Giulia, however, was as blind to this appeal as she had been to the look across the dinner-table, and stealing out of the opposite door of the kitchen, which opened on the huge staircase, tripped up to the privacy of her own room.
BLOCK-BOOKS.
It is difficult in this age of popular literature to realise as a fact that at so comparatively recent a period in the history of man as the fourteenth century, books were so rare as to be worth their weight in silver. Those born to the enjoyment of wealth rarely reflect on the toils that were involved in its accumulation; and, while exulting in its strength, this generation, the heir of all other ages, is apt to forget how largely it is indebted to the exertions of its ancestors for its superiority, and by what slow and laborious processes of thought the useful arts, whereon its prosperity is founded, have been brought to their present perfection.
That the flickering lamp of learning was not extinguished during the ages of anarchy that succeeded the dissolution of the Roman Empire is undoubtedly due to the monastic orders; but to whom the world is indebted for the diffusion among the masses of that practical religious knowledge which was the germ of modern civilization is not so generally known or recognised.
Dwelling in a tranquil seclusion which must have strangely contrasted with the tumultuous whirl of events around, enjoying the popular reverence, material ease, and abundant leisure; and familiarised by the ritual of the Church with the tongue exclusively employed by the learned, the monks naturally became the depositaries of the scanty knowledge of a period when a score of volumes constituted an important library, and when princes, more familiar with the sword than with the pen, could often do no more than, like Hodge, the ploughman, make their mark. The attainments of the monks, though generally very limited, were sufficient to inspire them with a hearty admiration for ancient literature, foreign as its spirit was to their peculiar views and modes of thought; and they were incited by that admiration to collect, preserve, and transcribe the classical writers, some of whom they must have regarded with a vague and ignorant interest, somewhat akin to that with which a virtuoso may contemplate the stone, the mystery of whose cuneiform characters he is unqualified to solve. Though there is reason to conclude that a monkish chronicle or a saintly legend was occasionally inscribed on a parchment whence the monks had obliterated a valuable work, which their ignorance incapacitated them from appreciating, yet respectful gratitude is due to these reverend men for their services to literature.
In the accumulation of these treasures the monks acquired a sad habit of hoarding them; and, partly from reluctance to resign an intellectual pre-eminence flattering to their pride, and partly from a habit of looking on knowledge as esoteric, proper to ecclesiastics, and incommunicable except to the initiated, were very jealous of their escaping from their care and passing into general circulation. In fact, the Catholic hierarchy, showing the ignorant prejudices of the times, conceived that unrestricted knowledge was incompatible with faith and orthodoxy—though it is hard to apprehend the value of a faith without knowledge, or in what lack of faith can originate but in an imperfect knowledge—and, thus conceiving, it endeavoured to limit education and subject it to the absolute control of the Church. The perpetuation of its own authority being what the hierarchy principally aimed at in cherishing learning, it had constructed out of the precious wrecks of pagan antiquity a philosophical basis for the doctrines of the Church; and in association with this arose an abstruse dialectical system, extending over the entire realm of mind, and imprisoning thought within a narrow circle of abstract and barren ideas intelligible only to the erudite. This scholastic philosophy, by substituting in an age emerging from barbarism a system of logical reasoning for ignorant acquiescence in authority, was undoubtedly favourable to the growth of learning; but, as it was a form rather than the substance of knowledge, and attached more value to the art than to the profitable results of reasoning, it materially impeded the progress of real enlightenment. In order to exercise a wide and profound influence, knowledge should not be abstruse or veiled in a learned tongue; but, like the Gospel, should accommodate itself to the ignorance, appeal to the hearts, and satisfy the spiritual needs of men.
The middle ages were characterised by a propensity to association—derived from the necessity for combination against the tyranny of princes and the rapine of nobles—and by a singular disposition to mysticism which was the protest of the popular heart against the arid and unspiritual theology of the period. In the Netherlands, which had long been ravaged by wars and pestilence, and the genius of whose people was practical and industrious, the spirit of charity born of the Gospel combined with these two popular tendencies in the formation of various fraternities for religious and charitable purposes, the result of whose labours was the wide diffusion of that spiritual religion and that practical knowledge which scholasticism in itself could never have originated.
The debased idea of Christianity then prevalent—identifying it with monachism, assuming monachism to be its highest form, and, as the spirit of an age is shown by its use of words, terming the monastic orders religious—this, and the expediency of conciliating the favour of an all-powerful hierarchy, led these fraternities to adopt the monastic organisation, submit to a rule, and assume the cowl, and, while distinguished from the monks by the temporary nature of their vows and dependence on labour for their support, become an intermediate class between the monks and the laity.
The disproportion between the sexes, caused by the Crusades, favoured the establishment, in the eleventh century, of the first of these associations, the Beguines, some communities of which yet survive; and this was succeeded in the early part of the thirteenth century by the Beghards and Lollards,