Among the sensual the Saint is always an Anchorite; Religion gets as far as possible from the world.[1] Rude men require obvious forms and sensible shocks to their roughness. The very place where the Monks prayed and the Nuns sang, was sacred from the ruthless robber. As he drew near it, the tiger was tame within him; the mailed warrior kissed the ground, and Religion awoke for the moment in his heart. The fear of hell, and reverence for the consecrated spot, chained up the devil for the time.
Then the Church had a most diffusive spirit; it would Christianize as fast as the State would conquer; its missionaries were found in the courts of barbarian monarchs, in the caves and dens of the savage, diffusing their doctrine and singing their hymns. Creating an organization the most perfect the world ever saw; with a policy wiser than any monarch had dreamed of, and which grew more perfect with the silent accretions of time; with address to allure the ambitious to its high places, and so turn all their energy into its deep wide channel; with mysteries to charm the philosophic, and fill the fancy of the rude; with practical doctrines for earnest workers, and subtle questions, always skilfully left open for men of acute discernment; with rites and ceremonies that addressed every sense, rousing the mind like a Grecian drama, and promising a participation with God through the sacrament; with wisdom enough to bring men really filled with Religion into its ranks; with good sense and good taste to employ all the talent of the times in the music, the statues, the paintings, the architecture of the temple, thus consecrating all the powers of man to man's noblest work; with so much of Christian truth as the world in its wickedness could not forget,—no wonder the Church spread wide her influence; sat like a queen among the nations, saying to one GO, and it went, to another COME, and it came.
Then, again, its character, in theory, was kindly and humane. It softened the asperity of secular wars; forbid them in its sacred seasons; established its Truce of God, and gave a chance for rage to abate. Against the King, it espoused the cause of the People. Coming in the name “despised and rejected of men,” “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” of a man born in an ox's crib,
- ↑ To illustrate this point see, instar omnium, the works of St Bernard.
