! for a lodge in some vast wilderness, 
 Some boundless contiguity of shade, 
 Where rumour of oppression and deceit, 
 Of unsuccessful and successful war, 
 Should never reach me more ! My ear is pained, 
 My soul is sick, with every day's report 
 Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. 
 There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart ; 
 It does not feel for man. The natural bond 
 Of brotherhood is severed, as the flax 
 That falls asunder at the touch of fire." 1 
 
 There must be some chord of sympathy in 
 human hearts which vibrates in unison with 
 such sentiments as these, or we should not find 
 them echoed by high and beautiful natures, 
 separated from each other by centuries of 
 human suffering and human wrong. And per- 
 haps this very gathering is a sign that men do 
 sometimes yearn for solitude and rest, for here, 
 and on a week-day evening, in the heart of 
 
 1 Cowper, The Task, Book II.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 39 
 
 London, with the rush and roar of its traffic 
 in our ears, many men, and even many young 
 men, have assembled to listen to such lessons 
 as may be gleaned from the life of the Desert 
 Fathers. What can be more separated by 
 leagues and aeons of outward circumstances 
 and inward sentiment, than is the life of the 
 hermits from our own ? What more unlike their 
 loneliness than the dashing waves of this sea of 
 men ? What more removed from their calm than 
 the feverish throbbing of the world's great beat- 
 ing heart ? What more unlike their poetry, and 
 peace, and contemplation, than " this stern 
 reality of things, this colossal uniformity, this 
 machine-like movement, this sour-visagedness 
 of joy itself?" 1 What more unlike their utter 
 indifference to temporal interests, and earthly 
 cares, than all that we see or hear of around 
 us : these dim careworn faces ; this dismal toil ; 
 this incessant anxiety; these reckless specula- 
 tions ; this mad greed for gold ; this sacrifice, 
 for the supposed gains of life, of all that 
 1 Heine.
 
 40 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 makes life worth living ; this puff and push ; 
 this quackery and imposture ; this gilded 
 luxury of the wealthy ; this ghastly poverty 
 of the poor ; these severe conditions of 
 struggle; these hardly veiled immoralities of 
 pleasure ; all the nominal Christianity, and all 
 the practical heathenism of this vast, teeming, 
 suffering, toiling mass of humanity this London 
 in the nineteenth century after the death of 
 Christ ? What have we, who have our part in 
 such life as this, what have we in common with 
 the " sainted eremites " ? was not their life 
 with its errors, no less than with its noblenesses 
 the dream of a byegone age ; an ideal which 
 we condemn as mistaken ; a torch which has 
 long since smouldered out? Well, lest you 
 should deem the subject wholly unpractical 
 when it is my humble desire that each of these 
 lectures should have a direct bearing on our 
 common lives, let me only at first remind you 
 that one of the noblest characters in the Old 
 Testament as well as one of the noblest in the 
 New, was nothing more or less than a hermit ;
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 41 
 
 in the Old, Elijah, the " lord of hair," l the rough, 
 wild, half-Arab prophet who shattered the 
 monstrous idols of Jezebel ; in the New, John 
 the Baptist, over whom the lips of his Saviour 
 pronounced the unequalled eulogy, " But what 
 went ye out in the wilderness for to see ? A 
 prophet ? yea, and I say unto you, and much 
 more than a prophet ! . . . Among them that 
 are born of women, there hath not risen a 
 greater than John the Baptist." It was in 
 special privileges, not in moral grandeur, in 
 blessings vouchsafed, not in holiness of charac- 
 ter that, "notwithstanding, he that is least in 
 the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." 
 
 2. But we are to speak to-day of those who, 
 under the Christian dispensation, have revived 
 that old ideal, not only in the spirit, but in the 
 letter. And I will first say a few words of the 
 most active founder, and the best type of these 
 the hermit, St. Antony. 2 
 
 1 2 Kings i. 8, "!$? ^3 BiJ. 
 
 2 In the following sketch of the facts of St. Antony's life I 
 have made free use of Canon Kingsley's Hermits, in which
 
 42 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 St. Antony was born of noble and wealthy 
 parents, in Egypt, about the year 251. Even as 
 a boy he was simple and serious ; and he and 
 his sister, being left orphans at an early age, 
 kept house together. The next incident in his 
 life finds its parallel in other lives of the saints. 
 One day in church he was struck by the words 
 of Jesus, "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell all 
 thou hast, and give to the poor ; and come 
 follow me and thou shalt have treasure in 
 heaven." Not considering whether that was a 
 special command or no, he took Christ at His 
 word, sold his estate and property, and gave 
 all to the poor, except a small amount which 
 he retained for his sister. Once more, in church, 
 the words " Take no thought of the morrow," 
 smote his conscience. He gave up the rest of 
 what he had, took his sister to a nunnery, and 
 retired to the outskirts of a little village. There 
 beloved by all, he worked with his hands, 
 prayed continually, and learnt the Scriptures 
 
 delightful little volume large parts of his life are translated from 
 St. Athanasius.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE- HERMITS. 43 
 
 by heart. Like Marcus Aurelius, he also strove 
 to imitate from each good man whom he met 
 his special virtue ; from one his self-denial, 
 from another his courtesy, from another his 
 charity, from another his meekness. Some- 
 times, as was natural, he wavered ; sometimes, 
 for he was still young, he turned to cast a 
 longing, lingering glance at the life which he 
 had left ; sometimes, which was to him the 
 most painful thing of all, he was assailed 
 by the sensual impulses of youth. But by 
 faith, and prayer, and fasting, and by dwell- 
 ing in constant meditation on the greatness of 
 the soul, and on the ennoblement of man by 
 Christ, and on the terrors of future retribution, 
 God helping him, he escaped. And, having 
 thus gained the victory, one night for to these 
 hermits in their emaciation and mysticism visions 
 were naturally numerous he saw the evil spirit 
 cowering at his feet like a black child, who- said 
 to him, " I have deceived many, I have cast 
 down many ; but as in the case of many, so in 
 thine, I have been worsted in the battle."
 
 44 SAINTLY WORKERS, [SERM. n. 
 
 " Who art thou ? " asked Antony ; and it 
 replied in a pitiable voice, " I am the Spirit of 
 Impurity." " Thou art utterly despicable," said 
 Antony ; " thou art black of soul and weak as 
 a child ; nor shall I henceforth cast one thought 
 on thee, for the Lord is my helper, and I shall 
 despise my enemies" ; whereat the black being 
 fled, vanquished and afraid. 1 
 
 But Antony knew far better than to suppose 
 that by one moment's revival, or conversion, or 
 acceptance of a formula he could make his life 
 an easy triumph or endless song. Utterly alien 
 to these old fathers was the promise of perfect 
 assurance held out by some modern teachers to 
 one single paroxysm of overpowering excite- 
 ment. He knew that the evil spirit would 
 return again ; and therefore, like St. Paul, he 
 bruised his body with blows, and led it about 
 as a slave, 2 lest, having conquered in one case, 
 he should be tripped up in others. He ate but 
 once a day, and then bread and water. He 
 
 1 Kingsley, p. 38. 
 
 2 I Cor. ix. 27. viraHTHify /uov rb ffu^ia Ka\ Sov\aycayu.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 45 
 
 slept but little, and mostly on the bare ground. 
 At last he went and made his home alone in 
 the village tombs. There he suffered at once 
 needlessly and terribly. Nature, in accordance 
 with her own inevitable laws, revenged herself on 
 a life which, however nobly meant, was so unna- 
 tural in its conditions. Haunted amid the pangs 
 of hunger and the deliriums of fever by the 
 painted imagery of those immemorial sepul- 
 chres, 1 in every physical pang, in every dis- 
 ordered thought, he seemed to see the hideous 
 faces and feel the unsparing blows of visible 
 demons. But God dealt mercifully with a life 
 which was utterly sincere, and amid visions 
 which would have tempted him by gold or 
 silver, or hideous noises, or unhallowed thoughts, 
 he heard holy encouragements, and thrilled with 
 inward consolations. Supported by all that he 
 believed, undaunted by all that he had endured, 
 at the age of thirty-five he retired to a moun- 
 tain-cave for twenty years to perfect in prayer 
 
 1 This is Kingsley's very ingenious and probable suggestion. 
 Hermits, p. 42.
 
 46 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 and solitude the purity of his soul. Before the 
 close of that period many inquirers had visited 
 him, many who wished to be his disciples 
 gathered around him ; and at the end of it, 
 still hale and happy, he came forth, and after 
 strengthening martyrs and confessors in a time 
 of persecution, retired once more into the 
 farthest desert, and under a high mountain, 
 among a few neglected palms, and by a spring 
 of water sweet and cold, in the midst of wild 
 beasts that did not harm him, he tilled himself a 
 little garden, and there dwelt in meditation and 
 peace. Casting out devils, advising all who 
 came to him, training brethren who were to be 
 his followers, uttering many a wise counsel, and, 
 in the belief of his contemporaries, working many 
 a miracle, he lived till extreme old age, retaining 
 his grace of countenance and his humility of 
 soul, his cheek still ruddy, his eye undimmed, 
 his natural force unabated. At last he saw 
 that " it was time for him to set sail, for he was 
 a hundred and five years old " ; and so bequeath- 
 ing to Athanasius his sheepskin cloak and
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 47 
 
 saying, " I perceive that I am called by the 
 Lord," he gently, and sweetly, and humbly 
 died. 
 
 3. Now was this a life which you and I can 
 venture to judge or to ridicule ? Was this life, 
 in the cave and the desert, an absurd life, an 
 erroneous life, a superstitious life, a life utterly 
 ignorant of what is the will of God towards 
 man ? Or was it, with all its imperfect know- 
 ledge, a noble and a worthy life, and a life 
 from the contemplation of which we all may 
 profit, and a life which had learnt, and learnt 
 worthily, some of the greatest truths and prin- 
 ciples which were taught us by Christ our Lord ? 
 My brethren, small indeed is the chance that 
 any one of us will be tempted to act in the 
 most distant degree as did St. Antony, or to 
 imitate the hundredth part of his self-denials. 
 Much of his conception of religion, we may 
 say with confidence, was mingled with error. 
 He made Elijah his model, but of Elijah as 
 of St. John we may say, as Christ has taught 
 us, that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is
 
 48 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 greater than he greater in revealed knowledge, 
 richer in spiritual blessings. Antony, it may 
 be, failed to realise that man is not born to live 
 alone, that God has made him for society, and 
 not for unbroken solitude ; that, all his life 
 long, man's duty is wider than a care for the 
 salvation of his individual soul ; that, even in 
 matters of religion, selfishness must be ex- 
 cluded; that love to our neighbour is ever 
 mingled with and is the appointed way of 
 manifesting our love to God. We are but 
 half-men, the very best of us. Antony's view 
 of truth was imperfect ; his ideal of life one- 
 sided. He was hampered by that dangerous 
 literalism in the interpretation of Scripture 
 which has been so immense a source of con- 
 fusion and error ; he was probably trammeled 
 by the dark and prevalent dogma as to the 
 all-but-impossible forgiveness of post-baptismal 
 sins ; he had not recognised in all their illimit- 
 able fulness the truths that mercy is better 
 than sacrifice, and that God is love. And yet, 
 when we have made all these admissions, it
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 49 
 
 may remain true that, because he was entirely 
 faithful to the light he had, therefore his life 
 may have been as incomparably superior to 
 any shallow, vulgar, self-indulgent Christianity 
 that would condemn him as the peak of Chim- 
 borazo is superior to the dull, salt ooze of the 
 flat seashore. In the light of this truth the 
 fact that God will judge us by our sincerity, 
 not by our wisdom there vanishes much of 
 the perplexing mystery in the silences of God ; 
 much of our wonder that He does not interfere 
 with does not miraculously interpose to illu- 
 minate whole aeons of honest ignorance and 
 convinced error. If there be enough of kindly 
 light to lead us on each step of life, what 
 matters the thickness of the encircling gloom ? 
 We may know not anything; it may turn out 
 at last that many of our own thoughts of 
 God were as poor and as imperfect as have 
 been those of many of His saints ; but if we 
 have been faithful to the best we know, then 
 we are full sure that He who died to redeem 
 us will judge us by the light we had, not by 
 
 E
 
 50 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. 11. 
 
 the light we had not ; that the Face like our own 
 face will smile on us with pardon and welcome, 
 and the hand of Him who died for us will fling 
 open to us the gates of everlasting life. 
 
 4. For whatever may have been his theoretic 
 errors or his intellectual limitations, St. Antony 
 too, taking Christ at His word, found His 
 promise true, and had, like the martyrs, even in 
 this life, his thousandfold reward. If he lived 
 in the wilderness God prepared him a table in 
 the wilderness, and brightened the barren rocks 
 with heavenly rnanna, and made the desert 
 blossom as the rose. 
 
 i. For note first that, with all its privations, 
 all its struggles, all its terrors in spite of the 
 loneliness in the mountain-cavern and the 
 demon-visions in the painted tomb the life 
 of Antony was a happy life. 
 
 a. It was happy in its solitude. It would not 
 be happy to us ; it would not be happy, and 
 hardly even possible, to any man whose soul 
 was not deeply absorbed in things eternal and 
 unseen. It is only the best men who know how
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 51 
 
 to live, if need be, alone. There is, indeed, a 
 time in the life of almost every man, " when the 
 weight of existence presses on fevered nerves 
 or weary heart, and they long for some refuge, 
 even on this side of death." But for merely 
 wearied natures, for the surfeit of luxury and 
 the satiety of ambition, solitude would be no 
 refuge. The disappointed worldling, the worn- 
 out voluptuary does not change his nature by 
 changing the scene of his life. " What exile 
 from his country succeeds also in escaping from 
 himself?" asks the wise Epicurean poet. A 
 change of surroundings involves no change of 
 inward disposition. The aim of the true hermits 
 was not to escape from temptation, but to train 
 themselves to conquer temptation. It was not 
 to find a retreat for the feeble, but a training- 
 place for the strong. The motive of the 
 dweller in the Thebaid was not misanthropy or 
 cynicism. 
 
 "They who from wilful disesteem of life 
 Affront the eye of solitude, shall find 
 That her mild nature can be terrible." 
 
 E 2
 
 52 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. 11. 
 
 But so far from such a disesteem of life, it was 
 an intense conviction of its awfulness and value 
 in the sight of God, which was the mainspring 
 of action to an Antony or an Hilarion. That 
 depth of soul, that self-recollection, that stability 
 of holiest purpose, which are almost impossible 
 in the incessant noise, and bustle, and hurry of 
 modern life, made hours, and even years, of soli- 
 tude a blessed boon to those whose spiritual life 
 found sufficient nurture in meditation upon God, 
 in thinking of " the days of old and the years 
 of ancient times." 1 The happiness of their 
 solitude sprang from an intense conviction, and 
 deepened it. To Antony the unseen world was 
 as the seen. " Trouble not at the loss of thy 
 bodily eyes," he said to a blind friend ; " thou 
 hast the eyes with which the angels see, with 
 
 1 " The bearing which thoughts and studies may have upon our 
 acts is not enough considered. . . . Not pathetic only, but pro- 
 found also, and of the most solid substance, was that reply made 
 by the old Carthusian monk to the trifler who asked him how 
 he had managed to get through his life. ' Cogitavi dies antiques 
 et annos aeternos in write habui.' 1 " (Ps. Ixxviii. 5.) Matthew 
 Arnold, The Great Prophecy, p. xxxvi.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 53 
 
 which thou mayest behold God." "For him," 
 it has been said, " the spiritual world was one 
 intense reality. Everywhere he felt himself face 
 to face with the eternal. What are to us figures 
 were to him sensible truths ; and he was strong 
 because he felt the awful grandeur of the conflict 
 in which we, no less than he, are engaged." 1 
 " One night," we are told, " he was thinking of 
 the destiny of the soul, and a voice came from 
 without, 'Antony, arise! come forth, and see.' 
 And when he lifted up his eyes he beheld a vast 
 and hideous shape, reaching to the clouds, and 
 other beings, winged, which strove to rise. And, 
 as they rose, the monster stretched forth his 
 hands to catch them, and if he could not, then 
 they soared aloft, untroubled for the future. 
 And Antony knew that he looked upon the 
 passage of souls to heaven." Such were the 
 convictions which filled his solitude with re- 
 alities, and gave him power to be a teacher 
 of mankind. 
 
 /3. And, as his life was happy in its solitude, 
 1 Westcott.
 
 54 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. 11. 
 
 because he walked by faith and not by sight, 
 so it was happy in its simple healthy conditions. 
 In the manual labour, the useful tillage, the 
 reduction of life to its simplest elements 
 combined with a heart which was at perfect 
 peace with God, there was an element of health 
 which accounts for the gaiety and charm in the 
 look and manner of the first of the hermits, and 
 which made Antony's life as true a life to every 
 purpose which he understood as any life which 
 we gain from all our comfort, and luxury, and 
 incessant activity and change. To him the 
 busy vanities, and reckless competitions, and 
 gnawing jealousies, and fretting cares of these 
 great cities would have been transcendently 
 more unnatural, would have had infinitely less 
 charm, than the long nights passed in such 
 insatiate prayer, that at the dawn he said, " O 
 sun, why dost thou rise already, and turn me 
 from contemplating the splendour of the True 
 Light ; " 1 than the long days, when, looking 
 across the blue waters of the Gulf of Akaba, 
 
 1 Montalembert, Monks of the West.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 55 
 
 he saw far away the granite peaks of Sinai 
 flaming in the hot noon, as though they were 
 still bursting with the splendour of the descend- 
 ing Lord. We who in these cities rarely see 
 a sunrise, or notice a sunset we who see so 
 little of "the unfolding of the flower, or the 
 falling of the dew, or the sleep of the green 
 fields in the sunshine," can hardly imagine what 
 the glory of nature was to those poor hermits, 
 as day by day the gorgeous pageant of the 
 sunlight passed over their heads, and night after 
 night " the stars leapt out, and hung like balls 
 of white fire in that purple southern sky. " l 
 The glories of nature gave to their purified 
 spirits a high and constant communion with 
 Nature's God. 2 
 
 7. And if the life was happy in its solitude 
 and happy in its natural simplicity, it was happy 
 too when once the passions of the rebellious 
 
 1 Kingsley, p. 132. 
 
 2 "A philosopher asked Antony, 'How art thou content, 
 father, since thou hast not the comfort of books ? ' Quoth 
 Antony, ' My book is the nature of created things. In it when 
 I choose I can read the words of God.' " Kingsley, p. 101.
 
 56 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 flesh were subdued in its exemption from many 
 of the assaults of sin ' I have been assailed 
 by three usurers," said the hermit Serapion, 
 "avarice, sensuality, hunger. Of the first two 
 I am rid, having neither money nor passions." 
 And how characteristic and how beautiful is such 
 a simple anecdote as this ! " Let us have just 
 one quarrel, like other men," said one old hermit, 
 who had lived for years in the same cell with 
 another without a disagreement. Quoth the 
 other, " I do not know what a quarrel is like." 
 Quoth the first, "Here, we will put this brick 
 between us, and each say it is ours, and have 
 a squabble over it." They put the brick between 
 them. "It is mine," said one. "I hope it is 
 mine," said the other. " If it is yours, take 
 it," said the first ; * and so these two poor old 
 men could not do what we find it so inconceiv- 
 ably easy to do get up a quarrel between them. 
 Or take this anecdote : 
 
 A brother once brought to St. Macarius a 
 beautiful cluster of fresh ripe grapes. He 
 
 1 Kingsley, p. 142, from Words of the Elders,
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 57 
 
 looked at them wistfully, but seeing another 
 brother at work, determined to give them to 
 him. He too would have liked the sweet, 
 purple, refreshing grapes, but preferred to give 
 them to another. And he gave them to another, 
 and so, each preferring another's enjoyment to 
 his own, they passed through the hands of the 
 little community, and were brought back un- 
 touched to St. Macarius. And he (for how 
 could he eat them when all his brethren had so 
 generously given them up ?) threw them far 
 away. Was not this at least unselfishness ? 
 Had not these men learnt something ? Is there 
 nothing noble in complete superiority to petty 
 indulgences ? Does not " the high desire that 
 others may be blessed " savour of heaven ? 
 Had they not this high happiness that their 
 whole desires were subordinate to the will of 
 God ? * Is the life we 'see around us, its greed, 
 
 1 "A great theologian once discovered that a poor beggar at 
 the door of a church was a man of profound learning. The 
 beggar said that he was perfectly happy ; that he had never had an 
 enemy ; that he had never been unfortunate ; and added, ' Hoc
 
 58 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. 11. 
 
 its self-absorption, its indifference to others, its 
 jealousies, backbitings, eavesdroppings, is it so 
 very beautiful, so very Christian ? is it so very 
 much an ideal to be in love with, that we 
 can afford entirely to look down on the strange 
 lives of the hermits in the wilderness ? 
 
 5. I cannot think so. Let us not sever our- 
 selves by any sharp discontinuity from any class 
 of God's children in the days of old. Each age 
 has its own types of saintliness, its own ideals 
 of the best way of serving God. No good 
 deed, no genuine sacrifice, is ever wasted. If 
 there be good in it, God will use it for His 
 own holy purposes ; and whatever of ignorance, 
 or weakness, or mistake was mingled with it, 
 will drop away as the withered sepals drop 
 away when the full flower has blown. Nor was 
 the life of the hermits mere individualism. It 
 was philanthropic also. It was very far from 
 useless ; it was useful to their own days ; useful to 
 the days that were to follow ; useful for all time. 
 
 unum volo quod vult Deus, ita omnia fiunt ut volo.' " K. Digby, 
 Mores Cathotici, i.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 59 
 
 i. It was useful to their own days. Different 
 remedies are required amid differing conditions. 
 What might in these times be absurd or per- 
 nicious may have been a necessary resource in 
 other ages. The hermits, let us remember, 
 arose during a period of terrible confusion, 
 amid the chaos of a society for which it might 
 well have seemed that the fountains of the great 
 deep were being broken up. There lay the 
 decaying carcase of the institutions of the world 
 of classic paganism ; and on every side was 
 heard the flap of the wings of the gathering 
 vultures. If St. Paul in his day had, because 
 of the present necessity, recommended, to some 
 at least, celibacy rather than marriage, 1 the 
 hermits might well have deemed that their own 
 age was too desperate for the ordinary moral 
 remedies. Art and science were dead ; society 
 had sunk into utter frivolity ; slavery had assumed 
 its most revolting aspects ; cruelty and luxury 
 were triumphant. They might well have thought 
 that the only protest which could be effectual, 
 
 1 I Cor. vii. I, 8, 26.
 
 60 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 the only protest which would startle into atten- 
 tion a dead and wicked world, would be one 
 which should at least unmistakably proclaim 
 the awful dignity, the inestimable value of the 
 individual soul. Merely to preach purity, and 
 unworldliness, and charity seemed hopeless ; 
 and therefore they proclaimed the glory and 
 the necessity of these virtues in the language 
 of such examples as no human beings could 
 misunderstand. As the days of Ahab needed 
 an Elijah, as the days of Herod needed a John 
 Baptist, so the age of the successors of Con- 
 stantine needed, and were leavened by an 
 Antony, an Hilarion, a Macarius, and a Paul. 
 
 ii. Nor did their example die with them. To 
 them we owe, both indirectly and directly, the 
 preservation, in its purity, of the Christian faith. 
 When Athanasius was in danger of death, it was 
 among the hermits of the desert that he found 
 safe refuge from his enemies. It was Athana- 
 sius who wrote the biography of Antony. It 
 was to Athanasius that Antony bequeathed his 
 sheepskin cloak ; and of all the honours of his
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 6 1 
 
 life, Athanasius accounted none greater than 
 this that he had been permitted to commune 
 with the desert saint. And St. Basil, too, 
 and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the eloquent 
 maintainers of the faith, had both been her- 
 mits. When the Emperor Valens sent a great 
 officer to try to win over St. Basil to the 
 Arian heresy, the saint stood firm. " I never 
 met such boldness," said the courtier. " Be- 
 cause you never met a bishop," said Basil. 
 " This bishop is above threats," reported the 
 officer to the emperor, and the orthodoxy of 
 the diocese was saved. 1 Again, it was the life 
 of Antony that tended to the conversion of St. 
 Augustine, as you have already heard. It was 
 St. Jerome, a hermit like Antony, who trans- 
 lated the Bible into Latin. It was Telemachus, 
 a hermit like Antony, who leapt down into the 
 amphitheatre at Rome, and, by his protest and 
 martyrdom, put an end for ever to its hideous 
 butcheries. It was Ephrem the Syrian, a her- 
 mit like Antony, who, with his dying breath, 
 
 1 Kingsley, p. 164.
 
 62 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 raised a needful protest against slavery, when 
 he made the daughter of the Governor of 
 Edessa swear never again to be carried in a 
 litter by slaves, because "The neck of man," 
 he said, "should bear no yoke but that of 
 Christ." 1 
 
 iii. And lastly, for all-time, the hermits have 
 proved by actual life, that perfect purity and 
 perfect self-denial are possible for men ; that 
 virtue, and even charity, are not beyond human 
 attainment; that envy, and hatred, and malice, 
 and all uncharitableness, and the base voices 
 of scandal, and the unmannerly jostlings in the 
 throng, are no necessary elements of human 
 life, but that men can live as they were meant 
 to live together, in mutual love and honour ; 
 that men can utterly do without the things for 
 which man most wildly struggles, and that men 
 need most the very things which they are apt 
 most utterly to disregard. They showed for all 
 time that when any man stood on the dignity 
 of being simply man seeing no greatness but 
 1 Montalembert, Monks of the West,
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 63 
 
 such as he could attain in the sight of God 
 he could be fearless in all danger, and could 
 rise superior to all desires. It is true that their 
 high ideal degenerated in foolish and fanatical 
 hands. The accidents of it were mistaken for 
 its essence, the means which it adopted for the 
 end at which it aimed. When the hermits be- 
 came stylites, living on the tops of pillars ; 
 when they became mere fakeers, " consecrating 
 ignorance, self-torture, and dirt," the salt had 
 lost its savour, and it was time for it to be 
 trodden under foot. The earlier hermits were 
 far more free from these errors, and were suffi- 
 ciently enlightened to admit that their own 
 lives were abnormal and exceptional. More 
 than one story of them shows that while they 
 believed their own mode of life to be eminently 
 pleasing to God, they were not so ignorant or 
 so self-satisfied as to imagine that it was the 
 sole method of aiming at perfection, and were 
 well aware that a holiness even more perfect 
 than their own was attainable in " the common 
 round and the trivial task." A voice came to
 
 64 SAINTL Y WORKERS. [SERM. 11. 
 
 Antony in his cell "Thou hast not yet at- 
 tained to the goodness of a certain currier 
 who lives in Alexandria." Antony took his 
 staff and went to see him. "Tell me thy 
 works, for on thy account have I come out of 
 the desert." "I know not that I have done 
 any good," said the currier ; " and therefore 
 morning and night I say that this whole city, 
 from the greatest to the least, will be sacred 
 before me." And when St. Macarius was told 
 that he too was inferior to two women who 
 lived in Alexandria, he found that they were 
 simply two good wives, married to two brothers, 
 who had done their duty, who had never quar- 
 relled, and never spoken one foul, unkind, or 
 worldly word. Thus we see how it is that even 
 the least in the Kingdom of Heaven might be 
 greater than these: and it was needful that 
 even these saints should be reminded that 
 great and noble as was their self-sacrifice, they 
 yet lived in a world where the ideal of Christ 
 was higher than that of Elijah, and that it 
 was the Father of the spirits of all flesh who
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 65 
 
 had " made love and marriage, and little chil- 
 dren, and sunshine, and flowers, the wings of 
 butterflies, and the song of birds ; who rejoices 
 in His own works, and bids all who truly rever- 
 ence Him rejoice in them with Him." 1 We 
 cannot imitate the outer life of Antony or 
 Serapion ; it is not necessary, it is not desirable 
 that we should; but in an age of much unbelief 
 and irreligion, of much gossip and detraction, 
 of much anxiety and corruption, of much luxury 
 and greed, we can learn their strong horror of 
 sin ; their noble struggle for righteousness ; 
 their entire simplicity of character ; their utter 
 aloofness from the mean and greedy scramble 
 of the world ; the sincerity with which they 
 cultivated the duty of mutual forbearance ; the 
 duty of absolute forgiveness of injuries which 
 they strenuously practised ; their intense con- 
 viction that the life is more than meat, and the 
 body than raiment. And as we learn these 
 good lessons we can hallow, and broaden, and 
 ratify them by the spirit of Him who sat at 
 1 Kingsley, p. 334. 
 
 F
 
 66 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. n. 
 
 the banquets alike of the Publican and of the 
 Pharisee ; who took the little children in His 
 arms and blessed them ; who beautified with His 
 presence and first miracle the humble marriage 
 feast of Cana in Galilee. Whatever other ideals 
 pass away, that one remains in its unchangeable 
 applicability, in its infinite and eternal beauty. 
 The poet sings : 
 
 "The old order changeth, giving place to the new, 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." x 
 
 And another poet sings : 
 
 "The one remains, the many change and pass; 
 Heaven's light alone remains, earth's shadows flee ; 
 Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
 Until death shiver it to atoms." 2 
 
 But in the life of Christ God hath fulfilled 
 Himself for ever, and over that life death has 
 no power. If we may gaze with profit for a 
 moment on God's saints, it is only, after all, 
 because they dimly reflect the image of their 
 
 * Tennyson. 2 Shelley.
 
 SERM. ii.] THE HERMITS. 67 
 
 Saviour. Their example is only precious be- 
 cause it teaches us how they were followers of 
 Him: 
 
 " The Saviour lends the light and heat 
 
 That crowns Mis holy hill ; 
 The saints, like stars around His seat, = 
 Perform their courses still. 
 
 " The Moon above, the Church below, 
 
 A wondrous race they run, 
 But all their radiance, all their glow, 
 Each borrows of its Sun." 1 
 
 Keble. 
 
 F 2
 
 SERMON III. 
 THE MONKS.
 
 THE MONKS. 
 
 Obedience. " It is a great matter to live in obedience to be 
 under a superior, and not to be at our own disposing." 
 
 "It is much safer to obey than to govern." De Imitation: 
 Christi, I. ix. 
 
 Chastity. " What is the reason why some of the saints were 
 .so perfect and contemplative ? 
 
 "Because they laboured to mortify themselves wholly to all 
 earthly desire, and therefore they could with their whole hearts 
 fix themselves upon God, and "be free for holy retirement. . . . 
 
 " But let us lay the axe to the root, that, being free from pas- 
 sions, we may find rest to our souls. " Id. xi. 
 
 Humility. " Here no man can stand unless he humble him- 
 self with his whole heart for the love of God." Id. xvii. 
 
 "If it seem to you impossible to keep many commandments, 
 then keep only this one little commandment, ' Depart from evil, 
 and do good,' Ps. xxxvii. 27." BENEDICT OF ANIANUM. 
 
 "Nihil, si malus est, ambitiosius monacho, nihil avarius 
 invenitur." RAYMOND LULLI, Concord. Vtt. et Nov. Test. 
 ii. 109. 
 
 " Quid prodest fratres exire in eremum, et in eremo habere 
 cor Aegyptium ? Quid prodest Aegypti ranas vitare et obscenis 
 delectationibus concrepare ?" BERENGAR.
 
 " Kav v^v dupav <pi.\offo<piav dffKrjs rav fit \otirSv diro\\vfjtfi'<av 
 dfjLf\jjs, ouSe/xuu/ Kvi.ffri iropi &etf irapptia-iav." CHRYSOtiT. In 
 Ep. I ad Cor. Horn. 2$. 
 
 " Virgines, viduas et maritatas, quae semel in Christo lotae 
 sunt, si non discrepant caeteris operibus, ejusdem esse meriti." 
 Jovinian, i. 3. 
 
 "Habitus et tonsura modicum confert ; sed mutatio morum 
 et integra mortificatio passionum verum faciunt religiosum." Df 
 Imitations Christi, i. 17. 
 
 "The perfeccion of Christian lyving dothe not conciste in the 
 dome ceremonies, weryng of the grey cootte, disgeasing ourselfe 
 after strange fashions, doking and beckyng, in girding ourselfifes 
 with gurdle full of knots. . . . but the very tru waye to please 
 God and to lyve a tru Christian man wytheout all ypocrasie and 
 fayned dissimulation, is sincerely declaryd unto us by our master 
 Christe, his evangelists and apostles." Surrender of Warden 
 and Friars of St. Francis in Stamford. 
 
 " Des Moines, c'est a dire des hommes qui ne songeaient a 
 devenir ni eveques, ni archeveques, ni senateurs, des hommes 
 ayant incessament presente la reponse d'un saint religieux a 
 Tempereur Othon IV. : ' Demandez-moi ce qu'il vous plaira,' 
 lui avait dit 1'empereur, 'et je vous 1'accorderai.' ... 'La seule 
 chose que je vous demande,' reprit le Moine, 'c'est que vous 
 pensiez au salut de votre ame."' FOISSET, Vie de Lacordaire, 
 
 p. 222.
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 THE MONKS} 
 
 GAL. ii. 20. 
 "7am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live." 
 
 " WAKE again," so sings a poet and a good man, 
 whose loss we still lament : 
 
 "Wake again, Teutonic father ages, 
 
 Speak again, beloved primeval creeds ; 
 Flash, ancestral spirit, from your pages, 
 Wake the greedy age to nobler deeds. 
 
 "Tell us how of old our saintly mothers 
 
 Schooled themselves by vigil, fast, and prayer, 
 Learnt to love, as Jesus loved before them, 
 
 While they bore the cross which good men bear. 
 
 "Tell us how our stout crusading fathers 
 
 Fought and died for God and not for gold; 
 Let their love, their faith, their boyish daring 
 Distance-mellowed, gild the days of old. 
 
 1 Preached at St. Andrew's, ilolborn, March 28, 1878.
 
 74 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 "Tell us how the sexless workers thronging, 
 
 Angel-tended, round the convent doors, 
 
 Wrought to Christian faith and holy order 
 
 Savage hearts alike and barren moors. 
 
 "Ye who built the Churches where we worship, 
 
 Ye who framed the laws by which we move ; 
 Fathers, long belied and long forsaken, 
 Oh, forgive the children of your love ! " 
 
 And then, after thus confessing our culpable 
 oblivion of those good and noble elements which 
 shone amid all the errors and darkness of the 
 past, in order to show that it is not the passing 
 form which we value or in any way desire to 
 reproduce, but only the living spirit, he adds : 
 
 "Speak ! but ask us not to be as ye were ! 
 All but God is changing day by day; 
 He who breathes on man the plastic spirit 
 Bids us mould ourselves, its robe of clay. 
 
 "Old decays, but foster new creations 5 
 
 Bones and ashes feed the golden corn; 
 Fresh elixirs wander every moment 
 Down the veins through which the live pait 
 Feeds its child, the live unborn." 1 
 
 I quote these lines, my friends, because they 
 express, in part, the intended object of these 
 
 1 Kingsley, The Saints' Tragedy.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 75 
 
 Lenten Lectures. You will have seen, I trust, 
 that I do not desire merely to interest you in 
 the goodness of past ages, though I would 
 gladly do so ; nor do I desire in any way to 
 revive old errors and obsolete institutions ; nor 
 is it at all my purpose to give you historical 
 disquisitions void of moral significance; least 
 of all do I wish to feed the vanities of our 
 selfish and easy-going natures by showing how 
 much we are superior to famous men of old and 
 the fathers who begat us. No ; but I do earnestly 
 desire that we should together catch some les- 
 sons from the past ; that while we thank God 
 for what we believe to have been a clearer insight 
 into His will, and a truer ideal of His service 
 than that of many of His saintly workers in 
 days of old, we may yet learn from them that 
 deep, intense, self-sacrificing love for Him 
 which ought not only to shelter them from 
 crude and wholesale condemnation, but which 
 ought to make them models to us of a more 
 burning enthusiasm, of a more absolute devo- 
 tion, of a more loving, a more holy, and a more
 
 76 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. HI. 
 
 spiritual life. We have seen that the path of the 
 martyrs is not yet closed for us, though we are not 
 called to resist unto blood ; we have seen that we 
 may learn something from the solitude, and the 
 simplicity, and the unselfishness of the hermits, 
 though our life is passed amid crowds of men ; 
 let us, this evening, glance for it can be no 
 more at the type of saintliness produced by 
 monasticism, and let us see whether, while we 
 carefully distinguish between that which was 
 permanent and noble in it and that which was 
 erroneous and evanescent, from that type too 
 we may not learn. 
 
 2. Let me say at once that I believe the day 
 of monasticism to be over. It did its work; it 
 fell into its decay ; it passed from poverty to 
 honour, from honour to wealth, from wealth to 
 vice, and from vice into corruption. 1 If ever it 
 
 1 " This is the moral of all human tales, ' 
 
 "Tis but the same rehearsal of the past ; 
 First Freedom, and then Glory; when that fails, 
 Wealth, Vice, Corruption, Barbarism at last ; 
 And History with all her volumes vast 
 
 Hath but one tale." 
 
 BYRON, Childe Harold.
 
 SERM. in.] , THE MONKS. 77 
 
 be revived it will not be by childish external 
 imitation ; it will not be by playing at abbacy, 
 or by wearing girdles and cowls, but in wholly 
 different forms, such as may be needed by a 
 wholly different age. It was perhaps the best 
 ideal possible in the times which called it forth, 1 
 and that it answers to a deep instinct of the 
 human heart is seen by the fact that not Chris- 
 tianity only, but other religions also, such as 
 Buddhism, have counted their monks by tens 
 of thousands. But yet the institution, under its 
 old conditions, was tried and found wanting. 
 It did not contain in itself the elements which 
 sufficed to preserve it from ruin and decay. 
 The dissolution of the monasteries by Henry 
 VIII. was very far from being an unmixed evil. 
 There may have been there probably was 
 exaggeration and lying in the charges brought 
 against them ; there may have been, there cer- 
 tainly was, greed and cruelty in the seizure 
 of their property; yet that black book which 
 was laid before Parliament in the Chapter-house 
 x - See Archbishop Trench, Meditzval Church, p. 104.
 
 78 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 of Westminster Abbey contained ample and 
 damning proof of the idleness and the pollution 
 of only too many of them, 1 and it was time that 
 the axe should be laid at the root of blighted 
 and barren trees. 2 Roman Catholic writers 
 themselves admit that there were idlers, there 
 were hypocrites, there were debauchees, there 
 were villains of the deepest dye among the monks 
 in bad monasteries under relaxed discipline, under 
 wicked abbots, in the days of their decline. 3 
 Long before the monks had to bear the scathing 
 satire of Erasmus and Ulric von Hutten, the 
 great mediaeval painters, and even the gentle 
 
 1 See the documents of the Surrenders of the Franciscans at 
 Stamford, the Convent of St. Andrew's at Northampton, &c. 
 Collier, Ecclesiastical History, v. 12, &c. 
 
 2 See Burnet, History of the Reformation, part i. ; Collier, 
 Ecclesiastical History, iv. 299-308, v. I. 
 
 3 "As well we as others our predecessors called religiouse 
 persons within yonder said monastery, taking on us the habile of 
 outward vesture of the said rule, onley to the intent to lead 
 oure liffes in the ydle quyetnesse, and not in the vertuose 
 exercyse, in a stately estimacion, and not in obedient humylyte, 
 have undre the shadowe or colour of the said rule and habile 
 vaynely, detestably, and also ungodly," &c. &c. "Surrender of 
 St. Andrew's Priory, Northampton."
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 79 
 
 Fra Angelico himself, had invariably painted 
 monks among the companies of the lost ; and 
 when Dante wishes to represent the punishment 
 of the hypocrites he describes them as a painted 
 people, walking with bent heads, watering the 
 ground with their tears, and bending for all 
 eternity under the crushing load of a monastic 
 habit, under brilliant cowls which dazzle the 
 eye from afar, but which, as they approach, 
 are seen to be but masses of gilded lead. 1 Bear 
 in mind, my brethren, that if I speak to you of 
 holy monasteries and saintly monks, it is because 
 these, and these only, furnish us with new ex- 
 amples in our endeavour to imitate Christ ; and 
 
 1 Dante, Inferno, xxiii : 
 ' ' Beneath we met a tribe bepainted fair, 
 
 Who, weeping, paced the round, exceeding slow ; 
 Jaded their looks and quite subdued with care. 
 Cloaks they had on with cowls, which from the brow 
 Reached to the eyes ; a fashion these displayed 
 Resembling what the monks at Cologne show. 
 With gilt, to dazzling, they are overlaid : 
 Within 'tis leaden all ; a weight so sore 
 That Frederick's seemed of stubble to be made. 
 O mantle ponderous for evermore." 
 
 FORD.
 
 So SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 not because we deny that there were also bad 
 monasteries and abandoned monks. It was not 
 a Christian, not a Catholic, but Voltaire himself 
 who said that if monasticism became vicious, 
 it was certain that secular life has always been 
 more vicious ; yet secular life furnishes us with 
 many an example of holiness, and it is for these 
 that we look in monasteries too. 
 
 3. Monasticism grew naturally out of the 
 necessities of the age in which it first appeared. 
 The multitudes who flocked round hermits like 
 Antony and Pachomius became the inevitable 
 germ of monastic institutions. In the East this 
 type of life, though it produced a Basil and a 
 Chrysostom, was less fruitful than in the West, 
 and its meditative silence degenerated soon into 
 dreamy indolence and fanatical tumult. 1 But 
 introduced into Europe by the example of St. 
 Athanasius, and extended by the authority of 
 St. Jerome, it assumed the manlier and more 
 practical type of rigid duty, regular worship, 
 and austere toil. During the two centuries after 
 
 1 See Milman, Latin Christianity, i. 409.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 8 1 
 
 St. Antony a different type of devotion had 
 grown up and awaited its fitting organisation. 
 The example of the early hermits had been 
 mainly (as we have said) a personal protest 
 for the awful importance of the individual soul, 
 The example of the monks was mainly a social 
 protest for the dignity and holiness of a common 
 life. By the close of the fifth century the wild 
 bands of Gothic barbarians were shattering the 
 political fabric of the Empire to pieces. Amid 
 homeless men, amid depopulated provinces, 
 amid perishing institutions, amid the rising 
 deluges of heathenism and barbarity, " A type 
 of common life," it has been said, " was needed 
 to preserve the inheritance of the old world and 
 to offer a rallying point for the Christian forces 
 that should fashion the new. Again this type 
 was found in a system of rigid discipline." x 
 
 1 Westcott, Sermon on Disciplined Life. See De Broglie, 
 L'Eglise et T Empire, vi. 471. "Confusion, corruption, despair, 
 and death were everywhere ; social dismemberment seemed com- 
 plete. Authority, morals, arts, sciences, religion herself might 
 have seemed condemned to irremediable ruin." Montalembert, 
 Monks of (he West, ii, p, I, (English Translation.) 
 
 G
 
 82 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 What was it that had preserved the best 
 elements of Christianity in the fourth century ? 
 The self-sacrifice of the hermits. What was it 
 which saved the principles of law, and order, 
 and civilisation ? What rescued the wreck of 
 ancient literature from the universal conflagra- 
 tion ? What restrained, what converted the in- 
 rushing Teutonic races ? What kept alive the 
 dying embers of science ? What fanned into a 
 flame the white ashes of art ? What redeemed 
 waste lands, cleared forests, drained fens, pro- 
 tected miserable populations, encouraged free 
 labour, equalised widely-separated ranks ? What 
 was the sole witness for the cause of charity, 
 the sole preservative of even partial education, 
 the sole rampart against intolerable oppression ? 
 What force was left which could alone humble 
 the haughty by the courage which is inspired 
 by superiority to those things which most men 
 desire, and elevate the poor by the spectacle 
 of a poverty at once voluntary and powerful ? 
 What weak and unarmed power alone retained 
 the strength and the determination to dash down
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 
 
 the mailed hand of the baron when it was 
 uplifted against his serf, to proclaim a truce of 
 God between warring violences, and to make 
 insolent wickedness tremble by asserting the 
 inherent supremacy of goodness over transgres- 
 sion, of knowledge over ignorance, of quiet 
 righteousness over brutal force ? You will say 
 the Church ; you will say Christianity. l Yes, but 
 for many a long century the very bulwarks and 
 ramparts of the Church were the monasteries, 
 and the one invincible force of the Church lay 
 in the self-sacrifice, the holiness, the courage of 
 the monks. 2 Let those who have nothing but 
 blind anathemas against monasticism remem- 
 ber that to it we owe the light of liberty and 
 of literature ; that there " learning trimmed her 
 lamp and contemplation pruned her wings ; " 
 that the Benedictines instituted schools; that the 
 Augustinians built cathedrals ; that the Mendi- 
 
 1 The work achieved for civilisation by the Catholic Church 
 has been stated by no one more forcibly than by Comte, Politique 
 Positive. See, too, Montalembert, Monks of the West, \. 275 
 283- 
 
 1 See Milman, Latin Christianity, i. 5, 6, 250. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. m. 
 
 cant Orders founded hospitals ; that, as Leibnitz 
 says, " He who is ignorant of, or despises, their 
 services has only a narrow and vulgar idea of 
 virtue, and stupidly believes that he has fulfilled 
 all his duties towards God by some habitual 
 practices accomplished with that coldness which 
 excludes zeal and love." 
 
 4. Now he who gave to monasticism its best 
 and most permanent form was St. Benedict of 
 Ntirsia. 1 His story is briefly this. When he 
 was a child his parents took him to be educated 
 at Rome. Disgusted to the heart's core by the 
 pollutions he saw around him, at the age of 
 fourteen he fled from Rome and hid himself in 
 a cave at Subiaco., among the woods on a wild 
 hillside over the foaming waters of the Anio. 
 He was supported with bread by a monk named 
 Romanus, and there he strove to subdue every 
 evil impulse in stern solitude and prayer. The 
 place overlooked an old palace of Nero, and the 
 
 1 See the sketches of him in Montalembert, Monks of the 
 West, iv. ; Milman, Latin Christianity, i. 414-426 ; Bossuet, 
 PanSgyriqtte de St. Benotl, &c.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 85 
 
 holy self-devotion of the Christian boy, compared 
 to the enormous infamies of the pagan emperor, 
 illustrate the vastness of the chasm between 
 heathenism and Christianity. Gradually he 
 was discovered, and disciples flocked to him. 
 A body of monks, revering his sanctity and dis- 
 regarding his warning that his rule would be 
 very strict, compelled him to become their 
 abbot ; but they soon grew weary of his 
 rigorous severity, and afterwards attempted to 
 poison him. Seeing that they were irreclaim- 
 able he left them, and again retired from 
 them to his cave, round which twelve com- 
 munities soon sprang up under his direction. 
 But still pursued by hatred and plots, he left 
 Subiaco and retired to an old temple and grove 
 of Apollo, which, under his influence, the still 
 semi-pagan rustics pulled down and destroyed. 
 There, holy and happy, allowing himself once 
 a year to spend a day with his sister Scholas- 
 tica, who had formed near him a community 
 of nuns, he lived for many years. And from 
 the Life of him by St. Gregory the saintly
 
 86 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 biography of a saint take but this one cha- 
 racteristic story. One night, just before the 
 evening hymns, as he was gazing on heaven 
 from the window of his cell, a mystic light 
 shone round about him, and the whole world was 
 brought before him, as if it had been gathered 
 up into one ray of sunlight. He saw it says 
 the inscription which is read to this day on the 
 tower in which he dwelt at Monte Cassino 
 " Inspexit et despexit " " He saw it and he 
 scorned it. " x The story of his interview with 
 Totila the Goth, and the influence he exercised 
 over the mind of that stern conqueror, shows 
 the ascendency which he had acquired by his 
 personal holiness. It was at Monte Cassino 
 that he drew up the immortal rule of the 
 Benedictines ; and the monastery which he 
 founded became one of the most famous in 
 the world. 
 
 5. The keynote of that immortal rule, to 
 which is due a very large part of the vast 
 services rendered to the world by true and 
 
 1 Discours, par le Pere Hyacinthe.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 87 
 
 uncorrupted monasticism is self-abnegation. 
 "Antony," it has been admirably said, "had 
 shown the foundation of individual freedom in 
 self-conquest ; St. Benedict showed the founda- 
 tions of social freedom in self-surrender." That 
 perfect obedience means perfect liberty ; that to 
 lose our lives for Christ's sake is to find them ; 
 that complete submission to the will of God is 
 a serene and tranquil empire over ourselves ; 
 these were his leading conceptions. Poverty, 
 chastity, obedience had always been the triple 
 vow of the monk poverty in ages which were 
 dying of opulence ; chastity in an age weakened 
 by orgies ; obedience in an age perishing of 
 disorders. 1 But to these St. Benedict added 
 Work and Prayer. " Ora et labora " was the rule 
 of his followers. It was Work, whether in the 
 form of handicraft or study, which rescued so 
 many a noble ancient poem and history from 
 oblivion, 2 and made so many a waste into a 
 
 1 Ozanam, Eludes Germaniques. 
 
 2 Literary labour was mainly introduced among the Benedic- 
 tines by Cassiodorus. Gieseler ii. 13.
 
 88 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 fruitful land. It was Prayer which inspired so 
 many a hope amid the general despondency ; 
 which re-conquered Europe into Christianity 
 from the invading barbarians, which brought 
 down the dew of God's blessing upon the 
 fainting world. To them we owe the preser- 
 vation of Roman literature, for the copyists of 
 manuscripts were Benedictine monks. To them 
 we owe our English Christianity, for Augustine 
 of Canterbury was a Benedictine monk. To 
 them we owe no small part of the protest which 
 saved us from irresponsible despotism, for Lan- 
 franc and Ansel m were Benedictine monks. 
 And very noble in its theory, very beautiful in 
 its realisation of social life, was a Benedictine 
 monastery under a holy abbot, faithful to its 
 principles and vows. Equality reigned there : 
 the proudest noble who came as a novice had 
 to serve like the humblest peasant. Brotherhood 
 reigned there : the rule was, " Submit yourselves 
 to one another in the fear of God." Tenderness 
 reigned there, for " There is always something," 
 said St. Benedict, " to which the strong may
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 89 
 
 aspire, and from which the weak may not 
 shrink." Humility reigned there, for if any 
 one were appointed to even the humblest 
 office, he had to fall on his knees before 
 his brethren and beg their prayers, always 
 ending his work with the words, "Blessed 
 art thou, O Lord, who hast holpen me and 
 comforted me." Charity reigned there, for 
 morning and evening the Lord's Prayer had to 
 be said in the hearing of all, that all alike, 
 brought face to face with the petition, that we 
 may be forgiven as we forgive, " might cleanse 
 themselves from every offence against Christian 
 love. " 
 
 I am told, my brethren, that some of you 
 yearn to find some receipt for unity and peace. 
 May you not be helped in the endeavour to 
 obtain these Christian graces by some of those 
 principles which made many a monastery a scene 
 of order and holiness ? You cannot and ought not 
 to copy the monasticism of the monks, but you 
 can and ought to copy this their ideal of brother- 
 hood and tenderness, of humility and charity,
 
 9 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. HI. 
 
 of work and prayer. " The Kingdom of God," 
 said the brave and good St. Hugo of Avalon, 
 "is not made up of monks and hermits. God 
 at the Day of Judgment will not ask a man 
 why he has not been a monk, but why he has 
 not been a Christian. Charity in the heart, 
 truth on the tongue, chastity in the body, are 
 the virtues which God demands. " l Some of 
 you, in God's . providence, are called upon to 
 live together in communities. Celibacy, which 
 was to the monks a voluntary surrender, is to 
 thousands of young men and young women, 
 for long years together, an inevitable duty, 
 imposed by God Himself. May not the yoke 
 be lighter and easier if it be borne in the spirit 
 of cheerful submission and humble self-sacri- 
 fice ? Can you see nothing to hallow the lot 
 to which God has called you in the rules of 
 St. Benedict ? Can you see no desire to imitate 
 Christ in the unmurmuring and willing poverty 
 which, in resigning all that was superfluous, was 
 spared all anxiety about what was necessaiy ? 
 
 1 Froude, Short Studies, ii. 70.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 9 ! 
 
 Do you find nothing instructive in the state 
 where "correction had all its firmness, con- 
 descension all its charity, subjection all its 
 repose ? where strength had its exercise, and 
 weakness its support ? where silence had its 
 gravity, and words their grace?" 1 Might you 
 not, if you tried to carry out these principles 
 in your own families, in your own social sur- 
 roundings, have all that was really holy and 
 precious in monasticism without its perils ? 
 Might you not gain some of that peaceful calm, 
 that noble gravity, that natural elevation which 
 we admire in the pictures of the monks ? Might 
 you not even learn to say with St. Bernard, 
 "Oh, merciful God, what consolations Thou 
 preparest for the poor!" 2 Might you not so 
 adorn with the Christian graces and virtues your 
 home, or your place of business, as to be able 
 to say of it what he said of his monastery, 
 " It is good for us to be here ; for here a man 
 lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more 
 
 1 Bossuet. 
 
 2 " Deus bone, quanta pauperibus procuras solatia ! "
 
 9 2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. m. 
 
 swiftly, walks more carefully, rests more se- 
 curely, dies more happily, is cleansed more 
 speedily, is rewarded more abundantly"? Cowls, 
 and girdles, and distinctive dresses would in 
 these days be a futile anachronism ; but I do 
 believe that the scores of young men and 
 young women who, in the complexities of 
 modern civilisation, and the necessities of com- 
 mercial life, live together in large communities, 
 might learn many a holy and beautiful lesson 
 from the ideal of monastic holiness and yet 
 might escape the peril of falling into one of 
 its theoretic errors, or of adopting one of its 
 needless and unnatural restrictions. No age 
 has ever more needed a form of happy com- 
 mon life than our own, and I can imagine 
 that thousands of young people would be the 
 brighter and the holier by openly recognising 
 some broad and simple religious rule, some 
 rule broad and simple as that which regulated 
 the communities of the early Christians, as 
 the bond of union between them. What but 
 good could possibly result from the open and
 
 SERM. IIL] THE MONKS. 93 
 
 common recognition of such plain Christian 
 principles as these from the rule of St. Bene- 
 dict ? l " There is a good zeal which separates 
 from vice and leads to God and to eternal life. . . . 
 Let the brethren exercise their zeal with fervent 
 love ; let them honour each other mutually ; let 
 no one follow what he judges needful to himself 
 only, but rather what is useful to others; let 
 them cherish fraternal love ; let them fear God ; 
 let them love their abbots with sincere and 
 humble charity ; above all, let them prefer no- 
 thing to Christ, who shall lead us to eternal life. 
 Amen. " What but good could result from the 
 endeavour to promote the three Benedictine 
 virtues of silence, humility, and obedience ? and 
 the three Benedictine occupations of worship, 
 reading, and labour ? There is surely many a 
 house of business where, without any formality, 
 without any externalism, without the faintest 
 tinge of Pharisaic hypocrisy, or sectarian self- 
 importance, they who love the Lord might 
 thus often commune with one another ; might 
 
 1 Cap. 72 ; Milman, Latin Christianity, i. 421.
 
 94 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 warn and comfort one another, amid the sor- 
 rows and temptations which beset the path of 
 life; might speak the truth to each other with 
 pure and simple hearts ; might keep alive that 
 sense of union which ought to result from an 
 identity of duties and hopes. 1 The results 
 might be small at first, but they would be very 
 blessed. Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the 
 Moravians, even when he was a boy at school, 
 founded a little society, which he called "The 
 order of the grain of mustard-seed," and of 
 which the only badge was a gold ring, in- 
 scribed with the words, " None of us liveth to 
 himself." 2 Did not that grain of mustard-seed 
 grow, in due course of time, into a great tree, 
 so that the fowls of the air took shelter among 
 its branches? 
 
 6. And, my brethren, as we may thus learn 
 from this byegone type of saintly workers in 
 their social life, in the principles (that is) which 
 
 1 See Lacordaire, Correspond. Intdite. 
 
 2 By way of giving form to this suggestion I print as an 
 appendix the very simple rules of a Society of Christian Progress 
 which has been formed within my own parish.
 
 THE MONKS. C} - 
 
 guided them as members of a community, so 
 most assuredly we may sit at the feet of very 
 many of them in their individual holiness, and 
 learn from them how better and more truly to 
 follow Christ our Lord. We may find warmth 
 in their footsteps, as faint and weary, and with 
 many a sad stumble, we follow them across the 
 sad world's snow. "Languor was not in their 
 hearts, nor weakness in their words, nor weari- 
 ness on their brows." 
 
 " Servants of God ! or sons 
 Shall I not call you? because 
 Not as servants ye knew 
 Your Father's innermost mind 
 His who unwillingly sees 
 One of His little ones lost." 
 
 It would be quite impossible to call before 
 you the multitudes of noble figures with white 
 robes and palms in their hands which would 
 arise at the bidding of a student of history. 
 Shall it be St. Anselm, after his stormy yet 
 noble archiepiscopate, in his hour of death, 
 like the humblest brother of his old monastery 
 at Bee, laid on sackcloth, over which were
 
 96 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 strewed ashes in the shape of the cross, and so, 
 amid prayers and low chants, and fervent bless- 
 ings calmly and happily breathing his last 
 among his weeping friends ? Shall it be St. 
 Edmund of Canterbury, with the pallor of his 
 beautiful countenance "growing a fair shining 
 red," as he spoke in his lecture-room at Oxford 
 of God and holy things ; or as he sprinkled with 
 dust the few coins, his sole possession, which 
 lay loose in his window-sill, saying ashes to 
 ashes, dust to dust ? Or shall it be St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, with his daily prayer, "Give me, O 
 Lord, a noble heart, which no earthly affection 
 can drag down ? " Or shall it be St. Bonaventura 
 pointing in silence to his crucifix, when he was 
 asked the source of his vast learning ; and found 
 washing the meanest vessels of his monastery, 
 when they brought him the hat of a cardinal 
 from Rome? Or shall it be St. Bernardin of 
 Siena, whose pure and modest presence, even 
 as a boy, hushed and overawed at once every 
 evil word of his companions ? Or shall it be a 
 ruler like Gregory tJie Great, the son of a poor
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 97 
 
 carpenter, yet towering so high in the might of 
 conscious integrity, so utterly superior to the 
 world by complete indifference to its interests, 
 that the guilty Emperor of Germany cowered in 
 terror before his look, and at his feet ? Or St. 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, rebuking princes, uphold- 
 ing popes, firing all Europe to a new crusade, 
 living in utter poverty, daily asking himself the 
 stern question, " Bernards, ad quid venisli ? " 
 " Bernard, wherefore art thou here ? " These are 
 but stray gleams from lives of steady radiance. 
 But go into our National Gallery, or any great 
 collection of pictures, and there for amid the 
 dust and weariness of life it is well to refresh 
 our souls with things holy and beautiful gaze on 
 the pictures of Fra Angelico of Fiesole, if you 
 would see the heavenly calm of spirit to which 
 some of the monks attained. // beato as he is 
 often called, for he was never canonised was a 
 monk of that famous monastery of San Marco, 
 at Florence, which, at the same epoch, also sent 
 forth the eloquent, fiery, undaunted Savonarola, 
 to thunder his impassioned denunciations against 
 
 H
 
 98 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 the gross corruptions of the Church and of the 
 world. In every cell of that monastery of San 
 Marco is painted a crucifixion, by this holy 
 painter. He painted them on his knees, and 
 with streaming tears. Never would he receive 
 one penny for them. Never would he alter a 
 line when once painted, for he painted the faces 
 of his visions, and looked on them as sent by 
 inspiration. And inspired, indeed, they were, 
 by the spirit of holy love ; by the stainless 
 purity of a soul which turned to the Divine as a 
 flower to the sunlight ; by the calm, unsullied 
 innocence of one whose soul was as a weaned 
 child. Look at the tender rose, and gold, and 
 violet the delicate springtide colourings of his 
 pictures ; look at the angelic and saintly faces, 
 so untroubled, so unlike those around us pure 
 and bright as the blue of heaven when there is not 
 one cloud to stain it ; look at the rapt, exquisite 
 devotion, radiating outward as from an inward 
 flame, which pervades the whole canvas as with a 
 subtle lambency like the atmosphere of paradise. 
 Alike the Sinaitic thunderings of Savonarola,
 
 SKRM. in.] THE MONKS. 99 
 
 and the " soft, silent pictures " of Fra Angelico 
 were the outcome of life in that monastic self- 
 sacrifice. It was the self-discipline of the 
 monkish cell which fired the indignation and 
 strengthened the courage of the one to face the 
 storms of hatred and the agonies of martyrdom. 
 It was the self-discipline of the monkish cell 
 which made the other so despise the world 
 that, wholly dead to rank and ambition, he 
 refused the Archbishopric of Florence, and 
 nominated a brother monk instead, who in his 
 turn became the best and holiest Archbishop by 
 whom Florence had ever been ruled. And how 
 came it that types of virtue so different the one 
 so magnificent in its power and fearlessness, the 
 other so perfect in its love and peace were 
 fostered in the same cloistral shade ? It came, 
 my brethren, from what Milton called " the un- 
 resistible might of weakness which shakes the 
 world ;" it came from the indefinite fruitfulness 
 of self-sacrifice ; it came from that spiritual force 
 of chastity, of self-denial, " which knows how to 
 weep, to pray, to love ; which knows how to 
 
 H 2
 
 100 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 be poor, unknown, despised ; harder than a 
 diamond against pride and corruption ; more 
 tender than a mother towards all that suffers 
 and that seeks." l 
 
 7. It was a monk, my brethren, and one who 
 may perhaps be called in some sense the last 
 of the monks it was Henri Lacordaire who 
 wrote those last words. It was a man who 
 died, as it were, but yesterday whom some of 
 us may have seen and heard who was a mem- 
 ber of the French National Assembly; who 
 was by far the most eloquent man of his day ; 
 who first reintroduced into France, and even 
 into the pulpit of Notre Dame, the black-and- 
 white robe of the Dominicans, which had not 
 been seen there for years. And it is a charac- 
 teristic of his stern self-discipline that always, 
 after those splendid conferences, in which he 
 thrilled the universal heart of Paris with his 
 eloquence, and held its subtlest intellects en- 
 tranced, he inflicted stern penance upon him- 
 self to prevent every possible access of vanity, 
 1 Lacordaire (Life, by Dora Greenwell, p. 12).
 
 SERM. HI.] THE MONKS. IOI 
 
 and was found on one occasion hanging upon 
 a cross in the crypt below. Now this great 
 preacher, and pre-eminently good man, was no 
 devotee of obsolete fanaticism ; he was a child 
 of this nineteenth century. He was a Liberal 
 in politics ; he was elected as a Liberal to re- 
 present a French constituency ; he said on his 
 deathbed : " I die a penitent Catholic and an 
 impenitent Liberal." Yet his ideal of saint- 
 liness was the ideal of the monk. With 
 the famous De Lammenais and the Comte 
 de Montalembert he had edited L'Avenir, a 
 Liberal newspaper, and when this fell under 
 the suspicion of the authorities at Rome, he 
 went with his companions to submit himself 
 to the verdict of the Pope. After many delays 
 and humiliations that verdict was given, and to 
 his crushing sorrow it was hostile. But the 
 spirit of holy obedience was strong in Henri 
 Lacordaire. He made the submission which 
 perhaps costs a man most dear he submitted 
 his intellect itself. More than that, at the 
 zenith of his fame, in the fullest power and
 
 102 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 splendour of his thrilling rhetoric, he deter- 
 mined to hide his head under the cowl of a 
 Dominican, and, if possible, reintroduce the 
 monastic orders into France. The resolve 
 seized him as he walked amid the ruined 
 magnificence of ancient Rome, and thought 
 of Antony, Basil, Augustine, Martin, Benedict, 
 Columban, Bernard, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius. 
 "In considering this luminous track," he says, 
 " the milky way of the Church, I discovered 
 its creative principle in the threefold vow of 
 poverty, chastity, and obedience the keystone 
 of the arch of the Gospel, and of the perfect 
 imitation of Jesus Christ." The world was 
 amazed at his determination ; amazed and 
 half incredulous that a man should thus be 
 willing to efface himself; should thus have the 
 noble desire to descend. 1 But his friends were 
 not amazed. One of the greatest of them 2 
 had walked home with him along the streets 
 
 1 "II faut savoir descendre devant les horames pour s'elever 
 devant Dieu." Foisset, Vie de Lacordaire, ii, 143. 
 
 2 The Comte de Montalembert.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 103 
 
 of Paris, after one of the most signal triumphs 
 of his oratory over a hostile audience. " He 
 was neither intoxicated by it," he writes, " nor 
 overwhelmed. I saw that for him these little 
 vanities of success were less than nothing 
 dust in the night." So, giving up all, Lacordaire 
 became a monk ; and Rome, following her usual 
 policy, did not spare his sensibilities. She tested 
 his sincerity to the very utmost. She did not 
 leave him with his companions ; she did not 
 place him in cities. She sent the greatest 
 orator whom the Church of France has pro- 
 duced since the days of the immortal Bossuet, 
 as a humble novice to the distant monastery of 
 La Quercia. And here is his own account of 
 it : 'It is now eight days since I became a 
 monk. I have been four days at La Quercia. 
 After a little speech from the Provincial, each 
 withdrew to his cell. It was very cold ; the 
 wind had veered to the north. We were yet 
 in our summer dress, and our cells without 
 fires. We knew no one ; all the prestige, all 
 the empressemcnt which so recently surrounded
 
 104 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 us, had vanished. We were alone with God, 
 in presence of a life as yet unknown to us. 
 Next day the cold was still more intense, and 
 we only partially understood the course of our 
 exercises. I had a moment of weakness. I 
 looked back on all that I had left behind a 
 settled life, many certain advantages, many 
 tenderly-loved friends; days filled with useful 
 conversations by warm firesides ; the thousand 
 joys of a life which God had blessed with out- 
 ward and inward peace. To lose all this for 
 ever was certainly paying very dear for the 
 pride of doing a bold thing. I humbled my- 
 self before God, and asked of Him the strength 
 I needed. Toward the close of the first day I 
 felt that my prayer had been heard, and since 
 then His consolations have been increasing on 
 my soul with the gentleness of a sea that 
 caresses the shore it covers.'" 
 
 My brethren, according to our notions the 
 sacrifice may have been needless ; we may 
 fancy that he might have found better methods 
 of obtaining the same high end ; but let us be
 
 THE MONKS. i O : 
 
 certain of this, that no genuine and honest self- 
 sacrifice, made in accordance with the best light 
 we have, is ever unfruitful, or ever fails. The 
 great preacher never regretted, he always re- 
 joiced in, what he had done. "Obedience costs 
 something," he wrote to a friend ; " but I have 
 learnt by experience that it is, sooner or later, 
 recompensed, and that God alone knows what 
 is good for us." 1 " Since I have few virtues," 
 he says in another place, " I wish at least on 
 the day of judgment to be able to carry there 
 the life of a priest without ambition." 2 You 
 have heard what he thought eight days after 
 he had made the great sacrifice of his life ; 
 would you hear whether he at all changed his 
 opinion at the close of it ? " What has been 
 my strength," he wrote, " during my whole life, 
 has been precisely not to choose what I should 
 have wished, but to be always at the orders of 
 God, whose will manifests itself by the often 
 
 1 Correspond. 7ncJit'\ p. 45. 
 
 2 Corresp. de AT. Lacordaire el de Madame de Swctchine, par !c 
 Comte de Fallowes, p. 24.
 
 106 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 unforeseen course of events. It is now thirty 
 years since I left the world. During those 
 thirty years God has twelve times changed 
 my residence, and fifteen times my position, 
 and I have scarcely ever done what I should 
 myself have chosen. What reassures me is 
 that I am not doing what I wish." " I am 
 committing suicide," he once said, in accept- 
 ing a high post, " but it is God who wills it : 
 that is my strength, my support, my life. " l 
 
 Now, my brethren, time does not permit that 
 I should say very many things which would 
 result naturally from the slight and rapid 
 glance which we have taken at an effort after 
 holiness, which, as you see even to this very 
 day, produced very beautiful and very memo- 
 rable results; which has enriched the world by 
 the heritage of noble services, and sustained the 
 Church with the viaticum of glorious examples. 
 But this surely we may say that though 
 monasticism has perished, probably for ever, 
 we, though we never enter the cloistered cell, 
 1 Foisset, Vie de Lacordaire, p. 261.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 107 
 
 may still, in the trivial round and the common 
 task, borrow from it its truest and most 
 exalted elements ; its victory over carnal pas- 
 sions ; its superiority to the allurements of the 
 world. And in aiming at these, by ways which 
 we deem better and more sure, we may try to 
 attain at least to some faint reflex of those 
 Christ-like virtues which we rightly revere in 
 these our elder brothers in the great family 
 of Christ, who have 
 
 " Gone before 
 And left their trail of light upon the shore." 
 
 Of superiority to worldly interests I may speak 
 another time ; but suffer me to say one last 
 word now on the conquest over sensual tempta- 
 tions. I cannot dwell on this ; but I do believe 
 that if the monks of old exaggerated their 
 danger, and it is very sad to think some- 
 times enormously increased that danger by the 
 very means which they designed to avert it, 1 
 
 1 See some veiy remarkable testimonies of monks and hermits 
 Gieseler's Ecclesiastical History, ii. 4.
 
 I0 8 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. in. 
 
 yet we in this age greatly underrate it, and are 
 not sufficiently on our guard against it. It is a 
 mistake to speak of youthful passions, as though 
 carnal passions were only youthful. The saints, 
 who meditated deeply and for long years on 
 the deceitfulness of the heart of man, knew 
 better than this. They knew, as St. Paul 
 knew, that the conquest over the carnal heart 
 is not to be won without a struggle, and not to 
 be won in a moment of time. Long, agonising, 
 terrible were their conflicts. With them life was, 
 in no mere figure of speech, a mortification of 
 sensuality, a crucifixion with Christ. St. Jerome, 
 after years of toil and fasting in his rocky cell 
 at Bethlehem, assailed by evil imaginations, 
 beats his worn breast with the stone which lay 
 ever at his side. 1 The bed of briers is still 
 shown in which St. Benedict, while yet a boy, 
 rolled his naked body, till it was well-nigh one 
 
 1 " Hie igitur ego, qui ob Gehennae metum tali me carcere ipse 
 damnaveram, scorpionum tantum socius et ferarum, saepe choris 
 intereram puellarum. Pallebant ora jejuniis, et mens desideriis 
 aestuabat in pallido corpore." Jer. Ep. ad Eustock. 1 8, and to 
 a similar effect Nilus, ii. 140.
 
 SERM. in.] THE MONKS. 109 
 
 wound, that he might be cured utterly from 
 unholy thoughts, and where St. Francis planted 
 roses in honour of his victory. 1 St. Bernard, 
 horrified at a bad impulse, rushed out, and 
 stood till life and sense had both well-nigh left 
 him, neck deep in an icy pool. And sometimes 
 we read how they achieved, after long effort, 
 the final victory ; how they got possession of, 2 
 were masters of, their own bodies ; " made their 
 passions come to heel by a stern will the ser- 
 vant of a tender conscience ; " 3 assumed and 
 maintained a < serene and tranquil empire over 
 themselves." We read how St. Nilus, 4 finding 
 it impossible to get rid of a sensuous tempta- 
 tion, though he wrestled with himself till the 
 sweat trickled from his forehead, threw him- 
 self with contrition to the ground and prayed 
 " Lord, Thou knowest my weakness ; pity 
 me, and ease me of my conflict ; " and how 
 
 1 Milman, Latin Christianity, \. 418 ; Montalembert, Monks 
 of the West, ii. 10. 
 
 2 K-ra.ffQo.1. I Tliess. iv. 4; Luke xxi. 19. 
 
 3 Piof. Huxley. 4 Neander, vi. 201.
 
 HO SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. m. 
 
 in a vision the figure of the Crucified stood 
 at his right hand, made over him thrice 
 the sign of the cross, and, vanishing, left him 
 the victor over all his worst temptations. We 
 read how St. Hugo of Avalon, at the age of 
 forty, not yet utterly dead to the flesh, in spite 
 of the harsh lifelong austerities of his rule, was 
 assailed by emotions so violent that he after- 
 wards said he would rather face the pains of 
 Gehenna than encounter them again ; and one 
 night, when the agony reached its crisis, wrestled 
 like Jacob in wild prayer, till he saw the dead 
 prior, who had admitted him as a boy into the 
 Chartreuse, lean over him, and seem to draw 
 from his bosom a fiery mass, and left him 
 thenceforth strong and cured for life. 1 My 
 brethren, if these great saints of God found 
 it so very hard to be delivered from unholy 
 thoughts and acts in lives spent in the sternest 
 and most unsparing self-discipline, is it not 
 mere hypocrisy for men in luxurious, self- 
 indulgent, full-fed lives, to assume that it 
 
 1 Froude, Short Studies, ii. 57.
 
 LM. in.] THE MONKS. 
 
 is very easy ? Is it not true, as Dante sang, 
 that 
 
 "Not on flowery beds, nor under shade 
 Of canopy reposing, heaven is won?" 
 
 Is there not a deep meaning in the verse of the 
 old familiar hymn 
 
 "Shall we be carried to the skies 
 
 On flowery beds of ease, 
 When others fought to win the prize, 
 And sailed through bloody seas?" 
 
 Is not the Christian life a race a wrestling 
 a warfare in which there is no discharge ? Even 
 if, by God's blessing, we have passed to any 
 degree unscathed through the storms of youth, 
 it is an illusion to think that all is well. Middle- 
 age religion, if it be not deep and true religion, 
 is too often " like the rotting tree-trunks, which 
 do but mimic the semblance of some ghostly or 
 human life ; " l and we have all deep need of that 
 promise of David, " Non timebis a dsemonio 
 meridiano," thou shalt not fear from the demon 
 
 1 Martineau.
 
 II2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. HI. 
 
 of the noonday. " That demon of the noonday 
 is the demon of maturity, a second youth which 
 comes to us about the middle of life, more 
 dangerous even than the first, and in which 
 even tried virtues often fail." l Oh, my brethren, 
 this much at least all of us, alike the elder and 
 the young, may learn from these saintly workers, 
 not to sleep on the post of danger ; not to 
 dream that the enemy is dead ; to be earnest, 
 to be simple, to be self-denying, to be resolute, 
 to be abstinent, to be sincere. Not indeed in 
 celibacy, but if God permits us, in honourable 
 marriage, or in the hope of a pure and faithful 
 betrothal ; not in self-torture, but yet in earnest 
 watchfulness ; not in extreme fasting, but in 
 habitual and careful moderation ; not in morbid 
 self-introspection, but in thorough and vigorous 
 occupation ; not in enfeebling the body by 
 maceration, but by filling its hours of work 
 with strenuous and cheerful activity, and its 
 hours of leisure with bright thoughtfulness and 
 many a silent prayer ; by these blessed means 
 
 1 LacorJaire, Corre fond. Ineditc, p. 459.
 
 SCRM. in.] THE MONKS. 1 j -, 
 
 we too, even in the midst of the world, may 
 attain to the spirit which is dead to the world : 
 we may be keeping under our body and bring- 
 ing it into subjection; may, in no mere for- 
 mula, but in truthful figure be "crucified with 
 Christ." Deeply, I fear, does this age need to 
 take to heart the stern, inexorable necessity 
 for such self-conquest. Surely this is the essence 
 of all Lenten lessons. It was the central con- 
 ception of monasticism, it may well be the 
 central lesson of modern civilisation. "The 
 night is far spent, the day is at hand : let us 
 therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let 
 us put on the armour of light. Let us walk 
 honestly, as in the day ; not in rioting and drun- 
 kenness, not in chambering and wantonness, 
 not in strife and envying. But put ye on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for 
 the flesh, to subdue the lusts thereof. " l 
 
 1 Rom. xiii. 12-14.
 
 SERMON IV. 
 THE EARLY FRANCISCANS. 
 
 I 2
 
 ST. DOMINIC. 
 
 ' Domenico fu detto, ed io ne parlo 
 Si come dell' agricola che Cristo 
 Elesse all' orto suo per aiutarlo. 
 Ben parve messo e famigliar di Cristo 
 Che '1 primo amor che 'n lui fu manifesto 
 Fu al primo consiglio che die Cristo." 
 
 Paradise, xii. 70-75. 
 
 ' He was called Dominic. I speak of him 
 As of a tiller of the earth whom Christ 
 To His own vineyard called to be His aid. 
 Well was he seen Christ's friend and messenger, 
 For the first act of love in him observed 
 Obeyed the chiefest precept left by Christ." 
 
 POI.LOK. 
 
 ST. FRANCIS. 
 
 1 Francesco e poverta per questi amanti 
 Prendo oramai nel mio parlar diffuse." 
 
 Paradiso, xi. 74. 
 
 Francis and Poverty, these loving ones 
 
 Thou mayst collect to be from this long strain." 
 
 POLI.OK.
 
 THE ORDER OF ST. FRANCIS AND ST. DOMINIC. 
 
 " Je vois sa vie toute resplendissante de cette divine clarte qui 
 est au dedans de nous, et ou nous decouvrons, comme dans un 
 globe de lumiere, 1'agrement immortel de 1'honneur et de la 
 vertu. " BOSSUET. 
 
 "O vitae tuta facultas 
 
 Pauperis, angustique lares, O munera nondum 
 Intellecta Deum." 
 
 Luc. Phars. v. 231. 
 
 "Dicite, Pontifices, in sancto quid facit aurum ? " PERS. 
 Sat. v. 69. 
 
 " L' Esercito di Cristo, che si caro 
 
 Costo a riarmar, dietro alia 'nsegna 
 Si movea tardo, suspeccioso e raro ; 
 
 Quando lo -'mperador che sempre regna 
 Provvide alia milizia ch' era in forse 
 Per sola grazia, non per esser degna ; 
 
 E, com' e detto, a sua sposa soccorse 
 
 Con duo campioni, al cui fare, al cui dire 
 Lo popol disiato si accorse." 
 
 Paradiso, xii. 37. 
 
 " Slow, and full of doubt, 
 And with thin ranks, after its banner moved 
 The army of Christ (which it so dearly cost 
 To reappoint), when its imperial Head,
 
 Who reigneth ever, for the drooping host 
 
 Did make provision, thorough grace alone, 
 
 And not through its deserving. For thou heard'st 
 
 Two champions to the succour of his spouse 
 
 He sent, who by their deeds and words might join 
 
 Again this scattered people. " 
 
 CARY. 
 
 " Occurrit importuna petitio qua omnes transeuntes per terras 
 adeo abhorrent fratrum occursum, ut eis timeant quasi praedonibus 
 obviare." BONAVENTURA (Gieseler, iii. 24). 
 
 "Omniapro Christo relinquere et ipsum sequi invitando in 
 bonis operibus opus perfectionis est, Luc. xviii. 22. Glossa : 
 bene operando non dicit mendicando : nam hoc prohibetur ab 
 Apostolis." GUL. DE STO. AMORE, De Periculis Navissimorum 
 Temporum, 
 
 " Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have 
 not charity, it profiteth me nothing." I COR. xiii. 3.
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 THE EARLY FRANCISCANS^ 
 
 PROV. x. 22. 
 
 " The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and He addeth no 
 sorrow with it." 
 
 i. IT happened one day that St. Thomas of 
 Aquinum, the " Angel of the Schools," who 
 was a Franciscan monk, was sitting in the 
 Vatican with Pope Innocent IV, when masses 
 of gold and silver were being carried into the 
 Papal treasury. " You see," said the Pope, with 
 a touch of self-satisfaction, " the age of the 
 Church is past when she could say, ' Silver and 
 gold have I none. ' " " Yes, Holy Father," re- 
 plied the Angelic Doctor, "and the day is also 
 past when she could say to the paralytic 
 ' Take up thy bed and walk ! ' " 
 
 1 Preached in St. Andrew's, Holborn, April 4, 1878.
 
 122 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 2. The anecdote bears very directly on the 
 work of those great saints, who once more in 
 the beginning of the thirteenth century gave 
 fresh impetus to the half-spent forces of previous 
 moral revolutions. The work of the Hermits 
 was over, because the age no longer needed 
 their intense protest for the awfulness of the 
 immortal soul. The work of the Monks had 
 shown the possibility and the usefulness of a 
 common religious life at an epoch of wild con- 
 fusion; but, though their work was not over, 
 they had sunk into too close conformity with 
 the corrupting influences of luxurious prosperity. 
 Once more not in such days of social dissolu- 
 tion as Antony's, nor in such days of political 
 disruption as Benedict's, but in a Church at the 
 very zenith of her splendid predominance and 
 ambitious ease there was need to fan, out of 
 the whitened embers of religion, the smouldering 
 flame of zeal and love. That work was achieved 
 mainly by two men St. Dominic of Spain and 
 St. Francis of Assissi. St. Dominic founded 
 the Ordo Praedicatorum, or Preaching Friars ;
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 123 
 
 St. Francis the Fratres Minores, or Mendicant 
 Friars. They both bore witness to the need of 
 energy and self-denial ; but I shall speak almost 
 solely of the latter. I do so partly because he was 
 the originator of that ideal of absolute poverty 
 which, for a time, produced rich fruit ; and 
 partly because his character is infinitely more 
 attractive than that of his stern contemporary. 
 That St. Dominic was a sincere and holy man, 
 we do not dream of questioning. He whom 
 Dante calls 
 
 " The loving cavalier 
 Of Christian faith, the athlete sanctified, 
 Fond to his own, and dreadful to his foes ; " 1 
 
 the man who lived so much in prayer ; the man 
 who could fearlessly rebuke great Papal legates 
 for their pride and ostentation ; the man who, 
 even in his youth, having given away all that he 
 had in charity, was so distressed by the tears of 
 
 "L'amoroso drudo 
 Dalla Fede cristiana, il santo atleta, 
 Benigno a' suoi ed a 'nimici crudo." 
 
 Paradiso, xii. 55-
 
 I2 4 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 a poor woman, who wished to redeem her son 
 from slavery, that he offered himself to be sold 
 into slavery in her son's place, was one whose 
 holiness and self-devotion it would be inexcu- 
 sable for the comfortable and conventional 
 Christians of this age to deny. But, however 
 wide may be the catholicity of our admiration, 
 we cannot feel specially drawn to one who in- 
 stituted the vain and mechanical iterations of 
 the rosary ; l to one who, however sincere in 
 his zeal who, however much he may have been 
 convinced that " agonies of pain and blood shed 
 in rivers was better than the soul spotted and 
 bewildered with (what he deemed to be) mor- 
 tal sin " yet comes to us with the traditions of 
 a persecutor; looms black and ghastly to us 
 through a century darkened with the Tophet- 
 smoke of the Inquisition, and from the midst 
 of men whose robes were drenched and dyed 
 with Albigensian blood. He presented, doubt- 
 less, a very different aspect to a different age. 
 
 1 See Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, August 4. It is a 
 recital of 15 Pater-Nosters, and 150 Ave-Marys.
 
 s ERM. iv.] EARL Y FRANCISCANS. 1 2 5 
 
 Dante sees him like one of the shining cherubs 
 the spiritus lucentes of Paradise, and says of 
 him and of St. Francis : 
 
 "One all seraphic was in ardent love; 
 The other was for wisdom on the earth 
 A radiation of cherubic light." 1 
 
 But though the workman be saved, the work is 
 burned ; though he and his followers built, or 
 meant to build, on the one foundation, yet that 
 which they built the cruelty of remorseless 
 persecution, the fanaticism of bigoted intoler- 
 ance, the furies of anathema and interdict 
 was a superstructure of worthless hay and 
 stubble, fit only to be consumed in God's re- 
 vealing fire, and winnowed to the four winds 
 with His purging fan. 2 And therefore from the 
 
 1 "L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore ; 
 
 L'altro per sapienza in terra fue 
 Di cherubica luce uno splendore. " 
 
 Paradiso xi. 57. 
 
 3 Dante (Paradiso, x. 94, and xi. ad fineni) speaks in words of 
 grave warning about the degeneracies of both Dominicans and 
 Franciscans ; and how rapid this degeneracy was may be seen in 
 the passage quoted from Bonaventura and others in (he Prefatory 
 Extracts, p. 119.
 
 126 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 ferocity and gloom of the Dominicans we will 
 turn to the angelic gentleness of Francis of 
 Assissi fit successor of Antony, the greatest 
 of the hermits, and Benedict, the wisest of 
 monastic founders. "Antony," it has been 
 said, "had shown to an effete and dying age 
 an image of the strength of man in fellowship 
 with God. Benedict had reared on the ruins 
 of the desolated empire the fabric of an abid- 
 ing society. It remained for Francis, in the 
 midst of a Church endowed with all that art, 
 and learning, and wealth, and power could give, 
 to re-assert the love of God to the poorest, the 
 meanest, the most repulsive of His children. 
 " A man," he said, " is as great as he is in the 
 sight of God, and no greater." " If I lived to 
 the end of the world," he said, again, " I should 
 need no other book than the record of the Pas- 
 sion of Christ." Humbling himself by every 
 mortification beneath the lowliest, he yet did 
 not mistake his mission. Once, when he was 
 suddenly seized by robbers, and they roughly 
 questioned him as to who he was, he replied,
 
 SERM. iv.] EARL Y FRANCISCANS. 1 2 7 
 
 with a prophetic voice, " I am a herald of the 
 Great King. " 1 
 
 3. Of all the men who have ever lived there 
 is probably not one who has ever made it so ab- 
 solutely his aim, as did St. Francis, to reproduce, 
 in letter as well as in spirit, the very life of Christ. 
 Among the hills and villages of Umbria he 
 strove to live with his few first followers the 
 very same life that our Lord had lived with 
 His apostles on the shores of Galilee and in the 
 villages of Palestine. You will say that there 
 was in this a fundamental mistake; that the 
 true imitation of Christ is the obedience to His 
 commandments ; that the unreasoning reproduc- 
 tion of external circumstances was, in the first 
 place, impossible, and in the second erroneous 
 a literal misinterpretation, a spiritual anachro- 
 nism. You may say, when you have heard how 
 St. Francis lived, that he was fundamentally 
 mistaken in supposing that the free and noble 
 poverty of Christ was either mendicancy or 
 pauperism ; that he was foolishly literal in 
 
 1 Westcott.
 
 128 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 making of universal application the special 
 directions given for a short time to the Seventy 
 or the Twelve ; that there was want of common 
 sense in trying to imitate amid the keen moun- 
 tain breezes of the Apennines the tropic dress 
 of the Plain of Gennesareth ; that the entire 
 system of the Friars Minor, as St. Francis in- 
 stituted it, was liable to be entangled with the 
 ignorant misconception that poverty and suffer- 
 ing are, in themselves, dear to God as ends, and 
 not as means. Well, on the one hand, to speak 
 thus is merely to judge the thirteenth century 
 by the totally different conceptions of the nine- 
 teenth, and on the other hand let the tree be 
 known by its fruits. Call St. Francis, if you 
 will, a sublime madman, a fanatical enthusiast. 
 Insult and misrepresentation have ever been the 
 portion in their lifetime of God's most earnest 
 children. 
 
 " Enough ! high words abate no jot or tittle 
 
 Of what, while life still lasts, shall still be true ; 
 Heaven's great ones must be slandered by earth's little, 
 And God makes no ado."
 
 s ERM. iv.] EARL Y FRANCISCANS. 1 2 9 
 
 But still it remains true that no human being 
 who has had the faith to take Christ at His 
 very word, be it even in unlettered ignorance, 
 has ever been allowed to find His promise 
 fail. On one occasion Fra Masseo, a handsome, 
 burly, eloquent, and somewhat self-satisfied friar, 
 and one of the earliest converts to the order, 
 meeting St. Francis as he came a gaunt, worn, 
 pitiable figure out of the wood where he was 
 constantly in prayer, burst out with the excla- 
 mation : " Why to thee ? why to thee ? " " What 
 say you ? " asked Francis, surprised at the 
 interruption. " I say," answered Masseo, " why 
 should all the world run after thee, and every one 
 desire to see, and hear, and obey thee ? Thou 
 art not handsome ; thou art not noble ; thou 
 art not learned ; then why to thee ? Why does 
 all the world run after thee ? " l The saint was 
 
 1 This and many of the facts here narrated of St. Francis 
 may be found in the admirable biography by Mrs. Oliphanf, 
 which is mainly taken from the lives of him by the Three Com- 
 panions ; by Bonaventura ; by Thomas of Celano ; and from the 
 Fioretti. The latter a delightful series of legends is trans- 
 lated by Ozanam in his Poctes Franciscains.
 
 I3 o SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 too modest to reply to this strange apostrophe 
 but we may answer for him. It was because he 
 was utterly sincere ; it was, as we have seen, 
 again and again, from the invincible strength of 
 his self-sacrifice. "That man," says Sir Arthur 
 Helps, " is very strong and powerful who has no 
 more hope for himself: who looks not to be 
 loved any more ; to be admired any more ; to 
 have any more honour or dignity ; and who cares 
 not for gratitude ; but whose sole thought is 
 for others, and who only lives on for them." * 
 He that utterly despises the world shall rise 
 above the world ; he that does not fear to be 
 made a slave, can become more potent than a 
 king ; if any man will be great among you, let him 
 be your servant. This man, who was dressed in 
 rags, who fed on scraps, who was unlearned and 
 simple, and had sold cloth in a shop, did more 
 for the Church than the most absolute Pontiff, 
 whose stirrup was ever held for him by princes, 
 or who put his haughty foot upon the neck of 
 Emperors. The Church which they helped to 
 
 1 Realmah.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS, 131 
 
 ruin, this beggar, this simple wanderer, this 
 glorious pauper of Christ, this man who had 
 become a fool for wisdom's sake, inspired and 
 glorified. "You prelates, provided you eat up 
 your vast revenues and drink the wine of your 
 vineyards, care nothing for the poor people," 
 said Philip Augustus of France very bitterly to 
 the French bishops ; and a Church of which such 
 things can be said is already sapped at its 
 foundations. One day when Innocent III. was 
 walking on a terrace in the Lateran, that 
 Pope Innocent who had made Otho of Germany 
 tremble; who had reduced Philip Augustus to 
 submission ; who had sent 
 
 " Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal," 1 
 
 to bring King John of England to his knees 
 while this stateliest of imperial Pontiffs, at the 
 summit of his grandeur, was meditating on the 
 government of nations in his silent pacing to and 
 fro he was disturbed by the approach of a 
 humble brown figure in peasant's garb. With a 
 
 1 He was, however, only a legate, not cardinal. 
 
 K 2
 
 I3 2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 gesture of contempt the great Pope motioned 
 him away ; but that night he had two dreams 
 the one was that a tali and beautiful palm-tree 
 grew up at his very feet ; the other that he saw 
 the grand church of St. John Lateran falling 
 into ruins, when the same poor brown figure 
 whom he had repelled, ran forward and upheld 
 it with his hands. Admonished by these dreams, 
 or with a flash of insight into the power of en- 
 thusiasm, he sent for Francis and gave a general 
 sanction to his organisation of the Fratres 
 Minores, the " Lesser Brothers," the lowest and 
 humblest, but destined to be the most powerful 
 order, the most militant missionaries of the 
 Church. Now which was the most really in- 
 fluential, the magnificent Pope or the ascetic 
 visionary? Did not God make the counsels of 
 princes of none effect, but bring the poor out of 
 his misery and make him households like a flock 
 of sheep ? Almost every vast design of the 
 mighty Innocent was, even in his own lifetime, 
 more or less of failure ; l but the order of St. 
 
 1 Milman, Latin Christianity.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 133 
 
 Francis of Assissi soon multiplied to myriads, 
 and was to be counted by thousands even at his 
 early death. The humility and devotion of 
 Francis gave fresh force to that Church which 
 the ambition of Innocent had weakened by over- 
 strain. And yet, happy in his wise ignorance, 
 profound in his unlearned simplicity, his whole 
 secret was to follow Christ, and to hold cheap 
 what the world desires. What is at this moment 
 occupying the vast majority in this city the 
 vast majority, it may be, of us even in this con- 
 gregation ? Is it not some form or other of 
 self-interest ? Is it not, in some form or other, 
 money, or pleasure, or ambition ? Do not the 
 streets, the shops, the offices, buzz with talk of 
 money ? " There are three things that make up 
 all business, which enter into all the intrigues, 
 which inflame all the passions, which actuate all 
 the eagerness of the world. St. Francis saw 
 that they were illusions; he saw that riches 
 enslave, that honours overpower, that pleasures 
 effeminate the heart. He saw that these broad 
 roads lead many to perdition. For himself he
 
 I 3 4 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 sought another road. He found riches in 
 poverty; joy in suffering; glory in self-abase- 
 ment." l At the age of twenty-five he burst every 
 bond of family, of position, of comfort, and, 
 stripped bare of every possession, descended 
 from the hill of Assissi to show the world the 
 most complete example of the madness of the 
 cross. " But far from revolting the world, he 
 subdues it ! The more this sublime fanatic 
 abased himself in order to make himself more 
 worthy, by his humility and the contempt of 
 men, to be the instrument of love, the more did 
 his greatness shine and radiate afar, and the 
 more did men fling themselves in his path, some 
 ambitious to despoil themselves of everything 
 like him, some eager, at least, to gather up his 
 words of inspiration " ; 2 those words, which, as 
 Thomas of Celano witnesses, "penetrated like 
 glowing fire to the inmost depths of the heart." 
 
 4. Let me, then, as briefly as I can, tell you 
 one or two of the facts of his life. Francesco 
 
 1 Bossuet. 
 
 2 Montalembert, Elizabeth d'Hongroie, i. 61.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 135 
 
 Bernardone was the son of a merchant of As- 
 sissi, in Umbria. In his boyhood and youth 
 he was the gayest of the gay, the flower of the 
 Assissian youth, pure and kind, but the bright 
 leader of pleasure-loving companions ; living 
 above his station, as though he had been a 
 prince's son ; a soldier, a singer, with many a 
 vain ambition, though not without stirrings of 
 deeper hope. When he was twenty-five a dan- 
 gerous sickness made the whole world look 
 different to him, and changed the current of 
 his tnoughts. Visions seemed to summon him 
 to some great work. He saw a palace full of 
 pieces of armour all signed with the cross, and 
 when he asked to whom these belonged, was 
 told: "To thee and to thy soldiers;" and 
 felt himself bidden to be a soldier ; but not 
 as he at first supposed in earthly armies. As 
 he knelt before the crucifix he thought that it 
 thrice said to him : " Go, rebuild My house, 
 which, as thou seest, is falling to ruins;" and 
 it was years before his simple and faithful 
 heart comprehended that the Church which
 
 1 36 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 he was bidden to rebuild was, not as he at 
 firsst supposed, the material structure, but the 
 living congregation. In the very midst of his 
 youthful gaiety deep hushes of emotion came 
 over him. He feels his head overshadowed 
 by the hands of " invisible consecration." 
 The life of Christ seizes possession of his 
 thoughts with overmastering sway. One day, 
 riding across a valley, he sees a leper, turns 
 from him for one instant with irrepressible 
 disgust, then in shame dismounts, fills the poor 
 sufferer's hand with alms, and humbly kisses 
 it. Then, riding on, he looks back for an in- 
 stant, and lo ! there is no leper there, and he 
 believes that he has had a vision of " the poor 
 man Christ Jesus " an image of whom he sees 
 ever afterwards in all who suffer and are poor. 
 He visits Rome ; flings his whole purse of 
 money as an offering on the floor of St. Peter's, 
 and, going out, strips off his gay robes, ex- 
 changes them for the ragged gaberdine of a 
 beggar, and sits begging on the steps. Called, 
 as he fancies, to restore the ruined Church of
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 137 
 
 St. Damian, he impetuously takes some of his 
 father's goods, sells them, and brings the 
 money to the priest. His father, regarding the 
 young man as a lunatic, chooses to treat this 
 as a theft, imprisons, and cruelly oppresses him. 
 Francis appeals to the bishop, and in full court 
 not only gives back the money to his father, but 
 strips himself of his very clothes, down to the 
 hair shirt which he wore next to his skin, and 
 covered by the pitying bishop with his own 
 pallium, calls the spectators to bear witness 
 that " he is no longer the son of Pietro Bar- 
 nardone, but a servant of God." Then begins 
 his special work. He rebuilds three crumbling 
 churches of his native town, begging for the 
 stones, and laying them with his own hands. 
 Though naturally fond of delicacies, he began 
 literally to beg for his daily food, and to 
 live only on the unpalatable scraps which were 
 given him. One day in church, as he listened 
 to the words of the Gospel : " Provide neither 
 gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses ; 
 neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.
 
 I3 8 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 And as ye go, preach, saying : The Kingdom 
 of Heaven is at hand" the words flashed 
 in upon his soul with overpowering force, as 
 though the light of God had moved over the 
 graven gems of the Urim. "Here," he ex- 
 claimed, " is what I have wanted ; here is what 
 I have sought ! " and with literal simplicity 
 then and there he flung away shoes, and staff, 
 and purse, and bound his tunic round him with 
 a rope. Companions began to join him. Seek- 
 ing guidance from God, he bade the priest take 
 the missal, sign it with the cross, lay it on the 
 altar, and open it three times ; intending to 
 take for his future guidance the Sortes Bib- 
 lictz thus solemnly invoked. The first time 
 the book opened at " Go and sell all that 
 thou hast, and give to the poor." The second 
 time at " Take nothing for your journey." The 
 third time at " He who will come after Me, let 
 him deny himself, and take up his cross and 
 follow Me." Francis and his few friends took 
 the commands literally, and the very first inci- 
 dent that followed showed that their practical
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 139 
 
 protest was needed, and was not in vain. Ber- 
 nardo, a rich and noble citizen, determined to 
 sell all and join the little company. Seeing 
 them give so amply to the poor, a greedy priest 
 came and claimed additional payment for some 
 stones which he had given to Francis when he 
 was building St. Damian's. " Wondering at 
 his avarice, but, like a true servant of the Gos- 
 pel, not wishing to contend with him," Francis 
 put both hands into Bernardo's lap, and rilling 
 them with gold, flung it into the priest's lap, 
 saying, with a little touch of contempt, " Have 
 you yet enough, Sir Priest ? " " I have enough, 
 my brother," said the priest in meek compunc- 
 tion, and from that day became a better and 
 holier man. 1 
 
 And from that day, too, the order grew 
 and prospered. They lived in a bare hut ; 
 they preached, they prayed ; they begged their 
 daily food ; they tended the sick ; they gave 
 of what they had to all the poor who came 
 to them ; they possessed nothing, either for 
 1 Mrs. Oliphant, Francis of Assissi, p. 43.
 
 1 40 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 their order or for themselves; and thus mak- 
 ing Poverty their bride amid the mad desire 
 of their age for wealth, they introduced nobler 
 aims and holier feelings into a luxurious and 
 ambitious Church, into an oppressive, blood- 
 stained, cruel world. It was a grand, emphatic 
 protest which appealed to the imagination of 
 all men. Nothing can show more forcibly the 
 power of this appeal than the fact that St. 
 Francis, as the chosen bridegroom of Poverty, 
 was celebrated alike in the paintings of Giotto 
 and in the verse of Dante. When men saw 
 Francis at the table of nobles and cardinals, 
 bright and courteous, but while he went on 
 talking, unostentatiously deluging his plate with 
 cold water, or quietly sprinkling a few ashes 
 over the rich food, with the half apology, 
 " Brother ash is pure," they saw at least that 
 these men had other thoughts and other hopes 
 than the fat monks, and immoral priests, and 
 splendour-loving bishops, of whom the Church 
 in that day was full. 
 
 Thus humbly and simply did St. Francis live
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 141 
 
 with his brethren, caring for others, not for him- 
 self. Before his death he founded the order of 
 the Poor Ladies of Clare, for women ; and (which 
 was a memorable advance on all previous re- 
 forms) the order of Tertiaries; a simple rule of 
 faith and prayer for married people, and people 
 in the world, who could not join his order to the 
 full. For St. Francis recognised, by true and 
 humble instinct, that God's world of fathers, and 
 mothers, and children, and workday people was 
 not all lost and ruined, but that mercy was open 
 and salvation possible even to those who walked 
 on the fair and holy way of nature ; that God 
 was also the master of those who lived in 
 comfort, and was able to call them by His 
 grace, as they trod the common path of life 
 "though a harder path, which was not that of 
 nature, a thorny road, above the common 
 flowery levels of humanity, was that which he 
 had chosen for himself." l He journeyed to the 
 Crusaders at Damietta, and earnestly courting 
 martyrdom, went at the most imminent risk to 
 1 Mrs. Oliphant, p. 204.
 
 I 4 2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 convert the Sultan, accompanied by but a single 
 brother, offering, if the Sultan would embrace 
 the faith, to walk through fire. And then his 
 long, but sweet and humble austerities began 
 to do their natural work. No one can with 
 impunity violate the clear indications of nature. 
 Though scarcely past middle age, he fell into 
 grievous sickness. It was in one of the fainting 
 ecstasies of his later years that his brethren be- 
 lieved him to have received, on Monte Alverno, 
 the stigmata the five wound-marks of the 
 crucifixion of his Lord. 1 His eyes, worn and 
 blinded with perpetual tears, began to fail. It 
 was deemed necessary that he should undergo 
 an operation with a burning iron. " O brother 
 Fire," he said, "the Most High hath created 
 thee of most exceeding comeliness, beautiful, 
 useful; be thou to me, in this my hour, mer- 
 ciful be courteous " ; and when the operation 
 
 'Nel crudo sasso intra Tevere ed Arno 
 Da Cristo prese T ultimo sigillo 
 Che le sue membra du anne portarno." 
 
 DANTE, Paradise, xi.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 143 
 
 was over, he told his friends that God had 
 been with him, and he had felt no pain. 
 Then came his last hour. Prostrate on ashes, 
 on the bare earth, naked, till one in pity covered 
 him with a garment, in great suffering, yet in 
 exceeding peace, he died, saying to his brethren 
 almost with his last words, " I have done my 
 part ; may Christ teach you to do yours." 
 
 5. My brethren, that life of the cross was 
 very richly fruitful ; fruitful in proportion to its 
 transcendent self-denial. St. Francis of Assissi 
 was " a living epistle known and read by all men." 
 His order, in that very century, produced among 
 its brethren lives so powerful and so famous as 
 those of St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas of 
 Aquinum ; among its Tertiaries lives so noble 
 and so saintly as those of St. Louis of France 
 and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. St. Francis 
 furnished one more instance of the truth that 
 " the grandest revolutions in the history of the 
 universe have been accomplished by its beggars, 
 and, as the world thought, its fools . . . Let a man, 
 in any age, go forth with the fire of God in
 
 1 44 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 him, and the force he wields, the mastery he 
 wins, the new life he quickens, pours silent con- 
 tempt on gold. The richest in such seasons are 
 those who give most, not those who have most. 
 It fills the Beatitudes with a wonderful meaning, 
 and shows the sorrows and straits of poverty 
 overflowed by the riches and joys of God." x 
 
 6. For with all his sorrows and privations, 
 Francis, too, like Antony, like Benedict, was 
 happy. It was not that in his supreme self- 
 sacrifice he had forgotten all human feelings, and 
 never felt disturbed by the natural yearning for 
 the sweet home joys which are not only natural, 
 but beautiful and innocent. The " touching story 
 of how, one night, in a tumult and fever of feel- 
 ing, he sprang out of bed, and was seen by a 
 brother who was praying in his cell to heap 
 together seven masses of snow in the cold moon- 
 light, and said, ' Here is thy wife ; these four are 
 thy sons and daughters ; the other two are thy 
 servant and thy handmaid ; and for all these thou 
 art bound to provide. Make haste then, and 
 
 1 J. Baldwin Brown, Misread Passages of Scripture, p. 24.
 
 EARL Y FRANCISCANS. j 4 5 
 
 provide clothing for them, lest they perish with 
 cold. But if the care of so many trouble thee, 
 be thou careful to serve our Lord alone.' He 
 dissipates the dream," says the author of his 
 last biography, " by the chill touch of the snow, 
 by still nature hushing the fiery thoughts . . . 
 and then the curtain of prayer and silence falls 
 over him, and the convent walls close black 
 around. " l Yet he was very happy. We see it 
 in the pleasant anecdotes of his tender love for 
 animals, of his innocent delight in the beauties 
 of nature. " Little brother leveret, come to me ; 
 why hast thou let thyself be taken ? " he said, as 
 the little trembling creature took refuge in the 
 folds of his gown, "as if it had some hidden 
 sense of the pitifulness of his heart." He 
 gently trains a little lamb to love him, and 
 gives it to the poor Sisters of Clare. He sets 
 free a fish which had been taken, quietly put- 
 ting it back into the water, and calling it brother. 
 " My sisters," he says to the twittering flitting 
 
 1 Mrs. Oliphant, p. 88. Most of these stories are taken from 
 the Fioretti.
 
 I4 6 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 swallows, who are disturbing his sermon at 
 Alvia, " since you have had your say, it is now 
 time that I should speak ; listen now in your 
 turn to the Word of God." " We are not worthy 
 of such a treasure," he said, again and again, as 
 he sat by a clear fountain with the scraps of 
 food spread out on a natural table of rock ; and 
 when his matter-of-fact companion grumbled, 
 " How can any one talk of a great treasure when 
 poverty is so hard upon us ? " " This table," he 
 replied, "is to me rich and precious, where 
 everything is provided for us by the hand of 
 God." Yes, he was very happy ; and the legends 
 of the harp which played for him unbidden 
 music, and the water which became for him like 
 heavenly wine, are but symbols of this inward 
 joy. 1 It glows in every line of those poems of 
 his which were the very dawn of Italian poetry. 2 
 
 1 The same stories are found in the lives of St. Dunstan and 
 St. Elizabeth of Hungary. On this happiness in the cloister, see 
 Montalembert, Monks of the West, i. 65. 
 
 2 I quote Mrs. Oliphant's version of this song. "InfocoTamor 
 mimise." It is first attributed to St. Francis by St. Bernardino 
 of Siena, Qpp. iv. 4.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 147 
 
 ' ' Love sets my heart on fire ; 
 
 I.ove sets my heart on fire. 
 When thus with Christ I fought, 
 
 Peace made we after ire ; 
 For first from Him was brought 
 
 Dear Love's veracious fire ; 
 And love of Christ has brought 
 
 Such strength I cannot tire ; 
 He dwells in soul and thought ; 
 
 Love sets my heart on fire." 
 
 Or take, again, in proof of his joyous tender- 
 ness, the famous Canticle of the Sun, or of the 
 Creatures : 
 
 "Praised be God my Lord 
 With all Thy creatures ; 
 Specially by my lord, our brother, the Sun : 
 Fair is he, and shining with a very great splendour. 
 O Lord, he signifies to us Thee ; " 1 
 
 and so on through others of God's works 
 ' Praised be our Lord by our sister the Moon, 
 and the Stars ; and by our brother the Wind ; 
 and by our sister the Water, for she is very 
 
 1 The text of this famous song and translations of it may be 
 found in Mrs. Oliphant, p. 235. Ozanam, Les Poetes Francis- 
 cains, p. 71 ; Mr. Matthew Arnold, Essays on Criticism, 
 p. 2OO; and Milman, Latin Christianity. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 serviceable, and humble, and precious, and pure; 
 by our brother the Fire, jocund, and beautiful, 
 and most robust and strong ; and by our mother 
 the Earth, and by our sister ' what think you ? 
 ' by our sister the Death of the body.' So 
 wrote this humble and holy man of heart, 
 who had a vision of all things in God ; 
 and then he added a verse to reconcile the 
 struggling factions of Assissi, and by it did 
 bring about their mutual reconciliation, even 
 with tears. " Praised be our Lord by those 
 who pardon one another for love of Thee, and 
 bear weaknesses and troubles ; blessed be those 
 who shall endure in peace, for by the Most 
 Highest they shall be crowned." No wonder 
 that he who thus loved God's creatures loved 
 also his brother man. " If a brother has 
 sinned," he wrote to one of his order, " however 
 great his fault may be; if he has once been 
 brought before you, let him not depart till he 
 has felt your mercy." And again: "By one 
 mark only can I know whether thou art a 
 servant of God, namely, if thou compassionately
 
 SER.M. iv.] EARLY FRANCISCANS. 149 
 
 bringest back wandering brethren to God, and 
 never ceasest to love those who grievously err." 
 
 Such songs, my brethren, and such rules are 
 the echoes of a heart that has learnt the 
 Apostle's precept : " Rejoice in the Lord al- 
 ways ; and again I say, rejoice." " Because," 
 says Bonaventura, " they possessed nothing 
 earthly, loved nothing earthly, and feared to 
 lose nothing earthly ; they were secure in all 
 places ; troubled by no fears, distracted by no 
 cares; they lived without trouble of mind, wait- 
 ing without anxiety for the coming day, or the 
 night's lodging." 
 
 6. My brethren, if this exquisite, humble life, 
 with its magic charm, have not taught you its 
 own lessons, without further words of mine, my 
 purpose has failed. Again, I say, I do not 
 dream of suggesting to any one that he should 
 imitate the external form of these lives of which 
 we have been speaking. The worst sinner could 
 do that, and it would be absolutely worthless. 
 Even St. Francis saw that in his austerities he 
 had gone too far. " I have sinned," he said,
 
 1 50 SAINTL Y WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 " against my brother the ass," meaning thereby 
 his mortal body. He even doubted in his 
 tender conscience whether, in weakening his 
 own natural powers by extreme asceticism, he 
 had not sinned, almost unpardonably, against 
 God. His Order of Mendicant Friars rapidly 
 degenerated, involving as it did an ideal which 
 could not be permanently maintained. But it 
 is no small element in our admiration of the 
 Umbrian saint that he founded the Order of 
 the Tertiaries expressly for those who could 
 only live in the world. And, however extreme 
 his needless austerities, let us not dream of 
 judging him ; let us speak of him more lovingly 
 than the historian who calls him "a mild en- 
 thusiast, not perfectly sane." For 
 
 "When God shall judge the world, I take it 
 
 He will not mete this man by rule or line, 
 Who felt no common thirst, nor feared to slake it 
 
 From that which flowed within him the Divine. 
 Or think you God loves our tame level acres 
 
 More than the proud head of some heaven-kissed hill? 
 Man's straight-dug ditch more than His own free nver, 
 
 That wanders, God regarding, where it will?" 1 
 
 1 Poems, by J. Rhoades.
 
 SERM. iv.] EARL Y FRANCISCANS. i $ l 
 
 And one thing assuredly we all can learn from 
 St. Francis of Assissi and his truest followers. 
 It is to live lives more simple, less luxurious, 
 more contented with a little, less absorbed in 
 earthly interests. In an age when simplicity 
 simplicity in dress, in surroundings, in eating and 
 drinking is eminently necessary for all, and 
 above all for the young ; in an age when there is 
 far too much of domestic and of family egotism ; 
 in an age when even good men on every side 
 fall off, we know not how, 
 
 "To selfishness, disguised in gentle names 
 Of peace, and quiet, and domestic love ; " 
 
 in an age when too many sell themselves for 
 handfuls of silver and for pieces of bread, we 
 can learn from him, and from the hap- 
 piness and influence which God granted him, 
 the spirit of that lesson which he had learnt 
 from the example of Christ the lesson, namely, 
 to increase our possessions by limiting our 
 desires ; to sit more loose to worldly luxuries 
 and worldly ambitions ; to scorn the too-paltry
 
 15 2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. iv. 
 
 English ideal of mere vulgar comfort ; to brave 
 abuse, and loss, and hatred, for the cause of 
 what we hold to be the truth; to learn that 
 the world will sink into nothing for him to 
 whom God is all. 
 
 "What is man, 
 
 If the chief use and market of his time 
 Is but to sleep and feed? A beast no more." 
 
 It is not gold or silver ; it is not land or 
 houses ; it is not a flourishing business or 
 hoarded funds that constitute true riches. 
 These things are haunted by meagre desires 
 and distracting cares. The true riches are 
 health, and a pure heart, and love of Christ, 
 and love to man, and perfect trust in the 
 sustaining providence of God, and a cheerful 
 spirit, and a noble charity. " Unto the angel 
 of the Church of the Laodiceans write; Be- 
 cause thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with 
 goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest 
 not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and 
 poor, I counsel thee to buy gold of me, that
 
 SF.RM. iv.] DEARLY FRANCISCANS. 153 
 
 thou mayest be rich." " But to the angel of the 
 Church in Smyrna write ; I know thy works, 
 and tribulation, and poverty ; but thou art 
 rich." And to all men alike, and above all 
 to men wearying themselves in the very fire 
 for the unsatisfying and uncertain goods of 
 earth, " The blessing of the Lord, that maketh 
 rich, and He addcth no sorrow with it."
 
 SERMON V. 
 THE MISSIONARIES.
 
 THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 ' ' And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having 
 the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the 
 earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, 
 saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him ; f :.r 
 the hour of His judgment is come : and worship Him that made 
 heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." 
 REV. xiv. 6, 7. 
 
 " Yes, or if loose and free, as some are telling, 
 
 (Little I know it and I little care), 
 This my poor lodge, my transitory dwelling, 
 Swings in the bright deep of the endless air, 
 
 " Round it and round this prophets shall proclaim Him, 
 
 Springing thenceforth and hurrying therethro', 
 Each to the next the generations name Him, 
 Honour unendingly and know anew." 
 
 MYERS, St. Paul.
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 THE MISSIONARIES.^ 
 
 IS. LI I. 7. 
 
 " How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
 bnngeth good tidings, that publish eth peace" 
 
 WE have been throwing a rapid glance, my 
 brethren, at some of the ideals of holiness 
 which prevailed among the Saintly Workers of 
 the past, and we have been doing so with the 
 humble and simple desire to learn lessons for 
 the present. You will have seen from the very 
 first that I have had in view no shadow of any 
 controversial thought ; that I have aimed at 
 nothing which could, in the most distant degree, 
 awaken a single legitimate suspicion. Some 
 have fancied that these lectures were meant to 
 
 1 Preached in St. Andrew's, Holborn, April II, 1878.
 
 160 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 evoke some latent sympathy with erring be- 
 liefs, some concealed antagonism to Protestant 
 principles. I can only look with sorrow upon 
 such suspicions ; I can only, with all earnest- 
 ness, disclaim such motives. You, my brethren, 
 will long ago have recognised how thoroughly we 
 have tried to keep in view the warning that, in 
 "unwinding the cerements of antiquity, we 
 should not be contaminated with their dust." 
 To revive the obsolete, to resuscitate the de- 
 cayed, to imitate the external, to reintroduce 
 the evils and errors of the past because we may 
 profit by the contemplation of its heroism and 
 its self-denials, has (as you will have recognised) 
 never remotely entered into our intentions. We 
 have but striven to be edified as faithful Chris- 
 tians; we have but tried to realise "the com- 
 munion of saints ; " we have but raised our eyes 
 to the beacon-lights upon the hills which show 
 how high our brethren in God's family have 
 climbed ; we have but tried to learn from them 
 how they were enabled, by Christ's spirit, to 
 follow His steps and bear His cross. Oh, that
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 161 
 
 all bitterness and all disunions among us were 
 over ! Oh for more of the unity of the spirit 
 in the bond of peace ! Oh that we could all 
 learn more of the tone of St. Columban, when 
 the French bishops wanted to enforce his obe- 
 dience to their time of observing Easter. " Let 
 France," he said and may not we say, " Let 
 the Church of England?" "receive into her 
 bosom all who, if they deserve it, will meet 
 in one heaven. For we have one kingdom 
 promised us we have one hope of our calling 
 in Christ, with whom we shall reign together 
 if we suffer with Him here on earth. Choose 
 ye which rule ye will respecting Easter," con- 
 tinued the saint ; " but let us not quarrel with 
 one another, lest our enemies rejoice. In com- 
 munion with Christ let us learn to love one 
 another, and pray for one another, that with 
 Him we may together reign for evermore." 1 
 2. To-day, and for the last time, we glance, 
 
 1 Maclear, Apostles of Medieval Eiirope, p. 64. I have also 
 referred to the charming sketch of St. Columban in Ozanam's 
 Etudes Germaniques, ii., 103-114. 
 
 M
 
 162 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 my brethren, at yet another class of saintly 
 workers. The age of frequent Martyrdom is 
 past ; the age of the Hermits is past ; the age 
 of Monasticism is past ; the needed protest of 
 the Dominicans and Franciscans very rapidly 
 degenerated from its original sincerity, and ex- 
 pended its original force. 1 But the day for 
 missions is not past, nor ever will be till the 
 kingdoms of the world have become the king- 
 doms of our Lord, and of His Christ. And 
 sure I am that all which was good and holy in 
 bygone ideals of self-devotion may be per- 
 petuated in the best forms of goodness which 
 are possible to-day. It needed not the stake 
 or the Tullianum to make the Martyr, but the 
 intense conviction that he who lost his life for 
 Christ's sake should find it. It was not the 
 cavern and the desert which constituted the 
 Hermit's virtue, but the spirit of " interior soli- 
 tude," 2 and the belief that, the life was more 
 
 1 We see this even in the warnings of Dante, though he is 
 full of admiration for the ideal of both. 
 
 2 " Secum habitavit," says St. Gregory of St. Benedict.
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 163 
 
 than meat, and the body than raiment It was 
 not from the tonsure and the scapulary that the 
 Monk derived his usefulness, but from that de- 
 terminate self-conquest which sprang from his 
 sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin. There 
 was no merit in the sandals and girdle of the 
 Franciscan, but in his utter superiority to the 
 allurements of the world. And all these lessons 
 have come down as a heritage to age after age 
 of mission workers. Speaking of the era of 
 classic glory, the poet asks : 
 
 "Ancient of Days! august Athena! Where, 
 Where are thy men of might ? thy grand in soul ? 
 G one glimmering through the dream of things that were : 
 First in the race that led to Glory's goal, 
 They won, and passed away. Is this the whole? 
 A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour ! 
 The warrior's weapon and the sophist's stole 
 Are sought in vain, and o'er each mouldering tower 
 
 Dim with the mist of years grey flits the shade of power ! '' 
 
 But however much the dreams of human 
 pride and the splendour of human intellect 
 may pass away, the lives and labours of good 
 men in no wise pass away with their external 
 
 M 2
 
 1 64 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 surroundings. Nay, far rather they are the 
 seed sown in weeping, of which others, it may 
 be long centuries afterwards, gather in the 
 sheaves with joy. What could seem more alien 
 from the spirit of a Romish monk than that of 
 a Baptist missionary ? Yet it was David Living- 
 stone who most assuredly had no mediaeval 
 sentiments or popish proclivities who pointed 
 to the ancient monks as teaching lessons to the 
 modern missionaries. " They did not," he said, 
 " disdain to hold the plough. They introduced 
 fruit-trees, flowers, vegetables, in addition to 
 teaching and emancipating the serfs. Their 
 monasteries were mission-stations, which re- 
 sembled ours in being dispensaries for the 
 sick, almshouses for the poor, and nurseries of 
 learning. Can we learn nothing from them in 
 their prosperity as the schools of Europe, and 
 see naught in history but the pollution and 
 laziness of their decay ? " 
 
 3. But though the other types of self-dedica- 
 tion have become partly or wholly extinct, 
 though each age has altered the device upon
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 165 
 
 the current gold of nobleness and self-devotion, 
 the missionaries (as Christ commanded them) 
 have continued unbroken their Christ-like toil. 
 Even the old dispensation lacked not its mis- 
 sionaries, from Noah, down to Jonah and to 
 Daniel. But since Christ gave His last com- 
 mand to His assembled disciples, there have 
 ever been some who felt that it was their more 
 special call to obey it. St. Paul was not one of 
 those who heard it, but was, as it were, "the 
 abortive-born" 1 in the apostolic family, yet 
 what a type and model of all missionaries was 
 he ! That life of his as it stands revealed to us 
 in his own Epistles, how sad it was, and how 
 fruitful! From that day on which, blind and 
 trembling, and with the scars of God's own 
 thunder on his soul, he had staggered into the 
 streets of Damascus, what a tragedy had 
 encompassed him of ever-deepening gloom ! 
 That first peril, when he had been let down in 
 a basket through a window the flights from 
 assassination the hot disputes at Antioch the 
 
 1 u.a"irtpf\ r$ fKTpufj.aTi. I Cor. xv. 8.
 
 1 66 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 expulsion from Iconium the stoning at Lystra 
 the quarrel with his own heart's brother the 
 acute spa'sms of that impalement by the stake 
 in the flesh at Galatia the agony in Macedonia 
 of outward fightings and inward fears the five 
 Jewish scourgings the three Roman flagella- 
 tions the polished scorn of Athens the fac- 
 tious violence of Corinth the streaming tears 
 of the parting at Miletus the gnashing fury of 
 Jewish mobs the illegal insolence of provincial 
 tribunals ; these were but a fragment, and a 
 small fragment, of his trials and miseries. 
 Even the brute forces of nature seemed to be 
 against him he had to struggle in her rushing 
 watercourses, to faint in her sultry deserts, to 
 toss for long days and nights in leaky vessels 
 on her tempestuous seas. This was the perilous, 
 persecuted life on which he had to look back 
 as he sat chained to the rude legionary in that 
 dreary Roman prison. He seemed to have 
 found no result from all his labours, no reward 
 for all his immense self-sacrifice. He seemed 
 to have been abandoned and forgotten by the
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. ifrj 
 
 very churches which he had loved. Nor did any 
 sunbeam gild even the last unrecorded scene. 
 See the bent, grey weak old man, led by the 
 soldier along the Appian Road ; see the sword 
 flash and the head fall ; and which, think you, 
 of that small handful of weeping Christian 
 brethren could have dreamed in his wildest 
 dream, that, to that poor martyr's glorious 
 memory, shrines more magnificent than that of 
 the Capitolian Jupiter should tower over cities 
 more glorious than Imperial Rome, long cen- 
 turies after the " insulting vanity " of triumph 
 had ceased, and "silent vestal" and "chiefest 
 pontifex" had become forgotten names? Nor 
 did the saint, the martyr himself, dream of it 
 His thoughts were not of earthly crowns. He 
 asked the service, not the payment ; the battle, 
 not the victory. Type of all true missionary 
 lives, his was " the faith triumphant in failure, 
 which is better than self-congratulation on any 
 visible results." 
 
 4. And for three centuries after him the 
 whole Church led more or less of a mission
 
 1 68 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 life. But missions in a directer sense the 
 setting forth of Christian men to preach the 
 Gospel in heathen lands became specially 
 memorable in the fourth and following centu- 
 ries. From point to point, like the flashing of 
 a glad signal from hill to hill, the heralds of 
 the Gospel sped on its light. In the fourth 
 century Ulphilas had been the apostle of the 
 Goths. In the fifth St. Patrick converted 
 Ireland. In the sixth St. Columba began that 
 holy work which makes "the heart glow amid 
 the ruins of lona," and St. Columbanus carried 
 to the shores of the Swiss Lakes the lessons 
 of truth and the examples of holy living. 
 In the seventh century, struck by the 
 beauty of the fair-haired Saxon slaves in the 
 market-place of Rome Non Angli, sed An- 
 geli, si essent Christi Gregory despatched St. 
 Augustine to become the first Archbishop of 
 Canterbury. When England had been con- 
 verted she sent forth St. Willibrod in the 
 eighth century to the shores of Northern Ger- 
 many, and St. Boniface to traverse undaunted
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. ^g 
 
 the Thuringian wilds ; and when the Scandi- 
 navian vikings were becoming the scourge of 
 every nation, and the terror of every sea, in the 
 ninth century, an Anskar, and, in the eleventh, 
 an Olaf, won them also to the faith of Christ, 
 and the main work of the missionary apostolate 
 in Europe was achieved. He who sits on the 
 hill at Canterbury may recall (as has been 
 pointed out) how, from the mission-work of the 
 little band of monks, headed by Augustine, 
 which advanced with beating hearts to preach 
 under the oak to the Pagan Ethelbert, there 
 sprang that first English Christian city of 
 Canterbury, and that first English Christian 
 kingdom of Kent, which has expanded into the 
 Christian empire of Great Britain, and which 
 involved in its vast issues the conversion not 
 only of Germany, but also of North America, of 
 Australasia, of the far Pacific Islands, 1 and who 
 can tell of what future empires and kingdoms, 
 in circle after circle of ever-broadening light, 
 
 1 See Dean Stanley, Memorials of Canterbury, p. 39.
 
 1 7 o SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 till the glory of the Lord shall cover the earth 
 as the waters cover the sea ? 
 
 5. At two of these earlier British missionaries 
 whom I have named (St Columban and St. 
 Boniface) let me for a moment glance. 
 
 St. Columban was an Irish monk, on whom, 
 at the age of thirty, came the strong mission 
 fervour to preach to the pagan tribes of Europe. 
 With twelve companions he sailed to France, 
 and passed through the country, preaching on 
 his way, till he reached and settled among the 
 wild hills and pine-groves of the Vosges. There 
 his monks lived, clearing the woods and tilling 
 the fields in prayer, and labour, and obedience. 
 " Whosoever overcomes himself," said Colum- 
 ban, " treads the world under foot If we have 
 conquered ourselves, we have conquered all 
 things. Let us die unto ourselves. Let us 
 live in Christ, that Christ may live in us." Of 
 course he met with persecution ; all good men 
 do. He was persecuted by bishops whose laxity 
 his life rebuked. He was persecuted by kings 
 and queens whose vices he openly denounced.
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 In spite of this he carried on for many years that 
 Laus perennis, that service of song and prayer, 
 unbroken through every hour of the day and 
 night, which struck the imagination of the care- 
 less, and was accepted as a source of spiritual 
 blessing by a troubled and tumultuous world. 
 lie was at last driven from the country, and 
 settled on the Lake of Zurich ; but his life- 
 long witness of prayer, and labour, and medi- 
 tation, and the bold antagonism to sin, had not 
 been in vain. " He had stood among wild 
 warriors a witness to an unseen 'power greater 
 than that of earth ; an apostle of spiritual ser- 
 vice harder than their own, speaking with a 
 stern majesty of acts which appealed to their 
 senses, and awakening hopes not quenched by 
 the battle or the feast." 1 His work was con- 
 tinued by his friend and follower Gall us, who 
 reclaimed the people from barbarism and 
 taught them both agriculture and religion, 
 and over whose humble cell rose that magni- 
 
 1 Wescott. A sketch of St. Columban may be found in 
 Ozanam, Etudes Germaniqita, ii., 103-114.
 
 I7 2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 ficent monastery of St. Gall which centuries 
 afterwards was one of the most celebrated 
 schools of Christendom, and one of the principal 
 centres of intellect and light in the Germanic 
 world. l 
 
 6. Still wider and grander was the work of 
 St Boniface. When he was a lad in Devon- 
 shire, his heart first burned with the desire to 
 serve God. Fearlessly piercing the dark forests 
 of Germany, he won over the heathen in thou- 
 sands by his self-denial, his toils, his courage. 
 Near Geismar, in Upper Hesse, there stood 
 a vast and venerable oak sacred for ages to 
 Thor, the God of Thunder. It has been an 
 instinct of idolatry in all ages to pay idolatrous 
 reverence to great and aged trees, and St. 
 Boniface tried in vain to win the Teutons from 
 their superstitious adoration to the Thunderer's 
 Oak. At last, as a desperate remedy, he seized 
 an axe, and. with his clergy, advanced, amid 
 the breathless alarm and wonder of the pagans 
 to hew down the object of their immemorial 
 
 1 Montalembert, Monks of the West, ii. 461.
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 1 73 
 
 worship. Stroke after stroke rang on the 
 gnarled trunk, while the priests of Thor im- 
 plored their deity to avenge himself, and the 
 pagans thought at each moment that the flash 
 of Heaven would fall. 1 At last, with a mighty 
 crash, the huge oak fell, and splintered into 
 fragments. Out of its fragments Boniface built 
 the chapel to St. Peter. Day by day his con- 
 verts multiplied, and the sphere of his influence 
 widened. Recognising his glorious work, the 
 Pope made him Archbishop of Mainz. But 
 even at seventy-five the fire of zeal was not 
 quenched in the old man's heart. He resigned 
 his archbishopric, and went to preach to the 
 heathen Frisians, ordering a shroud to be put 
 up with his books. A hostile band of pagans 
 met him on a river bank, and, forbidding all 
 resistance, he obtained the crown of martyrdom 
 for which he longed. The manuscript of the 
 Gospel, which he carried at the moment of 
 
 1 Maclear, p. 115. For a life of St. Columban, ?ee Mont- 
 alembert, Monks of the West, bk. vii. Ozanam, Etudes Ger- 
 maniques, ii. 170-220.
 
 174 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 death, was stained with his blood, and it is still 
 shown as a sacred relic among the treasures of 
 the great monastery of St. Fulda. 
 
 7. If these two may stand as specimens of 
 those earlier missionaries who converted Europe, 
 Raymond Lulli may show what a missionary of 
 the thirteenth century could sacrifice and dare. 
 A man of immense learning and splendid 
 ability, his youth had been devoted to gaiety 
 and sin, when he was won to holier aims 
 by a sermon of a Franciscan friar, in which 
 he told the story of St. Francis of Assissi, 
 who had then been dead some forty years. 
 It was the age of the Crusades, but Ray- 
 mond Lulli thought, as Francis had thought, 
 that it would be better to convert the Saracens 
 than to slay them. With incredible toil, with 
 unflagging zeal, in a life of incessant hardships 
 and perils, this great man, the fame of whose 
 genius was on. every tongue, whose logic was 
 long in use in the schools of Europe, devoted 
 himself to his great purpose with scarce one 
 voice to encourage, or one friend to share his
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. j 75 
 
 labours. The last year of his life was spent at 
 Bugia in concealment, but secretly preaching to 
 Jews and Mohammedans. One day, June 30, 
 1315, he ventured forth from the hiding-place, 
 and, openly preaching to the people, was as- 
 sailed by the fury of the Moslem population, 
 and stoned to death. 1 
 
 8. But perhaps no missionary who ever lived 
 was greater than Francis Xavier, in the sixteenth 
 century. A son of the lords of Xavier, he 
 entered the University of Paris, and there rose 
 into brilliant reputation. Among the crowd of 
 the wealthy and the noble who thronged his 
 lectures stood day by day the stern figure of 
 the quondam Spanish knight, Ignatius Loyola, 
 and his sordid dress and stern bearing were 
 often the butt of Xavier's' ridicule. Yet Igna- 
 tius did not leave him. Constantly with him, 
 in business, in pleasure, In discussion, in amuse- 
 ment, in exercise, in society, he invariably 
 ended every meeting with the one awful ques- 
 tion : " What shall it profit a man if he gain the 
 
 1 See an account of his genius in Vie dcs Savans lllustns.
 
 1 76 SAINTL Y WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 whole world and lose his own soul ? " When 
 the popularity of Xavier failed, Ignatius revived 
 it, but still with the same question, " What 
 shall it profit ? " When his resources were 
 wasted by extravagance, Ignatius resupplied his 
 wants, but still with the same question, " What 
 shall it profit ? " In success, in happiness, in 
 pleasure, always the same question, "What 
 shall it profit ? " At last that question was 
 burnt in upon the young man's soul, and 
 joining the Order of Jesus, which Ignatius 
 had founded; he surpassed all the rest in his 
 austerities and penances. At this time John 
 III. of Portugal desired to plant Christianity 
 in India, and Xavier embraced with delight 
 the awful and perilous mission. Imbued with 
 the stern error that the crushing of every 
 natural affection was a duty which Christianity 
 required, he passed without a farewell the 
 castle in which his mother and sister lived, 
 and embarked penniless and possessionless on 
 a vessel bound for Goa. During the long 
 months of the voyage he lived entirely on the
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. ijj 
 
 scraps given him by the soldiers and sailors ; 
 but so entirely did he win the love of all on 
 board by tending the sick and consoling the 
 sorrowful, and trying to reclaim the sinful, 
 that, though he landed in all the emaciation of 
 disease and weakness, his shipmates regarded 
 him as the happiest man of the crowded and 
 suffering crew. How he was shocked by the 
 depravities of Goa how he taught the children 
 there how he went to work among the poor 
 degraded pearl-fishers of the Straits of Manaar 
 how he laboured at Cape Comorin how he 
 converted thousands, and baptised tens of 
 thousands how he crossed to Travancore and 
 inspired the Rajah to repel a hostile invasion 
 how he reformed the guilty city of Malacca 
 how, with calm intrepidity, he carried on un- 
 moved the offices of religion while an earth- 
 quake was rocking the very ground under his 
 feet how, amid incredible dangers and violent 
 opposition, he made his way to Japan how he 
 met and foiled the bonzes how returning to 
 Goa he tended the people during a raging 
 
 N
 
 1 78 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 pestilence all his learning, all the sagacity, all 
 the patience, all the boundless self-denial, all 
 the immense empire and authority over the 
 minds of men which that self-conquest gained 
 for him, you may read in the records of his life. 
 But in his, as in so many previous cases, I 
 should like you to observe the abounding joy 
 and happiness which he experienced in the 
 midst of squalor, disease, starvation, hatred, 
 suffering. On one occasion he " baptised till 
 his hand dropped with weariness, and his voice 
 became inaudible; experiencing, as he says, in 
 his whole soul a joy which it would be vain to 
 attempt to express either in writing or by 
 speech." "So intense," he wrote on another 
 occasion, " and abundant are the delights which 
 God is accustomed to bestow on those who 
 labour diligently in His service in the vineyard 
 in this barbarous land, that if there be, in this 
 life, any true solid enjoyment, I believe it to be 
 this, and this alone. " And how did he die ? I 
 will read you the description. He was trying 
 to make his way to China to plant the Gospel
 
 THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 1/9 
 
 there, when the angel of death met him on his 
 wild and perilous journey. "At his own re- 
 quest he was removed to the shore that he 
 might meet his end with greater composure. 
 Stretched on the naked beach, with the cold 
 blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains, 
 he contended alone with the agonies of the 
 fever which wasted his vital powers. It was 
 an agony and a solitude for which the happiest 
 of the sons of men might well have exchanged 
 the dearest society and the purest joys of life. 
 It was an agony in which his uplifted crucifix 
 reminded him of a far more awful woe endured 
 for his deliverance. It was a solitude thronged 
 by blessed ministers of invisible consolation." 
 Tears burst from his fading eyes, tears of an emo- 
 tion too big for utterance. In the cold collapse 
 of death his features were, for a few brief moment, 
 irradiated as with the first beams of approaching 
 glory. He raised himself on his crucifix, and 
 exclaiming ' In te, Domine, speravi non confun- 
 dar in aeternum ! ' he bowed his head and died." 1 
 
 1 Sir J. Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, ii. 138- 
 
 N 2
 
 l8o SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 9. And, my brethren, what shall I more say ? 
 The time would fail me were I to attempt even 
 the catalogue of all the true saints and dauntless 
 heroes of the mission cause from age to age. 
 But may I, without wearying you, dwell for one 
 moment on some of the beloved names of this 
 last century ? Let me, at least, make passing 
 mention of the Moravian Missionaries in Green- 
 land, 
 
 " Fired with a zeal peculiar to defy 
 The rage and rigour of a polar sky, 
 And plant successfully sweet Sharon's Rose 
 On icy plains and in eternal snows;" 1 
 
 of John Eliot, the Apostle of the Red Indians, 
 Avith his life of toil and gentleness, and his motto, 
 that prayer and painstaking would accomplish 
 everything ; of David Brainerd, living alone 
 among the savages in the forests, though far 
 advanced in consumption, and saying, " My 
 heaven is to please God and glorify Him " ; of 
 the just, the venerable, the generous, the simple- 
 hearted Schwartz ; of Henry Martyn, the Cam- 
 1 Cowper.
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 bridge senior wrangler, as we see his pure pale face 
 rising above his foul congregation at Cawnpore, 
 and pity him during those long hours of linger- 
 ing fever, when he had to thrust his head for 
 rest among the damp boxes of his luggage, 
 till he sank into his lonely grave in the plague- 
 stricken city of Tocati ; of QoorAdoniram Jndson, 
 bright and cheerful even amid the horrors of a 
 Burmese prison ; of Bishop Reginald Heber, who, 
 though he had worked but two years in India 
 before he was found dead in his bath, yet during 
 those two years had breathed into his tender 
 lyrics that fire and dew of poetry which has 
 done so much to sweeten Indian life ; l of Bishop 
 Cotton, and the six years of wise and faithful 
 energy before that one false step on the plank 
 which flung him into the turbid river, never to 
 be seen on earth again ; of Samuel Marsden, 
 the friend of the Maories, who civilised as well 
 as taught them, and whom they loved and 
 honoured as a father, 
 
 1 Sketches of the missionaries mentioned in this paragraph 
 will be found in Miss Yonge's Pioneers and Founders.
 
 lS2 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 " With furrowed brow and cheek serenely fair, 
 The calm winds wandering o'er his silver hair ; 
 His arm uplifted, and his moistened eye 
 Fixed in deep rapture on the golden sky. 
 Upon the shore, through many a billow driven, 
 He kneels at last the messenger of Heaven. 
 Yes ! he hath triumphed ! while his lips relate 
 The sacred story of his Saviour's fate, 
 In speechless awe the wonder-stricken throng 
 Check their rude feasting and their barbarous song, . . . 
 And kneel in gladness on their native plain, 
 As happier votaries at a holier fane ! " 1 
 
 10. My brethren, what lives are these ! how 
 superior to ours, which are so murmuring, so 
 somnolent, so self-indulgent ! Are not our lives, 
 compared to the lives of such as these, as the 
 brambles to the oaks at whose feet they grow ? 
 Ay, but even in these days, even in our own 
 lifetime, there have been some, who, " aiming at 
 something more high and heroical in religion 
 than this age affecteth," have even glorified the 
 missionary's labours with the martyr's crown. 
 It was thus that, in 1840, John Williams was 
 murdered among the heathens of Erromango ; 
 it was thus that, in 1845, the brave sailor, Allen 
 1 PRAED, Australasia.
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 183 
 
 Gardiner, was starved to death in the long Ant- 
 arctic winter at Picton Island, while, on the 
 cavern near which his skeleton was found, he 
 had painted up the words, " My soul, wait thou 
 still upon God, for my hope is in Him." It was 
 thus that, in 1862, Bishop Charles Mackenzie, 
 after a life that looked all failure, died of fatigue 
 and fever amid the malarious swamps of the 
 Zambesi. "As for happiness," he said to his 
 sister not long before his death, " I have given 
 up looking for that altogether. Now till death 
 my post is one of unrest and care. To be the 
 sharer of every one's sorrow, the comforter of 
 every one's grief, the strengthener of every one's 
 weakness; to do this, as much as in me lies, is 
 my aim and object." " He said this with a 
 smile," she adds, " and, oh ! the peace in his 
 face ; it seemed as if nothing could shake it !" 
 
 II. And though that is but sixteen years ago, 
 even since then two more heroic souls have 
 joined that glorious army of martyrs David 
 Livingstone and Coleridge Patteson. Five years 
 ago, on May i, 1873, David Livingstone, the
 
 1 84 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 great pioneer, the great foe of the slave-trade, 
 breathed his last in the sultry wastes of Central 
 Africa, in his hut at Ulala, with no white man 
 near, no love of wife or sister to cool his 
 fevered forehead ; no hand of son or brother 
 to close his glazing eyes. And faithful to the 
 very last to that which had been the great work 
 of his life, he wrote, as the last words of his 
 journal, almost with his dying hand, " All I can 
 add in my solitude is, may Heaven's rich bless- 
 ing come down on every one . . . who will help 
 to heal this open sore of the world. " l And 
 seven years ago Coleridge Patteson, noble Cole- 
 ridge Patteson, the pure-hearted, gallant, modest 
 Eton boy, who gave up every prospect in Eng- 
 land to labour amid the Pacific savages; who 
 had been obliged to be ready many a time to 
 plunge in the waters that break among those coral 
 reefs, " amid sharks, and devilfish, and stinging 
 jellies," to escape the flight of poisoned arrows, 
 of which the slightest graze meant horrid death 
 
 1 These lines are recorded on his gravestone in the nave of 
 Westminster Abbey.
 
 SERA*, v.] THE MISSIONARIES. ^5 
 
 he too in that high service died by the clubs of 
 savages whom he had often risked his life to 
 save; died, as since then the brave and gentle 
 Commodore Goodenough died, at the hands of 
 savages exasperated by the accursed man-steal- 
 ing wickedness of white men who desecrate the 
 English name ; and they laid the young English 
 martyr Bishop in an open boat to float away 
 over the bright blue waters, with his hands, 
 crossed as if in prayer, and a palm-branch on 
 his breast. 
 
 12. There are many, many lessons, my bre- 
 thren, on which I have not even touched, which 
 yet spring immediately from the contemplation 
 of these noble and saintly lives during nineteen 
 centuries at which, by the good hand of God upon 
 us, we have, on these five Thursdays together 
 glanced ; lessons of self-denial, lessons of 
 patience, lessons of self-conquest, lessons of 
 mastery over the world in the might of unarmed 
 holiness. But I must say one word of one truth 
 deeply needed now the lesson of the essential 
 unity of the faith in men as unlike each other
 
 1 86 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 as the crusading warrior king and the consump- 
 tive puritan clergyman; as unlike as Benedict 
 the monk and Brainerd the Calvinist ; as unlike 
 as the highborn Jesuit, St. Francis Xavier, and 
 the unsuccessful cobbler, William Carey ; as 
 unlike as the poetic Heber in his lawn sleeves, 
 and the squalid St. Antony in his sheepskin 
 cloak. Yet all these, so utterly unlike each 
 other in particular beliefs, in outward practices 
 all these, though some of them, had they lived 
 at the same period, would have consigned one 
 another to the thumbscrew and the stake, were 
 yet all like each other, for they were all like 
 their common Lord. Each of them was a 
 bright planet in the firmanent of human good- 
 ness, sparkling with a different lustre, but each 
 irradiated by one common sun. Adoniram 
 Judson, the American missionary, tells us how 
 God had never refused him one fervent prayer, 
 in almost the same words as St. Dominic the 
 mediaeval Spaniard ; and Henry Martyn writes 
 of happiness, in the midst of disease and failure, 
 in the same tone as Francis Xavier and Henri
 
 SERM. v.J THE MISSIONARIES. jg; 
 
 Lacordaire. Yes, all these were one all one 
 in Christ ; the hermit, the monk, the papist, the 
 fanatic, the mendicant, the Jesuit, the inquisitor, 
 had not only one Lord, one baptism, one God 
 and Father of them all, who was above all, and 
 through all, and in them all, but even essentially 
 one faith with the English athlete, and the stern 
 Calvinist, and the American puritan, and the 
 passionate reformer. Faith faith in the unseen 
 faith in God, faith in Christ, and that faith 
 leading to infinite self-denial, and working by 
 incessant love, that was the secret of their com- 
 mon holiness, that is the lesson of their common 
 example. Alas for the mutual hatreds, and 
 miserable feuds, in the little lives of men ! St. 
 Carlo Borromeo, sweeping to the cathedral at 
 Milan in grand procession, in the splendid robe 
 of a cardinal, but by the trickling drops of 
 blood on the marble pavement revealing, against 
 his will, that his feet were bare over the sharp 
 flints beneath his scarlet robe, would have con- 
 signed an Eliot or Carey to the dungeon or the 
 stake. Henry Martyn or John Williams would
 
 1 88 SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 have regarded as votaries of the Beast and the 
 False Prophet, with more of religious aversion 
 than of Miltonic scorn, those " Eremites and 
 Friars, white, black, and grey, with all their 
 trumpery," whom our great poet consigns, with 
 embryos and idiots, to the paradise of fools. 
 But the thoughts of God are higher than men, 
 and the ways of God are juster. For the saints 
 who hate each other, who persecute each other, 
 who denounce each other as heretics, who attri- 
 bute to each other the worst motives, who call 
 down on each other the indignation of God 
 and man, Heaven opens its pitying harmonious 
 doors; and these holders of mutually destructive 
 opinions shall, with a smile at the old leaven 
 of their anathematising ignorance, and a sigh, 
 if there be sighs in heaven, for the aching hearts 
 they caused each other on earth shall in the 
 light of their Father's countenance " clasp inse- 
 parable hands in joy and bliss in over measure, 
 for ever." Yes, Heaven, we hope, will have its 
 healing peace for the bitter dissensions even of 
 earth's saints.
 
 THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 189 
 
 "O shame to men! devil with devil damn'd 
 Firm concord holds ; men only disagree 
 Of creatures rational, though under hope 
 Of heavenly grace ; and, God proclaiming peace, 
 Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife, 
 As if (which might induce us to accord) 
 Man had not hellish foes enow besides, 
 That, day and night, for his destruction wait ! " 
 
 But if peace cannot be between the children 
 of God on earth; if men, in their assumed in- 
 fallibility, will not tolerate one another's inevit- 
 ably divergent opinions ; let us, at least, try to 
 walk by faith. For all these died in the faith. 
 It was by faith that Ignatius faced the lions ; 
 by faith that Poly carp stood unflinching in the 
 flame; by faith Antony lived his twenty years 
 in the mountain cell ; by faith Benedict rolled 
 his naked body among the thorns to subdue 
 the lusts of the flesh; by faith Fra Angelica 
 despised the honours of the world; by faith 
 Francis reproduced on the Umbrian hills the 
 life of Christ ; by faith St. Columban faced the 
 fierce tyranny of Burgundian kings ; by faith 
 St. Boniface hewed down the idol oak ; by faith
 
 1 9 o SAINTLY WORKERS. [SERM. v. 
 
 Eliot, and Judson, and Marsden, and Heber, 
 and Mackenzie, and Coleridge Patteson, and A Hen 
 Gardiner, and David Livingstone civilised the 
 Indians, converted the heathen, put down the 
 slave-trade, showed us how to do, and dare, and 
 die in their Master's cause ; and even so by faith 
 we too, God helping us, may learn from the 
 Martyrs that better is fearful death than shamed 
 life ; from the Hermits that the life is more than 
 meat ; from the Monks the sacredness of poverty, 
 chastity, and obedience ; from the Early Fran- 
 ciscans contempt of gold ; from the Missionaries 
 devotion to God's other sheep which are not of 
 this flock. All these died in the faith, having 
 both received the promises, in part, on earth, 
 and seen them afar off in heaven. Let us 
 with them follow Christ our common Lord. As 
 one of themselves, even, a poet of their own 
 has written 
 
 'They faced the tyrant's brandished steel, 
 
 The lion's gory mane, 
 
 They bowed their necks, the death to feel ; 
 Who follows in their -train?
 
 SERM. v.] THE MISSIONARIES. 
 
 " A noble Army, men and boys, 
 
 The matron and the maid, 
 Around the Saviour's throne rejoice, 
 In robes of light arrayed. 
 
 " They climbed the steep ascent of heaven. 
 
 Mid peril, toil, and pain, 
 Oh God, to us may grace be given, 
 To follow in their train."
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I PRINT the following simple rules, drawn up to help the 
 younger members of my congregation in the effort to live a 
 Christian life, because I have been asked for them by several 
 clergymen who thought that they might be useful in other 
 parishes. 
 
 RULES OF THE ST. MARGARET'S SOCIETY 
 OF CHRISTIAN PROGRESS. 
 
 " Not as though I had already attained, either were already 
 perfect, but I follow after." PHIL. in. 12. 
 
 RULES. 
 ( To be kept with sincere intention, God helping. ) 
 
 I. Never neglect your Prayers, morning or evening. 
 
 2. -Examine yourself carefully as to your thoughts and 
 manner of life, at all events once in the week. 
 
 3. Read every day, and think over, at least a few verses of 
 the Bible : before you begin, ask Got) to bless what you are 
 about to read. 
 
 O 2
 
 ig6 
 
 4. Come to Church every Sunday, unless prevented by some 
 good reason, and at other times as you have opportunity. Take 
 care not to be late : kneel when you ought, and join heartily in 
 the Service. 
 
 5. Come to Holy Communion, bearing in mind your Lord's 
 command, ' ' Do this in remembrance of Me. " 
 
 6. Always prepare for Holy Communion by self-examination, 
 resolution, and prayer. 
 
 7. Try to think and speak kindly of every one; "Honour 
 all men." 
 
 8. Watch and pray against all temptations to definite evil. 
 Keep from all places and company in which you are likely to be 
 tempted. 
 
 9. Try to do some special work for GOD in His Church. 
 
 was admitted a Member of this Society 
 18
 
 INDEX.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 A. 
 
 Alexandria, story of Antony 
 
 and the currier of, 63, 64 ; 
 
 of Macarius and the two 
 
 women of, 64 
 American pilot, anecdote of a 
 
 heroic, 26 
 Appendix, 195 
 
 B. 
 
 Basil, quotation from, 35 
 Benedict of Anianum, quota- 
 tion from, 71 
 
 Berengar, quotation from, 71 
 Bonaventura, quotation from, 
 
 1 1 8, 149 
 Borromeo, Cardinal Carlo, 
 
 austerities and mistaken 
 
 zeal of, 187 
 
 Bossuet, quotation from, 118 
 Brainerd, David, his life among 
 
 the savages, 1 80 
 Brown, J. Baldwin, quotation 
 
 from, 143, 144 
 Buffs, anecdote of the courage 
 
 of a private of the, 26, 27 
 Burns, quotation from, 8 
 Byron, quotation from his 
 
 Childe Harold, 76, 163 
 
 C. 
 
 Catacombs of Rome, their 
 
 witness to the courage and 
 
 resignation of the early 
 
 Christians, 15, 16 
 Chrysostom, quotation from, 
 
 72 
 Cotton, Bishop, accidental 
 
 death of, 181 
 Cowper, quotation from the 
 
 Task of, 38, 1 80 
 Christian Progress, rules of 
 
 the St. Margaret's Society 
 
 of, 195 
 
 D. 
 
 Dante, quotation from the 
 Inferno of, describing the 
 punishment of hypocrites, 
 79 ; other quotations, in, 
 117, 119, 123 , 125 tr, 
 142 
 
 Desert Fathers, contrast of the 
 life of the, with that of the 
 men of the present day, 
 39. 40 
 
 Doyle, Sir F. II., quotation 
 from, 27
 
 2OO 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 E. 
 
 Easter, St. Columban's deliv- 
 erance to the French bishops 
 on the time of observing, 
 161 
 
 Elijah, a hermit, 40, 41 
 
 Eliot, John, Apostle of the 
 Red Indians, 180 
 
 Ephrem the Syrian, who pro- 
 tested against slavery, a 
 hermit, 6 1, 62 
 
 F. 
 
 Faith, the stimulus of all 
 saintly workers, 187 ; ex- 
 amples of its power in the 
 lives of martyrs, monks, and 
 missionaries, 187 191 
 
 Foisset, quotation from, 71 
 
 Fra Angelico of Fiesole, his 
 character and angelic spirit, 
 97100 
 
 FRANCISCANS, the early, 122 ; 
 anecdote of St. Thomas of 
 Aquinum and Pope Inno- 
 cent IV., 122 ; influence of 
 St. Dominic of Spain and 
 St. Francis of Assissi on 
 the Church and the World, 
 122, 123 ; their sincerity and 
 mistaken zeal, 124 127 ; 
 aim of St. Francis, and how 
 tar he succeeded, 127130 ; 
 interview of St. Francis with 
 Pope Innocent III., 131 ; 
 institution of the order, 132 ; 
 and its rapid spread, 133 ; 
 some incidents in the life of 
 St. Francis, and what they 
 teach, 134141 ; his latter 
 days and death, 142, 143 ; 
 
 anecdotes of his life, and the 
 lessons to be learned from 
 it, 143153 
 
 G. 
 
 Gardiner, Allen, the mis- 
 sionary, his death by starva- 
 tion, and last words, 183 
 
 Goodenough, Commodore, 
 death of, 185 
 
 Gregory the Great, spirit mani- 
 fested by, 97 ; despatches 
 Augustine to convert the 
 Saxons, 168 
 
 Griffiths, Rev. W., quotation 
 from, 28 
 
 Gul. de Sto. Amore, quotation 
 from, 118 
 
 H. 
 
 Heber, Bishop Reginald, his 
 work in India, 181 
 
 Henry VIII., dissolution of 
 the monasteries by, far from 
 being an unmixed evil, 77 
 
 HERMITS, the, 37 ; yearning in 
 certain natures for with- 
 drawal from the world, 37, 
 38; life of the Desert Fathers, 
 39 ; comparison of the life 
 of to-day with that of the 
 "sainted eremites," 40,41 ; 
 St. Antony, his birth and 
 early life, 42 ; struck by the 
 words of Christ, "Ifthou 
 wilt be perfect," &c., he 
 sells all that he has and retires 
 to the desert, 42 ; his spiritual 
 struggles and fights with evil 
 spirits there, 4345 ; his 
 death, 46 ; and the moral of
 
 INDEX. 
 
 201 
 
 his life, 47 49 ; recom- 
 pences of such a life, 50 
 56 ; St. Macarius and the 
 cluster of. grapes, 56, 57 ; 
 each age has its own types 
 of saintliness, 58 ; usefulness 
 of the life of the hermits to 
 their own days, 59, 60 ; to 
 the age which followed, 60 
 62 ; and for all time, 62 
 67 
 
 Howard, John, self-sacrifice of, 
 on behalf of the prisoner 
 and the captive, 23, 24 
 
 Huss, witnesseth for ChrLt by 
 his death, 19 
 
 Innocent IV., Pope, anecdote 
 of, and Thomas Aquinum, 
 
 121 
 
 Innocents, the Holy, com- 
 memoration day and martyr- 
 dom of, 6 
 
 J- 
 
 James the Lord's brother, 
 
 death of, 1 1 
 James the son of Zebedee, 
 
 death of, 1 1 
 
 John the Baptist a hermit, 41 
 Jovinian, quotation from, 72 
 Judson, Adoniram, in a Bur- 
 mese prison, 181 ; his suc- 
 cess in prayer, 186 
 
 K. 
 
 Keble, quotation from, 67 
 Kempis, Thomas a, quotations 
 from, 71, 72 
 
 Kingdom of God, St. Hugo of 
 Avalon's saying regarding 
 the nature of, 90 
 
 Kingsley, quotation from The 
 Saints' Tragedy of, 73, 74 
 
 Lacordaire, Henri, a Domini- 
 can monk, his influence on 
 his country and in the Church 
 100, 101 ; his self-denial, 
 and holy resignation to a 
 life of austerity at the 
 monastery of La Quercia, 
 102106. 
 
 Landor, W. S., quotation 
 from, 35 
 
 La Quercia, account of Lacor- 
 daire's withdrawal to the 
 monastery of, 103 
 
 U Avenir newspaper, con- 
 demned by the Pope, 101 
 
 Leibnitz, quotation from, as to 
 the usefulness of the Mendi- 
 cant Orders, 84 
 
 Livingstone, David, the Afri- 
 can missionary explorer, his 
 opinion of the ancient 
 monks, 164 ; his lonely 
 death at Ulala, and last 
 entry in his journal, 184 
 
 Lucan, quotation from, 118 
 
 Lulli, Raymond, quotation 
 from, 7 1 j a missionary of 
 the thirteenth century, 174; 
 his conversion, labours 
 among Saracens, Jews, and 
 Mohammedans, and death, 
 
 174, 175 
 
 Luther's conflict to keep pure 
 the faith, 19
 
 202 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 M. 
 
 Mackenzie, Bishop Charles, 
 his self-sacrifice and death 
 amid the swamps of the 
 Zambesi, 183 
 
 Maclear, quotation from, 161 
 
 Marsden, Samuel, the friend of 
 the Maories, 181 
 
 Martyn, Henry, his labours at 
 Cawnpore, and lonely death 
 at Tocati, 181, 186 
 
 MARTYRS, the, 5 ; St. Stephen, 
 St. John the Evangelist, 
 and the Holy Innocents, 
 6 ; martyr originally meant 
 witness, afterwards witness 
 to Christ by death, 7 ; 
 courage the chief quality 
 displayed by St. Stephen, 
 8 ; he saw deeper into 
 Christianity than any of his 
 brethren, 9 ; his enthusiasm 
 and death, 10 ; sufferings 
 and death of the apostles, 
 1 1 ; and of the early Chris- 
 tians, 12, 13; testimony of 
 St. Ignatius and Tertullian 
 to their courage and en- 
 durance, 13 15; witness 
 of the catacombs, 15, 1 6 ; 
 what the world has gained 
 from the death of the mar- 
 tyrs, 1 6, 17 ; the blood of 
 martyrs the seed of the 
 Church, 18 ; Savonarola, 
 Huss, Luther, Latimer, and 
 Ridley, 19 ; ennobling effect 
 of their examples on the 
 world, 20, 21 ; in patriotism 
 the battle of Sempach 
 22 ; in individual self-sacri- 
 fice the obscure monk, 
 Telemachus, denouncing the 
 
 butcheries of the amphi- 
 theatre, 23 ; in philanthropy 
 Wilberforce fighting the 
 battle of the slave, and 
 Howard that of the im- 
 prisoned, 23 ; and in in- 
 numerable instances in our 
 own day of courage, self- 
 denial, and endurance in 
 the noblest of efforts on 
 behalf of mankind, 26 31 
 
 Mazzini, saying of, regarding 
 the angels of martyrdom 
 and victory, 1 8 
 
 Milton, quotation from Comus, 
 35 ; from Paradise Lost, 189 
 
 MISSIONARIES, the, 159 ; 
 object of these lectures, 
 159, 1 60 ; reply of St. 
 Columban to the French 
 Bishops as to the time of 
 observing Easter, 161 ; the 
 age of Martyrdom, of 
 Hermits, of Monasticism, 
 is past, that of Missionaries 
 is come, 162 164; mission- 
 aries have continued un- 
 broken from the time of 
 Christ till now, 164, 165 ; 
 St. Paul, a pattern of the 
 earliest and the noblest, 165, 
 166; his life a type of all 
 true missionary lives, 167 ; 
 early missionaries, Ulphilas, 
 Columba, Columbanus, 
 Augustine, Willibrod, and 
 the work they did, 168, 
 169 ; sketch of the life of 
 St. Columban, 170 172 ; 
 and of St. Boniface, 172, 
 173 ; these two specimens 
 of the earliest European 
 missionaries, 1 74 ; Ray- 
 mond Lulli, a missionary
 
 INDEX. 203 
 
 of the thirteenth century, 
 
 spiriting effect upon us of 
 
 174, 175 ; and Francis 
 
 studying the lives of St. 
 
 Xavier, the noblest figure 
 
 Anselm, 95 ; St. Edmund 
 
 of the sixteenth century, 
 
 of Canterbury, St. Thomas 
 
 175; sketch of his early 
 
 Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, 
 
 life, conversion, works, and 
 
 St. Bernardin of Siena, 
 
 death, 175179; the labours 
 of the Moravian mission- 
 
 Gregory the Great, 96 ; St. 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, and 
 
 aries, of Eliot, Brainerd, 
 
 the monk of San Marco 
 
 Schwartz, Martin, 180 ; of 
 
 Fra Angelico, 97 100 ; 
 
 Judson, Heber, Cotton, and 
 
 sketch of a modem Domi- 
 
 Marsden, 181 ; missionaries 
 
 nican monk Henri Lacor- 
 
 who have earned the 
 
 daire and the lesson to be 
 
 martyr's crown Williams, 
 
 learned from his life, 100 
 
 Gardiner, Mackenzie, Liv- 
 
 106 ; results of monas- 
 
 ingstone, and Patteson, 182 
 
 ticism, 106, 107 ; incidents 
 
 185 ; the lessons to be 
 
 in the lives of some of the 
 
 learned from their lives of 
 
 saintly workers, 108 in ; 
 
 patience, faith, self-sacrifice, 
 
 and what they are capable 
 
 185 187 ; the blindness of 
 
 of teaching, 112, 113 ; 
 
 some the mistaken zeal of 
 
 Livingstone's opinion of the 
 
 others, 187, 188 ; the strong, 
 
 ancient monks, 164 
 
 unflinching faith of all, 189 
 
 Montalembert, quotation from 
 
 191 
 
 Monks of the West, Si n, ct 
 
 MONKS, the, 73, 74 ; lessons 
 
 seq. 
 
 taught by their lives, 75 ; 
 
 Moravian missionaries, their 
 
 monasticism and its effects 
 
 work in Greenland, 180 
 
 on the world, 7680 ; its 
 
 Myers, quotation from, 157 
 
 origin, 8 1, 82; and what 
 
 
 it did for the Church and 
 
 N. 
 
 civilisation, 83, 84 ; St. 
 
 
 Benedict of Nursia gave 
 
 Nero's Golden House, ill ; 
 
 monasticism its best and 
 
 his treatment of the early 
 
 most permanent form, 84 ; 
 
 Christians, ib. 
 
 his life, and its influence on 
 
 
 his contemporaries, 8486 ; 
 
 O. 
 
 self-abnegation the key-note 
 of the immortal rule of the 
 Benedictines, 86, 87 ; what 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., quotations 
 from, 146 et seq. 
 
 the order did for the world, 
 
 p. 
 
 8789 ; the good that may 
 
 
 be got from copying the 
 
 Patteson, Coleridge, his mis- 
 
 best features of monas- 
 
 sionary labours in Melane- 
 
 ticism, 8994 ; and the in- 
 
 sia, 184; and death, 185
 
 204 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Persius, quotation from, 1 1 8 
 Plotinus, quotation from, 35 
 Pollok, quotation from, 1 1 7 
 Praed, quotations from, 182 
 Prayer, anecdote of a soldier 
 who would not be laughed 
 out of a habit of, 28, 29 
 
 Ravignan, quotation from, 
 
 Rhoades, J., quotation from, 
 
 150 
 Russian serf, anecdote of the, 
 
 who sacrificed his life to 
 
 save his master's children, 
 
 26 
 
 S. 
 
 St. Anselm, the last hours of, 
 95 96 
 
 St. Antony, his birth, conver- 
 sion, and self-denial, 42 ; 
 his strivings after a holier 
 life, 43 ; his retirement to 
 the desert, and incessant 
 spiritual conflicts there, 45, 
 46, 52 55 ; his death, 46, 
 47 ; and the moral of his 
 life, 47-62 
 
 St. Athanasius finds a refuge 
 with the hermits, writes the 
 life of St. Antony, and in- 
 herits his sheep -skin cloak, 
 60, 61 
 
 St. Augustine, his labours in 
 England, 168, 169 
 
 St. Basil a hermit, 61 ; his 
 boldness to the Emperor 
 Valens, 61 
 
 St. Benedict of Nursia, the 
 real creator of monasticism, 
 84 ; his birth and early aus- 
 terities, 84, 85 ; his marvel- 
 lous vision, and interview 
 with Totila the Goth, 86 ; 
 his immortal rule of the 
 Benedictines, and its in- 
 fluence on monasticism, 86 
 89 ; social life of a Bene- 
 dictine monastery, 88 ; ex- 
 tract from the rule of, 93 ; 
 his bed of briers, 108, 109; 
 the wisest of monastic foun- 
 ders, 126 
 
 St. Bernard, saying of, 91 ; 
 his courageous spirit, 97 ; 
 horrified at a bad impulse, 
 rushes neck deep into an icy 
 pool, 109 
 
 St. Bernardin of Siena, purity 
 of, 26 
 
 St. Bonaventura, humility of, 
 96 ; quotation from, 149 
 
 St. Boniface, a native of 
 Devonshire, burning with 
 desire to serve God, pro- 
 ceeds to Germany to convert 
 the heathen, 1 72 ; legend of 
 Thor's oak, 172, 173; his 
 success made Archbishop 
 of Mainz his death, 173, 
 
 *74 
 
 St. Columban's deliverance to 
 the French bishops on the 
 time of observing Easter, 
 161 ; an Irish monk, he 
 sails for France with twelve 
 companions and settles in 
 the Vosges, 170 ; driven 
 thence by persecution, he 
 settles on the Lake of 
 Zurich, 171 ; his labours 
 there, 168, 171
 
 INDEX. 
 
 205 
 
 St. Dominic of Spain, 
 founder of the order of the 
 Preaching Friars, and crea- 
 tor of the Inquisition, his 
 gloomy and ferocious charac- 
 ter, 122 126 
 
 St. Edmund of Canterbury at 
 Oxford, 96 
 
 St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a 
 member of the order of Ter- 
 tiaries, 143 
 
 St. Francis of Assissi, sayings 
 of, 126 ; his early life and 
 strivings after holinessamong 
 the hills and villages of Urn- 
 bria, 127, answer to Fra 
 Masseo's question "Why 
 to thee ? " 129; does more 
 for the Church than the 
 greatest Pontiff, 130 ; his 
 interview with Innocent 
 111., 131 ; the Pope's two 
 dreams, 132 ; he sanctions 
 the organisation of the Less- 
 er Brothers, the lowest and 
 humblest, but destined to 
 become the most powerful 
 order of the Church, 132; 
 the rapid success of the 
 order, 133 ; sketch of the 
 life, visions, and spiritual 
 conflicts of St. Francis, 
 134, 143; founds the order 
 of the Poor Ladies of 
 Clare, and the order of 
 the Tertiaries, 141 ; re- 
 ceives on Monte Alverno 
 the stigmata, 142 ; his 
 death, 143 ; an instance of 
 the truth, that the grand- 
 est revolutions of the uni- 
 verse have been accom- 
 plished by enthusiasts, 143, 
 144 ; lessons of his life, 143 
 
 145 ; and some of his say- 
 ings, 145153 
 
 St. Gregory of Nazianzus a 
 hermit, 61 
 
 St. Hugo of Avalon's saying 
 regarding the kingdom of 
 God, 90 ; his terrific spirit- 
 ual conflicts, and ultimate 
 triumph, no 
 
 St. Ignatius, carried through 
 the cities of Asia in chains, 
 and thrown to the wild 
 beasts in the amphitheatre at 
 Rome, II, 12; his assertion 
 of his faith, 13. 
 
 St. Jerome, the translator of 
 the Bible into Latin, a her- 
 mit, 61 ; austerities of, in 
 his rocky cell at Bethlehem, 
 108 
 
 St. John the Evangelist, com- 
 memoration day, and legend 
 of, 6 
 
 St. Louis of France, a member 
 of the order of Tertiaries, 
 
 H3 
 
 St. Macarius, anecdote of, and 
 a cluster of fresh ripe grapes, 
 56, 57 ; his inferiority to the 
 two women of Alexandria, 64 
 
 St. Nilus, prayer and vision 
 of, 109, no 
 
 St. Paul, supposed to have 
 been beheaded on the Ap- 
 pian Way, 1 1 ; type and 
 model of all missionaries, 
 165 ; his perils and escapes 
 his trials and triumphs, 
 165, 166 ; his final doom, 
 167 ; the innumerable 
 shrines dedicated to his 
 memory, 167 
 
 St. Peter, said to have died 
 in the amphitheatre, 1 1
 
 206 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 St. Polycarp, incident at the 
 death of, 12 
 
 St. Perpetua, her youth, cour- 
 age, and faith, 12, 13 
 
 St. Stephen, commemoration 
 day of, 6 ; nature of the 
 courage displayed by, 8 ; 
 saw deeper into Christianity 
 than any of his brethren, 9 ; 
 confronts his enemies, and 
 dies with unflinching cour- 
 age, 10, II 
 
 St. Stephen, Church of, at 
 Rome, reflections originated 
 by a visit to, 16 19 
 
 Saints, terrible spiritual con- 
 flicts of the, 108 
 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, daily 
 prayer of, 96 ; anecdote 
 of, and Pope Innocent IV., 
 121 
 
 Savonarola, witness of, to the 
 faith, 19 
 
 Schwartz, a saintly worker, 
 180 
 
 Sempach, heroic self-sacrifice 
 of Arnold of Winkelried 
 at the battle of, 22 
 
 Serapion, saying of the her- 
 mit, 56 
 
 Shakspere, quotation from, 
 152 
 
 Shelley, quotation from, 66 
 
 Soldier, anecdote of a. who 
 would not be laughed out 
 of the practice of praying, 
 28, 29 
 
 Stephen, Sir James, quotation 
 from his Essays, 179 
 
 " Surrender of St. Andrew's 
 Priory, Northampton, "quo- 
 tation from, 78 n. 
 
 "Surrender of Warden and 
 Friars of- St Francis in 
 
 Stamford," quotation from, 
 72 
 
 Sutherland, Alexander, a 
 Scotch boy, anecdote of the 
 heroic courage of, 27, 28 
 
 T. 
 
 Telemachus, the monk, his 
 self -sacrifice in the amphi- 
 theatre at Rome, 23 ; a 
 hermit, 6 1 
 
 Tennyson, quotation from, ix. 
 66 
 
 Tertullian glories in the 
 ignominious names applied 
 to the early Christians, 14 
 
 Theodoret, quotation from, ix. 
 
 Thor's oak, legend of, 1 72, 1 73 
 
 U. 
 
 Ulphilas, the apostle of the 
 Goths, 1 68 
 
 Voltaire's opinion of monas- 
 ticism, 80 
 
 W. 
 
 Wilberforce, William, fights 
 the battle of the slave in 
 the House of Commons, 23 
 
 Williams, John, the mission- 
 ary, murdered at Erromango, 
 182 
 
 Winkelried, Arnold of, heroic 
 self-sacrifice of, at the battle 
 of Sempach, 22
 
 INDEX. 
 
 207 
 
 Xavier, Francis, the mission- 
 ary of the sixteenth century, 
 175 ; of noble birth, and 
 educated at the University 
 of Paris, he is converted by 
 lafnatius Loyola, 175, 176; 
 proceeds as a missionary 
 from Portugal to Goa, 176 ; 
 his increasing labours and 
 marvellous success in the 
 East, 177, 178; his lonely 
 and agonising death on the 
 
 naked beach in China, 179 ; 
 his last words, 179 
 
 Yvo de Chartres, quotation 
 from, 35 
 
 Zinzendorf, Count, anecdote 
 of, when at school, 94
 
 LONDON : 
 
 E. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, 
 BREAD STREET HILL, B.C.