CRISTO RAUL.ORG ' |
THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY |
FROM JUSTINIAN TO LUTHER. AD 518-1517
CHAPTER XVI.
LATER MEDIEVAL PIETY
IN the period of nearly five hundred years which
elapsed between the separation of Rome and Constantinople and the outbreak of
the Reformation there was not any great addition to the fundamental dogmas of
the Church. The three creeds known as the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Quicumque vult had
gathered up the results of the Church's conflicts with heresy from the days of
the early Gnostics to those of Nestorius, and defined the teaching of the New
Testament concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity. Closely connected with
the doctrine of the Person of Christ was the doctrine of the Eucharist, and in
1215 the Western Church at the Lateran Council accepted the term
transubstantiation as describing the change effected by the consecration of the
Eucharistic bread and wine. In the meantime new efforts were made to explain
how the work of Christ was to be interpreted and the fruit of that work
applied. The Atonement was studied with new interest, and St. Anselm's book
explaining the redemptive and propitiatory nature of Christ's self-oblation shed
light on an essential element in the doctrine of the Bible. On this, and many
other subjects, Rome had made no authoritative utterance, although the doctrine
of the Pope's infallibility had already been affirmed by St. Thomas Aquinas.
But there existed a great area of religious practice and custom, good and evil,
sanctioned and sometimes actively encouraged by the leaders of the Church, and
made authoritative by papal permission.
One of the best features of new thought and new
movement in piety is the fresh love for Jesus Christ as Man, and gratitude for
His Passion. His Godhead is understood through His manhood, and the great hymns
of this period seem indeed to be a 'new song' of His redeemed. The poignant
verses of Thomas of Celano which describe the day of Judgment have a note of
pathos which is repeated in other and more joyous hymns. In England we are
fortunate in possessing excellent translations of many of these hymns, and the
hold which even these translations have gained upon the affections of the
people is a proof that religious taste, like other tastes, can be educated.
Probably to a Benedictine abbess we are indebted for the lines:
Jesu! the hope of souls forlorn!
How good to them for sin that mourn!
To them that seek Thee, 0 how kind!
But what art Thou to them that find?!
Bernard of Cluny (and Morlas) has gained access to
modern hearts with the hymn containing the words:
Brief life is here our portion,
Brief sorrow, short-lived care;
The life that knows no ending,
The tearless life, is there.
Of the Eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas it is
impossible to say which is most popular or most deserves to be popular. But the
essence of them all is to be found in the lines:
Bone pastor, panis vere,
Iesu, nostri miserere,
Tu nos paste, nos tuere,
Tu nos bona fac videre,
in terra viventium.
It should be noted that in the earlier Middle Ages
secular poetry retained the old classical metres. But
in the twelfth century the Latin secular lyrics of love and spring, lyrics with
a wonderful command of rhyme and versification, owe their form to the rhymed
verses employed in the services of the Church.
One of the latest and best products of medieval
English piety is the Jesus Psalter, a long pathetic litany ending with the
words “0 Jesus, let me frequently and attentively consider, that whatsoever I
gain, if I lose Thee, all is lost; and whatever I lose, if I gain Thee, all is
gained”. It was for many generations printed in English Roman Catholic prayer
books, such as Challoner's Garden of the Soul.
The practice of carving or painting the wounded heart
of Jesus, together with His wounded hands and feet, has left many traces in
this country; the five wounds are on the banner of Marian times preserved in
St. John's College, Oxford, and on a shield of stone in the University church.
With this devotion to the Passion of Christ there
inevitably arose a deeper feeling of sympathy with His mother:
At the Cross her station keeping
Stood the mournful mother weeping
Close to Jesus at the last.
The hymn Stabat Mater came from Italy, but in England
as well as Italy men remembered 'Our Lady of Pity' holding in her arms the
lifeless body of her divine Son. This new feeling of tenderness knew no
frontiers of race. Artists carried it from Italy to Russia, where it had
already been in some degree anticipated. The mother of God is no longer painted
as merely interceding or showing her Son to the worshipper. She holds her Child
with the devotion of one who sadly guards a treasure which is threatened; and He
consoles her with the pressure of His tiny hand or cheek. In all this the art
of Novgorod and Moscow added something to the art of perishing Byzantium.
The 'Hail Mary', combining the salutations offered by
the angel and by St. Elizabeth to the Virgin mother, had been recited before
the thirteenth century. But not until the sixteenth century do we find the
additional words, 'holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the
hour of our death. Amen'. The English Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any
Christian Man of 1543 simply gives 'Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with
thee, Blessed art thou among women: and blessed is the fruit of thy womb'. In
the thirteenth century it was already a pious custom in some places to recite a
prayer in the evening at the time when the curfew bell was tolled. This
developed into the 'Angelus' repeated at morning, noon, and night, and it is
said that Elizabeth, queen of Henry VII of England, applied to Pope Sixtus IV
for indulgences to be granted to those who said the Angelus. The rosary with
its many Paters and Ayes grew in popularity in the
fifteenth century, thanks to the zeal of the Dominicans; but it had been
employed in some form by the Premonstratensians and Cistercians at an earlier
date. The feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on December the 8th or
9th, and that of her Presentation in the Temple on November the 21st, had a
somewhat romantic history. Observed by the Greeks, they were brought to England
before the Norman conquest and certainly celebrated at Canterbury and
Winchester. Both disappeared under Norman rule, and both began a new lease of
life in Western Christendom in the thirteenth century. The observance of the
festival of the Conception was complicated by the questions as to whether, and
in what sense, Mary was conceived 'immaculate', free from all stain of original
sin. This doctrine, opposed by St. Anselm, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St.
Bonaventura, and St. Thomas Aquinas, was warmly defended by the Franciscans,
and in 483 a bull of Pope Sixtus IV forbade Christians to describe as heretics
the persons who defended it. It was only declared to be a dogma 'divinely
revealed' by Pope Pius IX in 1854.
The festival of St. Joseph is found in a Roman
calendar of the fifteenth century, but there was no widespread veneration of
this saint. In the pictures of Christ enthroned, the old custom of placing, not
St. Joseph, but the Baptist, with the Virgin mother, nearest to the throne,
still remained.
The cults of the saints, and the pilgrimages to their
shrines, did at least make the ordinary Christian feel that he belonged to the
family of God's friends and the moral heroes of Christendom. But it was
disfigured by great superstition. And Rome never undertook the drastic measures
which were demanded by the naïve and childish customs of the people who owned
her sway. In one diocese after another this or that reputed saint of the most
doubtful authenticity was venerated; the ignorance of the people and the
carelessness of the bishops neglected to sift or to check such practices. It is
a consolation to find that in this matter St. Anselm showed an energy which
deserved to be more widely imitated than it was. The English Homily against
Peril of Idolatry says in rebuke of the popular saint-worship, “All diseases
have their special saints, as gods the curers of them; the pocks St. Roch, the
falling-evil St. Cornelius, the toothache St. Apollin,
&c. Neither do beasts and cattle lack their gods with us; for St. Loy is
the horse-leech, and Anthony the swineherd, &c. Where is God's providence
and due honor in the mean season?” In the second half of the twelfth century
the popes began to reserve to themselves the right to canonize. But the right
of bishops to beatify a servant of God was not definitely taken from them until
the seventeenth century.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the
doctrine and system of administering the sacraments became more and more
carefully defined in the West. Great differences of opinion existed as to the
number of the sacraments, even where there was substantial agreement as to the
nature of the seven different rites to which the name of 'sacrament' was
eventually given. Paschasius Radbertus (d. 868) had only acknowledged two: Baptism, including Confirmation which was
anciently administered in close connection with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper.
Rabanus Maurus reckoned Confirmation as a separate sacrament; and counted two
sacraments in the Eucharist, one of the body and the other of the blood of
Christ. Hugo of St. Victor still used the word in the wide vague sense which it
bore in earlier times. He reckoned three sacraments as necessary to salvation,
Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist; another class consisted of those
which were merely aids to salvation, such as sprinkling with holy water,
extreme unction, and marriage, while the ordination of priests was a sacrament
necessary for a particular calling. Peter Lombard fixed the number of
sacraments as seven, Baptism, Confirmation, the Lord's Supper, Penance, Extreme
Unction, Ordination, and Marriage. This number was authoritatively sanctioned
by the Council of Florence in AD 1439 and is accepted in the East as well as in
the West. It had been accepted by a synod of London in 1237, which mentioned
seven 'principal sacraments'.
Alexander of Hales, the celebrated English Franciscan
School-man (d. 1245), gave special prominence to Baptism and the Eucharist, as
alone instituted by Christ, a view which is retained in the English Thirty-nine
Articles and other documents of the Reformation. St. Thomas Aquinas gave this
rank to all the seven. But he drew a distinction between sacraments necessary
to salvation and those not necessary. He regarded Baptism, the Lord's Supper,
and Penance as necessary to salvation, without repudiating the theory of Peter
Lombard that the desire to make a confession of mortal sins to a priest was
sufficient if the actual confession was impossible. The fourth Lateran Council,
AD 1215, made confession of sins to a priest necessary once a year, before the
Easter Communion. But the practice of very frequent confession appears to have
been very rare before the Reformation. A very desirable change began to make
itself felt with regard to the celebration of Marriage. It had been the custom
from very primitive times for the priest to pronounce a blessing on the
marriage of a Christian pair, and from the ninth century onwards in the East
this blessing was required by the State for all legal marriages. In the West
the 'mutual consent' of the two contracting parties in the presence of a
witness or witnesses was recognized as constituting a legal marriage. The
second Lateran Council, AD 1139, and the fourth, required that the banns of
those intending to marry should be published in church, but a marriage without
the presence of a priest was recognized as valid by Rome until the sixteenth
century.
Extreme unction, the 'last anointing', i.e. of the
sick or dying, gradually assumed a somewhat new character. The earlier prayers
for this rite show that the anointing was originally given for the healing of
the body of the sick person, as is implied in St. James v. 14. But at this
period it was taught that it was administered primarily for the removal of the
'remains of sins' left after baptism and confession and absolution. Hence there
came a tendency to postpone the administration of extreme unction until the
sick person was evidently dying, a practice which is opposed to the meaning of
the prayers recited.
The sacrament of the altar occupied so prominent a
place in the theology and worship of the Middle Ages that it calls for some
special attention in even the briefest history. The Eucharist may be considered
as both a sacrament and a sacrifice. Strange as it may seem, there was in the
Middle Ages comparatively little discussion as to the meaning attached to the
word sacrifice in this connection. In Paschasius, in
St. Ivo of Chartres, and Hildebert of Tours we find a parallel drawn between
the sacrificial action of the Church in the Eucharist and the continuous
propitiatory work of the ascended Christ on the throne of His Father. But such
famous Schoolmen as Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas treated this subject
very meagrely. And the result of such neglect was the
growth of ideas which threatened the primitive Christian view of the unique
character and infinite merit of Christ's death, the Mass being regarded as
almost a repetition of His Passion. Hence came at the Reformation those violent
controversies which caused attempts to formulate the doctrine, attempts made in
an atmosphere which was ill-fitted for the consideration of a mystery so
affecting. But though the Schoolmen neglected the doctrine of the Eucharistic
sacrifice, they were greatly occupied with discussion of the nature of Christ's
presence under the forms of bread and wine. In earlier writers there can be
discerned two distinct modes of regarding this presence. Some writers, like St.
Cyril of Jerusalem, laid most stress upon the change by which the bread and
wine became the body and blood of Christ at the prayer of consecration
pronounced by the priest. Other writers, like St. Chrysostom and Pope Gelasius,
laid stress upon the fact that in the sacrament so consecrated the union of the
outward with the inward, the nature of Christ's body and His blood with the
nature of the bread and the wine, resembled the union of the human and the
divine elements in Christ's Person. These two views were sometimes combined.
But in time the former came rather to submerge than to embrace the latter. And
in opposition to the teaching of Berengarius of Tours and his predecessor Ratramnus there came a common adoption of the word
transubstantiation as the fittest word to express the change of the elements
into the body and blood of Christ. The word occurs in works of doubtful
authenticity ascribed to St. Peter Damian (d. 1071) and Hildebert of Tours (d.
1134), and it was formally adopted at the Lateran Council in 1215. It was a
word which was associated with the philosophical tenet then current that
everything possesses an invisible substance apart from the accidents of shape,
color, taste, weight, &c., which are discerned by the senses. Therefore it
was taught that while the accidents of bread and wine after they are
consecrated remain exactly as they were before, the substance of the elements
is changed into the body and blood of Christ.
The Roman Mass had supplanted the other Western
liturgies except the Ambrosian rite in the Archdiocese of Milan, and the
Mozarabic rite retained in a few churches in Spain. But it must be remembered
that even in Rome itself there was no such thing as a purely Roman missal.
Everywhere there were some traces of the impact of Irish and Gallic customs,
such as the insertion of a memento of the dead at every Mass. There was also
considerable variety in the preparatory prayers said at the altar steps, and at
the offertory and the communion of the priest. This can be seen at once by
comparing the Roman rite with that of Salisbury, which was that most widely
used in England. Generally speaking, it may be said that the more elaborate,
emotional, and scenic elements in public worship did not originate in Rome, but
in France, Germany, and England.
In England a series of prayers especially intended for
worshippers was provided in the Lay Folk's Mass Book. The original seems to
have been composed in French by an Anglo-Norman of the twelfth century. The
existing English translations are of various dates, and illustrate the
difference between the more archaic form of Yorkshire English and the later
Yorkshire and Midland English. The reader is bidden to say the Pater Noster
where nothing else is provided. There is a good paraphrase of the Creed, accurate
enough except that 'the communion of saints' is misinterpreted as the 'house or
sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood. Some of the prayers, in spite of the
roughness of their metre, are of great beauty.
A few lines are here transcribed in a slightly
modernized form. At the Offertory:
Jesu, that wast in Bethlem bore,
Three kings once kneeled Thee before,
And offered gold, myrrh, and incense;
Thou disdained not their presents,
But didst guide them all the three
Home again to their countree.
So our offerings that we offer,
And our prayers that we proffer,
Take them, Lord, unto thy praise,
And be our help through all our days.
At the time of the consecration the worshipper is to
pray without dread, kneeling and holding up both his hands in the ancient form
of supplication. He should pray in his own words, but if he cannot find words
of his own then he may say:
Loved be Thou, King,
And blessed be Thou, King,
For all thy gifts good,
That for me spilt thy blood
And died upon the rood.
Thou give me grace to sing
The song of thy loving.
The festival of Corpus Christi in honor of the
sacrament of the altar appears to have first been observed at Liege in 1246.
The fine service for the festival is the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. The
practice of carrying the Eucharist in processions apparently dates from the
eleventh century. It began as a part of the ritual for Palm Sunday, as is shown
in the missals of Rouen and Hereford. It is also prescribed for that day in
Lanfranc's statutes for Canterbury Cathedral. The rite known as Exposition of the
Blessed Sacrament, in which the sacrament is exposed on the altar in a
monstrance for the veneration of the faithful was known in northern Germany at
the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the north of Europe the sacrament
was reserved for the sick in a vessel of precious metal suspended over the
altar, or in a separate richly ornamented receptacle, which in Italy and in
Scotland was usually made in the north wall of the sanctuary. The latter
practice, and not the former, is implied by canon law. In spite of much
external devotion to the Eucharist, the practice of receiving the sacrament
became less frequent. Probably it was never very frequent in England, for the
Venerable Bede, in writing to Egbert, expresses his regret that the English do
not follow the example of Rome, where multitudes communicated every Sunday. By
the period of the Reformation it had become the ordinary practice, both in
England and in Rome, to partake of the Holy Communion only once a year. By the
end of the Middle Ages the chalice was not received by any but the priest who
celebrated, and this rule applied almost everywhere to both clerical and lay
assistants. The practice began in England about 1150, but only made way slowly.
In Rome communion was still given in both kinds to communicants on certain
occasions as late as the fifteenth century.
Any mention of the sacramental system as it existed
during the later Middle Ages must comprise an account of the indulgences or
'pardons' granted to the faithful.
At an early period of Church history it was in the
power of the bishops to remit some part of the public discipline required in
the case of penitent offenders. Later, when the so-called Penitentials were read and circulated, the severe penitential exercises enumerated in these
books were sometimes modified or commuted. Fasting, for instance, was sometimes
replaced by the recitation of psalms or the payment of a sum of money. Then
came the indulgence strictly so-called. It was taught to be the remission of the
temporal punishment due to sin, the guilt of which was removed by absolution.
The penitent was taught that though he was forgiven as
Moses and David were forgiven, yet, like them, he must be prepared to suffer
some temporal punishment. He must make amends to God, whose majesty had been
outraged. If he did not pay to God this satisfaction while he lived, he must
after death, before he entered heaven, pay it by suffering the torments of
purgatory. It was the payment of an expiation by bitter suffering. But this
awful punishment might be mitigated or escaped. The Church had an inexhaustible
treasure, not only in the merits of Christ but also in the works which the
saints and the faithful have done over and above what was necessary for their
salvation. Part of this over plus might be credited to the repentant sinner. At
first these indulgences were only a partial remission of punishment; but as
early as the end of the eleventh century Pope Urban II granted a plenary
indulgence to all who took part in the crusade. And beginning at the year 1300
the popes gave plenary jubilee indulgences, first every hundred, then every
fifty, and finally every twenty-five years. To gain such an indulgence it was
necessary to confess one's sins and visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St.
Paul in Rome. In the fifteenth century this indulgence was extended to those
who could not visit Rome in person, and in the same century it was decided that
indulgences could be made applicable to souls already in purgatory. In 1476
Pope Sixtus IV wrote that if parents and friends who wished to help those who
were exposed “to the fire of purgatory for the expiation of sins' would pay a
certain sum of money” for the repair of a church at Xanten, he willed that the
money should avail per modum suffragii for the souls aforesaid. The donation was to be considered as a kind of
recommendation to the Almighty for a plenary remission of punishment. This is
the first known instance of an indulgence being applied to the souls in
purgatory, and it speedily led to some of the worst scandals in Church history.
Even as early as the thirteenth century serious abuses
arose from the practice of giving indulgences in return for a money payment,
and long before the Reformation the 'pardoners' who distributed these
indulgences were a favorite target for satirists. When money was needed for a
charitable purpose, application was made to the Pope to grant an indulgence,
and agents were employed to travel through the country, publish the indulgence,
and solicit the alms of the faithful. Little or no care was taken in the selection
of these agents, and so long as the money came in satisfactorily, the
authorities were loath to scrutinize too narrowly the methods employed by their
deputies. Grindal, in a sermon preached in 1564, when he was Bishop of London,
says, “Some redeemed for money great plenty of indulgences from Rome, and he
that had the greatest plenty of them to be cast with him into his grave when he
was buried (which I myself have seen done) was counted the best prepared for
death”. This is no stronger than what was said by the great Oxford chancellor
Thomas Gascoigne, who about 1450 wrote, “Sinners say nowadays: I care not how
many or how great sins I commit before God, for I most easily and quickly get
plenary remission of any guilt or penalty whatever by absolution and indulgence
granted to me from the Pope, whose writing and grant I have bought for 4d. or
6d. or for a game of tennis” .
The system of the seven sacraments embraced the life
of man from the cradle to the grave, securing to man communion with God and
with the unseen world. But it also bound together the two different forms of
the Christian life, the life of the monk and the life of the Christian, whether
clerical or lay, living in the world. In earlier times, especially in the East,
there was a tendency towards a sharp and harmful separation between the life of
the monk, the life in the desert or in the monastery, and the life of the city
and the parish. There is some truth in the sarcastic remark of the Russian
philosopher that, though the monk in the desert and the charioteer in the
circus were both Orthodox, the first was a Monophysite and the second a
Nestorian. In the Middle Ages monk and priest and layman were closely bound
together by the same sacraments and to a considerable extent by the same
worship. This worship was not only sacramental worship. The result of the
monastic daily offices was that the secular priests had also their daily
offices as a matter of strict obligation. And in England the laity, at least on
Sundays, attended both Mattins and Evensong as well as Mass. To hear Mass and
neglect Mattins was even regarded as a mark of Lollardy.
The greatest devotional masterpiece written in the
Middle Ages is the book called the Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas a
Kempis, who finished it in 1441. He was a member of the society called the
Brethren of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groot, a native of Deventer in
Holland, in the preceding century. Gerard, when living a life of ease at
Cologne, was converted by a devout Carthusian, and himself began to work as an
itinerant preacher. Gerard was aided by Florentius Radewyn and the great Dutch mystic Ruysbroek. They founded
little societies of men who lived together, and observed the rules of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, but were bound by no vow, so that any one might return
to the world if he so desired. They supported themselves by their own hands,
unlike the mendicant friars, who lived by the alms of the faithful. The first
society was that founded at Windesheim near Deventer,
and one of its many daughter societies was that of Mount St. Agnes, Agnetenberg, near Zwolle. All the houses were homes of
quiet industry, and the brethren helped to teach in the town grammar schools.
Thomas, who was born at Kempen near Krefeld, was taught by the brethren at
Deventer, and, when his school days were over, was received at Mount St. Agnes,
where he lived until the day of his death, July the 25th, 1471. He copied
books, wrote little treatises, taught novices, and left behind him a convincing
proof that the right way to help others to be good is to become a better man
oneself. As the Order of the Brethren of the Common Life mainly supported
themselves by the copying and sale of manuscripts, the invention of printing
deprived them of their chief means of gaining a livelihood, and they did not
survive the Reformation. But the religious spirit which created the Order
should be reckoned among the greatest distinctions of Holland. It combined
fervor with sobriety, the love of God with the service of man.
The Imitation of Christ is perhaps nearer to the
Gospel and the First Epistle of St. John than any book written since the age of
the apostles. From the beginning to the end it breathes with a manly love of
Jesus Christ. The writer is a true mystic, who has learnt to see in everything
'a mirror of life'. Unlike the pseudo-mystic, he neither tries nor hopes to
lose his own individuality, and in seeking for union with his Lord he knows
that the worshipper can meet God only where God wills to meet him. Hence his
love of the sacraments and his readiness to work and to suffer as though 'the
trivial round, the common task' were themselves almost a sacrament of peace. He
has no tricks of style, no subtleties, nothing but his certainty that the
Catholic life is friendship with Jesus, and his power to exhort us to bear the
cross with courage. No one who has read the book year by year has doubted that
Thomas wrote the truth when he said, “I had rather be poor for thy sake: than
rich without Thee”. And few who know it have failed to find in it a guide to
that “cloudless day of eternity, which no night obscures: whose never setting
radiance is the supreme Truth; day ever joyful, ever secure”.
Whatever sanctity may be discovered in other lands,
England presents us with two pictures of later medieval piety which are of the
purest beauty. One is to be seen in the writings of the Lady Julian of Norwich,
the other in Chaucer's description of the poor parson of a town parish.
Julian, who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, was a nun and anchorite who dwelt in a cell adjoining the church of Conisford near Norwich. With little learning derived from
books, she possessed not only a deep religious and philosophical insight, but
also strong ethical qualities and an exquisite literary taste. Her conviction
that nature and grace are really at one brought with it both a keen hatred of
evil and an abounding hopefulness. Julian is a true lover of God, and in her
symbolism all that is best in human affection and loyalty is delicately
reflected. The solitary nun has in her heart the love of mother and the love of
child, the devotion of a faithful servant and of a valiant knight.
After Dante, Chaucer is the greatest of medieval
poets. And in his supreme work he has given us a characterization of a parish
priest which displays to us the qualities which the poet as a Christian and an
Englishman admired in a shepherd of souls. The portrait is no doubt ideal, and
it is deliberately introduced as a foil to the portraits of other and less
worthy representatives of religion. But the “povre Persoun of a toun” is no figment;
he is a true man intelligible in his simple goodness, a goodness which is
sometimes miscalled prosaic by those who are blind to the romance of common
duties.
But riche he was of holy thoght and werk,
He was also a lerned man, a
clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
Wyd was his parisshe, and
houses fer a-sonder
But he ne lafte nat, for reyn ne thonder,
In siknes nor in meschief, to visyte,
The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lyte,
Up-on his feet, and in his hand a staf.
This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,
That first he wroghte, and
afterward he taughte;
Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte;
And this figure he added eek ther-to,
That if gold ruste, what shal iren do?
Chaucer's sporting monk who loved “the newe world” and the friar who wantonly “lipsed”
his English, belong to the pageant of the past, “the povre Persoun” is alive today.
CHAPTER XVII.SCHISMS AND REFORMS |