it was taught that we also should learn not to be content with offering money, but to offer ourselves to Christ, and imitate the Son of man, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister." That is what St. Jerome says.' * So great, indeed, and numerous, are the spiritual advantages of poverty, that it might even be argued that the general influence of religion during the ages of faith was in some measure owing to the varied and constant application of that moral power which, though it may not have found a place in history, was most certainly exerted by the people, that is, by the vast majority of men who lived in a comparative state of poverty. The poor common people have often been the protection of the saints, as they were of John the Baptist from the fury of Herod, for we read "timuit populum: quia sicut prophetam eum habebant."+ How often would the foul crew of rich sophists and greedy plunderers of ecclesiastical property, who hold their counsel on the Seine, have overthrown whole churches, but that, like Herod, they feared the people? It is the poor common people too who have the quickest and most judicious sense of admiration for heroic virtue in distress. This is shown in Homer, when he says, that, "when Telemachus, at the close of his address, wept and threw his sceptre to the earth, all the people were moved to pity, but that Antinous, who represented the proud suitors, began to accuse him."‡ Nay, the holy poor have often exerted a direct influence upon the manners of the great. At Florence, after the defeat and execution of the conspirators, the people, who remembered the blasphemies to which old James Pazzi had been addicted, began to murmur publicly at his having been buried in holy ground. At length a multitude of country peasants repaired to Florence, and required that his body should be removed from the sacred place it was dug up and thrown into the Arno.§ Of a still more remarkable instance there is a monument yet existing, if we give credit to what is reported by some historians of Normandy, for there is a place on the banks of the Seine, opposite Jumiège, which is called Heulerie, or Jolerie, and it is said that the origin of the name is to be traced from the inhabitants having been accustomed to assemble there frequently in order to express their detestation of immorality, by hissing Agnes Sorel, as the king's mistress, who had retired there.|| * Epist. LIV. + Matt. xiv. 5. Hist. de Jumièges, par Deshayes. Od. II. 81. § Pignotti, III. 6. CHAPTER III. S O far we have regarded the state of the poor in ages of faith; but it is obvious that a far wider range is opened to our view in reference to the first circle of beatitude than the mere limits of material poverty, which, after all, may itself, in some instances, be excluded from it; for "if humility be not joined to poverty," as Thomas à Kempis says, "poverty cannot please God."* "Poverty is not a virtue," says St. Bonaventura, "but the love of poverty. "+-There may be religious poverty amidst riches, and worldly riches amidst poverty: the poverty of religion, that is, the spirit which is disengaged from the love of riches, distinguished Abraham, Job, David, Josias, in the Old Testament, to all of whom Providence had given great wealth, and the Augustins, the Paulins, the Gregories, and so many other holy bishops and kings and nobles of the Christian Church who regarded their riches and dignities as treasures of which they were only the dispensers for the good of others. St. Jerome appeals to the example of noble men and rich men then living who had renounced all things for Christ.§ The great possessions which every Christian must renounce are his attachment to creatures and his selflove. The Church, that city of the poor, as Bossuet calls it, possessed great wealth in these ages of faith. of faith. We must show in what manner this was consistent with that spiritual poverty which is the object of the divine benediction. From the very first, we know that offerings were brought to the churches, and placed at the disposal of the ministers. The Church had virtually acquired property long before the time of Constantine; for that emperor ordered that all things which had been unjustly taken from the Church, whether houses or lands, should be restored to her, at the same time making it lawful for all persons to leave property to her by will. After Constantine, in the Greek Church, we find St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Chrysostom urging the duty of devoting tenths to support the ministers of God. St. Augustin, than whom no one could be more pure from all terrene cupidity, presses upon the laity their obligation to enable those who serve the altar to live by the altar, and warns them to beware lest *De Tribus Tabernac. cap. 7. Medit. Vitæ Christi, cap. 43. St. Bonaventura de Sept. Grad. Vit. Spiritual. cap. 45. Epist. XCII. Thomassinus de veteri et nova Ecclesiæ Disciplin. Pars III, Lib. I. cap. 16. the silence of the clergy should reprove their illiberality."* He advises them to reserve some fixed sum for this use, "something fixed either from your annual or your daily fruits," and he even prescribes tenths;† as does also St. Jerome.‡ The maxim was "Laïcorum est antevolare cleri necessitatibus." Charlemagne, without regard to the remonstrances of several of the clergy, established the systems of tithes by law.§ The laws of Justinian would not even allow a Church to be constructed unless it was also endowed so as to support the clergy.|| Besides this legal provision, an immense source of wealth was derived from the faith and spirit of the people. Some made offerings through gratitude: thus in the year 1103. Hugue, count of Troyes, published the following letter at a time when he made great donations to the churches. "In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, I, Hugue, by the Grace of God, count of Troyes, after great sufferings and affliction from dangerous wounds, and despairing of a cure, expecting only death; and yet God having granted me a recovery, considering in myself that I have in many ways offended the grace of my God, and that I had justly deserved this penalty for my sins, and acknowledging that I had deserved a still greater; after this great benefit of God in restoring me to health, I have proposed to render him thanks, by giving alms and doing good to some churches." Others made offerings through fear of God's judgment. Thus at the close of the tenth century, the Church received a great influx of riches, in consequence of the opinion which then generally prevailed, that the world was near its end. I cannot refrain from observing here that the moderns need not make this a ground of triumph, for so far is this fact from being favorable to their views, that it is on the contrary one which reflects the highest honor upon the spirit of men in these ages. For what must have been the holiness and grandeur of that society to which persons of every rank and country offered their treasures, thinking that they were about to appear in a body before the eternal Judge, and that these offerings would recommend their souls to his justice? What must have been the faith and piety of those men who had their hearts thus fixed upon the good of the future and eternal world? When property was given to the Church, it was the practice to add the most solemn imprecations against all who should attempt to sever and convert it from the holy purpose to which it was destined. Thus the charter of Ednothus to the Abbey of Ramsey, giving to it his estate of Acleia, ends thus, "Rogamus ergo et obsecramus per Dei terribile nomen, ut nullis omnino hanc terram donet, vel vendat, vel aliquo modo ab eadem Ecclesia alienet ; quod si quis fecerit, sit ille maledictus, et alienatus ab omni beatitudine præsentis vitæ et futuræ, sitque ejus commoratio cum dæmonibus in inferno, ubi ignis eorum non extinguitur et vermis eorum non morietur."** * In Psal. iv. 46. Serm. 219, de Temp. Cap. Car. M. ann. 801. In Matt. xxii. 39. T. I. Col. 355. Thomassinus iii. Lib. I. cap. 19. Hist. du Diocèse de Troyes, par Desguerrois, 266. ** Hist. Ramesiensis, cap. xviii. Gale Hist. Brit. Tom. II. Long after the change of religion in England, it seemed a horrible and fearful thing to many even who went with it to take any part in the plunder of property which had been so solemnly dedicated to God. Some, indeed, of rich and powerful agents made no scruple, like Sir John Russell, in making a dwelling-house of the dissolved abbey, and a stable of the church; but in a vast majority of instances, when the first plunderers had departed on their circuit of destruction, the people durst not take any advantage of what then stood defenceless and open to any invader. The people, as Sir Henry Spelman says, were fearful to meddle with places consecrated to God.* Sir Henry Spelman, in his history of Sacrilege, gives a list of all the peers who were present in parliament on Friday the 23rd of May, in the thirty-first year of Henry VIII. when the act passed for dissolving the monasteries, and he shows the calamities which fell upon them and their races: he also gives a list of the abbeys, traces the property through various hands, and shows that the acquirers never prospered. A remark which was repeated by Jeremy Taylor and many of the Protestant preachers, with what consistency, indeed, might have been questionable. Such, then, was the wealth of the Church, and such the mode of its acquisition during the ages of faith. Now one observation suggests itself before we proceed to consider the spirit with which it was received, and the object to which it was applied. It would seem that the wealth of a particular church, or convent, was only a memorial of its sanctity. Hear the accurate Abbé Lebeuf, "The reputation of holiness which belonged to the Abbey of Livry, was the cause why Matilda de Cramoël gave to it in the year 1244 twenty acres of land at Berneau."+ We shall have occasions hereafter to produce many curious instances of a similar kind. At present I pass on to show the spirit of the Church in receiving this influx of wealth, and the purposes to which it was applied. "The holy fathers," says Thomassinus, "regarded the accession of temporal goods to the Church as a subject, not of joy, but of religious fear and necessary caution, and even of grief and sadness."I In a letter which Alcuin wrote to Charlemagne, he desires the emperor not to require that tithes should be always paid to the clergy. "It is much better to lose tithes than faith: we who have been born, nourished, instructed in the Catholic faith, even we can hardly consent to give the tenth of our goods, and must not the newborn faith, the weak heart, and the avaricious spirit of these people still less consent to it?" This was his view of their legal enforcements. In the year 813, a council of bishops under Charlemagne grievously inveighed against those who tempted the faithful to endow the Church, and ordered such gifts to be restored to the natural heirs, but it added, "Hoc vero quod quisque Deo juste et rationabiliter de rebus suis offert, firmiter Ecclesia tenere debet." A certain *Hist. of Sacrilege, p. 245. + Hist. du Deiocse de Paris. Tom. XIII. 235. De veteri et nova Ecclesiæ Disciplina, Pars iii. Lib. I. cap. 4. § Alcuini Epist. XXVIII. matron, by name of Ammonia, left land and her house to the Church. Stephania her nurse, and Calaxinus her son, hastened to Pope Gregory the Great, and exposed their poverty to him, upon which he ordered the land and house to be restored to them;* "Why desire gold which cannot help us?" cried St. Ambrose, "the Assyrians formerly plundered the temple of Jerusalem of its gold, but the gold of the Church, that is, the poor, holds out a prey to no one." "The tribute of the Church," says the canon of the Irish Church, in the eighth century, published by Dacherius "is according to the custom of the province, tamen ne pauperes in decimis vim patiantur." "The synod decreed that a priest should not receive gifts from any one of whom he did not know the conscience, for as much as the hosts do not profit him, so much do the gifts of the wicked man injure him who receives them."§ The bishop Jona, in his work de Institutione Laïcali, quotes as follows from St. Gregory's morals. "He who gives his external substance to the needy, but does not at the same time preserve his own life from sin, offers his substance to God and himself to sin; that which is least he gives to his Creator, and what is greatest he keeps for iniquity; he gives his propierty to God, and he prepares himself for the devil."|| We may observe that this is not the language of men who only thirsted for the riches of the laity. In like manner, Walafred Strabo, Abbot of Fulda, in the ninth century, shows that no offering to a monastery or church would be acceptable, unless from men who obeyed the precepts of Christ with a pure heart. In accepting offerings, the Church had always regard to the purity and innocence, or penitence, of those who offered, whence Epiphanius says in his exposition of the Catholic faith, "The Church admits the oblations of such as have done injury to no one, and done no wickedness, but led an innocent life."** "The offerings of the faithful at the altar were bread and wine, hosts for the Divine sacrifice, testimonies of gratitude for the clergy, and proofs of charity for the poor. The names of those who offered were solemnly read at mass from tablets which were the Diptycha."†† Men would not have relinquished the benefits of the Church, if they could have escaped their burden of tenths. The farmer of the farm of Orengis, in the deanery of Montlhery, was declared by sentence, exempt from paying tithes. The curate concluded that he was not his parishioner; but the farmer not choosing to remain without a pastor, offered to pay twenty livres every year, if he would put him among the number of his parishioners. The offer being accepted, it was approved of by the vicar-general in the year of 1660.‡‡ It is worthy of remark, that in the ages of munificence to the Church, we read of no consequent distress among the people. It was then the well-known proverb, *Thomassinus iii. I. 20. +Offic. Lib. II. c. 28. Capitula Canon. Hibernens. cap. xxx. Spicileg. Tom. IX. | Lib. III. cap. 10. Apud Dacher. Spicileg. Tom. I. Ibid. cap. xxii. De Rebus Ecclesiasticis, cap. xiv. |