phic culture realized in the middle ages, and diametrically opposed in the later schools, which produced young men without youth, and old men without dignity. The ancient poet represents an aged, avaricious father laughing at his son for having antiquated notions. Youth and ancient sentiments seemed associated in his mind, saying “ ὅτι παιδάριον εἶ καὶ φρονεῖς ἀρχαϊκά *” So it was in ages of faith. The boy was not then taught to forget his nature, and consigned over to those frigid pursuits, which contract the mind; but he was initiated in the ancient and holy mysteries of that love which expands the heart and illuminates the intelligence. By solemn vision, and bright, holy offices, his infancy was nurtured. Every sight and sound, from the beauteous choir, sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy fled not his thirsting lips: and all of great, or good, or lovely, which the sacred past in truth or symbol consecrates, he felt and knew. Nor did the studies of mature age efface these early impressions. As the love of poetry was not superseded by a belief in allegory, which only began in the fifteenth century, when it was absurdly used to interpret the Eneid and the Divina Commedia †, so the love of truth was not confounded with a desire of abstract knowledge. Positive theology itself was concerned with the beautiful, and imparted to man a perception of many harmonies in the whole scheme of our redemption, which filled the soul with exquisite delight: "There are also many other things," says St. Anselm, "which, when studiously considered, display a certain ineffable beauty in the manner of procuring our redemption ." This Dante felt, and, in the seventh song of Paradise, he introduces Beatrice solving his doubts, and quenching his thirst with drops of sweetness. "Nor ought," she says of this mystery, "so vast or so magnificent, either for him who gave or who received, between the last night and the primal day, was or can be." Delight was sure to flow from every study in connexion with theology, for it was with wisdom, in general, as in the human body, of which you know not whether each part was created Nubes, 767. + Heeren Gesch. der Class. lit. im Mittelalter, ii. 325. for the sake of use, or for that of beauty. "Certe enim," adds St. Augustin, "nihil creatum videmus in corpore utilitatis causa quod non habeat etiam decoris locum *." : "Philosophy sounds like poetry," says Novalis. One can easily understand such an impression, after sitting for the first time in Catholic schools: but what does the voice which succeeded it in nations, directed by the new religious guides, sound like? At least there is no great danger of the young mistaking it for a source of musical delight indeed, if the thoughts of such men had grown harmonious, the world might have shortly looked for discord in the spheres. In effect, as this philosopher observes, “ All evil is isolated and isolatizing: it is the principle of separation, contradiction, disorder-of all prosaic dulness, frigidity, and gloom. Falsehood, in particular, is confined and monotonous, cold and declamatory; while truth is broad, and infinitely diversified, inflamed, possessed of endless powers of assimilation, and, at the same time, mystical and unobtrusive. The tendency of the public mind, where faith has perished, is towards sameness and dissension, whereas, in the middle ages, it was towards variety and union; of which a type might be seen in that symbolic branch of fire, used in the celebration of the Paschal solemnities, which, as the church sings, although divided into parts, yet knows no diminution of light. In order to heal jealousies and lull contention, the best remedy, proposed by our wise men, is to abolish all the institutions and forms which Catholicity produced, in order that there should be no diversity discoverable on any side; whereas, under the influence of that philosophy, which is only another word for the Spirit of God, men knew how to establish and perpetuate variety by love; and instead of acts of uniformity we find only charters of foundation. Philosophy was then in thought, what poetry was in feeling. Religious learning was scientific poetry: in short, most of what Novalis delivers as a speculation was then realized; as we may still witness in those dulcet lays, those philosophic epistles, those religious histories, those profound treatises, "which, as long as of our faith the fervour does not fade, shall make us love * De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. 24. the very ink that traced them." Indeed, he remarks this himself: "The general expressions of the scholastic philosophy," saith he, "have a great resemblance to numbers; hence their mystic usage, their personification, their musical charm, their infinite combinations. All realities created out of nothing, such as numbers, and abstract expressions, have a marvellous relationship to things of another world, to an infinite series of strange combinations and relations, as if it were to a poetic, mathematical, and abstract world *." It is often a subject of surprise, that almost every eminent man of those ages should have been denominated, as was Baptist the Mantuan, a poet, a philosopher, and theologian; and this might lead us to reflect upon the divine virtue of that wisdom which, in such multitudinous excellence, is imparted to the clean of heart. The Catholic religion makes men naturally unimaginative think and do what poets utter in divinest strains. All that are with Peter's chair instinctively promote the charms of life, for by their very principles they are bound to protect them. I have often wondered to hear of long grown-up, dull, prosaic persons, resisting unfeeling sophists for a cause that seemed one of children, of youthful fancy-a cause of flowers and of poetry -a cause of the sweet wild pleasures, that hold the innocent fresh heart in a maze of delicious enchantment. How came they to feel an interest in it? the young will at times naturally ask: the fact is, that simple obedience compels them to act thus; so true is it, that children instinctively know more of God, than world-worn men. There is reality in the things which delight the young, in so much that the savages, who would take them away, would, with the same brutal violence and callous insensibility, strip the church of what essentially belongs to her: they would, with the same false cunning, cavil at her doctrine. Such is the secret harmony which must prevail- the mystic law, which cannot be reversed. Nothing can prevent the defence of truth, from being also the defence of poesy-the apology of faith, from being also the apology of the young. All these countless and indefinite aspirations of the heart, which pass under the name of sentiment, these Schriften, ii. 171. fair, and glorious, and solemn forms which float before the imagination in the grandest moments, these wreaths of flowers, these mossy cells, these forest depths. this indistinct delicious music of the inmost soul-all are placed under the safeguard of religion, and must be defended with authority; so that, when the barbarian race tries to rob us of them, we have only to turn our eyes to the supreme Pontiff, and cry, like the suppliants of yore, Roma, Roma! We had occasion to remark, in the Fifth Book, in what a deep and wondrous manner the ritual of the Catholic church harmonized with our whole nature. In these ceremonies there was to be found, besides the theological sense, much aspersion of philosophy: they were, in fact, truths embodied, and so presented, in substantial form, to the understanding. In many parts of it, you can mark some cunning artifice, to excite and kindle the sentiments of our poor humanity, as when the pillow of the dead man is placed upon his coffin, during the mass of burial: so that the feelings which, in the modern society, are often exclusively suffered to develope themselves through the infected and pestiferous medium of a novel, were, under the Catholic influence, cultivated and expressed through the pure, and noble, and sanctifying forms of religious worship. This was the result of a conviction which deep reflection has imparted to later philosophers, that "it is sentiment which puts the fire as it were to our ideas, and draws us out from the aridity of abstraction, that reason produces but a weak will, often at the mercy of the least obstacle, and that reason must sometimes be converted into a passion to become active *." According to the school, the use of the imagination extends to the highest and most spiritual inspirations of man. "Without doubt," says Richard of St. Victor, "the sense of the flesh precedes the sense of the heart in knowing things; because, unless the mind first should take sensible things by the corporeal sense, it would never find what it could think respecting them. But perhaps it is not wonderful if the bodily sense should lead the sense of the heart to a place whither itself can never come: but it is strange, in what manner it should * Alibert, Physiologie des Passions, tom. 1. lead it thither, when it cannot ascend itself. The corporeal sense does not take incorporeal things, to which nevertheless, without its guidance by the hand, reason doth not ascend. Certes, if man had not sinned, in the knowledge of things, the exterior sense would assist the interior; for who denies that Adam received Eve in order to be his assistant? But it is one thing to have a companion, and another a guide of one's journey. And since Eve drew away her husband, against the counsel or precept of God, to follow her counsel, Adam, as a punishment of his prevarication, is so weakened, that now he is obliged of necessity to follow her. Nevertheless, from the guidance of his assistant, not only he need not be confounded, but he may also glory, when, by that intervention, the use of corporeal similitudes leads him to the contemplation of things invisible *." The philosophy of the clean of heart contained the secret of sanctifying passion, of sanctifying all the countless unutterable affections and desires that are incident to the human mind. It showed how little reason had sense to fear the Creator, who made the earth and its creatures so beautiful to the senses-how little cause there was for distrust, in loving whatever was his workmanship, such as their natural loveliness and innocence, when that exquisite grace of form and colours had been so evidently contrived by his intelligence, and imparted by his hand. In another way too did scholastic science come to the aid of the devout mind, when perplexed with the consideration of the two-fold tendencies of flesh and spirit; for in its moments of discouragement, when distrust arose, and a scientific doubt suggested that the very rapture which it was enjoying might, after all, be only a deception of the senses, and darkness of the flesh, reason was brought to the rescue, and, from that moment, the victory to the clean of heart was complete: for reason herself, when enlightened by faith, assured them that the extasy was not the less divine and spiritual because the senses had been instrumental in exciting it. Such an employment of their power was according to the ordinance of God, and subservient to the angelic ministry which watched over it. "Who is that queen of the south," asks Richard of St. Victor, "who comes to hear * Ric. S. Vict. de Contemplatione, pass. ii. c 17. |