Of ancient deed, so long forgot; Of feuds whose memory was not; Of forests, now laid waste and bare ; Of towers which harbor now the hare; Of manners, long since changed and gone : So long had slept, that fickle fame Hath blotted from her rolls their name. Alas! it must indeed be admitted, in concluding this preliminary discourse, that, in alluding almost inadvertently to this seducive power of deceitful images, and to this variety of contending themes, within the bounds of the imagination, we have laid bare a source of real danger, enough to make us proceed tremblingly on our way in thoughtfulness and dread; for it is the counsel of the wise, as given in the words of Albert the Great, that we should abstain from the phantasms and images of corporeal things, because above all things that mind pleases God which is naked and stript from these " forms and features; since it is certain, that if the memory, imagination, and thought be at leisure often to dwell on such things, it will follow that the mind must be entangled with new or with the relics of ancient things, or be variously qualified, according to other objects; and the spirit of grace and truth departs from thoughts which are without understanding. Therefore a true lover of Jesus Christ ought to be so united in understanding, by a good will to the Divine will and to goodness, and so removed from all phantasms and passions, that he should not observe whether he be despised or honored, or in what way soever entreated, but should be in a manner transformed into the Divine likeness, so as not to see any other creatures or himself unless only in God, and so as to love only God, and to remember nothing of others or of himself, unless in God." These are the thoughts which purge the world's gross darkness off, and which heal the wounds of those that weep to see "the heathen come." I would exclaim in those words of Dante to the spirit of Oderigi, who had shown the vanity of earthly ambition. True great Albert, True are thy sayings; to my heart they breathe * Albertus, M. de adhærendo Deo, cap. VI. † Purg. XI. CHAPTER II. ND now delaying no longer through distrust, for they will assist me whose if we heard entoned the sentence ineffable did sing, "Blessed are Ah, how far unlike to this the There it was said with the great Stagyrite, "We fear all evil things; such as loss of fame, poverty, sickness, friendlessness, and death."* And here we are taught that each one of these can be the object of a Christian's love who meekly follows Christ. Aristotle insists that it is disgraceful, and indicative, of the highest insolence not to fear the want of glory. So far behind does his famed learning halt. The Athenian, with Plato, would make a law in every state to this effect, "Let there be no poor person in the city, let such a person be banished from the cities, and from the forum, and from the country fields, that the country may be altogether pure and free from an animal of this kind."+ In short, for four thousand years poverty was looked upon as a dreadful evil, a sign of malediction, insomuch that even he who was by such love inspired, that all our world craves tidings of his doom, prayed to God to deliver him from it. And such continues to be the case, for wherever the influences of the Catholic Church of Christ has not become dominant, the same sentiments maintain their ground among men, and form them to action. The poor are still those vile animals against whom the Athenian proposed to make laws, banishing them from every place of public resort, that the country may be clear of them. The Bonzes of Japan, in the time of St. Francis Xavier, even taught that neither the poor nor women could be saved, and the contrary doctrine of the Gospel was what chiefly rendered the preaching of that holy missionary so strange to them. The ages of faith were admirable in the contrast which they exhibited to this opinion and practice respecting the condition of poverty, as I shall proceed to show, by pointing out what were the sentiments held respecting it, and what was, in fact, the practice of men during that period. The sentiments, the principles, the philosophy, or, in short, the religion of men, in these ages, taught expressly that since the incarnate Son of God had chosen poverty for himself, and poverty in all *Ethic, Nicomach. Lib. III. 6. † Ὅπως ἡ Χώρα του τοιοῦτου ζώου καθαρὰ γίγνηται τὸ παράπαν. De Legibus, Lib. XI. Bouhour's Vie de St. F. Xavier, II, 67. its bitter circumstances, and had pronounced a blessing upon the spirit which corresponded with it, it was therefore a good and holy state to be borne cheerfully by all, and even to be embraced voluntarily by such as aspired to perfection; and in fact many, who like St. Dominic, as Dante says, seemed messengers and friends fast-knit to Christ, showed their first love after the first counsel that Christ gave. "Let the Pagan," says St. Bernard, "seek riches, who lives without God; let the Jew seek them, who receives temporal promises; but with what front, or with what mind can a Christian seek riches, after that Christ has proclaimed the poor blessed?" "Not to have the burden of poverty," says St. Augustin," is to have the burden more than needful of riches." The rich will discover at the last day what a weight has been this burden, unless the poor shall have relieved them of it by receiving their alms. There will remain nothing to them but that terrible woe of the Gospel, Væ vobis divitibus, Christ in his Gospel speaks to the rich only to thunder against their bride, Væ vobis divitibus! A virgin can conceive, a barren woman can bring forth a child, a rich man can be saved; these are three miracles of which the Holy Scriptures give us no other reason, but only that God is all powerful. This is what Bossuet says in his discourse on St. Francis of Assisium. St. Chrysostom says that there are always three considerations which should make a rich Christian humble, the contrast between the condition of the rich and that of Jesus Christ in poverty, the choice which Jesus Christ made of poverty for himself, and the character of malediction which he seems to have fixed upon riches. "Oh if we loved God as we ought," cries St. Augustin, "we should not have any love for money."+ "The rich man speaks of his money," says St. Cyprian, “his goods, his riches, which are all to be kept for himself."‡ How many from their grave Shall with shorn locks arise; who living, ay, How many are, even now, like the saaaes described by Virgil ? -Quàm vellent æthere in alto Nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores! | Now, at least, they know, "how dear it costeth not to follow Christ." "What have we to answer," asks St. Cyprian, "to the arguments of Satan against these wretched men, when he asserts that they have always served him and offered him their treasures? How can we defend the souls of the rich cover"Woe to you, his wretched followers! "cries ed with such thick darkness ?" Of gold and silver ye have made your god * Serm. I. De omnibus sanctis. § Dante, Purgatory, XXII. I V1. 436. In Joan. Tract. XL. 20. But that he worships one, a hundred ye? Some of the ancient sages were not without an insight into the evil and danger of riches, however that truth was generally obscured. Plato shows that the man who would correspond in his own life to the best constituted state must despise riches from his youth.* The man who in his life corresponds to a state whose constitution is mixed with good and evil, will despise riches while young; but as he grows old, he will become fond of them, because he partakes of the money-loving nature, rov piloxenμáτov púσεw5, from not being devoted purely to virtue, through having lost the best guard, which consists in reason tempered with music, Λόγου μουσικῇ κερραμένου· which alone is the preserver of virtue through life to whoever possesses it. And in another place he says, "We have proved, therefore, that the very rich are not good men, and if not good, that they cannot be happy." And of the rich and powerful man, Socrates says elsewhere, “that he is always in want of most things, and that he appears poor indeed if any one knows how to view his whole soul." In another place, he speaks as follows: "Who can question the possibility of the sons and descendants of kings and despots being born with a true philosophic nature? No one certainly. But perhaps it will be said, that if such sons should be born to them, their disposition must, of necessity, be corrupted, for we have ourselves admitted that it is very difficult to save it. But that in all the lapse of time there should not have been one saved, it would be absurd to suppose. If, then you grant the possibility of one escaping, it is sufficient to justify our hypothesis and to screen us from the charge of teaching impossibilities."§ This is language sufficiently discouraging to the rich, of whom there are many, and the good are rare. In truth, even according to the morals of Aristotle, such men might generally be found guilty in the two respects of deficiency in giving, and of excess in appropriating:||τῇ τ' ἐλλείψει τῆς δόσεως καὶ τῇ ὑπερβολῇ τῆς λήψεως. He says elsewhere, that "men who have ever so little, think that they have enough of virtue, but that they would go on to infinity adding to their wealth and possessions, to their power and glory." Plato represents Socrates as laughing at men of this description, and saying, as if he had lived on the bank of Thames, "that they would regard it as the height of happiness if they could have gold even within their bodies, three talents in their stomach, a talent in their skull, and a statera in each eye; and that they envy the Scythians for having their skull lined with gold, though it is for men to drink out of them.”** But it was only in the school of Christ that ordinary men were enabled to discover the depth of the evil, and the exceeding folly of that spirit of appropriating * De Repub. VIII. De Legibus, Lib. V. De Repub. Lib. IX. § De Repub. Lib. VI. Polit. Lib. VII. c. I. ** Plat. Euthydemus. Ethic, Lib. IV. cap. I. What mean these ex- How often does a single riches to themselves. St. Chrysostom asks, "Why does not the gold that shines in the shops of merchants give you the same pleasure as if it belonged to you personally? At least this would not involve you in such a number of torments. You reply, because it does not belong to you. Thence I conclude that it is nothing but avarice which makes you love all these treasures. pressions, this is ours, and that does not belong to us? words to the bottom I find only vanity and nothingness. moment cause people to lose for ever what they call theirs? equally to those vast possessions, those magnificent houses, those delicious gardens, of which the rich men of this world are so proud, and in allusion to which you will find that the words 'mine and ours' are senseless and vain. For the use of these things is common to all, only those who are called the possessors have the trouble of taking care of them."* St. Chrysostom does not seem here to contemplate the possibility of such a state as that in which no one but the actual possessor was allowed to enjoy the goods of life, such as may now be seen in countries where a servile war has repeatedly been on the eve of breaking out, to close the tragedy of "mine and thine," personages which have played such a part from the very first in that drama partaking of the terrible and the ludicrous, which professed to represent the downfall of superstition and the establishment by law of the reign of primitive Christianity! What must be the wretched state of that mind which can find delight in the solitude of pride, in the gloomy seclusion of vast parks, from which God and men are equally excluded? In the middle ages the castle of the Lord was surrounded by the houses of his dependants, and yet even then it was not a secret that his elevation had no privilege as to greater happiness. Martial d'Auvergne, in his Vigils of the death of Charles VII. contrasts the life of the great with that of the poor, and says Mieux vaut liesse De ses grans Seigneurs; Car ils ont douleurs Et des maulx greigneurs; Mais pour nos labeurs Nous avons sans cesse Les beaulx prés et fleurs, Et joye à nos cueurs, Sans mal qui nous blesse.t * Tractatus de Virginitate, cap. 24. + Gouget, Biblioth. Française, Tom. X. 51. |