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BX 957 .B7 1883
Brock, Mourant, 1802-1856.
Rome: pagan and papal
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ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Regina Saba, Queen of Sheba {From a cut in the " Nuretnburg Chronicle.")
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ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
MOURANT^BROCK, M.A,
Formerly huumlent of Christ Cluirck, Clifton. A itthor of The Cross : Heathen and Christian," " Short Chapters on tlie Sacraments," etc.
" He being dead, yet speaketh."
HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
MDCCCLXXXIII.
\.All rights reserved,]
Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesburj'.
I .HEC. NOV IBbii
■ THSOLOGI^
PREFACE,
TTOR many years, both at home and while sojourning ''- in other lands, I have been much interested in observing the various religions of the world, and in collecting such information respecting their traditions, ritual, and usages, as would enable me to comp arethem. And my intention was that, if it pleased God to grant me health, I would, after retirement from clerical duties, digest my miscellaneous papers, and shape them into a book.
But this was not to be : health failed, and my purpose was postponed from year to year. Last autumn, how- ever, finding that a few of the papers which appeared in the Rock had met with much acceptance, I thought it might, perhaps, be well to revise and republish these together with some others. But feebleness of body again interposed, and rendered me quite unable to decide the question. So I called upon my friend Mr. Pember — author of " EartJis Earliest Ages',' and " The Great Prophecies" — with a bundle of MS. in my hand, and asked his opinion. He replied that the MS. con-
vi PREFACE.
tained much interesting information of a kind likely to be valuable at the present time.
This answer determined me ; and when I further told him how unfit I felt to undertake the completion of my own work, he kindly consented to help me by digesting and revising the papers, verifying those extracts which were within the range of his library, and seeing the book through the press.
For the cuts of the Council of Florence, taken from the Bronze Gates of St. Peter's, I am indebted to the courtesy of the family of the late Rev. W. B. Marriott.
I have also to thank Dr. Lewis of Berkeley Square, Bristol, for the loan of many curious books from which I have culled much interesting matter.
Nor must I forget many other friends and acquaint- ances, who have most kindly helped me, either by gathering or .copying notes, and to whom I beg to tender my grateful thanks.
MOURANT BROCK. Clifton, Juue, 1883.
A few days after he had written his preface, the venerable author was called into the presence of Him who turneth the shadow of death into the morning.
He had requested that he might be spared to bring out a second edition of his useful " SJiort Chapters on the Sacraments" and his petition was granted, so that he
PREFACE. vu
was enabled to send copies of that work to some of his friends on his eighty-first birthday.
He had conceived a dread of lingering illness, and was wont to pray that, if such were the will of God, it might not fall to his lot. This desire also was remem- bered by his gracious Lord,
On Friday, June 29th, he retired to rest in his usual condition, but became ill in the night, and, after an hour's laborious breathing, the command went forth — " Loose him, and let him go ! "
A gentle calm stole over his face, he gasped out the words, " Old things are passed away ; behold, all things are become new," and quitted the sick chamber for the Paradise of God so quietly that his sorrowing family scarce knew the moment of his departure.
"Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them."
G. H. P.
CONTENTS,
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE TWO CITIES .1
II. THE RELATION OF PAGANISM TO THE ROMAN
CHURCH 8
III. THE EARLY CHURCH (PART I.) . . . . I4
IV. THE EARLY CHURCH (PART II.) . . . ■ ^9 V. THE COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARLY CHURCH 25
VI. FURTHER EVIDENCE TO THE COMPROMISING SPIRIT
OF THE EARLY CHURCH . . . .28
VII. THE DARK AGES 35
VIII. A DEVICE OF MAN FOR HIS OWN SALVATION. . 4I
IX. CELIBATES AND SOLITARIES 49
X. MONKS AND MONASTERIES . . . . • 55
XI. THE SUPERSTITION AND IMMORALITY OF MEDI/E-
VALISM ........ 64
XII. CHARMS AS USED IN THE PAGAN WORLD (PART I.) 72
XIII. CHARMS AS USED IN THE PAGAN WORLD (PART II.) 78
XIV. CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME (PART I.) . 86
XV. CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME {PART II.) . 90
CONTENTS.
CHAP. p^^g
XVI. CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME (PART III.), 97 XVII. THE CONSECRATION OF HOLY FIRE AND HOLY
WATER . . . . . . , .10^
XVIII. THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION, OR CANDLEMAS IIO
XIX. THE IMAGES OF THE GODS . . . ,114
XX. THE IMAGE OF ST. PETER AT ROME . . .121
XXI. THE ADORATION OF IMAGES BY KISSING , -125
XXII. THE CLOTHING OF IMAGES
XXIII. THE MOTHER AND CHILD
130
141
149
159 164
XXIV. VOTIVE OFFERINGS . XXV. THE NIMBUS XXVI. MARKS OF THE GODS XXVII. HOLY PLACES . XXVIII. MODERN PILGRIMS . XXIX. BLEEDING KNEES XXX. ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON . . . .167
XXXI. POPE JOAN jy^
XXXII. THE ELECTION OF A POPE . , . .187
XXXIII. ECCLESIASTICAL PAINTING : ITS SENSUOUSNESS
AND PAGAN CHARACTER . . . • 194
XXXIV. ECCLESIASTICAL SCULPTURE : ITS SENSUOUSNESS
AND PAGAN CHARACTER . . . .198
XXXV. THE BRONZE GATES OF ST. PETER's . . . 204
XXXVI. THE SHRINE OF ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA . .2 12
XXXVIl. THE BURLESQUE SIDE OF SUPERSTITION . -217
CONTENTS.
XI
CHAP. PAGE
XXXVIII. ORVIETO AND TRANSUBSTANTIATION. . .223
XXXIX. THE CATHEDRAL OF ORVIETO (PART I.) . . 228
XL. THE CATHEDRAL OF ORVIETO (PART II.) . . 234
XLI. THE CATHEDRAL OF ORVIETO (PART III.) . . 244
XLII. BOLSENA 248
XLIII. BRIGANDAGE ....... 253
XLIV. THE PERSECUTING SPIRIT OF ROME . . , 262
XLV. MODERN JESUITISM .... . 266
XLVI. CONCLUSION 269
f
I.
THE TWO CITIES.
IN Southern Italy there are two cities hard by each other : the one teeming with hfe, the other a city of the dead.
These cities are Naples and Pompeii. The latter, accident ally discovered after an entombment of nearly seventeen centuries, began to be disinterred from thfe debris with which Vesuvius had overwhelmed it. This consisted, not of streams of lava, such as those beneath which Herculaneum was buried, but of ashes and pumice stone, intermingled with mud and water. By its removal an astonishing spectacle was presented to the modern world, a complete specimen of ancient civiliza- tion, with its arts, habits, and domestic arrangements, all laid bare to view ; nay, even the very forms and features of some of the inhabitants of the overwhelmed city.
How, you will perhaps say, is the latter possible? Italian skill has cleverly solved the difficulty.
The volcanic ashes in which a human body was buried, were so delicately pressed upon every part of it by the water, which was also ejected from the mountain, that the form, whether male or female, was perfectly moulded. In process of time the body decomposed, but the impression upon the ashes which clasped the vanished form was still left.
Now mark the artist's skill. Professor Fiorelli — honoured
be his name — has found a mould, and, see ! he makes openings
into the cavity, and pours in plaster of Paris, so as to fill
it completely. He digs out the figure, now become solid ;
.^ I
2 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
he brushes off the ashes adhering to it ; and lo ! there comes forth from the ground a Pompeian man, matron or maid, horse or dog, an exact facsimile, whichever it may be, of its original.
The remains of the buried city disclose the fact that the habits of the ancient Roman differed but little from those of the modern Italian.
To this effect Professor J. J. Blunt, a most competent autho- rity, in the third chapter of his Vestiges of AncieJit Manners (Murray, 182S), writes as follows: — "From the discovery of Pompeii many connecting links between ancient and modern times may now be accurately traced. The same features present themselves in the general view of Pompeii as those of a modern Italian town. It exhibits indications, too, of the same gregarious habits as are still conspicuous. The ancient, like the modern, inhabitants of Italy ever preferred town to country life. The splendour of their sacrifices, the amusements of the Theatre, the Circus, the Baths, etc., have been succeeded by a magnificent Mass, the Opera, the Caft^s, the Piazza, and the Corso. . . . Lapse of time, and the glories of history, have almost persuaded us that such men as the ancient Romans could not have thought, acted, and spoken like beings of this nether world. By a nearer acquaintance, however, the spell is broken, and the more that acquaintance is increased the more, I am convinced, shall we find that they resembled their present descendants."
We shall be able to test the truth of these remarks as we proceed, and shall see that in many points, and especially in matters of religion, the Italy of the present does indeed sur- prisingly resemble the Italy of the past. Let us illustrate this from what has been, and is daily being, disclosed in Pompeii, instancing some of the ordinary habits and usages of society.
An Englishman going for the first time to Naples, or indeed \o any town of Italy, is surprised to find that, contrary to the
THE TWO CITIES. 3
custom of his own country, the grandest houses are built in the form of a square, with a garden and fountain in the centre \ and that the ground floor and entrance to these mansions are occupied by shops, the best rooms being always upstairs. If he seeks the prototype of these modern dwellings, he will find it in the old Roman residences, and among them are those of Pompeii, where shops fronting the street are found in the basement story, and where the inner square with the little garden and fountain belonging to the dwelling, are the almost invariable rule.
These fountains are usually, as in Naples and other modern Italian towns, either jets or little cascades, to serve which there are leaden supply pipes, with cocks and the usual modern appliances. On these ancient pipes, too, may be seen, as now-a-days, the stamp marked with the plumber's name.
This correspondence of ancient with modern usage may be found also, in the Museum at Nismes, on a leaden pipe fished out of the Rhone, which in times of yore conveyed water through the river from a much esteemed fountain for the use of the dwellers on the opposite bank. In the Museum at Bath, too, there is a piece of a Roman leaden pipe similarly stamped.
No glowing fire])lace cheered the occupants of a Pompeian saloon — poor enough truly is the modern Italian wood-fire — but in place of this northern comfort stood a brazier for charcoal. This is still the case in Naples, and in those towns of Italy where the English, and other northern visitors, have not yet taught the natives the use of fireplaces. Formerly nothing would have been found anywhere but these braziers and the miserable scaldinos, or open earthern pots of heated charcoal. I have even seen, at Pistoja in Tuscany, a bed heated with a scaldino. It was in the next room to mine, so I went to witness the operation.
The Pope's Swiss Guard, in their noble guard-room at the
4 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Vatican, keep themselves warm by standing round a great open brazen vessel filled with live charcoal. As I contem- plated them, I thought of Simon Peter, at the palace of the High Priest in Jerusalem, standing with the guard, and " warming himself," probably, at just the same kind of fire, the " fire of coals " — i.e., charcoal — of the New Testament.
One may also see in Pompeii the shop-signs so common in modern towns. For example, the figure of a goat, or of a cow, to indicate the sale of milk ; and so also the signs of various trades. Among them is a pictorial advertisement of a schoolmaster, found also at Herculaneum. Here you have it, reader.
y^micisv^
And characteristic of the calling it certainly is, showing that pedagogues two thousand years ago were just as fond of torturing boys with the birch as they used to be in our own country in my boyish days. It made me twist as I looked at it, and thought of the petty tyrant who ground me with oppression in tender childhood. Not that I would be under- stood to imply that boys never require the rod. No doubt they do sometimes, and it would be a good thing if our magistrates could see that occasionally men do also.
At Siena, again, in the noble Piccolomini library adjoining the cathedral, there is, in one of the many illuminated choir books, an illustration of the same disagreeable subject.
As one walks along the deserted streets of Pompeii, the eye
THE TWO CITIES. 5
is arrested by notices of municipal elections, with the names of the different candidates, which may still be seen upon the walls, where also the titles of the several guilds are yet to be read. Italy, always famous for its fraternities, received them from ancient Rome. For Sir W. Gell, in one of his charming volumes on Pompeii, says : — " In this street was an inscription of the Fruitsellers ; and it seems that there must have been a fraternity of almost every trade or profession."
Among these he mentions the corporations of Goldsmiths, Fishmongers, Woodmen, Carmen, Porters, Muleteers, etc.
Inscriptions, too, of a different kind may be seen upon the walls — scribbles, lampoons, personalities, scurrilities, and others of a still more objectionable character. Blackguards then, as blackguards now !
We have already noticed the similarity of medieval shops in Italy to those of the ancient Romans at Pompeii. In the towns of the Riviera of Nice such shops are still to be seen — stone counters and shutters, with an entire absence of glass For example, there are several of them in the old town of Mentone, in the " Rue Longue."
It is just the same with the kitchens. The Continental
Stove in kitchen of Pansa's house.
kitchen of the South is the kitchen of Pompeii, and it helps us to discover the kind of cooking which furnished Roman dinners — those of Lucullus for instance. For the old Roman, like the modern Italian, had the range of low arches supporting little hollow squares, for charcoal fires, uj)on which were fitted iron gratings for the stewpans. There you see the various utensils
6 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
of the culinary art, much the same as those in present use. There, too, stand the jars, large and small, as conspicuously as in the kitchens of modern Italy or of the East, their great size frequently putting one in mind of Hadji Baba and the Forty Thieves.
An interesting instance of old Roman economy struck me in connection with these earthen amphorae. I found that one or two of them, having been cracked, were stitched in several places with wire. And good the mending has proved to be, to have lasted, as it has done, through the best part of two thou- sand years. I have seen the same thing at Nismes, and with as enduring a result, in some similar Roman pottery.
But the Italians do not merely follow the Romans in the method of cooking their food, — the food itself is of the same character as that of their predecessors : and to this fact the discoveries at Pompeii give ample testimony. One of the disinterred streets has been named " The Street of Fruits," from the stores of fruits which were found in it. Figs, raisins, chestnuts, plums, fruit in glass bottles — think of that, English housewives ! — oil, lentils, hempseed, etc. : all these have come to light in abundance. Bread, too, has been found, and various other things, such as money, scales, and moulds for pastry. And quite recently the tablets of a Pompeian gentle- man, containing his private accounts, have been added to this curious list. In the Pompeian pictures, again, the old Roman taste is represented by sausages, hams, onions, garlic, and other savoury viands. In the Museum, one of the most curious relics of edible antiquity is some honey in the comb. With great interest I looked upon it — honey eighteen hundred years old!
The ancient Romans began their dinner with oysters : modern Europe has copied their example. As to sausages, they delighted in them ; and let the shops of Naples or modern Rome testify how truly the Italian people prove their descent
THE TWO CITIES. 7
in this point. Only see them, reader, on the eve of Good P>iday — that is the best time, and the place the Piazza Navona at Rome, or near the Pantheon ; for in those localities the shops of the Pizzicaruoli, or porksellers, are to be found. A season of fasting it is, to be sure ; but those sausage-shops do not look like it, splendidly illuminated as they are, and with their savoury and abounding goods arranged in varied and fantastic devices. Did one ever see such festoons of sausages as in modern Rome ? But where are the pigs fed ?
Oxford, the savour of thy sausages — how did it excite my undergraduate breakfast sensibilities ! But the sausages of Imperial Rome : must not they have been, and still be, sublime ? Perhaps ; but I like the Oxford ones better.
Water tap from Pompeii.
II.
THE RELATION OF PAGANISM TO THE ROMAN CHURCH.
IN the former chapter we iUustrated the striking similarity of the secular arrangements and usages of modern Italy to those of the ancient Romans. That similarity may also be detected in matters connected with religious worship.
Paganism, or the rejection of the One God and the worship of other persons or things, is that to which the great masses of the human family have ever shown themselves inclined, and may, therefore, be considered to be the religion of human nature. And the element of Paganism, that in which it lives and breathes, is the material and the visible, and not, as is the case with Christianity, the immaterial and the unseen. Pagan worship is sensuous ; that is, it belongs to the senses. Christian worship is not sensuous, but spiritual. For the object of Christian worship is God — a Being unseen, but revealed to faith by His Word, and not by sight.
There is, therefore, this distinguishing difference between Christianity and Paganisrn : that whereas the one is conversant with faith, the other is conversant with sense. " There be many that say, Who will show us any good ? " " Show us good ! " There is the voice of sense, of the sensuous or natural man, whether Pagan or baptized. And opposed to this voice is another, " Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us." Such is the cry of faith, and of the spiritual man.
In these two voices we recognise the two religions of the
PAGANISM AND THE ROMAN CHURCH. 9
earth : the religion of nature, which naturally belongs to all men ; and the religion of faith, which belongs to but few : the religion of Cain and of Abel, of the unregenerate and of the saints, of the world and of the Church.
In the following pages we shall see that the Church of Rome, though she holds some essential truth, allies herself most closely, by her materialism, to the sensuousness of natural religion, and so symbolizes with Pagan worship, from which also most of her ceremonies are derived.
Another means by which she corrupted, Christianity, namely, by the adoption of Mosaic ceremonial, I do not notice. Suffice it to say that we Christians have nothing to do with Jewish ceremonies, or with temple-worship. Judaism was an infantine dispensation, the shadow of a Substance since mani- fested— that is, of Christ. It was but a voice, " the voice of one crying in the wilderness " of Heathendom. To the law belonged only beggarly elements long since done away in Christ. Woe to us if we seek to reinstate this effete dispensa- tion ! Christ is our " all in all," and Christ is to be worshipped, not with ceremonies, incense, bowings, and prostrations, but with the heart.
Christ loved not ceremonies. He invented none ; only, out of the many which He was accustomed to see going on around Him, He partially adopted, or rather adapted, two — Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Both the rules and rites which He instituted for His new society were of the utmost simplicity, independent alike of place and of ritual.
I may, however, remark with respect to Jewish ceremonies in connection with Romish ritual, that I have been much struck by the little allusion made to them by Roman Catholic antiquarian writers. They freely refer to the Heathen origin of much in their Church, but to the Jewish element — so far as I have seen — there is seldom an allusion. And the reason I take to be partly as follows. While these ecclesiastical writers
lO ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
are well acquainted with the classical authors, they know their Bibles but little, or not at all. The writers in Picart, and Du Choul in his learned work full of classic lore, often refer Romish ceremonies to Heathen sources, but rarely ever mention Jewish rites. The inference, I apprehend, is that they were not acquainted with them.
It remains, therefore, a curious fact, that while Roman Catholics in England are apt to deem themselves insulted if one should refer any of their ceremonies to Paganism, their brethren on the Continent take quite a different view, and regard the adaptation of Pagan rites with satisfaction. To them it was a clever device on the part of their ancestors that they Christianized Heathen customs by appropriating them ; so that, on this head, they have nothing in common with the feel- ings of our Roman Catholic neighbours. Ecclesiastics in Rome itself fully recognize what has been stated above, and rejoice in it.
It is more than thirty years ago since Hobart Seymour wrote the following words : — " In England, Romanists are usually indignant when it is said that their ceremonies were originally Heathen. In Italy, on the other hand, that origin is claimed for them as a proof of the wisdom of a Church which has converted a Heathen people and their Heathen customs into a Christian people and Christian ceremonies." — Pilgrimage to Rome, p. 228.
To have "a right judgment in all things" is good ; and no doubt our Roman Catholic countrymen arrive at their more correct view of such a method of conversion through their intercourse with a people \yho are enlightened by the Word of God.
But the learned antiquarian Du Choul, "a good Catholic," thus expresses himself: — "if we closely investigate the subject, we shall perceive that many institutions of our religion have been taken and translated from Egyptian and Heathen
PAGANISM A AD THE ROMAN CHURCH.
II
ceremonies. Of this kind are tunics and surplices, the crowns made by our priests, their bowings around the altar, sacrificial pomp, the music of the temples, adorations, prayers and supplications, processions, and litanies. These and many other things — plusieurs autres choses — which the folly and superstitious ignorance of the Heathen refer to their gods and deified men, our priests adopt in our mysteries, and refer to the One Sole God, Jesus Christ." — Discours de la Religion des Anciens Romains, escript par Noble S. G. Du Choul, Coiiseiller du Roy, et Bailly des Montaigncs Du Dauphine : a Lyons, 1580; 4to, p. 339.
The date of this book is about eight years later than that of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572) ; so that our author may probably have wit- nessed the event.
He gives, observe, ten or eleven il- lustrations of our subject, and affirms that there are many others. And he is no mean authority, for Moreori writes of him that " he was of his day the greatest investigator into antiquity." He lived, too, at Lyons at a time when Roman antiquities were being continually disinterred.
This cut represents a baptismal font in the cathedral at Naples, of which I had a careful drawing made many years ago. A glance will show that it was originally a large Bacchic vase, for upon it may be seen the masks and
... - . , Font in N.iples C.nthedral,
thyrsi which were formerly used in the originally a Vase dedicated to
worship of the obscene god.
A similar vase — but not so fine — was, some years ago,
12 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
pointed out to me by the sacristan in the Church of the Bocca Veritatis at Rome ; and it, also, though once consecrated to Bacchus, is now used for the Christian rite of baptism.
These fonts present a good illustration of the way in which Rome unites Christianity with Paganism. Indeed, in the one at Naples a third element is introduced : Christian baptism is carried on by means of a Heathen vase surmounted with a Jewish apex, representing the son of Zacharias baptizing Jesus !
In the cathedral at Syracuse— where also may be seen many noble pillars which once supported a Heathen temple — there is a third antique font, cut from marble, of vast size, and exhibiting a Greek inscription.
And at Naples there is yet a fourth vase, the prince of all these Heathen vessels in beauty, though not in size. It is of Greek workmanship, and its material is white marble, the base being exquisitely sculptured in relief. No doubt it once adorned some Bacchic temple : but in later times it seems, like a well known Venus, to have been used by boatmen as a column for mooring their craft, and the hawsers have left their indelible mark upon its beauty. Subsequently, it became the baptismal font of the church at Gaeta, but at last found a more fitting home in the splendid Museum of Naples.
The subject of the sculpture is Mercury giving the infant Bacchus to the Nymph Leucothea, who gladly stretches out her arms to receive him. But her neck, as well as the body of Mercury, is sadly cut by the sailors* hawsers. Dancing fawns with Bacchantes playing on musical instruments attend their god, and make up the total number of the figures to nine. There is a Greek inscription commemorating the fact that — "The Athenian sculptor made this."
Now, the adoption of these four vases — and no doubt other examples might be found — while it shows that the Christianity of Rome has no special horror of Paganism, at least so far as the worship of Bacchus is concerned, illustrates also the state-
PAGANISM AND THE ROMAN CHURCH. 13
ment made above, that Roman Catholics on the Continent by no means shrink from that general adaptation of Heathenism which their English brethren so indignantly repudiate.
For see how freely the Italian priests use for the baptismal water of the Church those vessels from which once copious libations were wont to be poured out in honour of the Ogygian deity, amid the bowlings of his drunken worshippers.
"Would you, then, never adapt anything Heathen to Chris- tian use ? "
I would not say so much, but would certainly avoid Heathen sculptures and emblems.
It is with pleasure that I recall what I have seen in some Pagan temples in Nubia — and, unless I am mistaken, also at Philse in Egypt — where the idolatrous paintings on the walls had been daubed with Nile mud — obliterated, but not destroyed — by Christian worshippers, in order that their attention to their own service might not be distracted by Heathen blazonry.
With those long ago deceased Christians I have great sympathy ; for painted windows are to me what, I suppose, painted walls- were to them : they sometimes fascinate my imagination to the injury of devotion, and more frequently offend my tafste.
Ancient Priestess of Isis.'
Modern Priest of Rome
III.
THE EARLY CHURCH.
Part I.
THE corruption which Rome inherits began in the earliest days of the Church. As our Lord teaches, tares were from the first sown with the wheat. The prevalent idea of the purity of the early Church is a fiction : the Apostolic Church
* These illustrations, whicli form a striking parallel, represent an ancient Heathen priestess and a modern Roman priest, each with the aspersorium and aspergillum ; that is, the holy water vessel and the sprinkling brush. The priestess is from a fine marble in the Capitol at Rome : the priest may be seen every day.
THE EARLY CHURCH.
15
itself was not pure. And if that was not pure to which the Pentecostal efifusion of the Spirit belonged, what purity can be subsequently looked for ? See how the corruption was spread- ing even during the lifetime of the apostles. The Church of Galatia had turned away from the Gospel to the Law ; the Colossians were scarcely in a better condition ; the Corinthians were walking disorderly ; the Hebrews were in a critical state. At Miletus the elders of the Ephesian Church were warned by Paul of ** ravenous wolves," and told that ruin was imminent to their communion. Peter, James, and Jude give sad note, in their several epistles, of gross scandals which were then prevalent. And, last of all, the Lord's messages to the Seven Churches of Asia reveal deplorable corruption in their general condition.
This brings us down to about a.d. 96.
But if it went ill with the Church so far, things were much worse afterwards. By the rod of persecution the Christians were in some degree kept in the right path : but in the times of Constantine, when public persecution had ceased, worldliness and superstition openly took the lead. The effusion of the Spirit was small, and the standard of piety became propor- tionally low. Then priestly. power and monkery asserted their sway, and Mariolatry began to come into prominence. And, while glorying in the faith of their martyred predecessors, the early Christians soon passed from venerating their memories to worshipping their bones. Then, as Jortin remarks : — " Itinerant monks, as pedlars, hawked their relics about the country, and their graves became the haunts of superstition. The Fathers of those times — Athanasius, Gregory Nazienzen, and others, but particularly Chrysoslom with his popular eloquence — con- tributed to the utmost of their power to encourage the superstitious invocation of saints, the love of monkery, and the belief in miracles wrought by monks and relics. Some of these Fathers were valuable men ; but this was the disease of their age, and they were not free from it. In the fourth
1 6 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
century they usually introduced an irregular worship of saints on the following plea : — ' Why should not we Christians show the same regard to our saints as the Pagans do to their heroes ? ' The transition from lawful to unlawful veneration was easily made. As the Pagans from honouring their heroes went on to deify them, so it was easy to see that, unless restrained, the Christians would conduct themselves in much the same manner towards their saints. And the Fathers gave the evil encourage- ment by their many indiscretions. Praying at the tombs of the martyrs was one of those fooleries which the Fathers should have restrained. What an idea did it give of the Almighty to weak Christians ! As if fie would show more favour to their petition because it was offered at a place where a good man lay buried ! " — Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, Vol. iii., 7-17.
The same writer — he was Prebendary of St. Paul's and Archdeacon of London in the middle of the last century — in speaking of Justin Martyr, observes : — " Without detracting from the merits of this worthy man, truth and plain matter of fact extort from us that he and the rest of the Fathers are often poor and insufficient guides in things of judgment and criticism, and in the interpretation of the Scriptures ; sometimes in points of morality also, and of doctrine." — Vol. ii., 163.
So early, and so extensively, did Paganism begin to leaven the Church ; and convenience, and also the course of events, forwarded the evil. For the Heathen temples and the Heathen courts of justice — the latter stately and convenient buildings termed basilicas, that is, royal structures— were naturally utilized as places of Christian worship. In the case of the second class of edifice the metamorphosis was especially easy. The apse, which the Heathen magistrate and his assessors were wont to occupy — he being seated on a lofty chair, and they on semicircular ascending grades of solid masonry — was now used by the bishop and his presbyters. There were rails — cancelli, whence the words chancel and chancellor — which separated the
THE EARLY CHURCH. 1 7
apse from the rest of the building. Close to these stood the Heathen altar., which gave place to the Christian communion- table. At the gates of the basilica — certainly at those of the temple — might have been the vessel for the liistral water, or water of purification, which remained as it was before, except that it was now called holy water. The images of the gods, if they were not removed, received new names, and, by a process of anointing and sprinkling, were turned into Christian saints. Sometimes, however, they were removed, and their places supplied by others less unsuitable. The hangings, draperies, and many of the ornaments, remained ; the body of the build- ing with its two galleries was left unaltered. These basilicas formed the pattern for our noblest churches, one of which, yet in existence at Bethlehem, is supposed to be the oldest Christian structure standing. The grandest in Europe is St. Paul's, out- side Rome — one of those many wonderful buildings erected to captivate the imagination of man and powerfully assist in bringing him under the sway of superstition.
Enthroned in an edifice thus royal and splendid, the bishop became a person of the greatest importance, and his office was much coveted. Not infrequently his election was attended with bloodshed. As Gibbon (chap, xx.) says; — ^" The inte- rested views, the selfish and angry passions, the arts of perfidy and dissimulation, the secret corruption, the open and even bloody violence, which had formerly disgraced the freedom of election in the commonwealths of Greece and Rome, too often influenced the choice of the successors of the apostles." The historian is speaking of the era of Constantine, who died A.D. 3 '-,7. The See of Rome, as being that of the capital, was of course the most coveted, and its bishops, who soon assumed a Heathen imperial title, that of Pontifex or Pontiff, naturally rose to the first distinction.
And so Paganism began to recover its power, and to prevail among the Christians themselves. '* The gay and splendid
2
I 8 ROME: PAGAN AXD PAPAL.
appearance of the churches helped to allure the half-converts. New amusements made up for those which they had quitted. If they had been superstitious before, they might be so still. In the room of gods and goddesses they had saints male and female — lord and lady protectors — to whom they might pay their respects. Instead of sleeping in their former temples, they could slumber over the bones of the martyrs, and receive as good information and assistance as before. If they longed for miracles, prodigies, visions, omens, divinations, amulets and charms, they might be supplied." — -Jortin, Vol. iii., lo.
In regard to the sleeping in the churches, we may remark that this is still practised at Jerusalem, in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, a night or more before " the holy fire." On one occasion I was much surprised to see a quantity of bedding in the church, and a number of both sexes waiting to occupy it. The sight was curious, but painful, and I was told that strange vows are made in connection with this ancient Heathen custom.
Du Choul (p. 319) says that in Pagan times the skins of victims which were part of the temple furniture formed the bedding. But he adds that, when Christianized, the custom became so abused that Constantine did away with such noc- turnal devotions, p02(r les insolences que Von y faisoit.
Something similar was, however, formerly carried on in St. Peter's at Rome, and continued even into the present century. At Easter a large cross was illuminated in the church, while the rest of the building was left in darkness. But all kinds of abominations compelled the discontinuance of the practice. Human nature, bad enough in the light, is still less to be trusted in darkness. However, when at Rome in 1852, I was told of something in St. Peter's even worse than this.
Thurifers, or Incense-bearers. Heathen. Christian.
IV.
THE EARLY CHURCH.
Part II.
IN the preceding chapter, allusion was made to the irregu- larities and violence which frequently disgraced the election of a bishop in the early times of the Church. " In the latter half of the fourth century," writes Dean Milman, "the streets
* The illustrations represent youthful incense-bearers, Pagan and Papal ; the former from an engraving after the antique in Montfaucon's great work. Their duty was to attend upon the priest during the sacrifice, etc. An incense-box is seen in the hand of each, styled acerra by Pagan, and naviccllo by Papal, Rome. The Heathen official was called camilliis : the Christian is named thurifer or acolyte. See Rich's Diet.
20 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
of Rome ran with blood during the contest of Damasus and Ursicinus for the bishopric of that city."
" One cannot say of Damasus, the successful combatant," remarks Archdeacon Jortin, "that he fought a good fight when he fought for his bishopric. His bravos, hired gladia- tors, and others, slew many of the opposite party ; and great was the fury of the religious ruffians on both sides in this holy war. Pious times, and much to be honoured and envied ! "
The historian Ammianus Marcellinus — an honest Pagan, as Gibbon calls him — relates that Juventius, the governor of Rome, was quite unable to put an end to these disorders, and was at last compelled by the violence of the Church factions to withdraw from the city. " Ultimately," continues the historian, " Damasus got the best of the strife by the strenuous efforts of his partisans. It is certain that on one day one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies were found in the Basilica of Sicinius, which is a Christian Church." He adds that he does not marvel at the efforts which men put forth to obtain such a rank and power ; " since, after they have succeeded, they will be secure for the future, being enriched by offerings from matrons — Damasus was called the ' ear-tickle of the ladies ' — riding in carriages, dressing splen- didly, and feasting luxuriously, so that their entertainments surpass even royal banquets." Strange contrast to the humble poverty of the apostles of Christ !
It was in a.d. 366 that Damasus fought for the Popedom, in the sixtieth year of his age. " But," says Jortin, " the strangest part of the story is that Damasus was a saint, and that miracles were \\Tought in his favour after his death ! " The world will love its own, and here is an example of those whom it deifies ! What matter, whether they be Heathen heroes or Christian saints ?
Pope Damasus died towards the close of the fourth century,
THE EARLY CHURCH. 21
and here is a bird's-eye view from Gibbon of what followed in the Church.
*' If, in the beginning of the fifth century, TertuUian or Lactantius had been suddenly raised from the dead, to assist at the festival of some popular saint or martyr, they would have gazed with astonishment and indignation on the profane spectacle which had succeeded to the pure and spiritual worship of a Christian congregation. As soon as the doors of the church were thrown open, they must have been offended with the smoke of incense, the perfume of flowers, and the glare of lamps and tapers, which diffused, at noon-day, a gaudy, superfluous, and, in their opinion, a sacrilegious light. If they had approached the balustrade of the altar, they would have had to make their way through the prostrate crowd, con- sisting for the most part of strangers and pilgrims, who resorted to the city on the vigil of the feast ; and who already felt the strong intoxication of fanaticism, and perhaps of wine. Their devout kisses were imprinted on the walls and pavement of the sacred edifice ; and their fervent prayers were directed, whatever might be the language of their Church, to the bones, the blood, or the ashes, of the saint. . . . Whenever they undertook any distant or dangerous journey, they requested that the holy martyrs would be their guides and protectors on the road ; and if they returned without having experienced any misfortune, they again hastened to the tombs of the martyrs to celebrate, with greatful thanksgivings, their obliga- tions to the memory and relics of those heavenly patrons. The walls were hung round with symbols of the favours they had received ; eyes, and hands, and feet, of gold and silver ; and edifying pictures, which could not long escape the abuse of indiscreet or idolatrous devotion, represented the image, the attributes, and the miracles, of the tutelar saint."
Such was the semi-Pagan worship carried on in the Christian Church in the fifth century.
22 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
In the beginning of this age died St. Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, who lived in the reign of Theodosius. He has left us copious and instructive details of the state of society in his capital and country at that period. In delineat- ing its corruption, he also inveighs against the luxury of the times, and especially the dress of females, which he describes. He represents the stage as obscene and abominable, and tells us of rope-dancers, balancers, etc.; so that those who have read Kingsley's wonderful historic romance, "Hypatia," will at once perceive the source whence the author obtained some of his facts. Moreover, he censures the manner in which mar- riages were celebrated— the hymns which were sung in honour of Venus ! the indecent plays which were exhibited to the guests, and the introduction of other abominations which were offensive, not to Christians only, but to the very Heathen themselves.
St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, comes a little after Chrysostom, and died a.d. 444. This saint was a remarkable man, and one who pushed his pretensions of priestly power to the utmost degree. His letters show the height to which the episcopal power aspired before the religion of Christ had become that of the Roman Empire. He demands implicit obedience for the priest of God, who is the sole infallible judge, or delegate of Christ, Judex vice Chris fi. "He was made bishop," says Jortin, " and made himself lord and master, of Alexandria." " He acted like a sovereign prince, and shut up all the Novatian churches, taking away their plate and furniture, and all the goods and chattels of their bishop."
At that time there were some forty thousand Jews residing in Alexandria. These had made an onslaught on the Chris- tians, and it was thus that Cyril took his revenge. Without any magisterial sanction, he led a seditious multitude at dawn of day to destroy the synagogues, and succeeded in effecting his purpose. The Jews, taken by surprise and unarmed, were
THE EARLY CHURCH. 23
not able to resist ; they were driven out of the city, and the pillage of their quarter rewarded the exertions of the Christian mob. Thus was Alexandria impoverished by the loss of a wealthy and industrious colony, which had been for centuries protected by special statutes.
But a yet darker crime is, it is to be feared, connected with Cyril's patriarchal chair. The Roman governor of Alexandria, Orestes, was attacked in his chariot and severely wounded by five hundred moiiks from the desert, the creatures of Cyril, from whose hands he was delivered by some loyal citizens. The ringleader of the monks, who was cruelly executed, was, though a rebel and assassin, treated as a martyr by Cyril, who buried him with grand solemnities, and highly eulogized him . from the pulpit of the cathedral. Shortly afterwards something worse followed. Orestes and Cyril were at variance, and a rumour was abroad that their reconciliation was impeded by a person renowned, not merely in that city, but throughout the whole of civilized Europe. This was the celebrated Hypatia, whose statue in marble some of my readers may have seen in the last Paris Exposition. It is thus that Gibbon tells her dark story : —
" Daughter of Theon, the mathematician, she was initiated into her father's studies. Her learned comments have eluci- dated- the geometry of ApoUonius and Diophantus, and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples. The persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philo- sopher, and Cyril beheld with a jealous eye the gorgeous train of horses and slaves which crowded the door of her academy. . . . On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader,
24
ROME: FAGAN AND PAPAL.
and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics : her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, which lay near, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts ; but the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of Alexandria." " At the mention of that injured name," adds Gibbon in a note, " I am pleased to observe a blush even on the cheek of Baronius."
Cyril professed his innocence ; but since he would neither give up, nor even excommunicate, the murderers, we can draw but one inference.
The monks of Alexandria, with their patriarch Cyril, shared a Paganism which they held in common with that " rout that made the hideous roar," the murderers of the sweet-voiced Orpheus. They had indeed been baptized, but what ditference was there in heart between them and the fierce Bacchantes who tore the poet's limbs asunder ? Were not both monks and Thracian women Heathens alike ? " " By their fruits ye shall know them."
And yet this Cyril was a saint !
A caiitillns, or Heatlien acolyte, usually of noble birth, who acted as attendant to the priest at the altar. Copied from the Vatican Virgil.
V.
THE COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARLY CHURCH.
WE have sketched some of the corruptions of early Christianity ; it is time to inquire to what causes they were mainly due. And the answer undoubtedly is — To the compromising spirit of the nominal Church.
" Rome," says Professor Blunt, " was under a temptation to mingle sacred and profane together. It did not, like Con- stantinople, rise at once a Christian capital. The Gospel was gradually introduced into it, and had to win its way by slow degrees through the ancient sympathies and inveterate habits of the Pagan city. It was a maxim with some of the early promoters of the Christian cause to do as little violence as possible to existing prejudices. They would run the risk of Barnabas being confounded with Jupiter, and Paul with Mer- cury. In the transition from Pagan to Papal Rome much of the old material was worked up. The Heathen temples became Christian churches ; the altars of the gods, altars of the saints ; the curtains, incense, tapers, votive tablets, remained the same ; the aquaminarium was still the vessel for holy water ; St. Peter stood at the gate instead of Cardea ; St. Roque or St. Sebastian in the bedroom, instead of the " Phrygian Penates " ; St. Nicholas was the sign of the vessel, instead of Castor and Pollux; the Matre Deum became the Madonna; "alms pro Matre Deum " became alms for the Madonna ; the festival of the Mater Deum, the festival of the Madonna, or Lady Day ; the Hostia, or victim, was now the Host ; the " Lugentes Campi, " o*r dismal regions. Purgatory ; the offerings to the Manes were masses for the dead."
26 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Such is the testimony of Blunt, who adds in a note that the very name Purgatory is Heathen ; since the annual Feast of Purification in February was called " Sacrum Purgatorium."
" This mode of acting," says Picart, in regard to the same subject, " was not intended to Paganize, but wisely to counter- mine Paganism, and as a counterpoise — covime tin contre-poids — to parry the reproaches that the Pagans made against the Christians" (vol. i., p. i6).
" Wisely to countermine " ! Such is the wisdom of this world. But "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" (i Cor. iii. 19).
The following quotation, also from Picart, illustrates the principle, alluded to above, of doing no violence to sinful prejudices and habits ; in other words, of doing evil that good may come. " In order to win the Pagans to Christ, instead of Pagan watchings and commemorations of their gods, the Christians rejoiced in vigils and anniversaries of their martyrs ; and, to show that they had regard to the public prosperity, in place of those feasts in which the Heathen priests were wont to supplicate the gods for the welfare of their country — such as the Amba7~valia, Robigalia, etc.— they introduced rogations, litanies, and processions made with naked feet, invoking Christ instead of Jupiter" (vol. i., p. 26). And this, according to the writer, is the reason why " our fetes and ceremonies have generally a Pagan origin."
Thus we trace what has been faithfully called the introduction of a baptized Heathenism. As Didron expresses it, " Chris- tianity— his kind of Christianity-^«//<3? // necessary to appro- priate the images of Paganism, and to purify them with a Christian ideality."
Yes ; and Mahomet also found tlie same necessity in intro- ducing his false religion : nor is the reason difficult to discover in either case. Neither a depraved " Christianity," nor Islam, possessed an innate power that could grapple with and over-
COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARLY CHURCH. 2 J
come the older idolatrous creeds : therefore both false systems were constrained to compromise. The tribes that were to be " Christianized " were allowed to transfer the peculiar worship of their old divinity to a patron saint of similar attributes. And, in much the same way, Mahomet also was forced to suit himself to circumstances, as the following remarks — copied from the Times of January 3rd, iSSo — will show : —
" The old Sabean ceremonies and superstitions were so intimately connected with the social life of the Arabs that Mahomet was compelled to leave them almost as they were, contenting himself with forbidding a few of the most glaring and vicious abuses. Thus the mummeries of the Haji pilgrim- age, with the visitation of the sacred mountains of Safa and Merwa, where two favourite idols used to stand ; the custom of pelting the Devil in the vale of Mina ; the sacrifices on the same spot; the festival of the new moon, and a thousand other Pagan rites and observances, were left to temper the creed of the iconoclastic prophet."
In opposition to this time-serving complaisance on the part' of false Christian and Mahometan, with what majesty does the uncompromising simplicity of the religion of Jesus stand forth, proclaiming in the ears of all men : —
" He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life ; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life ; but the wTath of God abideth on him " (John iii. 36).
VI.
FURTHER EVIDENCE TO THE COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARLY CHURCH.
IN further confirmation of the previous chapters on the early corruption of Christianity, we quote the following passage from Merivale's Lectures on Early Church History, in which the Dean gives his view of the Paganized condition of the Church in the fifth century — a period which many are wont to consider comparatively pure.
"But neither Leo— that is Leo the Great, Pope from A.D. 440 toA.D. 461 — nor, I think, the contemporary doctors of the Church, seem to have had an adequate sense of the process by which the whole essence of Paganism was, through- out their age, constantly percolating the ritual of the Church, and the hearts of the Christian multitude. It is not to these teachers that we can look for a warning —
" That the fasts prescribed by the Church had their parallel in the abstinence imposed by certain Pagan creeds ;
" That the monachism which they extolled so warmly, and which spread so rapidly, was, in its origin, a purely Pagan institution, common to the religions of India, Thibet, and Syria ;
"That the canonizing of saints and martyrs, the honours paid to them, and the trust reposed in them, were simply a revival of the old Pagan mythologies ;
" That the multiplication of ceremonies, together with proces- sions, lights, incense, vestments, and votive offerings, was a mere
COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARIY CHURCH. 29
Pagan appeal to the senses, such as can never fail to enervate man's moral fibre ;
"That, in short, the general aspect of Christian devotion was a faint, and rather frivolous, imitation of the old Pagan ritual.
" The working of true Christianity was never more faint among the masses ; the approximation of Church usage to the manners and customs of Paganism never really closer.
" Surely we must complain that all this manifest evil was not, at this time, denounced by the teachers of the Christian Church; nay, that it was rather fostered and favoured by them."
A little further on he remarks : —
" The spirit of the old (Heathen) traditions had become to a great extent merged in the popular Christianity, and actually assimilated to it."
" The multitudes. half-Christian and half-Pagan, met together in those unhappy days to confuse the Feast of the Nativity with the Feast of the Saturnalia (in honour of Saturn) ; the Feast of the Purification with the Feast of the Lupercalia (in honour of Pan) ; and the Feast of Rogations with the Feast of the Ambar- valia (in honour of Ceres)."
Such is the opinion of Dean Merivale. We will now cite the testimony of a layman to the same effect, an extract from a well-known book, Mathetd's Diary of an Invalid: —
" Amongst the antiquities of Rome you are shown the Temple of Romulus, built round the very house in which they say he lived. Need we go further to seek the prototype of the tale of the house of Loretto ?
" The modern worship of saints is a revival of the old adoration paid to heroes and demigods.
" What are nuns with their vows of celibacy, but a new edition of the vestal virgins ?
" What the tales of images falling from heaven, but a repetition of the old fable of the Palladium of Troy ?
30 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
" Instead of tutelary gods, we find guardian angels.
" The canonization of a saint is but another term for the apotheosis of a hero.
" The processions are clearly copied from ancient patterns.
" The lustral water, and the incense of the Heathen temple, remain without alteration in the holy water and in the censer of the Church.
" The daily 'Sacrifice of the Mass' seems to be copied from the victim — hostia — of the Heathen ritual.
" The ceremonial of Isis to have been revived in the indecent emblems presented by women ; e.g., at Isernia, near Naples, up to the year 1790, as votive offerings at the shrine of S. Cosmo in that city.
" Nay, some would trace the Pope himself, with the triple crown on his head and the keys of heaven and hell in his pocket, to our old acquaintance Cerberus with his three heads, who keeps guard as the custos of Tartarus and Elysium.
" The very same piece of brass which the old Romans wor- shipped as Jupiter, with a new head on its shoulders — like an old friend with a new face — is now, in St. Peter's, adored with equal devotion by the modern Italians.
" And, as if they wished to make the resemblance as perfect as possible, they have, in imitation of his Pagan prototype, sur- rounded the tomb of the Apostle with a hundred ever-burning lights."
'• Centum aras posuit, vigilemque sacraverat igneni."
Virg. ^7''.ii. iv. 200.
The writer further observes that " some traces of the old Heathen superstitions are indeed constantly peeping out from under their Roman Catholic disguises. We cannot so inocu- late our old stock but that we shall relish by it. If anything could have improved the tree, it must have borne better fruit by being grafted with Christianity. But in many particulars,
COMPROMISING SPIRIT OF THE EARLY CHURCH.
3f
so far as Italy is concerned, all the change produced has been a mere change of name " (p. 90).
Just in the same strain Forsyth, a man well acquainted with Italy, and possessed of a fine classic taste, writes as follows :—
" I have found the statue of a god pared down into a Chris- tian saint ; a Heathen altar converted into a church box for the poor; a Bacchanalian vase officiating as a baptismal font; a Bacchanalian tripod supporting the holy water basin; the sarcophagus of an old Roman adored as a shrine full of relics ; the brass columns of Jupiter Capitolinus now consecrated to the altar of the Blessed Sacrament ; and the tomb of Agrippa turned into the tomb of a Pope." — Forsyth's Italy, p. 134.
And indeed all writers who are acquainted with antiquity — be they lay or clerical, Protestant or Papal, Italian or foreign — agree as to the Pagan origin of Rome's present usages and ceremonies. It is a palpable fact that, in very early times, the nominal Church made a compromise. She soon ceased to cry, "Come out from among them, and be ye separate; and touch not the unclean thing." There was no sound of the trumpet, no alarm of war, no protest, no extermination of idolatrous practices. A living Church in the midst of a sinful and adulterous generation must be an aggressive Church : but here all was compromise, polite assent, dilution, " the wine mingled with water." There was, just as there is now, a tacit consent to keep unpleasant subjects in the shad-e. There was peace when there should have been the shout of battle, and " Paganism was assimilated, not extirpated." " The leaders of the Church," says Merivale, " were afraid of any spiritual movement which should extend the limits of their dark outlook. They scouted the more spiritual reformers of the age, whom God will never suffer to be altogether wanting in His Church, and branded them as heretics, while they suppressed the testimony of their teaching."
How striking the likeness in the men of the present day to
32 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPA I..
the Christians of the fifth century ; for the spirit of compromise is again abroad. And yet everything beyond St. Paul's " decently and in order," everything belonging to the old Heathen rites, such as gorgeous ceremonial, "high ritual," " stately worship," — not one of these things belongs to the Gospel, not one is to be found in the New Testament, not one is countenanced by the teachings of our Lord and His apostles. All are but devices of the natural unregenerate heart _of man, and have, therefore, appeared in all ages, and among all nations, whatever their religion might be.
Strange that those compromising priests of the early Church should not have been able to decipher the mind of Him, Whom they professed to own as God, by His direction given to His ancient people in circumstances very similar to their own. For the Israelites, like the early Christians, were set in the midst of an idolatrous people, and it is thus that they were commanded to deal with the abominations around them : —
" Ye shall utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high moun- tains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree : and ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire ; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place " (Deut. xii. 2, 3).
But the teachers of the early Church could not resist the goodly Babylonish garment, and the shekels of silver, and the wedge of gold ; they did not prayerfully consider God's hatred of everything idolatrous : for had they done so, Christianity would not have been handed down to us the jumble of Heathenism which it is.
Would that many clergymen in the Church of England would take warning from the mistake, and would earnestly study the Word of God with the view of ascertaining His mind
COMPROMISING' SPIRIT OF THE EARL Y CHURCH. 3 3
upon this point : they would then no lOnger show that inclina- tion toward the idolatrous Church of Rome which is now so painfully apparent.
" Idolatrous Church of Rome, did you say ? " some might ask in surprise. Yes. On four counts at least Rome can be proved guilty of idolatry without any difficulty.
She worships graven and molten images, and to justify the idolatry frequently omits the second commandment in her catechisms, and divides the tenth into two, in order to make up the number. She worships dead men and women, and angels. She worships relics, especially pieces of the cross, to which she gives the highest kind of worship, called Latria.
She worships a piece of bread in the Mass, in that Sacrament which the Church of England, in her Thirty-ninth Article, desig- nates as " a blasphemous fable."
On these four counts, then, without going further, we maintain that Rome is guilty of idolatry.
In our Protestant churches images are allowed by law for ornament, but not for worship. Unfortunately this permission opens the door for many abuses. For who shall say where ornament ends, and worship — that is, idolatry — begins? Or what true believer can read the denunciations of the Almighty against images, and all that is connected with them, and not exclaim, — " Perish images from Protestant churches ! " ?
The Moslem enters our places of worship, and says, — "These Christians are idolaters ! "
The Jew looks into our churches, and cries, — " These Christians are idolaters ! "
Both thQ one and the other execrate our Christianity as idolatry, and should we, for the sake of ornament, forsooth, cast this scandal and stone of offence in our brother's way ? " Woe to that man," said the Lord of the Church, " by whom the offence cometh ! "
3
34 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
In this respect, both the mosque of the Moslem, and the synagogue of the Jew, are more pure than the church of the Christian !
" Look," said a Polish Jew to his son, the latter, from whom I heard the story, being a recent convert to Christianity — " Look," said he, taking the youth to the window, and pointing to the image of a saint at the opposite corner of the street, " there is the idolatry by joining which you have degraded yourself, and dishonoured your ancestors."
The father, however, was mistaken : it was not to an idolatrous form of Christianity that the young man had become united.
" Look, look ! aunt," said a little boy just come from India, as he entered an English parish church adorned with these legalized graven images, " Look at the idols ! " The child in his simplicity took them for Siva, Vishnu, or other Heathen gods. One cannot help remembering to have read something about " little ones," and that it would be better for him who puts a stumbling-block in their way, if a millstone had been hanged about his neck, and he had been cast into the sea.
VII.
THE DARK AGES.
WE have already, in our third and fourth chapters, passed in review several facts illustrative of the early corruption and subsequent Paganizing of the Christian Church, from the times of the apostles to about a.d. 450. The subject is a painful one. But at a time when everything ancient — that is, post- apostolic — in Church matters is lauded and held up to imitation, it becomes a duty, however disagreeable it may be, to inquire what the truth really is. And hitherto our investigation has not strengthened our trust in antiquity. The extract from Gibbon's twenty-eighth chapter showed generally that Christian worship in the early part of the fifth century presented ''a profane spectacle " ; because it was to a great extent a mere reproduction of Pagan ceremonial. Then, again, the actions or writings of Damasus, Chrysostom, and Cyril, the bishops respectively of Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, prove that in those great centres — the capital cities of Roman Europe, Asia, and Africa — the state of religion was as corrupt as it could have been in the provinces. And what else could have been expected, seeing that two of the three saints, namely the Pope and the Patriarch, were, if not themselves men of blood, at least the abettors of murderers and assassins. The basilica of Sicinius at Rome, bespattered with the blood of the hundred and thirty- seven victims of ecclesiastical violence, and the great metro- politan church of Alexandria, desecrated by the ferocious murder of the gifted Hypatia, attest how little Christianity had subdued the Paganism of the age ; while the writings of
T^6 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Chrysostom give painful evidence to the same effect. Such, then, was the state of reHgion in the Church up to the middle of the fifth century.
Some brief notices of intermediate times may be useful? before we pass on to expose the gross darkness which was brooding upon Christendom when the light of the Reformation began to dawn upon it from the Word of God.
But was there no light through the long intervening period of gloom ? Oh, yes ! God did not leave Himself without wdtnesses. In the desert, in the monastery, in the city, here and there in dens and in caves of the earth, in the mountains of Piedmont, Dauphine, and elsewhere, they might have been found ; often destitute, afflicted, tormented, and yet the salt of the earth of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the secret ones of God ; such were His elect, His faithful witnesses, who carried on the apostolic succession of the Spirit, and with whom was the fulfilment of the promise, " Lo ! I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." But the sword of persecution, and the torture and flames of the Roman Inquisition — the Holy Office — cut off these holy ones in countless multitudes. Many of them were in the Church of Rome, but not of her : and of these not a few gradually learnt to look upon her as the woman sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast, the mother of harlots and abominations, drunken with the blood of the saints. They testified against her idols and idola- tries; and, in answer, she slew them. Very remarkable among the testimonies of the period is that of Uante, one of those who escaped the sword.
" To you, St. John referred, O shepherds vile, When she, who sits on many waters, had Been seen with kings her person to defile — The same who with seven heads arose on earth, And wore ten horns to prove that power was hers Long as her husband had delight in worth. Your gods ye make of silver and of gold, And wherein differ from idolaters ? " lufcnio, xix, lo6.
THE DARK AGES. 37
How terrible a comment have we upon the svords " drunken with the blood of the saints " in the slaughter of the Vaudois, in A.D. 1686. Dr. Gilly informs us that, in the course of six months, out of a slender population, over twelve thousand were destroyed by imprisonment, fire, and sword, —
"Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, who roll'd Mother and infant down the rock."
We will now adduce some evidence respecting the state of things in that period of the Church which is well called the Dark Ages.
Cardinal Baronius, the annalist and ready apologist of all Rome's evil deeds, thus describes it : — " It seemed as if Christ again slept a profound sleep in the ship of His Church, and there wanted disciples in the midst of the storm to awaken the
Lord with their cries They had thrust into St. Peter's
chair, which was the throne of Christ, monstrous men, most debauched in their lives, abandoned in their morals, and in all respects abominable." (Quoted by Townsend in his Accusations, p. 103.)
"Against the Catholics," says Jortin, " their enemies alleged — ' You have turned your love-feasts into Pagan sacrifices, and your martyrs into their idols, whom you serve with the very same honours. You appease the shades of the dead with wine (libations) and with funeral feasts. You celebrate the festivals of the Heathen, and their manners you retain without any alteration. Nothing distinguishes you from Pagans, except that you worship apart from them.' " The archdeacon adds, " In this there is falsehood and truth. Pagans had, with Paganism, begun to enter into the Church."
In regard to the appeasing of the dead with wine at their saints' festivals, this practice was considered good both for dead and living. As to the dead, " they thought they pleased the saints by pouring fragrant wine upon their tombs," after the manner of the Heathen. As to the living, they thought it good
38 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
for themselves, and drank freely at the martyrs' graves. " Oh ! " cries a saint of the time, "that they would offer with more sobriety ; that they would not be quaffing wine within the sacred precincts ! "
In the ninth century, Michael, the Emperor of the East, a foe to those images of which the Orthodox were so fond, in describ- ing the worship of the Churches to the German Emperor Louis, says, " They sang before the images." This, however, is common enough now. Last Christmas I was at Aries and at Nismes, and heard young girls singing before an image of Mary in both places. It was at night, and the idols were beautifully and tastefully illuminated, while the other parts of the churches w^ere in darkness. The effect was admirable, and the singing to the idols very sweet : but the virgins of Aries were more melodious in their songs than the virgins of Nismes. I have witnessed the same practice at Florence, and at Antwerp.
But let me say a word respecting the grand old church at Aries, to which we have just referred. Observe when you go there, reader, a curiosity — one of many — in the noble cloister of the cathedral ; namely, the capital of one of the columns which represents the dream of the Magi. There they are, three little men all tucked up most comfortably in the same bed, and fast asleep. The old sacristan called my attention to this mediaeval eccentricity. *' Voila ! " said he, " Monsieur perceives that they have their crowns on instead of night-caps ! " And Eure enough they had.
To return to the Emperor Michael. " Before the images," he says, " they sing, worship, and implore." Of course : but this. Heathenish as it is, we may see, alas ! every day. What follows is, however, more startling. *' Many dress the female figures in robes — a common practice still — and then make them stand godmothers to their children(!). They offer up to them the hair first cut off, just as the Heathen did. Some presbyters scraped the paint from the images, mixed it with the
THE DARK AGES. DEIFICATION OF HEROES.
39
Apotheosis or Canonization Heathen.
Assumption Christian.
40 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Eucharist, and gave it in the Communion. Others put the body of our Lord — that is, the bread — into the hand of the images, and made the communicants take it thence." — Jortin, vol. iv., p. 480. Such presbyters must have belonged to the genus wooden, as given by Boniface in a bon mot attributed to him. " Formerly," said he, " the Church had golden priests and wooden chalices ; now she has wooden priests and golden chalices." Boniface was an Englishman known as " the Apostle of Germany," and, although he was canonized, seems to have been a true servant of Christ. He was Arch- bishop of Mentz, and, which is much more, a laborious missionary among the Pagans, who murdered him in the seventy-fifth year of his age, a.d. 755. "The day," said he, " for which I have long waited is come ! " And so he departed in peace — a saint passing to his rest.
We observed that he was canonized. This process, an invention of the tenth century, was adapted from the custom of deifying heroes so common among the ancient Greeks and Romans. The illustrations on the preceding page will show the similarity of Heathen and Christian apotheosis or assump- tion. The first group is taken from a marble of the Empress Faustina at Rome, as given by Montfaucon ; the second is from a Roman Catholic picture representing the assumption of our Lord's mother. The ceremony of canonization is very costly, for the fees demanded at Rome are many and large ; but the result is that the canonized person becomes a saint.
I have before me a long alphabetical list, published at Naples in 1846, and entitled Universal List of the Saints from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time. It is im- possible to number God's elect ; the Lord alone knoweth them that are His, and they are a great multitude which no man can number. Yet this list may be perfectly correct ; for Rome can count her own saints : but that is"(|uite another matter.
VIII.
A DEVICE OF MAN FOR II IS OWN SALVATION.
THERE is in Scripture the record of an anxious inquirer who, nearly three thousand years ago, asked what he could do to expiate his sins — ^how he could find peace for his soul. The answer was that the Lord required him to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with his God. And so far as it went, this answer was good ; though we, with our present light, would be able to refer such an inquirer at once to " the Lamb of God, Who taketh away the sins of the world."
Upon the conscience of this inquirer there was a burden of guilt so heavy that he would have made any sacrifice to be delivered from it. " Shall I," he cried, " give my firstborn for my transgression ; the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? ''
And as it was with him, so throughout all generations it ever has been, is, and will be, with every conscience-stricken sinner. As soon as man feels a sense of sin, he will, if he be ignorant of the Atonement which Christ has made, manifest an earnest desire to find some way of expiating his iniquities, and of recommending himself to God. This is the religion of nature ; and it is ever conspicuous in Heathenism, which is the outcome of nature.
As a rule, man is sure, sooner or later, to feel himself a transgressor ; and, as a transgressor — if he be ignorant of the One Atonement— he seeks to make expiation for himself. Hence came self-inflicted tortures, scourgings, penance, priva- tions, pilgrimages, and retirements to the hermitage or the
42 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
cloister. And the universality of these religious practices — common, as they are, to all countries and all times— prove that they are no characteristic of particular races, tribes, or classes ; but that they indicate a want felt by all humanity.
To meet this universal want, to calm the palpitating heart of anxious men, and to guide their steps into the way of salvation, God has given the glad tidings of His Word, which speaks peace through the sinners' Friend, the Lord Jesus Christ. And how stands the case? Man thinks he must do something to recommend himself to God. No, says the Scripture : for in the first place you can do nothing to recommend yourself; nor, again, is there need, since you are already recommended. Christ is your Saviour, and all that is to be done, or can be done, has been accomplished by Him. Your part is but to believe on Him : then His perfect atonement becomes effectual for you, and His wealth of righteousness is put to your account. " Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."
Such, then, is God's simple and gracious method of salvation. This is His way of peace and holiness, and He declares that there is none other. Man, however, has many devices for the attainment of the same end, and we will now say a few words respecting one of these devices— that of self-inflicted privations and pains. Look at these scourges. One of them is Heathen — ancient Roman ; the other is Christian — modern Roman. The former is from a marble in the Capitol Museum at Rome, and is figured in F. Righetti's great work (plate 130). The marble is very remarkable. It represents a priest of Cybele, an archigalliis in full costume, with medals on his head and a picture hung round his neck, displaying the sacred vitta or garland, and bearing the aspcrgilluin, or pot of holy water, and the whip which these priests' of " the Great Mother " were wont to use upon themselves. This whip was a terrible instrument of torture, similar to iheflage/li/^n, or metal-loaded scourge, with which slaves were punished. The thongs, it will be noticed,
A DEVICE OF MAN FOR HIS OWN SALVATION.
43
are loaded with small squares : these are bones — pastern, or knuckle bones, kmicks — of sheep, which must have inflicted a terrible punishment.
The other is from an original which I bought at Rome, in the Lent of 1852, at the church of the Flagellants. It is a severe instrument when applied to the bare back ; its length is about two feet, and it is made of stout cord. There is a
Rome Pa?an.
Rome Papal.
peculiar way of using it which was once explained to me by a French ex-Trappist. The operator kneels down and strikes over his shoulders, right and left — over the right shoulder with a back-handed blow. This is done rapidly, according to the zeal of the flagellant ; and, I need not say, with a very painful effect.
In the church at Rome the disciplina was at night, and was thus arranged. The monks assembled and sat in the choir, where I also sat with them, A few candles only were burning,
44
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A DEVICE OE MAN FOR HIS OWN SALVATION. 45
just SO many as to enable the brother who handed round the scourges to see his way. All the candles except one were then extinguished, and by that feeble light I saw a little, while I heard much, of what was going on. The brethren — some of them at any rate, perhaps all — laid aside their garments and commenced the discipline. The church resounded with the strokes, but I heard no cries : all the monks were kneeling — some thirty or forty, perhaps — on the choir floor, opposite to each other. The exercise lasted some minutes ; then the candles were relit, and we departed. A strange experience !
Ill-tempered people will say that the flagellants lashed the benches instead of themselves. I cannot tell. But the im- pression left upon my mind was that the discipline was real ; while the impression left upon my heart was sad and painful. Every lash told me that " by His stripes " they were not healed ; every reverberation echoing through the roof was a denial of the glad tidings oifree salvation, for they by their pains and penalties were seeking to purchase it. They were as those Jews who, " going about to establish their own righteousness, did not submit themselves to the righteousness of God " (Rom. x. 3). While everything had been done for them by Another, they were seeking to do everything for themselves : they were stultifying the work of Christ, and raising up a righteous- ness in opposition and antagonism to His. Such is the whole monastic system. It is " another Gospel," a device of the natural man for saving himself
Poor men ! My heart bled for them, and I longed to see them delivered out of such Pagan darkness into the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ. For what real difference is there between the priests of Cybele, the Corybantes, or Galli, scourging themselves to appease their deity, and these flagellant monks ? They were both alike in worshipping, not the God of Scripture, but a being of their own depraved and sensuous imagination ; in following, not the guidance of God's Word, but
46 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
the instincts of their own corrupt nature. In both cases the worship was Pagan ; whether a pretence or a reality, it set forth the shedding of man's blood as the ransom for man's sin, and thereby ignored and trampled under foot the precious blood which was shed at Calvary.
The flagellant priests of Cybele were, like the modern monks who exercise the same vocation, ascetics ; and they were well known in the same great city of Rome. x\sceticism — a term derived from a Greek word which means discipliiie — together with monkery, had its origin, like most other superstitions, in the East. Thence it found its way to Rome and the West, at the time of the introduction of the worship of Cybele from Phrygia, if not earlier. There is a curious story respecting the conveyance of the miraculous image of Cybele to Rome, very similar to those which are told of other images of the same character. The ship which brought it from Phrygia ran aground in the mud at the entrance of the Tiber, and no power could move it, until, so runs the story, a young girl — whose character had been aspersed, poor thing — came, and, attaching her veil to the galley, drew it miraculously into the river. Such miracles are not uncommon in the region of superstition, whether of ancient or modern Heathenism. Have you, reader, been to Lourdes ?
Besides the Corybantes, there were other monkish priests at Rome in early ages, such as those of Serapis the Egyptian Nile-god, so famed for the magnificence and glory of his worship.
The great "high place" of this divinity was Alexandria, where from an artificial mound rose the sumptuous temple erected either by Alexander or by the Ptolemy who imme- diately succeeded him. " There," says Milman, " all around the spacious level platform, rose the habitations of the priests and of the ascetics dedicated to the worship of the god. The temple was ascended by a hundred steps ; and beneath were the dark chambers used for orgies which would not
A DEVJCE OF MAN FOR HIS OIVN SALVATION.
47
bear the light of day, and where the noblest and most beautiful women were sacrificed to the lust of the officials of the temple."— Milman, Bist of Christ, vol. iii., p. 68.
By the aid of torches I have visited some of these dark subterranean precincts. Their vastness, no less than the fine and delicate finish of all the huge stone-work of their formation, amazed me. And what obscurity, coupled with what hopeless- ness of escape ! Fitting places, indeed, for evil men and for deeds of darkness.
Two instances have now been given of the early introduc- tion of asceticism into Europe from the East. The practice seems, however, to have found its way among us at a still more remote period ; for it was one of the earliest and most wide- spread manifestations of the corruption of pure and primitive religion.
In Chaldea, Thibet, China, Japan, and in India, priestly celibacy has been a custom from time immemorial, and the history of those countries bears copious testimony to the abominations which have flowed from it. In Athens there were sacred virgins bound to celibacy ; and again in Scandi- navia we hear of an order of nuns of noble family, whose duty it was to keep alive the sacred fire. The similar office of the Vestal Virgins at Rome, and the dreadful fate which awaited them in case of incontinency, are well known. In Peru, under the rule of the Incas, the same institution existed in the Virgins of the Sun. " These," says Prescott, " were young maidens dedicated to the service of the deity, who at a tender age were taken from their homes and introduced into convents, where they were placed under the care of certain elderly matrons, — j/iamaconas, that is. Mother Priestesses — who had grown grey within their walls." Their duty also was to keep watch over the sacred fire ; and to be buried alive was, as in the case of the Roman Vestal, their dreadful doom if their frailty yielded to temptation. So, too, the incontinent nun of later times,
48 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
when the mason had done his murderous work, found her living tomb in the wall of the convent.
One cannot but think of the scene in " Marmion," which depicts the end of poor Constance, —
" Sister, let thy sorrows cease ; "
and of the offending monk, —
" Sinful brother, part in peace."
In 1852, travellers on their road to Rome were shown a skeleton so immured in a wall at Perugia. And Scott, in his notes to " Marmion," mentions that "among the ruins of the abbey of Coldingham were some years ago discovered the remains of a female skeleton, which, from the shape of the niche and position of the figure, seemed to be that of an immured nun."
Execrable system, which first dooms its victims to an en- forced celibacy, and then with irresponsible power, and in secret tribunal, condemns them to the horrors of a terrible and lingering death if they yield to the instincts of outraged humanity ! Yet such is the system which many among us would wish to see re-established in our own country !
IX.
CELIBATES AND SOLITARIES.
WHILES John the Baptist "came neither eating nor drinking," and made his home in the wilderness, our Lord " came eating and drinking," and dwelt among men. Taking advantage of this fact, His enemies were wont to say : " Behold, a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners ; " in other words, a sensualist and an associate of the profligate and the vile.
Now, by following the solitary and ascetic life of John, and declining the social life of Christ, the monastic system of Christendom declares its choice of the former and its rejection of the latter ; shows its preference of the Law to the Gospel, of John to Jesus, of man to God. Monasticism is thus, from age to age, a permanent witness to the fact that the wisdom which is from beneath is opposed to the wisdom which is from above, that man's plan of salvation is diverse from God's.
Monasticism repudiates marriage ; but it can find no Scrip- tural authority for such a course. The first celibate and the first solitary was Adam. But God said, "It is not good for man to be alone " ; and so having formed Eve, He brought her to Adam to be his companion and his wife. Rome, on the contrary, affirms that the state of the solitary and the celibate is the nearest to perfection.
God says : "Increase and multiply." Rome builds monas- teries, and forbids to marry.
God says : " I will, therefore, that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house " (i Tim. v. 14;. Rome
4
50 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
confines them within the gloomy walls of convents, and pro- hibits obedience* to God's command.
And this the apostate Church does in the face of the fact that our Lord honoured wedlock by His presence and miraculous assistance at the marriage in Cana of Galilee — in the face of the prophecy, "Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith . . . • forbidding to marry " !
Indeed, so reckless is Rome of Divine authority that she pronounces the monastic life to be the perfection of Christianity — the highest of all spiritual attainments. She styles it " the religious life " pa?- excellence ; calls those who practise it " the religious " ; and whether they be men or women, considers .that they amass through their vows such a wealth of righteous- ness and merits that they can spare some for others who are not " rehgious " like themselves, and even for the souls in purgatory.
But now comes the question, Why is Rome thus opposed to marriage ?
Because by means of celibacy she is enabled to detach from society, in all countries, a multitude of men and women whom she uses to forward her own selfish interests and intrigues to the detriment of society. Consider how vast a power she wields throughout the ^hole world in those myriads of monks and nuns who stand ever ready to do her bidding ! Nay, how mighty an engine does she possess in that one department of the system, the confessional ! Abolish celibacy, and you remove her chief support and stay. Who, then, can wonder at her earnest and impassioned appeals for its maintenance and extension ?
But the question might be asked, Can you, then, pefceive no good thing in connection with monasticism ? I should be sorry to say so much as that. Nay, what chance would it have had in the world unless there had been some good mingled
52 ROME: PAGAN AND I'APAL.
with it ? It must have had something whereby to allure the many excellent and honest individuals who have submitted themselves to it; and to those who, despite the influences brought to bear upon them, have rested, not on it, but on Christ, it may have been sometimes beneficial. Often, for example, amid the wars and massacres and anarchy of the Dark Ages, cloister life provided an asylum for the persecuted, the weary, the hopeless, and the ruined. And, to men and women of a certain temperament, it must have presented great attractions, promising as it did — and not always without some fulfilment of the promise — a quiet and comfortable home, the society, perhaps, of spiritual and intellectual companions, opportunities for retirement, study, and devotion, time for the cultivation of the contemplative life, and an absence of gnaw- ing cares and of many of the temptations of the world.
But after all has been said, nothing can countervail the truth of God. For the monastic life is, as we have seen, unlawful : it is opposed both by the example of Christ and by the precepts of His Word ; it is a retrogression from the liberty of the Gospel to the bondage of the Law, from faith to works. Besides which the system of monastic vows is sinful, and the forcible detention of its ^•ictim through all the long years of life soon becomes intolerable. The cloister, if you will ; celibacy, if you will ; but no vows. God will have us to preserve our liberty. " Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage," is His command : and how terrible a yoke have multitudes found these vows to be ! No ; however well-intentioned, however useful it may have been at the first, the whole system is wrong ; and the vow should be broken as soon as the conscience, through the Word of God, is convinced that it is sinful.
But monks and solitary ascetics are by no means confined to the Romish Church. On the preceding page are representa- tions of two anchorites ; the one Christian, the other Pagan ; the one ancient, the other modern ; the one from Europe, the
CELIBATES AND SOLITARIES. 53
Other from Asia. Both of them are inhabitants of the desert : both are in a state of nudity, disgusting and pitiable objects : both have their beads, which are more necessary to them than clothing : both are holy men in the estimation of their co- religionists, and bear the name of saints.
The first picture represents St. Giles, and is adapted from Mrs. Jameson's JMonastic Orders. The second is taken from a series of drawings " illustrating Hindoo Mythology," which were lately lent to the South Kensington Museum by Colonel Ouseley. The use of the chaplets, rosaries, or beads, which may be seen in both pictures, is one of the many Heathen practices which have been imported into Christianity.
I might add a description of two other such saints — Mohammedans, and held in the highest veneration — from my own personal observation. It was in Egypt that I saw them ; the one was walking in the neighbourhood of a town ; the other, whom I will describe, was seated near the Nile in Upper Egypt, not far from a village where he had lived — so I was told — for fourteen years. Both of these men were perfectly naked.
Observing one day a number of people assembled at some distance, I inquired what was going on, and, on being told that a saint was the attraction, went to see him. I found the holy man surrounded by about thirty men and women who had their eyes fixed admiringly upon him as he sat upon the ground, undraped — in the conventional language of art — and presenting a disgusting appearance. His body was much covered with hair of a reddish colour, while the hair of his head was like the wool of sheep ; his skin, scorched by the fierce sun, was scorbutic and scarlet ; his person was large and fat — these ascetics are well supplied with food by the people; and his countenance was sensual in the extreme. Such was the unclothed and unwashed creature, dignified by the name of saint, which I saw in the country where, in times long past, Simon the Stylite, and
54 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Other ascetics his predecessors, had in their ignorance degraded and bestialized our common humanity.
The crowd of admirers which surrounded him were kissing his hand • while the women touched his filthy flesh and then kissed their finger, hoping thereby to receive some virtue in regard to progeny. Even our dragoman, as well as some of the ship's company, did the same as the others. The former I rebuked for so doing, because I knew him to be a Syrian Christian. " I beg your pardon, sir," said he, " I kissed my thumb."
Kissed his thumb ! I remember, when a child in Devonshire, hearing just the same thing said of a man who had been sworn on the Testament in a court of justice. *' No ; he did not kiss the book, he kissed his thumb." And so his oath was invalid !
INIen are alike in all parts of the world : the astute Syrian and the Devonian clown have the same nature, and the same tendency to resort to subterfuge. And, because this is the case, all men have, if left to themselves, one religion, that of their common nature. Look at the two saints rei)resented above, the European and the Indian, the Christian and the Heathen : what difference is there between them ? Then compare them with the saint of the Nile. Is not he, too, of precisely the same type? European, Asiatic, and African, differing as they do in nationality, language, colour, habits, and faith, are yet, as unregenerate men, one in spirit ; and, being ignorant of God's Word, carry out, each in his peculiar creed, the leading instincts of natural religion. Our own fathers were no better ; and had not the light of the gospel shone into our hearts, we should be like them. " But for the grace of God, there goes John Bradford," as that good man said when he saw a criminal being led to execution.
X.
MONKS AND MONASTERIES.
WE will now take a brief glance at the history of Monkery. As we have before observed, it is of Pagan and very early origin, " It maintained its authority among all the older religions of the remoter East," says Milman {Hist, of Christ.^ ii. 35). It was introduced into Europe from Asia, and was commonly practised in various nations long before the Christian era. It was also found to be existing in America when that continent was discovered. Thus, the system was by no means new or peculiar when it was introduced into the Church : it was merely the adaptation of an old custom, which had been for centuries connected with the worship of the Heathen gods.
It seems to have first crept into the Church in the following manner : In earlier times, the Christians were cruelly perse- cuted, and many of them fled, as well they might, into the wilderness, and there supported life in whatever way they could.
They must have lived in somewhat the same way as the Heathen hermits did, and probably gave many hints to those who came after them. But a little later, in the reign of Constantine, the persecutions ceased, and a period of rest followed ; bringing with it, however, a corruption so frightful and so universal, that numbers of pious men were more alarmed at the profligacy and wickedness of the world than they would have been at its hostility ; and so, ignorant alike of what was due to their God, to their families, and to their fellow-men, they abandoned their station and their duties, and fled to join the
56 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
hermits in the desert. Then a rage for celibacy and asceticism set in. Marriage was reprobated, and true chastity was said to be confined to the unmarried state ; while those who had already entered into wedlock were taught that, if they would attain to a high degree of holiness, they must thenceforth lead separate lives. Many obeyed these teachings, receiving the traditions of men rather than the Word of God. Thus, the wilderness became peopled with anchorites, who soon began to devote themselves, like the Indian Fakirs, to the most terrible penances. It is stated that there were over 100,000 of these unfortunates in Egypt alone, in the fourth century. Many of them were deeply in earnest ; but they were ignorant of God's Word — the only source of light; and so they thought to appease and please Him by their sufferings, in accordance with that religion of nature which belongs to all of us, and springs from an instinctive consciousness of guilt.
As the celibates and solitaries of the desert multiplied, they began to form themselves into societies, and so, after a while, the monastic system was developed.
Then different religious orders arose, the most important of which was the Benedictine, so called from its founder Benedict, who was born in Italy, a.d. 480. He was a most remarkable man, and, as Sir James Stephen remarks, " A profound genius, of extensive learning, and in the very first rank of legislators." The fraternity which he founded, with its numerous branches ramifying in all directions, exercised for centuries a vast in- fluence over Europe, in theology, literature, agriculture, and other matters. And, unlawful and faulty as monasticism is, neverthelesSj in those early days, before its corruption had passed all bounds, it certainly did confer great benefits upon the surrounding barbarism and savagery of Europe. When almost everything besides was vile, monkery, then in its prime, was better.
Moving a little lower down the stream of time, we come, in
MONICS AND MONASTERIES. 57
the thirteenth century, to those wonderful institutions, the Mendicant Orders, which were also by their vows opposed to the Gospel. These were the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augus- tines, and Carmelites — the latter deriving their name from Mount Carmel, in Palestine.
In regard to the two former, it was in the year a. d. 1216 that, without previous concert, Dominick the Spaniard, and Francis of Assisi the Italian, met at Rome. The first of these men was a fierce zealot, the other an amiable enthusiast ; but both of them were wholly devoted to the Papacy, and they had each conceived a new order of things by which to aid the Pope in crushing heresy, in checking the uprisings of the human mind, just awakening, as it then was, to the Gospel after its long and deep slumber. Pope Innocent III. approved of their schemes, and the two men bade each other farewell, and departed from Rome " to divide," as Sir James Stephen says, "the world between them." Well and rapidly did they succeed. The ferocity of the followers of the one, acting through the medium of the terrible Inquisition, and the gentle- ness of those of the other, which everywhere provided access for them to the homes of the people, combined to make their work effectual and complete.
By a play on their name, the Dominicans were called Domini- canes, the Lord's dogs, and the emblem of the community was a dog with a firebrand in his mouth — uncleanness, ferocity, and fire ! No one can dispute the aptness of the device ; for how terrible were the fires kindled by that brand in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Sardinia, India, and other places !
As to St. Francis, violent proceedings were not congenial to his mind ; he was too amiable and gentle. He dealt in visions, revelations, and such things; nay, he would even preach to the birds and the fishes, and one of his sermons to the former is still extant. " Yet," says Sir James Stephen, " he would draw up codes and canons with the precision of a notary."
58 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
There is no doubt that by his influence, and that of his followers, he greatly assisted in extinguishing the light of the Reformation. A portrait by Sassetta represents him as trampling upon the emblems of various vices ; and, among other things, upon a printing press — the type, in monkish estimation, of heresy.
Later, and immediately upon the Reformation, came the Jesuits, whose founder, Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier, died in a.d. 1556. It was mainly through the address, talents, courage, and intrigues, of the members of this indefatigable organization that the Papacy recovered so much of the ground which it had previously lost. For, as Lord Macaulay observes, " during the first half-century after the commencement of the Reformation, the current of feeling in the countries on this side of the Alps and of the Pyrenees ran impetuously towards the new doctrines. Then the " tide turned, and rushed as fiercely in the opposite direction. ... It is difficult to say whether the violence of the first blow or of the recoil was the greater." — Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes.
But the means used to bring about this "Catholic revival" were very diverse. " The great effort," says Michelet, " of the ultramontane reaction about the year 1 600 was at the Alps, in Switzerland and Savoy. The work was going on bravely on each side of the mountains, only the means were far from being the same ; they showed on either side a totally different countenance — here the face of an angel, there the look of a wild beast ; the latter pliysiognomy was against the poor Vaudois in Piedmont. In Savoy, and towards Geneva, they put on the angelic expression, not being able to employ any other than gentle means against populations sheltered by treaties, and who would have been protected against violence by the lances of Switzerland."
We will not, however, pursue the history of these orders any further ; but wish to say a few words respecting the Benedic- tii"te monastery of St. Alban, an essay on which is included in
MONKS AND MONASTERIES. 59
one of the volumes of Froude's recent work, entitled Short Studies on Great Subjects.
Among some old English records, which are now in the course of publication under the authority of the Master of the Rolls, are The Afinals of the Abbey of St. Aiban, the "wealthiest and most brilliant of all the religious houses of Great Britain." These annals were collected by the historian Walsingham. who, having been himself a monk of the abbey, may probably be trusted not to give what he would consider a bad character to his Alma Mater. His details are very amusing and instructive.
According to tradition, St. Alban was the protomartyr of Britain. He was a Roman citizen, and is said to have been put to death during the Diocletianic persecution (a.d. 303) for sheltering his friend Amphibolus, a deacon. In his honour, and over the sumptuous shrine — a part of which is still existing — supposed to contain his remains, and another shrine said to be that of his friend, the present noble church was erected.
But did these persons ever exist ? Or has all this great architectural display of shrines, monastery, and church, this acquirement of lands and other possessions, a purely fictitious origin, and is it merely due to the tricks of ignorant or design- ing priests ?
I cannot tell. But there is no authority but tradition, and we know how unreliable tiiat is. The whole story is extremely uncertain, and one of the latest authorities, a contributor to Smithes Dictionary of Christian Biography, writes, " St. Alban, if ever he existed ;" while in reference to Amphibolus he adds, " This is a twelfth century fiction." The name Amphibolus is Greek, and in that language signifies a cloak : there are those who think that this good Amphibolus is nothing more than the saint's cloak/
Why not? The mistake would be no more unlikely than that which gave rise to the fable of St. Oreste, whose monastery may be found on the mountain anciently called Soracte. You,
60 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPA/..
perhaps, know the story. Horace says of the old mountain : — " Vides Lit alta stet nive candidum Soracte " (*' Thou seest how deep with snow Soracte stands "). The name is now softened into S. Oresti, with the S separated, which is the Itahan method of writing "Saint." And in this manner a new saint, one of very many, has been added to the Roman calendar, and a monastery has been erected in his honour upon the mountain which gave him birth and name. There the mythical Church- god is now taking the place of the old Heathen god Apollo, ofwhom Virgil writes, " Sancti citstos Sonicfis Apollo " (" Apollo, guardian of holy Soracte"). — Virg., yEn. xi. 785.
St. Viar, a Spanish saint, has a similar parentage. An ancient stone fragment was found with the letters S. VIAR inscribed upon it. " A saint ! " they cry, and his fame is spread abroad. The antiquaries, however, read the fragment other- wise, and science laughed at superstition. The letters are old Roman characters, and, if complete, would have read, PrefectuS VIARum ; that is, in plain English, Overseer of roads / The stone was a portion of an inscription in honour of some Roman official connected with the highways. Such is the story of St. Viar, and there are others of the saintly brotherhood who might be shown to have as strange an origin.
But to return to the great church and monastery of St. Alban. It was founded a.d. 793, by a murderer, the Saxon king Ofifa, a descendant from Odin, who thought thereby to atone for his crime. And the then Pope, Adrian I., himself as ignorant as Offa, confirmed him in his error by giving him license to found a monastery, " in tuorum peccatorum remis- sionein " — " for the remission of your sins."
Of course there were the usual miracles leading to the dis- closure of the spot where the relics of the saint were to be found. And after their discovery they w-ere placed in a magnificent shrine adorned with gold and jewels of such great value that a gallery, or loft — which you may yet see — was erected close to it
MONKS AND MONASTERIES. 6 1
for the watchers who guarded its treasures by day and by night. If you visit it, do not forget to notice the curious stair of blocks of ancient oak. In the shrine itself, and under it, you will observe certain holes. These — the Guide to the Abbey tells us — " were possibly intended for the admission of diseased limbs, or of cloths to be applied to them, which, placed beneath the martyr, might derive thereby some special virtue."
Much the same thing is done to-day at the famous tomb of St. Antony in Padua. I have myself seen people rubbing their heads up and down on the tomb, in the hope that some of the goodness of the saint's dry bones might soinehow get through the thick stone to them. It was a pitiful and sorrowful sight.
But how were the relics of St. Alban discovered ? Heaven lent its aid, and somebody had a dream ; in consequence of which, bishops, monks, and priests were seen moving towards the appointed spot in long procession, carrying banners, and . chanting hymns. " Suddenly lightning flashed out of the sky, and struck the ground before their feet. Then, terrain percutiunt — they strike the earth ; and the bones of the saint were found entire, and placed in a loculus, or box — Anglice, locker — inlaid with gold and set with sapphires."
This is Papal Rome's manner of procedure in such cases, and it is easy to show that she has borrowed it from Paganism. How like, for instance, is the story of St. Alban to that of the finding of the relics of Theseus as narrated by Plutarch. When the Athenian Cimon was searching for these remains, it is said that he espied an eagle breaking up the earth with its beak and talons. He recognised this as a Divine omen, and, like Offa and his ecclesiastics, at once began to dig. Of course he found ; and the bones of the Hero were received at Athens with as much gladness as those of the Saint at St. Alban's.
But we may carry out the parallel a little further. The Pagans erected a magnificent temple called the Theseum over
62 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
\.\\t relics of the Hiro, while over those of the Saint the Christians built a noble church which they named St. Alban's. And yet again, the Pagans celebrated the " invention " of the bones of their god by setting apart a day in honour of the event : the Christians, following them to the letter, commemorated their discovery in the same "manner. Whether it be dealing with heroes or with saints, the religion of nature is, in its objects and manifestations, always the same.
St. Alban did not always remain in his box. Once upon a time he manifested hinriself in the shades of evening to a monk who was reciting his office in the church. A discussion was being carried op in those days touching the identity of the con- tents of the locker, and the monk was among the doubters. But suddenly the shrine which contained it burst open, and an awful form strode out of the obscurity, and stood before the prostrate unbeliever. "■ Ecce, ego A/baniis /" "Behold, lam Albanus ! Didst thou not see me issue from my tomb ? " " Yea, Lord and Martyr," replied the monk. Whereupon the blessed St. Alban went back into his locker — Beatus Albanus rediit m lociilum.
The community of St. Alban's, like all other religious com- munities, was best in its earliest days. Wealth, and those invariable concomitants of wealth, luxury and idleness, worked its ruin. That which at first showed so fair, became so foul that its ill odour reached to Rome, " and shocked even the tolerant worldliness of the much-enduring Pope." He, Innocent VIII., enjoined Cardinal Morton to visit St. Alban's and report upon it. The original of tlie report is now in Lambeth Palace, and in it the Cardinal states that " the brethren of the abbey were living in filth and lasciviousness with the nuns of the dependent sisterhoods, the prioress of the adjoining nunnery of Pray setting the example by living in unrebuked adultery with one of the monks." There is much more to the same effect, " the details of which cannot be quoted
MONKS AND MONASTERIES. 6^
even in Latin," says Froude, and with which I should be sorry to defile this book.
Alas that our rulers in State and Church should have lately selected a place so desecrated by pollution for the seat of a Protestant bishop ! " The only reason for this arrangement of the new diocese — which is inconvenient, and opposed to the wishes of a majority both of clergy and of laity — is, so far as I can see, the ecclesiastical fancy to revive the memory of St. Alban." So writes to me a friend for many years an incumbent in South London, which is now a part of the newly-arranged diocese.
" To revive the memory " of one who probably never existed ! Such is the present tendency to superstition in high places in the Church ! Such is the outcome of the " spiritual revival," falsely so called, of the last thirty years. A spiritual revival in the Church of England I utterly deny ; an eccle- siastical revival, hostile to what is spiritual, and delighting in services, ceremonies, dresses, processions, congresses, priests, bishops — provided they are favourable to it — and ecclesiasticism generally, I admit. St. Alban's is a " consecrated place," which, in the eyes of many, renders it sanctified. Froude declares that it is stained by every crime, even to the sin of Sodom, and was in the olden time "a nest of fornication, the very aisles of the church being defiled with the abominable orgies of incestuous monks and nuns."
Froude thus concludes his essay : " There is a talk now of restoring St. Alban's. We are affecting penitence for the vandalism of our Puritan forefathers, and are anxious to atone for it. * Cursed is he that rebuildeth Jericho ! ' "
XI.
THE SUPERSTITION' AND IMMORALITY OF MEDIEVALISM.
SINCE there are so many who desire to restore the priestly and monkish dominion of the Middle Ages, it is most important that we should understand what it was. We will, therefore, endeavour to get a few more glimpses of the religion, and morality of that period. The following remarks of Hallam are instructive.-
" In that singular Polytheism, which had been grafted on Christianity, nothing was so conspicuous as the belief of per- petual miracles. , . . Successive ages of ignorance swelled the delusion to such an enormous pitch, that it was as difficult to trace, we may say without exaggeration, the real religion of the Gospel in the popular belief of the laity, as the real history of Charlemagne in the romance of "Turpin." It must not be sup- posed that these absurdities were produced, as well as nourished, by ignorance. In most cases they were the work of deliberate imposture. Every cathedral or monastery had its tutelar saint ; and every saint his legend, fabricated in order to enrich the churches under his protection by exaggerating his virtues, his miracles, and consequently his power of serving those who paid liberally for his patronage.
"That the exclusive worship of saints, under the guidance of an artful, though illiterate, priesthood, degraded the understand- ing, and begot a stupid credulity and fanaticism, is sufficiently evident. But it was also so managed as to loosen the bonds of
IMMORALITY OF MEDIEVALISM. 6$
religion and pervert the standard of morality. . . . They — the saints — appeared only as perpetual intercessors, so good-natured and so powerful, that a sinner was more emphatically foolish than he is usually represented, if he failed to secure himself against any bad consequences. For a little attention to the saints, and especially to the Virgin, with due liberality to their servants, had saved, he would be told, so many of the most atrocious delinquents, that he might equitably presume upon similar luck in his own case.
"This monstrous superstition grew to its height in the twelfth century." — Middle Ages (i860), vol. iii., pp. 298 — 300.
In a note Hallam gives some examples of the stories used by the monks, from which we extract the following : —
" At the Monastery of St. Peter, near Cologne, lived a monk perfectly dissolute and irreligious, but very devout towards the apostle. Unluckily he died suddenly without confession. The fiends came as usual to seize his soul. St. Peter, vexed at losing so faithful a votary, besought God to admit the monlc into Paradise. His prayer was refused ; and though the whole body of saints, apostles, angels, and martyrs joined at his request to make interest, it was of no avail. In this extremity he had recourse to the Mother of God. ' Fair lady,' he said, ' my monk is lost if you do not interfere for him.' . . . The Queen-m.other assented, and followed by all the virgins, moved towards her Son."
" The rest," says our author, " may be easily conjectured." And he adds, " Compare the gross stupidity, or rather the atrocious impiety of this tale, with the pure theism of the Arabian Nights, and judge whether the Deity was better worshipped at Cologne or at Bagdad."
We will quote one other story from the same source, in which " the Virgin takes the shape of a nun, who had eloped from the convent, and performs her duties ten years, till, tired of a libertine life, she returns unsuspected. This was in con-
5
66 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
sideration of her never having omitted to say an *' Ave " as she passed the Virgin's image."
These and other examples are taken, Hallam tells us, from a collection of " religious tales, by which the monks endea- voured to withdraw the people from romances of chivalry." Certainly this was casting out Satan by means of Satan.
Of a similar tendency is the story of St. Kentigern, who figures in the armorial bearings of the city of Glasgow. It is furnished to me by my friend Mr. Macgeorge, and is taken from his Armorial Insignia of the City of Glasgo^v (Glasgow, 1866).
" The fish with the ring in his mouth" in the ancient seals of the Bishopric of Glasgow, refers to the story of St. Kentigern and the lost ring of the Queen of King Cadzan. It is given in the office for the day of the saint in the Breviary of Aberdeen.
" The Queen, enamoured of a certain knight, gave him a ring which the king had before presented to her. The king, aware of her unfaithfulness, got it from the knight, and, after throwing it into the Clyde, demanded it from the queen, threatening her with death if it were not produced. Having sent her maid to the knight, and failed to recover the ring, the queen despatched a messenger to Kentigern, telling him everything, and promising the most condign penance. The saint, taking compassion on her, sent a monk to the river to angle, directing him to bring alive the first fish he might take. This being done, the saint took from the mouth of the fish, which was a salmon, the ring, and sent it to the queen, who restored it to the king, and thus saved her life."
The crest of the city of Glasgow, adopted from this vile story, is the saint vested as a bishop. On the shield is a salmon on its back, holding up to the saint a ring in its mouth; the supporters are two salmon, each with a ring in its mouth. The whole fable is represented in the seal of Bishop Wyschard
IMMORALITY OF MEDLEVALISM. 6/
— made about a.d. 1271. The legend to the seal, on which are figured the saint, the king, and the queen — but not the knight — briefly tells the story: — ^'' Rex furit: Hccc plorat : Patet aurum : Dum sa?icti/s orat." That is, in English, " The king rages : she laments : the ring turns up : while the saint is praying."
The hymn appointed for the 7iiore solemn altar service of the saint's day thus sums up the story : —
" Moecha mosrens confortatur, Regi reconciliatur, Dum in fluctu qui jactatur Piscis profert annulum."
Which, perhaps, may be freely rendered : —
"Saint queen and knight an evil union make With monk, who, with a hook, the fish doth take. The adulterous queen is by the saint consoled, Who kindly cloaks her guilt, and brings the tell-tale gold."
The moral tone of this Scotch saintly story is not, it must be confessed, higher than that of the two which have preceded it. And even in the present day the Church of Rome seems to have the same low estimate of her gods.
Some years ago, Ali Pasha, at that time governor of Egypt, presented the Pope with some pillars of oriental alabaster for the magnificent Basilica of St. Paul, which was then in process of reconstruction. They were designed by the architect to support the Baldachino, or canopy of the high altar, in which position the reader. may now find them. In the winter of 1852 I was in Rome, and went to see them. They were lying on the ground at the time, ready for erection, and splendid monoliths they were. As I stood, with a group of friends, looking at and admiring them, the old Cnstode, who was exhibiting them, remarked, " I am sure the Virgin will never allow those columns to be erected to the honour of St. Paul."
68 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
"But why?" we asked. "Oh, she will be jealous," was the reply; " she will want them for herself."
Thus calmly did the votary attribute the vile passion of envy to his goddess. One is carried back to Homer and the courts of Olympus, to the gods the greater and the gods the less, to their squabbles, envies, intrigues, and uncleanness : and one is moved to ask, — What difference is there between gods Heathen and gods ecclesiastical ; between the Pantheon of Olympus and the Pantheon of the Church ?
The courteous intimacy implied in the chivalrous phrase attributed in our first story to St. Peter, when he addresses the Virgin as " Fair lady," reminds me of an Irish fact — not story — illustrative of the great familiarity existing between the gods and their ministers.
I can vouch for its authenticity, having received it from two independent quarters ; and one of my informants, an Irish archdeacon who knew the persons concerned, has furnished me with their names.
A Roman Catholic priest. Father James O'AI. of B ,while
taking a friendly glass with some of his brethren, was summoned to attend a parishioner — a woman in child-bed at the point of death. The priest dismissed the messenger with a promise of speedy attendance, but at the entreaty of his friends, jolly fellow that he was, he stayed to take another and another glass of punch. More than once was the messenger sent away with the same assurance. Again he appeared, not, however, for the same reason as before, but to inform the priest that his presence was not now needed, since the poor woman had just passed away, without having received the last Sacrament of the Church — Extreme Unction, the priest's passport to Paradise. At first the priest was so agitated by the anger of his parishioner, and so ashamed of his own neglect, that he forgot the power he possessed over the invisible world. But, on recovering his presence of mind, he told the man that there was no cause for
IMMORALITY OF MEDIMVALISM. 69
alarm in regard to the departed, since he could make it all right. Then, calling for a piece of paper, he wrote a few lines, and screwing the paper tightly together, desired the man to place it in the mouth of the corpse. At the same time he charged him on no account to allow the paper to be opened, or the charm would vanish and the soul be ruined.
The man went off satisfied, and so far all was well. But unfortunately the curiosity of the doctor was excited, and he felt a great desire to see what Father James had written on the screw of paper. Accordingly he persuaded the nurse, and at a convenient moment she secretly withdrew the paper, and brought it to him.
" The words written on the paper," says the archdeacon in his letter to me, " were these : * Dear Saint Peter, please admit the bearer — she is a parishioner of mine ; ' and I think there was something added about being late, owing to company. Dr. H. saw the paper, and often told the story to the late bishop, Mr. L. : and many a laugh Mr. L. and myself have had over Father James and St. Peter ! "
However, the Irish priest had only followed the example of no less a man than St. Gregory, called " the Great," of whom Mrs. Jameson, in her Sacred and Legendaiy Art (vol. i., p. 323), relates the subjoined story.
A monk under the excommunication of Gregory had died unabsolved, and when the saint heard of it he was filled with horror ; but at the same time was by no means without resource.
" He wrote upon a parchment a prayer and a form of absolution, and gave it to one of his deacons, desiring him to go to the grave of the deceased and read it there."
The charm — which seems to have been valid only if used in a particular place, that is, at the grave — was successful ; for " on the following night, the monk appeared in a vision, and revealed to the saint his release from torment."
The following modern instances from the East, for the
70 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
correctness of which I am able to vouch, are not inapt illustra- tions of this kind of superstition.
A priest of the Greek Church was importuned to go to a sick person, and being at play was unwilling to do so. " There," said he, taking off his cap and giving it to the messenger, " place that on the head of the sick man, and it will answer all the purpose." The messenger went away well-contented !
An indolent bishop of the same Church, too lazy to go to a distant ordination at which a part of his duty was to breathe on the candidates, adopted this expedient. Having procured a couple of bladders and filled them with his breath, he despatched them to the ordination, directing that puflFs from them should be blown upon the heads of the candidates.
Such are a few specimens of medievalism as it was, as it is still in many parts, and as some would have it to be again in Protestant England — " which peril. Heaven forefend ! "
Before closing this chapter, let us glance for a moment at the applicability of Hallam's remark on saint-worship to the examples we have quoted. "It was also so managed," said the historian, " as to loosen the bonds of religion and pervert the standard of morality."
In the first instance, the profligate monk of Cologne dies in his sins and irrepentant. Yet, because he has a friend at court, and through favour of the Queeij of Heaven, he escapes punishment.
The Virgin, for ten years, takes the place and duties in the convent of the dissolute nun, and for what purpose ? That the latter may live an a!bandoned life, undetected, as long as she pleases. And, when she is tired of it, the Virgin puts her back again into the convent, and enables her to re-appear among her former companions as a chaste woman, nobody having the least suspicion of what she had been doing. She thus receives from her heavenly patroness the power to hood- wink the conventual authorities, and the privilege of being
IMMORALITY OF MEDIEVALISM. 7 1
able to spend the rest of her days in peace and lying hypocrisy !
In the third, St. Kentigern is exhibited as a patron of vice.
In the fourth, the old Custode of St. Paul's attributes envy of the meanest kind to the Virgin, without a suspicion that he is injuring her character.
In the fifth, the moral and religious tendency of Father James' story is in every respect deplorable.
In the sixth, St. Gregory is proved to be Father James' precedent and authority, both in magic art and in pious fraud.
Lastly, in the seventh and eighth instances, the conjuring- cap of the card-playing Greek priest, and the bladders of the idle Greek bishop — but of what use is it to make remarks on such a tricky and amulet-kind of religion ?
There can be no question as to the truth of Hallam's saying. Saint-worship does indeed loosen the bonds of religion and pervert the standard of morality. And saint-worship ever has been, and still is, prominent in the religion of Rome.
XII.
CHARMS AS USED IN THE PAGAN WORLD. Part I.
FROM the earliest times to the present hour the use of charms or amulets has been universal. The strange power of fascination which belongs to them is due, I conceive, to the fact that the natural mind, being ignorant of God, must have some object of veneration or superstition. Hence the nations vi^hich have become enlightened by the teaching of the Bible have, in a greater or less degree, cast off such follies ; while the Church of Rome has retained them, together with many other Pagan usages and customs, merely superadding a drapery of Christianity. For she throws something, indeed, over the nakedness of her Heathenism ; but it is a veil so transparent that no practised eye is needed to detect the (lentilism which lies beneath.
The following extract is interesting.
" It is curious to note in Rome how many a modern super- stition has its root in an ancient one, and how tenaciously custom still clings to the old localities. On the Capitoline hill, the bronze She-wolf was once worshipped, as the wooden Bambino is now. It stood in the Temple of Romulus, and thither the ancient Romans used to carry children to be cured of their diseases by touching it. On the supposed site of the temple now stands the church dedicated to St. Teodoro. Though names must have changed, and the temple has vanished, and church after church has here decayed and been
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 73
rebuilt, the old superstition remains, and the common people, at certain periods, still bring their sick children to the saint, that he may heal them with his touch." — Roba di Roma : quoted in Hare's Walks in Rome., vol. i., p. 223,
We implied above that Romanism has not so much adopted as continued Heathen usages. And such is indeed the fact. Though called by the preaching of the Gospel to cast off Heathenism, she still carried it with her in her profession of Cliristianity, and made Christ, so to speak, a con-templar god — or, fellow in the temple — with "gods many and lords many." She forced the, in one sense, unsocial religion of Christ into Heathen company, somewhat as the Emperor Alexander Severus introduced the statue of Jesus among the deities of his Lararium, or private chapel.
This will be shown as we proceed ; but, as an illustration of her general spirit, I will here quote an inscription from an altar in the cathedral at Luca. It is given in C. S. Bird's Romanism (Hatchards, 1851), and runs as follows : — " Christo Liberatori, ac Diis Tutelaribus ; " that is, " To Christ the Deliverer, and to the Guardian Deities," the latter being those saints who specially preside over Luca. The Heathenism of this will be apparent to those who know that the titles here given to the gods and heroes of the Church Pantheon are identical with those given by the ancient Romans to their gods and heroes.
The Lares have been already mentioned ; they were little images representing the household gods, and were universally used as charms. " To what extent they were employed in this capacity," says Blunt, " may be guessed from the number of small antique figures still existing — formed of bronze, ivory, bone, and other materials — bored, and evidently intended to be worn about the neck.
" In like manner, to this day, there is scarcely an individual of the lower classes in Italy, or Sicily, who is not provided
74 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
with an image, or print, of a favourite Madonna or Saint, suspended from the neck.
"I remember a shop at Trepani, in Sicily, where the principal stock consisted of figures of the Virgin of that place, carved in bone, about an inch in length, and actually having no per- ceptible difference from those in use among the Romans eighteen hundred, or two thousand, years ago." — Vestiges, p. 40.
In 1877, the writer of this book bought one of these charms in Rome ; it was made of bone, and perforated so as to be worn round the neck of a woman ; being, in fact, a charm for children. He gave it to the British Museum, since it was of such a character that he did not care to keep it. Museums are the proper depositories of such things, where they become lasting witnesses of the foulness of Heathenism, and of the truth of such statements as those in the first chapter of Romans, and similar Scriptures.
In Dyer's Pompeii, p. 446, there is an engraving of a neck- lace taken from a box which was found in the hand of a female skeleton at Pompeii. The poor owner was evidently fleeing with her little treasure when she was overwhelmed by the outburst from the mountain. She seems to have been a worshipper of Isis, since her necklace is composed of no less than thirty-five pieces, all of which are consecrated to the goddess and her belongings. Thirty-five charms, and yet unavailing to ward off her doom ! Two of them are of the same character as the one deposited by the writer in the British Museum.
In the museum of the late Sir Richard Colt Sloane, at Stourhead — and also in the British Museum — are some ///(?///, which he obtained in 17 19 at the cathedral of Isernia, near Naples, where they had been offered ex voto ! So that, up to that time, at least, the worship of the obscene god Priapus seems to have been continued' in Isernia under Roman Catholic direction.
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 75
But before we can compare the modern usages of Roman superstition with early days, we must know something of the Pagan doctrines and practices in regard to charms, and to this end we will now devote a few pages.
The following translation from the eighth Eclogue of Virgil will exhibit the popular ideas respecting charms some thirty or forty years before the birth of Christ. The rendering is that which was given in the Fortnightly Review, vol. xxii., p. 87.
" Bring forth water, and wind round this altar a soft woollen fillet. Richest of vervain and strongest of frankincense burn on the altar. These be the magic rites whereby the cold heart of a husband Fain would I seek to entrance. 'Tis but the charm that is wanting ; Back to his home from the city, my charms, draw the wandering Daphnis !
" Charms have the power to draw down the truant moon from the heavens. Circe by charms transformed the trusty band of Ulysses. Crushed by the force of charms the cold snake lies dead in the meadow. Back to his home from the city, my charms, draw the wandering Daphnis !
" Like as this image of clay grows hard, and the waxen one liquid Under the self-same fire, so let my love work upon Daphnis. Sprinkle the cakes, and light up the crackling laurel with sulphur. Daphnis burns me, and I burn this laurel, and wish it were Daphnis. Back to his home from the city, my charms, draw the wandering Daphnis !
" See how the quivering flames have laid hold of the horns of the altar ! Now, while I dally, it burst forth unbid 1 Be the sign a good omen ! Something is certainly there ! and Hylax barks on the threshold ! Shall we believe it ? Or is it a dream from the brain of a lover ? Stay, my charms ! From the city he comes, the wandering Daphnis ! "
But after all, the testimony of Virgil is comparatively modern. Hgre is evidence of an earlier date. In the Swiss Lake of Brienne are the remains of a prehistoric Lacustrine village ; and there human skulls have been found, submerged in the lake, with round pieces cut out of them " for use as amulets." Bits of infants' skulls were once used for this purpose, and were " put inside the heads of the dead to protect them from evil beings in the world of spirits. The same custom prevailed among the American Indians of Michigan, and in the South of
']6 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
France, in Sweden, Germany, and Austria." — The Times, Nov. 1 6th, 1878. Charms, then, were known even in the prehistoric period, and when we come into historic times, they may be traced in every country. Ancient Egypt bears witness to their use. Examine the mummies in the British Museum, and you will find them fortified with amulets. I have counted as many as twenty upon one mummy.
Assyria also, in her recently discovered literary treasures, brings the same fact to light. The talismanic principle is to be seen in her very careful arrangement of lucky and unlucky days ; and her monarchs wore talismans upon their persons, as their disinterred statues reveal.
Again, in Persia, similar customs prevailed ; for we read that Haman (b.c. 520) was casting lots for a whole year before he could hit upon a lucky day for the destruction of Mordecai and his nation. — Esth. iii. 7.
In Asia Minor, we have — say ten centuries before Christ — the Palladium of Troy, an image of the goddess Pallas con- sidered to be a charm of such power that until it was removed the city could not be taken. So Ulysses and Diomedes, as the story runs, contrived to steal it. Again, at Ephesus, the figure of Diana, " the image that fell down from Jupiter " (Acts xix. 35), was also a talisman.
Passing from Asia into Europe, we find,' some seven centuries before Christ, the wondrous Ancile in the palace of the second king of Rome, that shield " not there conveyed by mortal hands," the sure pledge of empire. To protect the treasure from theft on the part of such rogues as Ulysses, " fertile in counsel," and his not very respectable friends, Numa caused eleven other shields to be made exactly similar to the Ancile, and committed the whole twelve to the twelve Saliiy or leaping priests of Mars.
While in Dresden, in 1S79, 1 saw, in the Museum on the other side of the Elbe, a good illustration of the first line quoted
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 77
above from Virgil, " Wind round this altar a soft woollen fillet." It is "a triangular pedestal of a candelabrum in Pentelican marble."
On it are three sculptures in low relief, very arresting. In the first of them Hercules, bad fellow, steals a tripod ; and Apollo pursues him. A pretty pair !
In the second, which contains the illustration, a priest with flowing hair and long cloak, and a young priestess in a Doric robe, are consecrating a torch, perhaps for a torch race : both are standing on tip-toe, in accordance with the ancient custom of officiating priests. A bowl is set to catch what may fall from the torch, and both torch and bowl are bound round with fillets. But another feature of the picture interested me more than the illustration of Virgil, because it exhibited a modern priestly act to which I may again refer. This was the very peculiar position of the fingers of the consecrating persons in holding the fillets. " The priest with his right hand, the priestess with both hands, touch the torch in a sacred manner, holding up the third, fourth, and fifth fingers, the thumb and forefinger being crossed (priore digito in erectum pollicem residente)."
In the third picture, we have again both priest and priestess ; but the latter alone is in the act of consecrating a tripod, with the same peculiar arrangement of the fingers and thumb of the right hand.
XIII.
CHARMS AS USED IN IVIE PAG AM WORLD.
Part II.
AS we move on down the stream of time, the number and variety of amulets and charms increases. We will now notice a few of them, and may begin with the charm which was worn by all, or nearly all, of the Roman youth. This — it was not of a very delicate character — was enclosed within a small globe of metal or leather called the bulla, and was hung round the neck, just as in the present day the Neapolitan or Spanish peasant wears his charm.
Then, again, bells, when jingled, were con- sidered by the ancient Romans to act as a powerful charm for the driving away of evil See Rich's Die, p. 666.
Genii.
"tunsaque concrepat sera, Et rogat ut tectis exeat umbra suis "
Ovid, Fasti, v. 4.
" The bells he jingles, and requests the shade That speedy exit from his roof Ije made."
This superstition still prevails in Italy. "Why are the church bells making that noise? "said an inquirer to a peasant of that country. The answer was, " Per cacciare il Diavolo, Signore " — " To chase away the Devil, Sir."
Bells were very common among the Romans. In the Museum at Naples are several from Pompeii. The writer has
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD.
79
an old Roman bell which he obtained at Perugia : its shape is
nearly square ; it is made of bronze with an iron clapper, and is
fairly sonorous. It stands three
or four inches high, and may,
perhaps, have been worn by
cattle.
Lustral, or Holy water, was also used by the Heathen as a charm for the purification of persons, of houses, and of temples. At the gate of the Pagan temple stood a vessel filled with it for the use, as in modern Roman Catholic churches, of those who entered. At funerals, too, the Heathen used this charm just as their Church suc- cessors do now. So Virgil (y£//. vi. 229-31), in describing the obsequies of Misenus, says of ^neas : —
" From branch of olive thrice the holy clew Of lustral water sprinkling on the crew, The men he puyified."
The use of candles at funerals is another Heathen custom, though now adopted by the Roman Church. Rich {A?-f. Candela) proves this from Varro, and gives an illustration from a sepulchral marble at Padua.
On leaving home for a journey, a Roman Would repeat some verse or incantation, as a protection from evil. t3
For the same purpose he would also habitually carry some small image, or other sacred object, suspended from his neck. Thus it is recorded of Sylla that " he wore, and used to invoke, a little golden Apollo hung round his neck" (Hare's i?^;;;^, p. 224); which reminds one of Louis XI. of France, who was wont to wear his "gods protectors" — i.e., saints — leaden though they were, in his hat !
A magic property was also imputed by the Romans to coral,
80 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
a branch of which was thought to be eminently efficacious in affording health and protection to infants. See Blunt's Vestiges, chap. X., where Pliny is quoted and mentioned as having been " most industrious in recording the charms of his own time."
Did you ever, reader, drive from Perugia to Assisi ; or from the station on the Ferrara and Bologna line to Cento, to see the Guercinos in that little town ? (As regards the pictures of the illustrious artist, however, to examine which was my sole object in visiting the town, I confess I was disappointed.) Well, then, you may have noticed that the road to each of the two places abounds in charms. "What are all those slender wooden crosses stuck in the fields ? " I asked my rustic com- panions in the public carriage. " What are they for?" "To drive away the devil, and evil spirits ; and the pictures of saints you see in the trees are, Signore, for the same purpose."
Two thousand years ago, for the same purpose, there used to be suspended in the fields — what ? Masks of Bacchus ! Now crosses and pictures of saints have taken their place. And not only in Italy : for I have seen the same charms in the fields north of Munich.
Of the Heathen usage, the suspension of oscilla, or little masks, there was a good illustration in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1879. It was in a small and charming picture of a Pomona Festival by Alma Tadema. In the British Museum one of these faces of Bacchus is preserved with the ring attached to it by which it used to be suspended.
Another talisman of Heathen Rome is the lightning of yupiter, which is represented on the opposite page, from a medal of Augustus.
I give this from Du Choul, who informs us that " the Heathen— /^j G^ot/ZA— held it in singular estimation, ... be- lieving that after it had been consecrated by the Chief Pontiff —for the consecration of such things by a priest belongs as much to Heathendom as to Christendom— it preserved
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 8 1
from tempests, and possessed a certain virtue." — La Religion des Anciens Jiomains, p, 2S6. The "S. C." on the medal is, I beheve, for Saiatus consulto — " by decree of the Senate."
To pass on to more modern times, since the next chapter will treat of the ages intervening, we quote the following in regard to Heathen America.
"The Spanish missionaries in the fifteenth century were amazed to find the cross as devoutly worshipped there as by themselves. It is not generally known that the cross is originally and properly a Heathen emblem, perhaps the most ancient and
most universal of any throughout the world, east or west, north or south. The Spaniards found it everywhere in America, and made of every material. It figured on the vestments of priests, and was worn as an amulet by the people. ... It was beheved among the inhabitants both of north and south to be endued with power to restrain evil spirits." — The Pre-Christian Cross, Edin. Review, Jan. 1870.
Here, again, is something respecting China, taken from Picart's History of all Religions, vol. ii., p. 214.
" Navaretti informs us that the Chinese, after sacrificing to Confucius, carry home what remains of the sacrifice, which is
6
82 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
given especially to the children, in hope that it will make them become great men." In other words, the consecrated elements are expected to act as a charm.
An artillery officer, related to myself, told me that, in the late Chinese war, he was present when a Tartar, badly wounded, was brought in as a prisoner. Though the poor fellow expected little mercy, his great anxiety was, not for his own safety, but for that of something which he wore suspended round his neck — his charm. This, and terror lest it should be taken from him, seemed to occupy all his thoughts.
Lately there appeared in some English journals a piece of advice to distressed Chinese, copied from a Chinese newspaper. Certain wags had been making free with some native tails by removing them from the heads of the proprietors. The result was a general feeling of insecurity and alarm ; and how did the journalist endeavour to allay it ? By suggesting a charm ! Meet these foreign devils, said he, thus : — Fold such a paper in such a manner, carry it on your person, and your tail is safe.
The kind of charm referred to — that is, written paper— \s also very commbn among the followers of Islam. I have by me several specimens which I obtained from one of the crew of the Nile boat, a Hadji, or pilgrim who had been to Mecca, and so, according to Mohammedan ideas, had become a holy man. He wore them on his person. They are of leather, about two inches square, and contain bits of paper.
Fifteen hundred years ago the learned Heathen author Quintus Sammonicus recommended the same kind of amulet. Letters were to be written in a peculiar form upon several pieces, and "then," said he, "tie them together, and hang them by a linen thread to the neck of the patient."
tn the Graphic of February 22nd, 1879, appeared an illustra- tion by their artist in Affghanistan, the subject of which was ' Camels passing under the Koran." The explanation given is
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 83
as follows : — " Returning from pasture, camels are driven every Thursday evening — their Saturday night — under the Koran, which, placed in a turban, is suspended between two lances. The drivers are most particular to see that every camel passes under the book. It is a charm against sickness and other evils."
The evil eye is well known as a charm of malignity which must be met with more potent charms. It was lately stated in the Athenmim, in reference to Holman Hunt the painter, that " his models in Jerusalem had all forsaken him, having taken it into their heads that they were under the influence of the charm."
I have myself had a similar experience in the same country. On the high lands of Benjamin, at Jeremiah's town, Anathoth — a wretched desolate place, where, however, there is a fine Roman pavement — I was looking compassionately upon a sick sheep. The owner at once became very angry, because, as our Dragoman told me, he considered that my evil eye injuriously affected his property.
A recent number of the Jewish Chronicle, i n giving an account of the inauguration of the religious head of a sect of Jews at Jerusalem, informs us that the new dignitary was protected from the evil eye by hands dipped in the blood of a sheep just slaughtered, the mark of the ten fingers being imprinted on his door. The Chronicle also states that at Tangier a red hand, painted outside a door, is a favourite charm for the same purpose.
The belief that some had power to injure by their look was as prevalent among the ancient Greeks and Romans as among the superstitious of modern times ; and the evil eye is frequently alluded to by the Classical writers ; as, for instance, in the following verse of Virgil {Ed. iii. 103) :
" Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos." " Some unknown eye does fascinate my lambs."
Various amulets were used to avert its influence, the most
84 ROME: PAGAN AND FA PAL.
common of these being the />/ia////s — the turpicula res of Varro — hung round the necks of children. See Smith's Diet. Ant., Art. Fascinmn.
An Irish correspondent of mine writes to me as follows : — " The Church has continued these charms, of which some are decent, some the contrary ; and many of them are, or were, placed in churches. I am told that several taken from old churches are in the museum at Dublin. They are statues of naked women which were formerly placed over the entrance doors of the buildings as lucky objects." If the eye rested on them the first thing in the morning, it was supposed that a person Avould be free from bad luck for the rest of the day. They were called Shela-na-gigs.
What the Shela were to the outside, that St. Christopher is to the inside of the church, his decent and respectable figure being often painted on the wall opposite the door, to catch the eye of the worshipper as he enters, " for good luck." Hence the old distich, the original Latin of which I regret that I have mislaid: —
" Betimes to see St. Christoph is good luck : That day shall see thee by no evil struck."
Lastly, Fetish, so common in Africa, is a widely-spread charm, constituting the whole religion of many peoples. In Maa/iillans Magazine for July, 1878, we are informed by Max Miiller that " the Portugtiese mariners first gave the name of Fit-igos, i.e., Fetish, to the ornaments worn by the Negroes of the Gold Coast, because they themselves were perfectly familiar with the Fici-tigo {sic) or amulet." Indeed, since they all carried crosses or beads blessed by their priests they were themselves, in a sense, fetish worshippers.
Ample evidence has now been laid before the reader to show the antiquity, universality, and continuity in the human family, of the use of charms ; to prove that, belonging, as it does, to all nations and all times, its universal development manifests a
CHARMS IN THE PAGAN WORLD. 85
universal principle inherent in the human race ; that principle being the kind of superstitious reverence which forms so large a part of the Religion of Nature.
In the following pages we propose to demonstrate how fully this principle is recognized and sanctioned in the Church of Rome.
XIV.
USE OF CHARMS IN 7HE CHURCH OF ROME.
Part I.
OUR sphere is now more limited than in the two previous chapters : we have to consider the use of charms in the Church of Rome.
In speaking above of " the Hghtning of Jupiter," we quoted
Du Choul, as testifying to the great power attributed to it by
the ancient Romans. And, from the same author, we gave a
cut of the charm as imprinted upon a medal of Augustus.
We now subjoin a representation of a modern charm, equally
potent, taken from another learned Roman Catholic author (luoted in Picart. It is the Agnus Dei, and forms a good pendant to Du Choul's *' lightning of Jupiter."
CHARMS LV THE CHURCH OF ROME. 8/
The Agnus Dei, that is, Lamb of God, is " a medal made of wax mixed with oil and balm," on which is stamped " The Lamb and Flag," the well-known device of that once powerful and profligate order of monk-warriors, the Templars. Together with " The Saint Petershead," " The Salutation," and one or two similar subjects, it yet figures among us as the sign of a public-house.
From Du Choul we have already learnt in how great estima- tion the Romans held "the lightning of Jupiter," as a protection against tempests, and as possessing "a certain virtue." He also tells us (p. 285) that " the little Agnus Dei when blessed, and bells when consecrated, obtain virtue, the one to drive away tempests, the other to expel evil spirits."
The " little Agnus," then, takes in the Church the place and efficacy of " the lightning of Jupiter," so far as the weather is concerned ; while the bells, able even in Ovid's time to fray the ghosts, are equally potent in the spirit world.
Here are influences exerted upon the natural and the super- natural ! But why are the bells, and not the Agnus, supposed to be capable of the hardest work ?
Perhaps on the score of the length of their pedigree ; for the bells were originally well-known Heathens, though they are now baptized Christians. You are doubtless aware that bells are baptized. But the Agnus only appeared in comparatively recent times, to take the place of the Heathen " lightning of Jupiter," which could not be baptized. So the bells keep their own : they are now in the Church just what they were thousands of years ago in Heathendom, whereas the Agnus is only an interloper, lately come into fashion.
To the passage quoted above, Du Choul adds : — " In like manner, salt and water — that is, holy water — by means of benediction and exorcism obtain force and virtue to chase away evil spirits " — the same power as that which is attributed to the bells.
88 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
But how very strange that salt-and- water should be able " to chase away evil spirits ! " Is this anywhere mentioned in Scripture ?
Scripture ! No. But who supposes that Church ways and doings have any necessary connection with Scripture ? Nay, the priest, the charmer, and the charms — these are more to the point ; these are the powers which put virtue into " the salt and water," into the " benediction and exorcism ; " that which avails is the incantation, the " Double, double, toil and
trouble."
" When in Salamanca's cave Him listed his magic wand to wave, The bells would ring in Notre Dame."
And there is nothing which the priest cannot do. Of late years, since a.d. 12 15, he has even taken to assert that he can turn a morsel of bread into God Himself ! He does it — so he says — every day, though his senses and ours declare the false- hood of the assertion.
But to return to the Agnus Dei. If the Heathen Pontifex Maximus could by consecration infuse such power into his charm, " the lightning of Jupiter," we may well suppose that the consecration of his successor, the Church Pontifex, would bestow no less virtue upon the Agnus Dei. The following doggrel verses, a literal translation of the old French in Picart, will leave us in no doubt upon this head. They were sent by PoTie Urban V. to the Greek emperor, to explain to him the value of an Agnus Dei, in order that he might properly appre- ciate three with which the Pope at the same time presented
him.
' ' Thunder it chases,
Sin it effaces,
From fire it saves,
And flood when it raves.
Sudden death shuns it,
Devils revere it.
Enemies fear it.
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 89
Far from danger are set Both children and mother Who to make it are met. Where good is found, It makes it abound. Big pieces or small Are alike good to all."
So the spell of the Pope is even more efficacious than that of the Heathen. And after all, the Agnus must be as potent as the bells, and more so still ; for, " sin it effaces."
But how subservient to the priesthood must the laity have been, that the former could dare, in the person of their chief and in the name of religion, to palm off such barefaced lies upon the vi^orld ! What an illustration of the ancient saying, "The people wills to be deceived. Deceived they shall be."
Modern Heathenism also has its parallel to the Agnus. The following account of what has lately happened in Thibet is taken from the Illustt'afed Missionary Nezt's, 1879.
" A priest of Laboul had died, one who would, the people considered, be reckoned among the gods. So, after having burnt his body, they mingled the ashes with clay, from which small medallions were made, distributed everywhere, and kept in sacred places."
Thus, the customs of Heathenism, ancient and modern, "the lightning of Jupiter," and the medallions of Buddha, form with the Agnus of Papal Rome a trio alike illustrative of the natural religion, which is the basis of them all. Neither in Rome nor in either of the other false systems is there any power to rise from the grossness of sense to the spirituality of faith. The unre- generate man can deal only with the tangible and the sensuous ; beyond this he has no perceptions, no capacity of reception. " Can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" "Show us the Father." "Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe."
XV.
USE OF CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME.
Part IL
WE will now adduce a few more instances of the use of amulets.
Just as Sylla, the Dictator (d. B.C. 68), consulted a little Apollo hung round his neck, so Pope Gregory XIV. (a.d. 1590) put his trust in a figure of St, Philip Neri, "by which image he believed that his life was saved in an earthquake at Beneventum." — Hare's Rome, vol. ii., p. 168.
In Spain, during the age of chivalry, a knight was not allowed to enter the hsts until he had made a declaration that he had no relic or charm upon him. Ford, in his Handbook for Spain, informs us that even now, few Spanish soldiers go into action without such a preservative ; that the Duchess of Abrantes hung the Virgin del Pilar round the neck of her favourite bull-fighter, who escaped in consec^uence; and that Jose, his own guide, attributed his frequent escapes from danger to an image of the Virgin which never quitted his shaggy breast.
Spanish robbers, Ford adds, have always been " remarkably good Roman Catholics." They, too, wear their charms; while " Italian banditti always wear a silver heart of the Madonna." — Vol. ii., p. 192.
In the Times of Sept. 2 ist, 1879, the Naples correspondent wrote as follows :
" The fanatics, who are the observers of the superstitions
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 91
practised in Naples, are those who supply the most abundant materials for the police courts. Crime and superstition go hand-in-hand. The brigands who were taken red-handed in this province were invariably found to have rosaries and relics around their necks."
I remember a painful example of this confidence in amulets at Devonport a few years ago, in a case in which it would not have been expected. It was that of an aged and well-known clergyman, who on his death-bed held a consecrated medal with the greatest tenacity.
" Mary," said a Protestant minister to a sick convert from Romanism, "what are you doing?" She had been fumbling with something under the bedclothes while he was reading the Scriptures, and made no reply to the question. It was, how- ever, repeated, and at last tlie truth came out in the shape of some medals, and other consecrated toys, which she had been keeping about her. "And must I give them up ? " she said in a pitiful voice. " Yes," he replied, " Christ will not share your heart with idols."
But this case is surpassed by that of two educated English ladies of my acquaintance who were not satisfied unless they had a crucifix in their bed — I suppose as a charm !
The following story, which I heard from an Indian judge, is a good instance of the trust which superstitious minds put in these charms. About forty years ago, my friend stayed at Rome on his way to the East, and presented a letter of introduction to Bishop Baggs, honorary chaplain to the Pope. He had frequent intercourse with the bishop, who evinced great anxiety to win him to " the true faith," and on one occasion said, "Will you wear this medal for nine days, while I and others pray for your conversion ? " Some virtue in the medal was to dispose him to conversion ; but it did not, and he remains a good Protestant up to the present time.
The following extract from Sterling's Cloister Life of
92 ROME: PAGA.Y AND PAPAL.
Charles V. illustrates the influence of charms over a great mind.
"Towards eight in the evening," his chronicler relates, " Charles asked if the consecrated tapers were ready. ' The time is come,' said he, ' bring in the candle and the crucifix.' These were cherished relics which he had long kept in readiness for the supreme hour. The one was a taper from Our Lady's shrine at Monserrat; the other a crucifix which had been taken from the dead hand of his wife at Toledo. He received them eagerly from the Archbishop, Carronza, the Primate. ... On his bosom was placed the crucifix of the Empress, and at the head of the bed hung a beautiful picture of our blessed Lady."
So died the great Emperor !
The lamented Prince Napoleon had— as a Roman Catholic soldier commonly would — a charm upon him when he was killed by the Zulus. It was a medal of the Madonna; and a London newspaper stated that the Zulus would not detach it from his neck, because they believe that " charms," if removed from the last wearer, bring his luck with them.
It is recorded that the Duke of Monmouth, when taken prisoner at Sedgemoor, was found to have similarly fortified himself with several charms tied about his body ; while his " table book " — purchased in this century at a book-stall in Paris, and now in the British Museum — is filled with songs, recipes, prayers, and charms. But all did not avail to save him from defeat and the block.
A good story connected with our subject is told by a correspondent of the Times in a letter dated Rome, May 26th, 1879. It relates to one of the then newly-made Cardinals, Monsignor Pie, the well-known Bishop of Poitiers — the man who denounced Napoleon III. as Pontius Pilate, was most active in recruiting the Antibes Legion for the Papal army, and sup- ported Pio Nono in his most ultramontane measures. Here it is.
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 93
" An amusing story is told of Pie's having ordered a grand funeral mass for a Pontifical Zouave who was supposed to have fallen at Castel Fidardo — of his having extolled in glowing language the exalted virtues and heroism of the defunct, whom all should strive to imitate ; while the man himself was in the church, attending his own funeral ceremony.
" At the end of the service, however, the man was arrested as a runaway debtor, to the scandal of all good Catholics.
" To escape from his creditors he had taken service in the Papal army ; had fallen, shamming death, at the first encounter, and to get clear off after the battle was over, had changed clothes and passports with an officer of his own regiment, who had been killed. He had been cunning enough to leave the officer's scapular on the body, and to put the beads into the pocket of, and the decorations upon the breast of, his own jacket in which he had dressed the corpse.
" These things, found on the body of a private soldier, were taken as undoubted proofs of his virtues and valour. Accord- ing to the passport, the defunct was a native of Poitiers, Pie's diocese, and when the news of so edifying a death reached him, he thought the occasion too valuable not to be improved — with the result as above.
"And the result was also improved by the Liberals, who published an account of the affair in double columns. In the one was the discourse delivered by Monsignor Pie ; in the other the police report of the martyr's antecedents and short- comings !"
We have before seen that several famous cities were in ancient times supposed to be preserved by charms such as the Palladium and the Ancile. Just in the same manner the images and relics of saints are the security of cities now. Thus, there is an annual procession on the fifth of September at Pegli, near Genoa, in honour of St. Rosalia ; because in A.D. 1667 she protected the place from a prevailing pestilence.
94 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
In a church near Nice a lady once drew my attention to an ugly little image of the Virgin, which she told me had saved the town from cholera.. She quite believed it, poor thing, and I well remember the energy of her statement. I had previously asked her if the tawdry little goddess was miraculous : " Molto niiraculoso, Signore," was her reply.
We have already seen that the Bulla — there is a fine speci- men in gold in the Vatican Etruscan Museum — contained the charm which blessed the children of Heathen Rome ; a parallel may be found in these days.
" V/hat, madam," said I to a French lady, "permit me to ask, is that object hung round the neck of your infant ? "
" That, sir," she replied, " is a medal blessed by the priest, to keep the child from harm."
So the Heathen usage is continued in the Christian custom.
The coral charm, before alluded to, acts precisely the same part now as it did in old Rome, " affording health and i)ro- tection to children," So wrote Pliny, and so his people still believe, and even now protect their children with coral against evil spirits.
Did you, reader, ever observe how the old painters often deck even the Holy Child Jesus with this Heathen talisman ? We give a specimen above, after a picture by Pinturicchio, in
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 95
the National Gallery. The four detached ornaments belong to the Child Jesus in other pictures — by Lippi, Crivelli, and others — also in the National Gallery. See pp. 37, 88, 151, 270, and 330, of the authorised catalogue, 1876.
Seven examples may, I think, be found in the gallery.
Sometimes the charm is attached to a coral necklace, and bracelets of the same material are occasionally added.
Nor is this amulet represented only on canvas. Among the bronzes in the South Kensington Museum it may be seen in bronze on the necks of a pair of children — seventeenth century — a Child Jesus and a Cupid. What a union !
We have already remarked that a superstitious Pagan blessed himself on leaving home, by some form of incantation thrice repeated. The worshipper of Papal times blesses himself by signing the cross three times.
The use of Lustral, or Holy Water, by the ancients has also been noticed. They applied it to the purification of houses, as well as persons, and even in this they are still followed. " The modern Italians," says Blunt, " use holy water as a charm. All their rooms are annually sprinkled with \X.r— Vestiges, 1^. 172. The writer has himself witnessed this ceremony in Florence at Easter.
Modern holy water is mixed with salt ; how very ancient and Pagan this custom is, the following rendering from Theo- critus (xxiv. 95-7) will show:
" With sulphur let the house be purified ; Then, from a full urn, sprinkle on the floor Pure water, mixed with salt, from side to side ; For so the holy custom doth provide."
I conclude the chapter with a specimen of the unlimited popular belief in this charm. It is quoted from a letter which appeared in a Roman Catholic journal, from one who is en- trusted, apparently, with the care of Irish Emigrants.
" A storm was raging, when an old woman sent for me. I
96
ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
went to her. She said she had a bottle of holy water, and that if I sprinkled the ship with it, it might still the storm. I complied with her request ; after which she desired me to throw the bottle into the sea, so that it might calm the rage of the angry waters."
Christ using His cross as a charm to break open the gates of Hell, in order that He might bring forth the Old Testament saints, with Adam and Eve at their head. From a French miniature of the thirteenth century.
XVI.
USE OF CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME.
Part III.
WE have stated that, in Pagan China, the remains of a sacrifice to Confucius are carried away and given to children as a talisman, "to make them become great men." A few instances will now be cited of the uses to which the consecrated wafer filched from "the Sacrifice of the Mass " is applied in Christendom, by way of a charm.
The following are from Picart. " Sometimes," he says, " it is used as a love-charm, or philtre, both for honourable purposes, and by priests in dishonest love. Here is an ex- ample of the former.
"'A woman of Ancona,' says the Monk Bassius, Svith an unfaithful husband, reserved part of the wafer in her mouth, took it home, and then made it into a philtre to win back his love.' "
Very much like the passage of Virgil quoted in a former chapter —
" Back to liis home from the city, my charms, draw tlie wandering Daphnis."
Again ; we find, also from Bassius, that the wafer has been used as a bee-charm. The bees belonging to a certain woman were barren ; so one day she did not swallow the Host at the Communion, and, "after taking it out of her mouth, placed it in one of her hives."
It will also serve as a gardt n-charm. A young girl of the
7
98 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Isle of St. Nicholas had a garden which was eaten up by caterpillars. So she, like the others, hides the wafer in her mouth, and then, "breaking it into morsels, sows it broadcast among the vegetables."
Again ; " a woman of virtue and of piety," whose son Accacius was born blind, cured him by a poultice made of this charmed bread.
But the wafer can develop still more extraordinary powers. It was the custom, Deacon Amaliri, of Metz, informs us, to bury the dead with a wafer laid on the stomach ; and this, he adds, was done in the case of St. Cuthbert. Now, there was a certain man so wicked that when, after his decease, attempts were made to bury him, his dead body was twice cast out by the earth. His relations were distressed and perplexed, and appealed for advice to no less a person than St. Benedict. The saint directed them to use the charm just described, and gave them a wafer for the purpose with his own hand — de la prop7-e ??iain. This treatment proved successful, and the corpse was comfortably settled in its grave. — Picart, xi. 49-65.
Picart considers that the custom of burying with a wafer is a relic of Paganism, and that the wafer on the stomach was substituted for the coin which used to be put into the mouth of the corpse for the purpose of paying Charon's fee.
In the Twenty-eighth Article of the Church of England it is affirmed " that Transubstantiation hath given occasion to many superstitions." If any of us have not hitherto realized the force of this, we can hardly fail to do so after considering the quotations just given.
To one believing in Transubstantiation, the desire to have the Host buried with him is surely most natural and proper. It certainly would be my wish had I faith in the doctrine ; for how comforting the idea of having God with one's flesh in the grave !
Yes, and that, too, of having Him certainly with us in life.
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 99
The larger Wafer used in the Mass.
The small Wafer given in the Communion to the people.
lOO ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Were I a believer of the type of the woman of Ancona, or the girl of St. Nicholas' Isle, I fear I should long ago have yielded to sore temptation, just as they did, to effect such a purpose ; and would wear the filched wafer ever round my neck. I entirely sympathize, not with their theft, but with the cravings of their humanity.
Of the caterpillars we will not say much : the girl, though sincere, must have been idle ; or why did she not pick them off with her fingers ? But the wife of Ancona — conceive ! To be able by means so simple to restore the love of her " wandering Daphnis " !
The quantity of bread given to the recipient in the Sacrament has also been a cause of superstition : for the Church of Rome uses a large and a small wafer, figures of which may be seen on the previous page.
" Pride," says Picart, " leads some laics to desire to com- municate with the large wafer — grande Hostie — in order to distinguish themselves from those — pour se distinguer des autres — who have only the small one." And he describes the manner in which the Sieur of Schlosperg, in the Tyrol, was punished by God for this sin, the pavement of the church yawning at his feet to swallow him up. St. Theresa, too, he says, avowed that she was glad to receive a great wafer ; and so others, piously but ignorantly, " in order to obtain more abundant grace — en vue de recevoir des graces plus abondantes."
Well, poor things, who blames them ? I am sure I do not : it would have been the same with me but for the grace of God through the Reformation. We are all alike enwrapt in nature's night until the Word of God shines into our dark heart.
Another powerful amulet, among Heathens and Christians alike, is the Cross.
Here is what T/ie Poor Man's Catec/iisin teaches in regard to it. " This sacred sign is a means of preserving us from evil spirits, which disappear at its siglit." How imi)udent a stat-e-
CHARMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. lOI
ment, when we remember some of the scenes in which the cross or crucifix has been prominent !
An engraving iUustrating this charm, and intended for the instruction of young people, is sold in Paris. It depicts a child calling his good angel to succour him against a serpent which crawls towards him. In the child's hand is a cross, and the angel says, " Carry that sign before thee in confidence, and the serpent will be powerless at thy feet." How well this " Catholic " print agrees with another verse of the passage quoted above from Virgil's Eclogue : —
" Cnislied by the force of charms the cold snake lies dead in the meadow."
The following from Picart (i. 102) is curious.
In Toulouse there is a considerable portion of the cross, which is exhibited twice in the year. At those times it is steeped in water, and the water is afterwards given to the sick, who find it a great comfort — qui s'en trouvent extremement sonlagcs.
Among some of the Heathen inhabitants of America the cross is, according to the testimony of the Spanish mis- sionaries, used as an amulet, and called "the wood of health" (^Edinburgh Ranew, Jan. 1870). It appears, therefore, to be good for health by way of an infusion in France, and as a solid in America !
But of the universal prevalence of the cross as a Pagan charm we say no rnore here, because the subject has been already treated in an illustrated work by the present writer, entitled The Cross: Heathen and Christian, and published by Messrs. Seeley.
The scapular and the rosary are also powerful charms. Of the efficacy of the latter the following story — from Ford's Handbook for Spain, vol. ii., p. 192 — is an example.
" A robber, shot by a traveller, was buried. His comrades passing by, sometime afterwards, heard his voice. They opened
102 ROME: PAGAN A AD FAPAL.
the grave, and found him alive and unhurt ; for when he was killed he had a rosary round his neck, and consequently, St. Dominic — its inventor — was enabled to intercede with the Virgin on his behalf."
A saving efficacy is supposed to reside in a Monk's dress, and I am told that it is still usual in Spain for sick persons to have one put on in order that they may die in it. " A monk," says Picart (vol. i., p. i8i), "imagines that he exhales from his body corpuscles, or particles, of piety, and that if a dying man be covered with his holy garb, these particles will go straight to the heart of the latter. Thus, as regards dignity, the Monk can always put his dress on a par ivitli Baptism and 7i.<ith the Passion of Christ T
From what follows — extracted from the Daily Ncios, March 25th, 1879 — it will be seen that a similar virtue is supposed to proceed from the bodies of Heathen Monks even in the present day.
" The Phongees, priest-monks in Burmah, have great in- fluence. There are whole districts in Mandalay devoted to Phongee monasteries. A Phongee has no bother about any- thing at all. He is forbidden to have any money, nor does he want it : he wears a bright yellow garment. People bring him his food — rice from this admirer, or from that. His life is celibate: he is not supposed to let his eyes rest upon a woman, but has a quiet knack of giving a sly glance out of the corners of them. He never goes hungry, and when he dies, has a funeral the pageant of which may last for days. When dead, he is plunged into a cask of honey ; and, after such a time as may be sufficient to allow the virtues of him — 'corpuscles of piety' — to pass into the honey, he is fished out, and i)ious people greedily consume the honey."
So closely is the monachism of Heathendom allied to that of Churchdom; so clearly do they exhibit their common origin in the Religion of Nature.
i
CHAKiMS IN THE CHURCH OF ROME. 103
Homer tells us of the wonder-working cestus, or girdle, ot
Venus —
" The broidered cestus wrought with every charm To win the heart."
Like it is the girdle of the Virgin of Tortosa in Spain. " It was brought from Heaven by herself in a.d. 117H, and became the Palladium of the city. Like the Bambino Jesu of the Ara-Coeli at Rome, it is also particularly invoked by women in child-birth." — Ford's Handbook for Spain, vol. ii., p. 160.
Lucky and unlucky days, as in the already quoted case of Haman, were much regarded by the Heathen. In the Assyrian monuments great stress is laid on them ; and reference to them may be found also in the Classical authors. " Days," says Aulus Gellius (v. 9), " of ill-repute for their bad omen, and forbidden, are termed superstitious, on which one must neither perform religious rites nor begin any new undertaking." Christianity puts all days except the Lord's day on a level : but superstition ever resists this, and exalts one day above another to the bane of the Church of Christ. " How turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days " (Gal. iv. 9, 10).
Numerous are the Saints' days of Rome ; and it is sad to know that our bishops and clergy are pressing the observance of them upon us, as well as that of the forty days of Lent. Neither of these, so far as I can understand, suit that " liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." What is Lent but a " yoke of bondage ? " Its observance may be traced among Heathens ancient and modern : long fasts and oft-repeated prayers are ever characteristic of the Religion of Nature.
XVII.
THE CONSECRATION OF HOLY FIRE AND IIOIY WATER.
WHENCE comes the holy fire which one sees ever burning in Roman Cathohc churches ?
Having this morning — "Holy Saturday," April 12th, 1879 — witnessed its generation by the priests, just outside the gate of the large church at Mentone, I am able to tell.
Saturday in " holy week " is a great day for Church cere- monies, especially for those which are connected with " holy fire" and "holy water."
The week has been, of course, ceremonious and sombre. T.ast Sunday the blessing of palms and branches took place : the ceremony was performed in the church with "holy water" manufactured a year ago. As I was going to the Protestant place of worship on that day, I met with a number of people carrying home consecrated palms, in order to place them in their houses, and use them as charms. Of two persons who bore them, I asked their use. " Eor charms," was the reply — Contre les main'ais esprits, et pour chasser le Diab/e." These palms, like the holy fire and water, are renewed at the same time every year. The old ones are burned : and with the ashes, my informant tells me, he made the sign of the cross on his forehead on Ash Wednesday. So at Rome, on the same occasion, and with similar material, I have seen the Pope in grand state charming the Cardinals as they knelt before him.
There are many other sights in this week, such as the table set out for the Supper, the washing of the pilgrims' feet, and the procession, on the night of Good Friday, of the dead
CONSECRATION OF HOLY FIRE AND WATER. 1 05
Christ. This is a figure as large as life, and shocking to look upon. It is placed upon a bier, and, accompanied with lights and music and chanting, it is carried through the town upon men's shoulders from church to church. For a while it is deposited in a public place on its illuminated catafalque, and then it is borne back in procession to its pretended tomb in the church. Such is the manner in which I have seen the ceremony performed.
Subjoined is a list of the usual doings in Roman Catholic countries during Passion week ; it is extracted from the Monaco journal, April, 1879.
Offices De La Sef)iai?ie-Samfe A La Cathedrale.
6. Avril. Dimatiche des Ranieaiix.
Benediction des palmes faite par Mgr. I'Eveque. Procession. Grand' Masse, a laquelle Sa Grandeur assistera en cappa. Chant de la Passion.
L'apres-midi. — -Vepres, Sermon, Salut.
Mercredi Saint. Trois heures et demie. — Office des Tenebres. jEUDi Saint.
Sept heures du Matin. — Communion generate, donnee par Sa Grandeur.
Matin. — Grand'Messe Pontificale. Benediction des Saintes Huiles. Procession au Reposoir. Lavement des pieds par Mgr. I'Eveque.
L'apres-midi. — Office des Tenebres.
Du soir. — Procession de la Confrerie des Penitents. Sermon a la Cathedrale.
Vendredi Saint.
Matin. —Chant de la Passion. Adoration de la Croix. Pro- cession du Reposoir. Messe des Presanctifies.
Apres-midi. — Les trois heures d'agonie avec chants. Sermons suivis de I'Office des Tenebres.
Huit heures du soir. — Procession du Christ mort de I'eglise des Penitents a la Cathedrale. Sermon. Chant du " Stabat Mater."
I06 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Samedi Saint. Huit hcures et demie du Matin. — Benediction du Feu. Chant des Propheties. Benediction des Fonts. Grand'Messe Pon- tificale.
We said that the week has been sombre : but its oppressive- ness will presently be relieved by an Easter outburst of enjoy- ment and dissipation — a natural reaction after the enforced, and therefore unscriptural, observance of Lent. Since Thurs- day even the bells, always so offensively noisy in advertizing the Clergy and their doings, have been silent. In some places — as, for instance, in Malta — the people are called together during these days by the clapping of boards, a process which I have also witnessed at the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem. But, at any rate, the silence is frequently broken by the rattling of Judas' bones — a statement which may fairly require some explanation.
Well, the said bones are pieces of wood, used as a sort of Castanet, which the boys rattle in the streets more or less throughout Lent. This is one way in which the people show their piety, by rattling the supposed bones of the traitor : while, at the end of Lent, they belabour his image with clubs, and afterwards burn it. In the same manner one may some- times see the effigy of Judas burned amid execrations, at this time of the year, on board the Portuguese ships in the London Docks. Truly there are strange ways of expressing piety !
But we will now watch the ceremony of the blessing of the fire. Just outside the door of the church, on the right side and on the upper step, is a little heap of shavings and fircones ; and many children in picturesque dresses are stand- ing near to see the sight. Immediately within the door a lectern has been placed, and the service-book is laid upon it ; so that everything is now ready for the ceremony.
Soon after nine o'clock, a company of priests, handsomely dressed, with acolytes, etc., march in procession from within to
CONSECRATION OF HOLY FIRE AND WATER. 10/
the door. They bring with them a censer, a vessel of holy water with a sprinkler, and a plate upon which are laid some small candles, a piece of incense, an apparatus for striking a light, and four lemon-coloured and lemon-like balls. There is some trouble in producing the light, since the Papacy will have nothing to do with the " lucifers " of the nineteenth century, and rigidly adheres to the old flint-and-steel as appointed by her rubric.
So there is a long pause, while the priest is contending with his difficulties. At length, however, the light is obtained in the orthodox way, the shavings and fircones are kindled, and from them the incense in the censer, and also the candles. Now follows a brief ofifice in the porch, and the candles, objects in the plate, etc., together with the fire itself, are all sprinkled with holy water — that is, with the old holy water consecrated a twelvemonth ago. Now a procession is formed, and as it slowly advances up the church, those who compose it chant, and, at stated intervals, fall on their knees, until in this manner they reach the altar, where some candles, v/hich have been previously extinguished, are relighted with the newly-obtained fire.
Such was the ceremony, and very Heathen and wizard it seemed. Picart gives an engraving of it, but no explanation. Foye's Romish Rites furnishes the following additional particu- lars, among others. — That the priest blesses the new fire in front of the church, then blesses five grains of incense to be put into the wax taper, and sprinkles them with holy water ; and also that three candles, previously blessed, and fixed on a triangle elevated upon a cane, are lighted at intervals.
Later, in the same morning, the water ceremony is performed ; but this takes place within the church. I extract from Foye the following particulars in regard to it.
It appears that there are three kinds of holy water, two of which are used for the consecration of churches.
I08 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Of these two, the first is considered to be inferior, since nothing but salt is used in its preparation — " salt exorcised for the salvation of those that believe." It serves for sprinkling the building.
The other is made up by a mixture of salt, ashes, and wine — all blessed, of course. This appears to be the holier of the two, and is used for the consecration of the altar.
The third cldss of holy water, that which is referred to above as being consecrated on " Holy Saturday," is used for baptisms during the following year ; and also, as I gather, for sprinkling generally.
In its preparation — amid many exorcisms of devils and evil spirits, and forms of prayer — the following ceremonies are observed.
The priest divides the water in the font, with his hand, in the shape of a cross.
In exorcising the water, he touches it with his hand.
In blessing it, he thrice makes over it the sign of the cross.
In dividing it, he pours it towards the four quarters of heaven.
He breathes thrice into it in the form of a cross.
He lets down the great Paschal candle a little into it, and says, " The might of the Holy Ghost descend into this fountain-plenitude" — /;/ hanc pleiiitiidincin fontis.
Then he takes the candle from the water, and again merges it more deeply, saying the same words as before, but in a higher tone.
The third time he plunges it to the bottom, again repeating the formula with a still louder voice.
Then blowing — sufflans — thrice into the water in the form of the Greek letter Psi, he says, " Impregnate with regenerating efficacy the whole substance of this water ;" and so takes the candle out of the font.
Besides these doings, various oils are poured into the
CONSECRATION OF HOLY FIRE AND WATER. 109
water, and mixed with the hand ; and, still more strange, spittle is mingled with it, as I have once seen with my own eyes in the grand Baptistry at St. John Lateran in Rome !
" The miglit of the Holy Ghost descend into this fountain- plenitude, and impregnate tvith regenerating efficacy the whole substance of this water.
Such is the spell. Exorcisms first chase all evil spirits from the water, then incantations and charms^dividings, oils, cross- ings, breathings, candle-plungings, and other things — cause the might of the Holy Ghost to descend and impregnate the water with regenerating efficacy. It is no longer ordinary water, such as that wherein the eunuch or Cornelius and his friends were baptized ; but, by the power of charms, it has become an ecclesiastical compound, and those to whom it is administered are made new creatures and regenerate, not — so far as I understand — because they are brought by faith to Christ, but through the mere application of the fluid impregnated with virtue by an ecclesiastical process. And the only man who can make and apply this " Elixir of Life " — of eternal life ! — is the priest.
To the Law and to the Testimony, and how cruel a decep- tion is this system of magic detected to be. It is not the water of Baptism which regenerates, but the Word of God implanted in us by His Spirit. Hear the evidence : —
" Of His own will begat He us with the Word of truth "' (James i. 18).
" Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorrup- tible, by the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever " (i Peter i. 23).
" That He might sanctify and cleanse it — the Church — with the washing of water by the Word " {Eph. v. 26).
XVIII.
THE FEAST OF THE PURIFICATION, OR CANDLEMAS.
THE Feast of the Purification, or Candlemas, was, as Picart tells us, substituted for the Heathen festival called Ambarvalia ; in which processions were made through the fields, and a sacrifice was offered for purification. At the same time it also took the place of the nocturnal perambula- tions with lighted torches, which commemorated the wanderings of Ceres, when she traversed the country in search of her daughter Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried off.
In the early ages of the Church, it could not but be noticed that these Roman feasts were the causes of much debauchery, and consequently Christian PontiiTs were anxious to do away with them. It was, however, thought necessary to give the people some equivalent ; and, with this view, the second day of February was devoted to the Feast of the Purification. It was called Candlemas, and the torches and wax tapers, formerly carried about in honour of Ceres, were now connected with the Holy Virgin ; while the people were permitted to indulge in the diversions and pleasures which such occasions never failed to inspire. See Picart., vol. i., p. 163.
Thus Ceres went out, and Mary came in ; torches disap- peared, and candles succeeded.
In Sicily, a similar transformation was effected, but with the difference that there Agatha, the patron saint of Catania, and not Mary, was substituted for the Heathen goddess Ceres.
The following extract will show that Picart is not alone in his opinion respecting the design oi these adaptations,
CANDLEMAS. 1 1 i
which were as common as they were ruinous to the purity of Christianity.
" Theophylact, Patriarch of Constantinople, with a design of weaning men from Heathen ceremonies, particularly those of Bacchus, substituted Christian festivals partaking of a similar spirit of licentiousness, which led to a still further adoption of rites more or less imitated from the Pagans." — Chambers' Book of Days, Jan. 14.
Judaism, Gnosticism, and Heathenism — these from the first were the tares sown with the wheat.
During his stay in Sicily, Professor Blunt witnessed the festival of St. Agatha, and was much struck with its corre- spondence to that of Ceres. He mentions, among other things, the fact that the day of observance, February 2nd, is the same ; and also that, according to the testimony of Ovid, the fete of Ceres commenced with a horse-race, at which the Town Council were present, which is also the custom at St. Agatha's festival.
Candles and torches of an enormous size used to be dedi- cated to the " Bona Dea." Similar offerings are now presented to the saint, and in a similar manner.
The goddess was borne to her temple upon a splendid throne, and in great state ; the saint is conveyed to her cathedral with equal pomp, and on a silver throne.
Ovid tells us that at the Eleusinia, or festival of Ceres, all were draped in white, and at the feast of St. Agatha, the favourite colour is also white.
To the programme of each of the festivals there is appended a grand procession, during the progress of which the ancient cry to the goddess was, " Hail, Ceres ! " while " Viva, Sta. Agatha ! " is the modern greeting addressed to the saint. And it is certainly remarkable that the day of the modern procession coincides with that of the ancient, both of them being the fourth day of the festival.
112 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
Lastly, in the matter of relics the goddess resembled the saint ; for the relics of the former were deposited in a holy basket, which was conveyed in a consecrated cart ; while those of the latter are placed in a sacred chest, and carried in a sacred car. Goddess and saint, basket and chest, cart and car — how exact the parallel between ancient and modern Heathenism !
Relics have ever been objects of reverence in Heathen worship. According to Varro, the original sow which verified an augury to yEneas was preserved by the priests at Lavinium — a somewhat strange fancy ! To the bones of Theseus, which were laid up at Athens, we have already referred. Men have always had a passion for such things : what has been, is ; and what is, will be.
The relics of St. Agatha, as Blunt tells us, are her veil — by means of which the eruptions of Mount Etna have been more than once stayed, if you are disposed to believe it — her foot, and her breast. According to the legend, both her breasts were cut off; where the other is I do not know, but how much better if such things were buried out of sight. These relics are generally to be seen in her pictures, so that one can easily recognize her. I shall never forget the look of contempt which a painter, who was copying something in a gallery at Florence, gave me when I pointed to St. Agatha, and said, " Who, pray sir, is that saint ? " Much more polite was the treatment I received at Naples, from an artist of whom I inquired the name of the painter of the Virgin, in copying which he was busily engaged. He not only told me the name, but added the undesired information, " And the original, sir, was his mistress."
While staying at Orvieto, in South Italy, in the May of 1879, I was much struck with the very pleasing effect of a procession which had assembled to perform some such ceremony as that of the ancient Ambarvalia. Led by the clergy of the
CANDLEMAS. II3
cathedral, beneath the spacious roof of which it had been marshalled, and composed of various guilds of the town in their many-coloured costumes, its distant appearance was charming. First traversing the streets of the town, it then emerged into the country, passing through vineyards, corn- fields, pastures, and woodlands, with streaming banners long drawn out. As it wound round the rocks of that magnificent scenery, and went in and out among the olive-trees, the sight was certainly dehghtful. But what was the use of it? Heathenism and processions have, indeed, always kept com- pany ; but where in the New Testament do we read of such a thing in association with Christianity ?
Among the many remarkable pictures at the Luxembourg, there is one which well illustrates our subject. It depicts an imitation of the Heathen ceremony of Ambarvalia. The priest, with his attendants, is seen carrying the Host, as he winds his way through the cornfields in spring, and blesses them with holy water and other mystic rites. It is difficult to realize that the subject is " Christian," and not Heathen.
XIX.
THE IMAGES OF THE GODS.
MANY are the objects of worship to which the heart of man has turned aside from God. Among tliese are the heavenly bodies (Job xxxi. 26-28), the brute creation (Rom. i. 23), fire, the generative principle, the productive principle, the frame of nature, and fetish. But there is also another and very prevalent kind of idolatry ; that is, the worship of dead men — ancestors, heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, and saints male and female.
•This is hero-worship ; and is called Demonolatry, or the worship of the spirits of dead men who, by ecclesiastical authority, whether Christian or Heathen, have been canonized, and are thus supposed to have become qualified recipients of public worship.
But of these — since they are invisible, and the nature of man desires something which can be laid hold of by the senses — tangible representations have been made in the form of images and pictures.
" Images," says the Roman Catholic writer in ricart, " are nearly as ancient as worship itself; and no wonder, since their origin is due to the weakness of humanity. Man could not long fix his attention on purely spiritual objects, and, therefore, insensibly turned to the material, and tried, so to sjjcak, to render the object of worship palpable.
" It is true that the use of these signs becomes dangerous. Formerly God was obliged to forbid it to the Jews : the Christians, however " — mark the writer's irony — " thought
THE IMAGES OF THE GODS. II5
that they might without risk imitate their predecessors, the Heathen.
" Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, in order to preserve the new converts from the guilt of idolatry, destroyed the images in his diocese. But St. Gregory, the Pope (d. 604), ordered them to be restored, considering that pastoral instruction would correct the grossest of popular errors." — Picart, vol. i., chap. 3.
Fallacious and ruinous idea, too clearly manifested by the prevalence and endurance of idolatry in Christendom ! I suppose Gregory thought as did a traveller of the last century, who, after remarking upon the difficulty of teaching an illiterate peasant to comprehend an immaterial and invisible God, adds, "But set up before him the figure of a fine woman, with a beautiful child in her arms — the most interesting object in nature — and tell him she can procure him everything he wants ; he knows perfectly well what he is about, feels himself animated by the object, and prays to her with all his might." — Bridone's Tour, vol. i., p. 163.
" The ancient Heathen also, long before the introduction of Christianity, attributed the power of working miracles to the images of their gods and heroes. Livy, that ingenious Pagan fabulist, adorned his pages with an infinity of piiracles and prodigies, among which are several relating to images. And Cicero — not one of the credulous — often mentions religious marvels; as, for instance, the sweating of statues. He assures us that the statue of Apollo at Cumae perspired, as also that of Victory at Capua." — Picart.
And such things are still believed, as we may easily discover from well-known instances of sweating saints and winking Virgins. Here is an example from the Report of the Syrian Schools at Bcyrout, 1876. "The priests publicly announced that, on a certain day, the image of the Virgin would perspire ; and that all must come and dip their fingers in the perspiration, and make the sign of the cross."
Il6 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
In May, 1876, I was at Clermont Ferard, the capital of Auvergne, in France, and upon entering a shop close to the famous Sanctuary of Notre Dame du Port, found myself confronting a grisette who was selling prints and images of this same Lady of the Port.
*' But tell me, Ma'm'selle, tell me, pray," said I, " is the image in the church yonder really miraculous ? "
" Certainly it is, Monsieur. It has performed many — many miracles."
She, too, believed the lie, poor thing. So I went to see the idol ; and lo ! there it was, a mean diminutive little thing, but painted of course by St. Luke, as most of these images were if you will only be good enough to believe what you are told. It was placed above the altar, in a crypt brilliantly lighted with candles, adorned with many votive offerings, and at the time occupied by a crowd of worshippers ; for the Fete of the image was then going on. The sight was touching ; for all seemed, and many no doubt were, much in earnest.
One incident specially affected me. A young servant girl, brimming over, no doubt, with love of the image, offered a rosary, and Soeur Marie, an habituee of the church, mounting some steps and kneeling upon the altar, hung the little gift round the idol's neck.
Dear child ! no doubt she gave the tiny offering with all her heart : but, oh ! that that heart had been drawn to Christ instead of to the senseless image ! Then her adoring love would have been worship, and not idolatry.
In the Museum of the Capitol at Rome, there is another girl, portrayed in marble — not French, but Roman ; not modern, but ancient ; not a worshipper of the image of Mary, but of the image of Hygeia, the goddess of health, to whom, as you see in the cut on the opposite page, she is presenting the usual offering of cakes.
She lives now but in marble. Yet once she, too, was warm
%
THE IMAGES OF THE GODS.
117
with life, and her heart beat with emotions Hke that of the French girl. How similar their circumstances ! Each of them had a patroness, revered her image, would have kissed it with
lively feeling, and sought to gain favours from it. Both of them offered gifts, the most acceptable they could procure; the one the rosary, the other the cakes. The Roman girl did
Il8 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
SO for the restoration of her health ; the French maiden for the success, it may be, of a love-affair, or, perhaps, for pros- perity in some little " commerce " which she was meditating.
Here then are two girls equally, we will say, well-intentioned, pious, and devout, yet the one is called a Christian, and the other a Heathen. Nay ; it is not so. In the particular acts of worship of which we have been speaking both girls were alike Heathen : for both performed a Heathen rite, and both bowed down to a graven image. Such things are idolatry ; and it matters little whether they be done in the temple of the goddess Mary at Clermont, or before the image of the goddess Hygeia in the temple of ^sculapius at Rome.
A great contrast to the pretty Heathen votary and her goddess is a wooden idol, about six inches high, and painted in blue, red, and yellow, which people venerate at Le Puy, the capital of the volcanic region of Auvergne in the centre of France. It is a black Virgin, and is represented on page 119.
I visited Auvergne, in the August of 1 861, to examine the remarkable church-architecture of the district, and then obtained a portrait of this beauty. How hot it was that summer ! — the thermometer in the carriage at 93° — it should have been a good vintage.
But, to return to the Black Virgin, I am thoroughly puzzled in regard to the attractiveness of ugliness ; for in England, alas ! we have an artistic school devoted to it. How often do we see children enamoured of their very ugliest doll ; and certainly in the churches the most hideous images, and this Black Virgin of Le Puy among them, are generally the most popular. There is an instance of this at Dijon, and I have a vivid remembrance of a little ugly deformity in Rome, brought — so they say— from Jerusalem. It may be found in the church just outside the city gate, below the Vatican palace; and the last time I was there, a lovely basket of camellias, the offering of Pio Nono, lay before the image.
THE IMAGES OF THE GODS.
119
Evidently beauty is no necessity to an object of adoration ; for the black deformities abound in France and Italy. And could there be anything more offensive than the volto sacro, or " sacred countenance," of our Lord at Luca ? How frightful, again, are the gods worshipped by the Heathen of modern
times. And even the idols of the old Etruscans, a people of taste, are, as we see them on their monuments, often not merely ugly, but ridiculous. The attraction of ugliness certainly is a puzzle.
The Black Virgin of Le Puy is actually called the Mother of God ! " Mother of God ! " exclaimed John Knox, when, during his captivity in France, they presented to him a similar
I20 ROME: PAGAN AND PAPAL.
image to kiss, " Mother of God ! Why, it is only a painted board ! "
My beauty, too, is, as you may infer from the woodcut, only a painted board. Together with the rest of its kind, it pro-