engage in the devil's work, nor roam about the fields and woods, shouting and laughing."

Then he hints very plainly at worse doings inside or outside the church, law business, dice, games, and even fighting. Then turning his attention within the walls he adds,

"Do not give your attention to vain talk; for there are many, principally women, who so chatter in church, who so keep on talking, that they neither hear the lessons themselves nor allow others to hear them."

Then follows a cut at the men who want the minister to shorten the service so that they may go hunting the earlier. Of course this is not eloquence as we reckon it; that would have been out of place and useless with that kind of people.

Here is a sermon which shows that, in some things at least, the world has moved forward since Ethelwulf of England brought a crown of gold to Pope Benedict III, in 853. It bears the title, "Against those who raise an outcry during an eclipse of the moon," and begins, “It is a great joy to me to see you frequent the churches, seek baptism, and study the worship of the true God; but it grieves me exceedingly that I see many of you implicated in certain follies, mixing among the truths of religion certain false things which in no wise should be done." Then he describes the shouting, blowing of horns, casting of javelins and arrows against the moon, much after the fashion of our own aborigines. This was in Germany. "What madness is this, brethren! What insanity!

How can ye bring help to the heaven and stars who are not able to protect yourselves on the earth? I

praise you not, since, being deceived by the devil, ye are devoted in no small degree to pagan errors. And whence is this except from the pagans, whose company ye love and whose customs ye imitate? I have ofter forbidden you to consort with them, or to take part in their abominable feasts; but avarice hinders you from obeying me. Ye love money and are not afraid of hell. 'For this cause many are weak and sickly among

you and many sleep.'

The plainness of this discourse is a revelation of the state of mingled religion and superstition which prevailed in the half-barbarian empire of the Franks in the ninth century. Rabanus' sermons have one quality which would commend them to this hurried and impatient age-they are short. But a contemporary, Otto, of Verceil, surpasses him in this respect. His sermons occupy ten or twelve minutes in delivery, but not satisfied with such brevity he sometimes appends a shorter form and adds, "the last sermon abbreviated, lest the common people should be disgusted."

Another prevailing feature of the preaching of that age is illustrated by Peter Damiani, Cardinal of Ostia. It is the stringing together of texts of Scripture with scarcely a connecting word, and yet making a connected discourse. In one page of a sermon on the Epiphany can be counted twenty-seven different quotations, with only four connecting clauses, all other words of conjunction being particles. This might be called easy composition if it did not imply such a familiarity with every part of the Bible as could be obtained only through constant study. It was a time of few theological works and fewer

still of any other kind, and the Bible was the basis of all religious discourse and the principal possession of the clergy.

Another characteristic which had come down from remote times was the scriptural symbolism, which these mystical preachers drew out in a marvelous manner. Thus Damiani finds in the two cherubim above the mercy-seat a type of the two Testaments, the old and the new, and in the cross the concord of the two; and in the same paragraph he finds twenty-five other things of which it is the type, of which the key to open paradise may stand as an example. His apostrophe to it borders upon that worship of the sign for the thing signified, which was growing up at this time, and came near to idolatry in after centuries.

The oratorical style of Damiani in his perorations rises above that of his predecessors, as was possible in the passionate appeal to even an uncultivated audience. Some of his discourses on the Evangelists are marked by force and energy, combined with gentleness and sweetness, equaled by no mediæval preacher until we come to Bernard.

The Sæculum Obscurum has settled down upon the nations, the Dark Age of crime and ignorance gathers like a cloud around the thousandth year. The schools of Charlemagne have died out; there are no writers. worth mentioning. Doctrine is received by rote and tradition, and the clergy know little but the routine of the church service.

It is only a lone watch-fire burning here and there in. this universal night, like Rabanus and Damiani, that

prevents the extinction of hope. The fact that such a discourse as the one on the Glory of the Heavenly Jerusalem, by Damiani, could be composed in that age must be attributed to the special divine illumination, or to disgust with the kingdom of heaven on earth as it then appeared. It is too long to quote, short as the homily is; but it has the strain and the spirit of the old Latin hymns, Jerusalem the Golden, the Vexilla Regis, and the Hymn of Adam of St. Victor.

XIV.

PREACHERS OF THE CRUSADES.

HE general expectation of the end of the world.

THE

after a thousand years, and seemingly at hand by reason of the general corruption of the times, had not been met. The day of doom had not fallen on a disordered world, with its stagnation in learning and in

As the eleventh century begins there are signs of revival. In Greek and Mohammedan cities learning is cultivated by such men as Avicenna and Avicebron, by Gerbert at Rheims and Lanfranc at Canterbury, while theology takes on a new form in scholasticism, reducing traditional dogmas to scientific unity by the aid of revived dialectics, combining Aristotelian metaphysics and logic with the traditions of the church and decrees of councils.

Its realism is not that of the New Testament, however, and its nominalism is transient. Before the end of this century the great battle will have begun between the papacy of Hildebrand and the spirit of feudalism and the rights of church and state in England, France, Germany, and Italy. England will not yield to the pope, France will remain independent, Germany will be humbled but will triumph over the pope, who in turn will never ask an imperial sanction to his election again. It is time to be looking for some intellectual activity in