gained, as when men learned to add, with an effectual desire after justice, “O, if I could know what it was to be loved by heaven! O, if I could taste divine love! For it is a force stronger than mine, which impels me to love more than with love, and to lose myself in that sea of Christ which they say is deep enough to receive to rest innumerable souls, and all their remembrances with them." Search the annals of religious orders, search the particular history of each abbey, and there you will find what was the end of that thirst, the source of so many tales of poesy and woe,-the names of Antonius Santaranensis, James of Tuderto, Raymund Lullus, the Abbot de Rancy, are as familiar to the cloister, as they were once to bower and hall. "I have seen vain love," says a saint of the desert, "made occasion of penance, and the same love transferred to God; love excluded by love, and fire extinguished by fire." It was these victims who became the fervent penitents. What do I say? they became the poets who, like Jacoponus, have left to the Church, chants of seraphs and hymns, that breathe heaven. Ah me! they seem to cry each moment, "How sweet is love, itself possest, when but love's shadows are so rich in joy!" CHAPTER V. ANNUNTIAVERUNT opera Dei, thus chanted voices when I prepared to move onwards. Et facta ejus intellexerunt, others added in responsive strain, while I saw a crowd who sat apart with such effulgence crowned, as send forth beauteous things eternal. These had all been separate to the Church; these had all pleased God in their days, and had been found just. They had trusted in the Lord, and St. John Climac. Grad. XV. had preached his precepts, and had turned men to justice, and had been heard from the holy mountain. Attend now, reader, and mark intently as thou canst, whilst I endeavour to unfold a grand historic page, and show what was the institution, character, action, and influence of the clergy, in relation to the fulfilment of the divine promise, to those who hungered and thirsted after God. The ecclesiastical discipline which imposed celibacy on all who ministered at the altar, originated in the motives alleged by the apostle of the nations, the justice, and irresistible weight, of which might be collected out of the mouths even of those adversaries, who in different ages of the Church, have pretended that the reasons which prescribe its abolition, would rather sink the scale. The remark of Anselm de Bagadio, Bishop of Lucca, in the time of Gregory VII. that the deficiency of the clergy of Milan, in preaching and other good works, must arise from their being married (an abuse which under the direction of the Roman pontiffs, along with St. Ariald, and St. Herlembald, he was appointed to correct), is sufficient to disprove all the arguments of the historian Landulph, who incautiously records it, even had he not so grossly falsified the doctrine of antiquity, in order to prove that marriage had been permitted to his clergy by St. Ambrose *. At the first, this discipline could not have appeared new or paradoxical to the Gentile philosophers, who had consulted the early traditions, or had paid attention to the condition and phenomena of human life. St. Augustine remarks in his book, "De Vera Religione," that Plato chose a life of celibacy merely from philosophic speculations. The Greek poet speaks of the advantages of men, who are without the marriage state, and says, that "those who are not fathers of children, not knowing whether it be sweet or bitter to possess them, however unhappy in this ignorance, are yet delivered from many labours." But he adds, "I behold those in whose houses there is this sweet fruit, oppressed with cares unceasingly; first with respect to the manner in which they should educate them, and then as to their means of leaving them a provision, • Muratori in Landulph. Prolegomena, Rer. Ital. Script. tom. IV. The while after all, it is uncertain whether they undergo_all this labour for those that will prove good or evil *. old Roman authors gave a definition, fanciful, it is true, of the word expressing an unmarried life, tracing it from that which expressed a celestial life, delivered from the burden of earthly cares †. Of the objection founded upon political reasons, it is needless to speak: for the arguments of those who adduce it are generally involved in such contradiction, that they refute themselves, as in the work entitled, "New Principles of Political Economy," by Sismondi, one part of which is devoted to attacking ecclesiastical celibacy, and the other to proving the necessity of interdicting marriage to the poor. After a review of the ancient states, and the changes wrought by Christianity, some have come to the conclusion of Rubichon, that a clergy, under the discipline of celibacy, with its property and its different relations, were the conditions of existence of modern society ‡. He that was sent affirms, it is better to adopt the state which the Church sanctions; those who speak on their own authority, denied that it was. 66 The moral difficulties which are said to oppose the discipline of the Church, though they may have a greater show of reality, were not deemed sufficient to justify its abrogation. Louis of Blois meets, in limine, those who think them insurmountable, and speaks as if experience and common sense were sufficient to disprove their assertions. They say," he observes, "that they cannot live continently; but they do not say the truth; for they received reason and free will from God, and his grace is never wanting to the humble §." It is curious to find the heathen moralist appealing to experience, in order to disprove the proposition which Luther maintained; for speaking of sensual pleasures, Cicero says, ab iisque abstinere minime esse difficile, si aut valetudo, aut officium, aut fama postulet ||." Had other objections which seem of some weight in the modern schools, been brought forward in days of the old learning, their supporters Eurip. Medea, 1088. 66 + Quintil. Lib. II. Du Mécanisme de la Société en France et en Angleterre, 272. § Epist. ad Florentium. Tuscul. Lib. V. 33. would not have been treated with more respect than were the old men condemned by Cephalus in the republic of Plato, who regretted the pleasures of their past youth, and seemed quite indignant at being deprived of great things, thinking that before they had lived as men ought to live, νῦν δὲ οὐδὲ ξῶντες. It would have been deemed a sufficient answer to reply to such protesters, in the words of Sophocles; εὐφημεί, ὦ ἄνθρωπε, ἀσμενέστατα μέντοι αὐτὸ ἀπέφυγον, ὥσπερ λυττῶντα τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποφυγών *. 66 Certainly, it is not I who will speak against marriage," says a modern French historian, "this state also has its sanctity. Nevertheless, would not the virginal union of the priest and the Church be troubled by a marriage less pure? Would the mystic paternity hold against the natural? Even if he were to accomplish all the works of the priesthood, could he then preserve its spirit? No; there is in the holiest marriage something which softens the iron, and bends the steel; the firmest heart loses something of itself. And this poesy of solitude, those manly pleasures of abstinence, that plenitude of charity, and of life, when the soul embraces God and the world, can all this as easily subsist in the conjugal state? Without doubt, there is a pious emotion on beholding the cradle of one's child; but where are the solitary meditations, the mysterious dreams, the sublime tempests, in which combatted within us God and man + Such thoughts may seem proper food for the peculiar kind of merriment which used to be so extremely offensive to Johnson, though "the_sad priest" would have seen in them the testimony of reason, to the wisdom of that choice with which the sacred Scriptures have associated the promise of an inheritance better than sons and daughters," and to which philosophy may ascribe a multiplied return, even to those who still wear mortal flesh; for as Tieck declares, through the lips of a certain stout and deep-souled Baron, "there are in life a great many sorts of happiness to be consumed." As early as the fourth century, we find the clergy externally distinguished from the laity by their dress §. Pope St. Stephen, in the reign of the emperors Vale * Lib. I. Isaiah lvi. + Michelet. Hist. de France, II. 109. rian and Gallienus, ordained that priests and deacons should never use their sacred vestments excepting in the Church. During the middle ages, the secular clergy did not exclusively wear black habits. It appears from a bequest in the Testament of Nicolas Flamel, of cloth for the clergy, and also from old banners in churches, and ancient paintings, that priests wore at pleasure cassocks of black or brown, or of bluish cloth. Clerks bore the tonsure as serfs of God; for only the chiefs of the Franks could let their hair grow long, and the rest were shorn. It was an ancient usage among the Romans to wear short hair. The Barbarians wore long hair. The Jews imitated the Romans. When the Gentiles were admitted into the Church, it was usual to cut the hair of all such as entered among the clergy. Some have supposed, that the tonsure originated with the penitents, from whom the monks adopted it; and that thence it passed to the clergy, who desired to imitate the monastic state *. The clerical tonsure became of three kinds; there was the tonsure of St. Peter, prevailing in the west, which left a circlet of hair like a crown; the tonsure of St. Paul, leaving no circlet, which prevailed in the east, and with the Greek monks, of which Bede speaks, saying, "that the monk Theodore came into England with the tonsure of St. Paul, and that he had to wait till his hair grew, before he could appear with the crown. Finally, the Britons, Picts, and Irish, had another tonsure, wearing only a half circle of hair on the fore part of the head. دو Objects which we beheld formerly, in relation to the duties of the blessed meek, present themselves again in this place, as connected with the accomplishment of justice. Formed to war against the huge army of the world's desires, the soldiers of Christ were spread throughout the whole social state in such a manner, that their action might produce the greatest effect, being both diversified to suit the variety of degrees, and united in order to maintain the efficacy of the whole. "As God is a God of order, it is of consequence," says Leibnitz, "that to the body of the one Catholic and apostolic Church, there should be one supreme spiritual Magistrate, with directorial power for accomplishing all things G. Devoti Instit. Can. I. 1. |