trude or of St. Theresa. Lest, however, our hasty sketch of Benedictine intellectual greatness should be defective, without some specimen of their super-terrestrial poetry, we venture to remind our readers of one passage of which M. de Malan (one of Mabillon's biographers) has reminded us ourselves, in which the author of the De Imitatione Christi' (himself a Benedictine, if Mabillon may be trusted) has sung to his Æolian harp a more than earthly strain. It is, indeed, an excellent example of a style of which we have no model in our own language, except perhaps in occasional passages of Archbishop Leighton. My son, let not the sayings of men move thee, however 'beautiful or ingenious they may be: for the kingdom of God ' consisteth not in words but in power. • Weigh well my words, for they kindle the heart, illuminate 'the mind, quicken compunction, and supply abundant springs ' of consolation. Read not the Word of God in order that thou mayest appear 6 more learned or more wise. When thou shalt have read and known many things, then return to the one beginning and principle of all things. I am he that teacheth man knowledge, and to little children • I impart an understanding more clear than man can teach. He to whom I speak shall quickly be wise, and in spirit 'shall profit largely. Woe be to them that search out many curious things, and 'take little thought how they may serve me. I am he who, in one instant, raise up the humble in mind to 'understand eternal truth better than if he had studied many 'years in the schools. I teach without noise of words, without confusion of opi'nions, without ambition of honour, without the shock of 'arguments. To some men I speak common things, to others things rare; 'to some I appear sweetly by signs; to some, with much light, I 'discover mysteries. The voice of books is, indeed, one; but it is a voice which 'instructs not all alike. I am he who teaches the truth concealed 'within the voice. I the searcher of the heart, the discoverer of 'the thoughts, promoting holy actions, distributing to each one as I will.' If, as the Benedictines maintained, this sacred chant was really sung by a poet of their own fraternity about the beginning of the fourteenth century, it may be looked upon as a kind of threnody, designed to intimate the approaching obscuration of their order. For already might be observed, in a state of morbid activity among them, those principles of decay which were pointed out so indignantly by Benedict himself to Dante, when, under the guidance of Beatrice, the poet had ascended to his presence in the seventh heaven: * My rule Is left a profitless stain upon the leaves; The walls, for abbeys reared, turned into dens ; Against God's pleasure, than that fruit which makes Carey's Dante, canto xxii., 'Il Paradiso.' In the lapse of more than seven centuries, the state of society had undergone vast changes; but the institutes of Benedict had not been changed to meet them. The new exigencies of life demanded reformations in the religious state which Francis, Dominic, and Loyola, successively established. They combined a more mature policy with a younger enthusiasm. Exhibiting ascetic self-mortifications, till then unknown among any of the monastic communities of the West, they, also, formed relations equally new with the laity in all their offices-domestic, political, military, and commercial. Having, at the same time, obtained possession of nearly all the pulpits of the Latin Church, the imagination, the interests, and the consciences of mankind fell so much under the control of these new fraternities, that their influence was felt throughout all the ramifications of society. While the spiritual dominion of the earlier monasticism was continually narrowed by this formidable competition, the Benedictines were no less constantly becoming more and more entangled in the cares and enjoyments of the world. They established an ill-omened alliance with the Templars, with the Knights of Calatrava and Alcantara, and with five other orders of chivalry-an unhallowed companionship, which, by familiarising the monks with the military, and dissolute manners of these new brethren, gradually contaminated their own. Wealth and temporal prosperity were no less prolific of evil in the order of St. Benedict than in other societies in which their enervating influence has been felt. But on the monks riches inflicted a peculiar disaster. For, riches tempted the chief sovereigns of Europe to usurp the patronage of the religious houses; and to transfer the government of them from abbots elected by the chapters, to abbots appointed by the king. The grant of these conventual benefices in commendam, was one of those abuses in the Church, which yielded to no reform until the Church herself and her abuses were swept away together, by the torrent of the French revolution. It was, however, a practice in favour of which the most venerable antiquity might. be alleged. From the earliest times churches had been placed under a kind of tutelage, between the death of the incumbent and the appointment of his successor. But it not rarely happened that when the period of this spiritual guardianship was over, the tutor had become too much enamoured of his ward, and possessed too much influence with the great, to acquiesce in a separation from her. In such cases the commendatory, aided by some ill-fed stipendiary curate, assumed all the privileges and immunities of a sinecurist. Yet it was not necessary to rely on any vulgar names in defence or in extenuation of this usage. The great Athanasius himself held a bishopric in commendam, in addition to his see of Alexandria. Neither were they vulgar names by whom it was condemned. Hildebrand, Innocent III., and the Fathers of Trent, rivalled each other in denunciations of the abuse; and were cordially seconded by Philippe Auguste, by St. Louis, and even by Francis I. Papal, synodal, and royal decrees, proved, however, too feeble to check an abuse so tempting to royal and sacerdotal cupidity. The French kings converted the splendid monastery of Fontverault into an appanage for a long succession of royal or noble ladies. The abbey of St. Germains des Prés also was given in commendam by Louis the Debonnaire, to a bishop of Poictiers; by Eudes to his brother Robert, a layman; and at length, by Louis XIII., to a widow of the Duke of Lorraine-which is much as though the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge, had been given to the widow of the Elector Palatine. During the progress of this decay, there was no lack of reformers, or of reforms of the Benedictine Order. But the corrupting proved too strong for the renovating power; and their decline proceeded without any real check until, in the year 1614, Dom Nicholas Benard became a member of the congregation of St. Maur. Benard was one of those reformers to whom it is given to innovate, at once in the spirit of the institution which they desire to improve, and in the spirit of the age in which the improvement is to be made. His object was to bring back his order to the dutifulness, the industry, and the self-renunciation enjoined by Benedict. His remedial process consisted in conducting them, by exhortation and by his own example, to the culture of those studies which were held in highest esteem in France in the reigns of the 13th and of the 14th Louis. In those times no seeds of science or literature could be sown in that favoured VOL. LXXXIX. NO. CLXXIX. C land without yielding an abundant increase. The reason of this redundant fertility at that particular era, no historian can explain and no psychologist can conjecture. But, like the other promoters of learning in his age, Benard soon found himself followed and surrounded by a band of scholars, who joined with him in the successful culture of all historical, antiquarian, and critical knowledge. With their aid, he restored one of the chief households of the great Benedictine race to even more than their pristine glory. During the 17th century one hundred and five writers in the congregation of St. Maur (then established at St. Germain des Près) divided among them this harvest of literary renown. A complete collection of their works would form a large and very valuable library; as may indeed be inferred from a bare enumeration of the books of the earlier and later fathers, which they republished. Among them are the best editions which the world has seen of the writings of St. Gregory the Great, of Lanfranc, Basil, Bernard, Anselm, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, Athanasius, Gregory of Tours, Irenæus, Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Tertullian, Justin, and Origen; to which must be added their edition of Josephus. But it would be as easy to form an image of the Grecian Camp from the catalogue of the ships, as to conceive aright of the Benedictines of St. Maur from an enumeration of their publications and the names of them. To exhibit some slight sketch of that great seminary as it existed in its days of splendour, it is necessary to confine our attention to the Achilles of their host to him whom all the rest revered as their great example, and acknowledged by acclamation as their head. The life of Mabillon has been written by Ruinart, his affectionate pupil; by Dom Filipe le Cerf, the historiographer of the congregation; and more recently by M. Chavin de Malan. To the last of those biographers we are largely indebted for much valuable information. But a companion at once more instructive and provoking, or a guide less worthy of confidence, never offered himself at the outset of any literary journey. It is the pleasure of M. de Malan to qualify the speculative propensities of our own age, by the blindest credulity of the middle ages. He is at the same moment a rhetorician and an antiquarian (as a dervish dances while he prays), and is never satisfied with investigating truth, unless he can also embellish and adorn it. Happily, however, we are not dependent on his guidance. All that is most interesting respecting Mabillon may be gathered from his own letters and his works. For to write was the very law of his existence; and from youth to old age his pen un ceasingly plied those happy tasks, of which the interest never fails and the tranquillity can never be disturbed. Jean Mabillon was born at the village of St. Pierre Mont, in Champagne, on the 23d of November, 1632. His mother did not long survive his birth; but Ruinart congratulates himself on having seen Etienne, the father of Jean, at the age of 105, in the full enjoyment of all his mental and bodily powers. Jean himself was sent by his paternal uncle, the curé of a parish near Rheims, to a college in that city, which, on his return homewards from the Council of Trent, the celebrated Cardinal of Lorraine had founded there for the education of clergymen. The habits of the place well became its origin. Except while addressing their teachers, the pupils passed in profound silence every hour of the day save that of noon; when they amused themselves in a garden, where, as we read, it was their custom, many hundred times a day, to salute a conspicuous image of the Virgin, with assurances of their veneration and their love. Whatever may have been the effects of this discipline on the characters of his fellow students, it moulded the meek and quiet nature of Mabillon into the exact form which the authors of it regarded as the most perfect. He surrendered up his will to theirs; and yielding his whole soul to the divine offices of his college chapel, became so familiar with them, that when, after an absence of more than fifty years, Ruinart knelt beside him there, he heard the then aged man repeat, from memory, with unerring exactness, every prayer, every ceremonial, and every sacred melody in which he had been accustomed to offer up the devotions of his youth. In the year 1653, and (to use the chronology of the cloister and of Oxford) on the feast of the Decollation of St. John the Baptist, Mabillon was received as a Postulant at the Benedictine monastery then attached to the cathedral church of St. Remy. In that sublime edifice his imagination had long before been entranced by the anticipated delights of a life of devotional retirement. It had been his single indulgence, while at college, to wander thither that he might listen to the choral strains as they rose, and floated, and died away through the recesses of those long-drawn aisles; and there had he often proposed to himself the question, whether this world had any thing to offer so peaceful and so pure as an habitual ministration at those hallowed altars, and an unbroken ascent of the heart heavenwards, on the wings of those unearthly psalmodies? To this inquiry his judgment, or his feelings, still returned the same answer; and, at the end of his novitiate, he gladly pronounced those irrevocable vows which were to exclude him for |