election. Then, quitting for ever his native England, Boniface pursued his way to Rome, to solicit the aid of Pope Gregory the Second, in his efforts for the conversion of the German people. Armed with a papal commission, a papal blessing, and a good store of relics, Boniface again appeared in Friesland, where Charles Martel was now the undisputed master. Victory had rendered him devout, and he gladly countenanced the labours of the monk, to bring his new subjects within the fold of the Christian Church. So ardent, indeed, was his zeal for this great work, that the destined author of it was soon compelled to migrate into Saxony, as the only means of escaping the unwelcome command of the conqueror to fix his residence in Friesland, and there to assume the coadjutorship and succession to the Bishop of Utrecht. The missionary labours of Boniface, interrupted only by three short visits to Rome, were prolonged over a period of more than thirty-six years; and were extended over all the territories between the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Ocean. At Rome he sought and found all the support which papal authority, zeal, and wisdom could afford him. Gregory the Second consecrated him a bishop, though without a diocese. Gregory the Third raised him to be the Archbishop and Primate of all Germany; with power to establish bishoprics there at his discretion. The same pontiff afterwards nominated him Legate of the Holy See, in Germany and France. To these distinctions Pope Zachary added the Archbishopric of Mentz, then first constituted the metropolis of the German churches. Last of all was bestowed on him the singular privilege of appointing his own successor in his primacy. There have been churchmen to whom such a memento of the vanity of even the highest ecclesiastical dignities would have afforded but an equivocal satisfaction. To Boniface the remembrance of the shortness of life was not only familiar, but welcome. The treatise of Ambrose on the advantages of death was his constant companion. It had taught him to regard his successive promotions but as the means of preparing his mind for the joyful resignation of them all. His seventy-fourth year was now completed. For the spiritual care of his converts he had established seven new bishoprics, and had built and endowed many monasteries for the advancement of piety and learning among them. At last abdicating his own mitre in favour of Lullus, a monk of Malmesbury, he solemnly devoted his remaining days to that office of a missionary, which he justly esteemed as far nobler than any symbolised by the crosier, the purple, or the tiara. Girding round him his black Benedictine habit, and depositing his Ambrose De Bono Mortis' in the folds of it, he once more travelled to Friesland; and pitching his tent on the banks of a small rivulet, awaited there the arrival of a body of neophytes, whom he had summoned to receive at his hands the rite of confirmation. Ere long a multitude appeared in the distance; advancing towards the tent, not however with the lowly demeanour of Christian converts drawing near to their bishop, but carrying deadly weapons, and announcing by their cries and gestures that they were Pagans, sworn to avenge their injured deities against the arch-enemy of their worship. The servants of Boniface drew their swords in his defence; but calmly, and even cheerfully awaiting the approach of his enemies, and forbidding all resistance, he fell beneath their blows a martyr to the faith which he had so long lived, and so bravely died, to propagate. copy of Ambrose, De Bono Mortis,' covered with his blood, was exhibited, during many succeeding centuries, at Fulda as a relic. It was contemplated there by many who regarded as superstitious and heretical some of the tenets of Boniface. But no Christian, whatever might be his own peculiar creed, ever looked upon that blood-stained memorial of him without the profoundest veneration. 6 His For, since the Apostolic Age, no greater benefactor of our race has arisen among men than the Monk of Nutsall, unless it be that other Monk of Wittemberg who, at the distance of seven centuries, appeared to reform and reconstruct the churches founded by the holy Benedictine. To Boniface the north and west of Germany, and Holland, still look back as their spiritual progenitor; nor did any uninspired man ever add to the permanent dominion of our faith provinces of such extent and value. If, in accomplishing that great work, Boniface relied more on human authority than is consistent with the practice, or, rather, with the theory, of our Protestant churches, his still extant letters will show that he rebuked, with indignant energy, the vices of the great on whom he was dependent. In placing the crown of Childeric on the head of Pepin, he may have been guilty of some worldly compliance with the usurper. Yet it is not to be forgotten that the pope himself had favoured the cause of the Mayor of the Palace, by his Delphic response, 'Melius esse illum vocari regem apud quem summa potestas consisteret.' The guides of our own missionary enterprises will, probably, accuse Boniface of undue promptitude in admitting within the pale any one who chose to submit himself to the mere outward form of baptism. His facility is indisputable; but what Protestant will venture to condemn the measures which brought within the precincts of the Christian Church the native lands of Luther, of Grotius, and of Melancthon? On a single occasion we find him wearing a garb at least resembling that of an inquisitor. Within his spiritual jurisdiction came a Frenchman, working miracles, and selling as relics the cuttings of his own hair and the parings of his own nails. This worthy had an associate in one Vincent, a Scotchman, a sort of premature Knox-a teacher, it is said, of heresies-but certainly a stout opponent of all the laws and canons of the Church. Moved by Boniface, the secular arm lodged them both in close prison; and, all things considered, one must doubt their claim to any better lodgings. Peace be, however, to the faults of Boniface! whatever they may have been. Among the heroes of active piety, the world has few greater to revere; as the disciples of Benedict have assuredly none greater to boast. They boast, however, in Lanfranc, another primate, to whose far-seeing wisdom in the government of mankind may not obscurely be traced much of the vital spirit of those venerable institutions which are still the glory of the Anglo-Saxon race, in our own islands and in the North American continent. In his romance of Harold,' Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton solving, with equal erudition and creative fancy, the great problem of his art (the problem how to produce the greatest amount of dramatic effect at the least expense of historical truth), has produced a living portrait of Lanfranc, the subtle Italian, who, armed with homilies for the devout, jests for the facetious, austerities for the superstitious, learning for the inquisitive, and obsequiousness for the great, renders the weakness and the strength of each in turn tributary to his own ambition; and ascends the throne of Canterbury, not merely by the aid of the meek old Abbot Herduin, but on the shoulders of the imperious William and the imperial Hildebrand. Our great master of historico-romantic portraiture would have destroyed the picturesque unity of his beautiful sketch if, by advancing further, he had taught us (and who could have taught us so powerfully?) how vast is the debt of gratitude which England owes to her great primates Lanfranc, Anselm, Langton, and Beckett, or rather to that benign Providence which raised them up in that barbarous age. Whatever may have been their personal motives, and whatever their demerits, they, and they alone, wrestled successfully with the despotism of the Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation; maintaining among us, even in those evil days, the balanced power, the control of public opinion, and the influence of moral, over physical, force which from their times passed as a birthright to the parliaments of Henry the Third and his successors; and which at this day remains the inheritance of England, and of all the free communities with which she has covered, and is still peopling, the globe. The thunders and reproaches of Rome are sufficiently encountered, by such reverberated thunders and reproaches as they provoke. To those who deplore alike the necessity and the rancour of the conflict, it may yet be permitted to render a due and therefore a reverent homage to the ancient prelates of the Roman Church. Unchecked by the keen wisdom, the ecclesiastical policy, and the Roman sympathies of the Benedictine Lanfranc, the fierce Conqueror would have acquired and transmitted to his posterity on the English throne, a power absolute and arbitrary, beneath the withering influence of which every germ of the future liberties and greatness of England must have prematurely perished. When, in the mind of William Rufus, the fear of death had prevailed over the thirst for the revenues of Canterbury, he placed the mitre of Lanfranc on the head of the Benedictine Anselm; anticipating, probably, a less effective assertion of the rights of the Church by the retired and gentle student, than had been made by his insinuating and worldly-wise predecessor. In the great controversy of investitures, however, Anselm showed that nothing is so inflexible as meekness, sustained and animated by the firm conviction of right. Yet at the very moment of success, he turned aside from these agitations, to revolve the mysterious enigmas which it was at once the purpose and the delight of his existence to unravel. Those boundless realms of thought over which, in the solitude of his library, he enjoyed a princely but unenvied dominion, were in his eyes of incomparably higher value, than either his primacy of the Church of England, or his triumph in maintaining the prerogatives of the Church of Rome. In our days, indeed, his speculations are forgotten; and the very subjects of them have fallen into disesteem. Yet, except perhaps the writings of Erigena, those of Anselm on the Will of God,' on Truth,' on Free-will,' and on the Divine Prescience,' are not only the earliest in point of time, but, in the order of invention, are the earliest models, of those scholastic works, which exhibit, in such intimate and curious union, the prostration and the aspirings of the mind of manprostrating itself to the most absurd of human dogmas -aspiring to penetrate the loftiest and the most obscure of the Divine attributes. Truth may have concealed herself from most of these inquirers; but their researches formed no unimportant part of the education which was gradually preparing the intellect of Europe - for admission into her sanctuary. Among the followers of Anselm are to be reckoned not merely the Doctors-Venerable, Invincible, Irrefragable, Angelical, and Seraphic, — but a far greater than they, even Des Cartes himself—who, as may be learnt from Brucker, borrowed from the Benedictine philosopher his proof of the Being of a God. Anselm taught that the abstract idea of Deity was the fontal principle of all knowledge -that as God himself is the primeval source of all existence in the outer world, so the Idea of God precedes, and conducts us to, all other ideas in the world within us-and that, until we have risen to that remotest spring of all our thoughts, we cannot conceive rightly of the correspondence of our own perceptions with the realities amidst which we exist. If these speculations are not very intelligible, they are at least curious. They show that the metaphysicians who lived when Westminster Hall was rising from its foundations, and those who lived when the first stone of our Edinburgh University was laid, beat themselves very much in the same manner against the bars of their mental prison-house. Philosophy may thrive in other places than conventual cells. But there is a literature which scarcely flourishes elsewhere. The peculiar and spontaneous product of the monastery is mystic devotion. If the Benedictines had been cursed with barrenness in yielding this fruit, they would have resembled a Dutch garden in which it was impossible to cultivate the tulip. But no such reproach clings to the sons and daughters of Benedict. It must, however, be admitted that our own land has been singularly destitute of fertility in this the most delicate of all the plants cultivated in monastic seclusion. We produced schoolmen to satiety. Erigena, Hales, Duns Scotus, and Occam were our own. But we must pass over to Spain and Germany to find a type of Benedictine greatness, in that impalpable, though gorgeous world, which in later times was inhabited by Molinos and by Fénélon. In those more fortunate regions, many are the half-inspired rhapsodists whom we encounter-chiefly ladies, and, what is worthy of notice, ladies who from their childhood had scarcely ever strayed beyond the convent garden. Nevertheless, the indestructible peculiarity of our national character (whether it be shyness or dryness, high aims or low aims, the fear of irreverence for what is holy, or the fear of being laughed at for what is absurd), that character which forbade the public utterance in these islands of the impassioned communings of the soul with its Maker and with itself, forbids us to make any report to our fellow countrymen of the sublime Canticles' of St. Ger |