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Nor were the men of the New Learning, who explored new worlds of knowledge, or re-discovered lost continents of thought and literature, necessarily hostile to the older faith. Erasmus, himself a commentator on the Psalms, writing from Louvain (May 3oth, 1519), praises Luther's commentaries on the Psalms, which pleased him "prodigiously," and should be " widely read." Pico delta Mirandola, one of the most brilliant scholars of the Italian Renaissance, was the friend and apologist of Savonarola, without whom he could not live, and in whose church of San Marco he lies buried. His life and works were translated by More. " Let no day pass," writes Pico, " but thou once, at the least-wise, present thyself to God by prayer, and falling down before Him flat to the ground . . . not from the extremity of thy lips, but from the inwardness of thine heart, cry these words of the prophet, ' 0 remember not the sins and offences of my youth ; but according to Thy mercy think upon me, 0 Lord, for Thy Goodness " (Ps. xxv., verse 6). The advice was daily practised by More himself, even when he was surrounded by the splendours of the court of Henry VIII., and in the midst of the active life of a diplo- matist and statesman, man of letters, Chancellor, and Trea- surer. The Psalms formed part of his morning and evening prayers, and he had made a small collection of special psalms for frequent use. In the days of his disgrace, a prisoner in the upper ward of the Beauchamp Tower because he would not swear an oath against his conscience, he composed many works, chiefly meditations on the Christian faith, by the dim light that flickered through the bars of his prison.
Whatever view may be taken of the course of the Protestant Reformation in England, at the different stages of its progress, it is difficult to justify the public farce of Queen Catherine's divorce and Anne Boleyn's coronation. With or without the Pope's sanction. Henry VIII. was resolved to go all lengths in order to obtain his will. " He was," says Bishop Stubbs, " the King, the whole King, and nothing but the King: he wished to be ... the Pope, the whole Pope, and something more than Pope." The question of the marriage was still before the Pope when Anne was crowned (June ist, 1533), and when the Princess Elizabeth, in the following September, was born. In March 1534, an Act of Parliament (25 Henry VIII., c. 22), declared Catherine's marriage illegal, the divorce pronounced by Cranmer valid, the marriage of Anne Boleyn lawful, and her children rightful heirs to the throne. On March 23rd, 1534, Pope Clement pronounced the marriage of Henry and Catherine to be valid. A plain issue was thus raised. Armed rebellion, aided by foreign intervention, was in the air. An oath of allegiance was framed, the actual terms of which seem to be doubtful; a commission sat at Lambeth to tender it, and fore- most among those who refused to accept the oath, in whole or
in part, stood Sir Thomas More, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, bell-wethers of the flock which adhered to the older faith. Both were committed to the Tower of London in April 1534. Both found in the Psalms their strength and solace.
Twelve years before his imprisonment began. More was writing an English treatise on the works of Ecclesiasticus, " In all thy works remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin." In the fragment on Death, he says : " Mark this well, for of this thing we be very sure, that old and young, man and woman, rich and poor, prince and page, all the while we live in this world, we be but prisoners, and be within a sure prison, out of which there can no man escape. The prison is large, and many prisoners in it, but the Jailer can lose none :
He is so present in every place, that we can creep into no corner out of His sight. For as holy David saith to this Jailer, ' Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from Thy face ?' (Ps. cxxxix., verse 6), as who saith-no whither." To such thoughts his mind now naturally re- verted. Scantily fed, and "besides his old disease of the breast, grieved in the reins by reason of gravel and stone, and with the cramp that divers nights seized him," he yet main- tained his cheerful temper. By her own earnest suit, Margaret Roper was allowed to visit him in his cell. On one occasion, "after the Seven Psalms and Litany said (which whensoever she came unto him, ere he fell into talk of any worldly matter, he used accustomably to say with her)," he even made light of the rigour of his confinement. " I find," he says, " no cause, I thank God, Meg, to reckon myself in worse case here than at home: for methinketh God maketh me a wanton" (i.e., a spoiled child), "and setteth me on his lap and dandleth me."
But fifteen months' confinement in " a close, filthy prison, shut up among mice and rats," told upon More's strength. When, on July ist, 1535, he was sentenced to death, he was aged by suffering, his head white, his " weak and broken body leaning on a staff, and even so, scarcely able to stand." Five days later (July 6), he was executed on Tower Hill. The scaffold was unsteady, and, as he put his foot ton the ladder, he said to the lieutenant, " I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself." After kneeling down on the scaffold, and repeating the Psalm, " Have mercy upon me, 0 God" (Ps. 1L), which had always been his favourite prayer, he placed his head on the low log that served as a block, and received the fatal stroke.
.Another victim, scarcely less illustrious than the Chancellor, was John Fisher, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, and Bishop of Rochester (1459-1535), whose worn face, with its "anxiously conscientious expression," lives for us in the powerful sketch of Holbein. His public services, his reputa-
tionTat|?home andfabroad, his pure and simple life, his charities, his great but unostentatious learning, made his refusal to take the oaths of succession and supremacy a matter of extreme importance. A collector of books, the owner of the best private library in England, an early master of English prose, he was a friend of Erasmus, who wrote of him in 1510 :
" Either I am much mistaken, or Fisher is a man with whom none of our contemporaries can be compared, for holiness of life or greatness of soul." In his sermons on the Penitential Psalms, preached in English, early in the sixteenth century, at the " sterynge " of the Lady Margaret, Countess of Rich- mond, occurs a passage, which unconsciously foreshadows the part that, thirty years later, he was himself to play. He is commenting on Psalm cii., Verse 13, " Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Sion : for it is time that Thou have mercy upon her, yea, the time is come." He shows that when the Church was first built, the soft slipper earth in which the foundation was set was hardened into stone by the fire of Love. Peter, who denied his Master, became a rock. So now he prays that God may " chaunge and make the softe and slypper erth into harde stones," and " set in Thy chirche stronge and myghty pyllers that may suffre and endure grete labours, watchynge, pouerte, thurst, hungre, colde, and hete, whiche also shall not fere the thretnynges of prynces, perse- cucyon neyther deth . . . for the glory and laude of Thy holy name." For the glory of God, as he in his conscience believed, Fisher braved threats, persecution, and death.
Fourteen months of imprisonment in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London were passed by Fisher, partly in writing two devotional treatises for the use of his sister. Possibly the action of Paul III., who. May 2oth, 1535, created the bishop a cardinal, hastened his execution. On Thursday, June i7th, he was sentenced: on the following Tuesday, June 22nd, he was beheaded on Tower Hill, so weak and emaciated that he could scarcely stand. At the foot of the scaffold to which he had been carried, his strength seemed to revive. As he mounted the steps alone, the south-east sun shone full in his face. Lifting his hands, he murmured the words of Psalm xxxiv., verse 5, "They had an eye unto him, and were lightened; and their faces were not ashamed." On the scaffold, after a few words to the spectators, he knelt down upon his knees in prayer, repeating Psalm xxxi., "In Thee, 0 Lord, have I put my trust." Then, with the joyful mien of a man who receives the boon for which he craves, he received the blow of the axe upon his slender and feeble neck, and so passed to his rest.
Many monastic houses, as well as individuals, refused the oath of supremacy, and suffered the penalty in loss of life, or of home and possessions. Comparatively few yielded to
the temptation of accepting it. Conspicuous among the sufter- ers were the Franciscans of the Regular Observance at Greenwich, headed by their warden, John Forest, confessor to Queen Catherine, who was herself a tertiary of the Franciscan Order. The story of their sufferings strikingly illustrates the power of the Psalms. But, as Forest's life, for some unknown reason, was spared till 1538, an earlier victim may be chosen from another Order, John Haughton, prior of the London Charterhouse, a zealous servant of God, govern- ing his community by example rather than by precept. He had been twenty years a monk, before the reign of Henry VIII. disturbed the peace of his cloistered life. Neither he nor his monks had meddled in the question of the king's marriage; but when, in 1533, the Commissioners asked his opinion on the divorce of Catherine of Arragon, he boldly said that he could not understand how a marriage, ratified by the Church and so long unquestioned, could now be undone. In 1535, Henry assumed the title of Supreme Head, and the prior prepared for the end which he saw approaching. From the text, "0 God, Thou hast cast us out, and scattered us abroad" (Ps. lx., verse i), he preached a sermon in the chapel, ending with the words, "It is better that we should suffer here a short penance for our faults, than be reserved for the eternal pains of Hell hereafter." Then he and the brethren, each from each, implored pardon for any offence they might have committed by thought, word, or deed, against one another, and, thus prepared, awaited their fate. Haughton, and the priors of two daughter houses, refused to acknowledge the new title, were tried for treason, condemned, and, on May 4th, 1535, executed at Tyburn, with all the horrible barbarities of the time. Haughton suffered first. "Pray for me," he said, "and have mercy on my brethren, of whom I have been the unworthy prior." Then, kneeling down, and reciting a few verses of Psalm xxxi., he calmly resigned himself into the hands of the executioner. All died with the same calm, unflinching courage.
In the case of England, whatever might have been the personal wishes of Henry VIII., there could be no turning back. Directly attacked by the Protestant Reformers, threat- ened from various directions by the New Learning, the Roman Catholic Church roused herself from her torpor. The assault was not only checked, but for the time driven back; lost ground was recovered; new spheres of work were conquered. Among all the adherents who rallied to the defence of the Church, none were more zealous, none more self-devoted, none, in two different senses of the word, more successful, than St Francis Xavier or St Teresa.
On December and, 1552, Francis Xavier lay dying on the island of San Chan, half a day's sail from Canton. Winged
by pity, armed by faith, and fired by love, he had travelled seas and explored lands that were only known to Europe by vague report. He had braved dangers and endured priva- tions which might well be thought superhuman, and literally compassed sea and land to win a single human soul to Christianity. The spirit of love which is breathed in the well-known hymn attributed to his pen ("O Deus, ego amo Te"),1 was the consuming passion of his life:
" My God! I love Thee, not to gain The bliss of Thy eternal Reign, Nor to escape the fiery Lot Reserved for those that love Thee not. Thou, Thou, my Jesu, on the Tree Didst in Thine Arms encompass me.
(< Thou didst endure the Nails, the Lance,
Disgraces manifold, the Trance
Of Bloody Sweat, and boundless Seas
Of Bitterness and Anguishes,
Nay even Death's last Agony-
And this for me-for sinful me!
Most loving Jesu, shall this move No like return of Love for Love ?
" Above all things I love Thee best, Yet not with Thought of Interest:
Not thus to win Thy promised Land, Not thus to ward Thy threat'ning Hand;
But as Thou lov'st me, so do I Love, and shall ever love-and why ?
Because Thou art my God and King, The Source and End of Everything."
It had been Xavier's ambition to carry the Gospel message to China. But for weeks he could find no one who dared to brave the penal laws of that country. It was death for foreigners to enter the empire; it was death to anyone who conveyed them within its borders. At last he bribed a merchant to land him on the coast. Fever struck him down while awaiting the arrival of his agent, " tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore." For a fortnight he lay in his cabin: then he was put on shore, and a shelter was hastily erected of brushwood and coarse grass. Feeling that his end was near, he desired that his attendants should leave the hut. Far from his native land, without a friend at his side, racked with pain, his death is enviable even by the happiest of mankind. To mortal eyes he was alone. But to his
1 The version given above enters into no vain competition with Caswall's
beautiful rendering of the hymn; but it may be thought to preserve more
faithfully the mediaeval quaintness of the original.
unclouded vision there floated round him bright forms ready to bear him to his heavenly home, and, as the wings of the approaching angel of death winnowed the mists from before his eyes, he saw the blessed figure of his Master standing with outstretched arms to welcome His faithful servant. As he entered the dark valley, the glow upon his face was of sunrise, not of sunset; and it was a ray from the Divine Presence itself which lit up his face, as with an expiring effort he fixed his eyes upon his crucifix, and, gathering all his strength to utter the words, "In Thee, 0 Lord, have I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion" (Ps. xxxi., verse i), breathed his last.
Xavier has been called the canonised saint of Europe. It is not, on the other hand, everyone who sympathises with the mysticism of Teresa, or gives credence to her visions. Yet few can withhold their admiration from the solitary, sickly woman, who restored the austerities of Spanish con- ventual life, and replanted in Spain the great monastic ideals of poverty, humility, and self-sacrifice.
Born in 1515, at Avila, she began in early childhood to show the bent of her mind. The lives of saints were her nursery tales; her doll's house was a nunnery; at the age of seven, she set out with her little brother to walk to Africa, and win from the Moors the crown of martyrdom. Such a childhood prepares us for a life of ascetic zeal; it gives no hint of the calm, self-reliant, tranquil nature, which, combined with ready w7t, charm of manner, and an eloquent tongue, enthralled the greatest of Spanish grandees. Her enthusiasm, her patience, her adroitness triumphed over difficulties which others would have found insuperable. Though continually harassed by intrigues and opposition, she established sixteen nunneries of the Reformed Carmelites and fourteen founda- tions of friars belonging to the same Rule. In worldly matters shrewd, energetic, and a keen judge of character, Teresa seemed a different being from the enraptured mystic who in her autobiography-a favourite book of the Duke of Alva-sets down her visions and illuminations. Nowhere, and by no man or woman, was a stronger resistance offered to the new ideas that warred against mediaeval opinions than was made in Spain by Teresa. At her voice the dying aspirations of a previous age revived, as she travelled through the country, attracting to her austere, ascetic Rule many of the best and most conscientious men and women of the day. The little inns where she stopped in her ceaseless wanderings are still, after the lapse of three centuries, hallowed spots to the inhabitants of rural Spain.
About Teresa hangs the pathos of a lost cause, though she herself was spared the pain of disillusion. She did not live to see the edifice, on which she had lavished the labours of
a lifetime, crumbling to decay. Death came to the worn-out woman at Alba, October 4th, 1582. On her lips were the words (Ps. li., verses 10-11, 17), "Make me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy holy Spirit from me. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, 0 God, shalt Thou not despise."
First from one side, then from the other, as the fierce struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant swayed backwards and forwards, the note of encouragement, comfort, or deliverance sounds clear and high for combatants on either side, in the verses of the Psalms. As More, Fisher, and Haughton, or as Xavier and Teresa, had drawn strength from the Psalter, so, in their day of trial, Protestants like Bishop Hooper, or Bishop Ridley, and at a later stage in the struggle, Jesuits like Robert Southwell, faced the terrors of the stake and the torment of the rack with words from the same book upon their lips, and, as they spoke them, seemed possessed by a heavenly ecstacy.
John Hooper, at the close of the reign of Henry VIII., had fled for his life to Strasburg; had married, and, March, 1547, settled in Zurich. Two years later, he determined to return to England, in order to help those who were contending for the religious principles which he himself zealously advocated. He knew his danger. Taking leave of his friend Bullinger in March, 1549, he used words prophetic of his fate. He promised to write to those who had shown him so much kindness; "but," he added, "the last news of all, I shall not be able to write; for there, where I shall take most pains, there shall you hear of me to be burnt to ashes." In 1551, he was consecrated Bishop of Gloucester. No man ever entered upon his work with a stricter sense of duty. If he erred, it was the severity of the discipline which he exacted from himself as well as from others. On the accession of Queen Mary, he was a marked man. He might have escaped, but he refused. "I am," he said, "thoroughly persuaded to tarry, and to live and die with my sheep." In September, 1553, he was committed to the Fleet prison, to a "vile and stinking chamber," with nothing for his bed but a "little pad of straw" and "a rotten covering." In his prison he wrote an "Exposition" of Psalms xxiii., Ixii., IxxiiL, Ixxvii. "All men and women," he says, "have this life and this world appointed unto them for their winter and season of storms. The summer draweth near, and then shall we be fresh, orient, sweet, amiable, pleasant, acceptable, immortal, and blessed, for ever and ever; and no man shall take us from it. We must, therefore, in the meantime learn out of this verse to say unto God, whether it be winter or summer, pleasure or pain, liberty or imprisonment, life or death, 'Truly God is
loving unto Israel, even unto such as be of a clean heart'" (Ps. Ixxiii., verse i). To his wife, Anne Hooper, who had escaped to the continent, he wrote a letter (October i3th, 1553), bidding her read Psalm Ixxvii. ("I will cry unto God with my voice," etc.), because of the "great consolation" which it contains for those who are in "anguish of mind"; and Psalm Ixxxvii., " wherein is contained the prayer of a man that was brought into extreme anguish and misery, and, being vexed with adversaries and persecutions, saw nothing but death and hell." Also he recommends Psalms vi., xxii., xxx., xxxi., xxxviii., Ixix., for their lessons of "patience and con- solation" at times "when the mind can take no understanding, nor the heart any joy of God's promises."
It was not till February gth, 1555, that, by his death, Hooper passed from the winter of imprisonment into the summer of eternal life. The bishop had been sent to Gloucester for execution. If his enemies hoped that his demeanour at the stake would weaken his hold upon his people, they were disappointed. With unflinching courage, he met the tortures of the fire-needlessly protracted for three-quarters of an hour by the greenness and insufficiency of the materials, resigning himself to his fate with the words, which More, Fisher, and, it may be added, Thomas Cromwell had used, " Into Thy handes I commend my spirite; Thou haste redeemed me, 0 God of truthe " (Ps. xxxi., verse 6).
Psalm ci. was the favourite psalm of Nicholas Ridley (1500-" 55), Bishop of London. He often, as Fox relates, read and expounded it to his household at Fulham, " being marvellous careful over his family, that they might be a spectacle of all virtue and honesty to others." On the night preceding his execution, his brother offered to pass his last hours in his company. But the bishop refused, saying that he meant to go to bed and sleep as quietly as he ever did in his life :-"I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for it is Thou, Lord, only, that makest me dwell in safety" (Psalm iv., verse 9). The next morning he was chained to the stake in the town ditch, opposite the south front of Balliol College, Oxford. As the flames rose round him, he exclaimed, "with a wonderful loud voice, In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spirituni meum (Ps. xxxi., verse 6); Domine, recipe spiritum meum " and then in English, "Lord, Lord, receive my spirit."
Equally courageous, equally firm in their religious con- victions, were those, who, as the tide of victory ebbed and flowed, suffered a violent death on the other side. The dungeons in the Tower still record the power of the Psalms to soothe the "sorrowful sighing" of Roman Catholics who suffered for their faith. Here, for example, are the words of Ps. cxi., verse 10 (" The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom "), inscribed by Charles Bailly on the walls of his cell
in the Beauchamp or Cobham Tower: "Principium sapientie timor Domini, I.H.S.X.P.S. Be frend to one. Be ennemye to none. Anno D. 1571,10 Sept." Here, again, is the inscription carved by Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, in 1587: " Gloria et honore eum coronasti Domine " (" Thou madest him lower than the angels; to crown him with glory and worship," Ps. viii., verse 5). Here, lastly, is another, hidden for three centuries under the whitewash in St Martin's Tower, and only brought to light in 1902. Beneath an emblem of the Trinity appear the sacred letters "I.H.S.," and then the name, "George Beisley, Priest." On the left is a shield containing the fleur de Us, the word "Maria," and the date "1590." A mutilated -Latin inscription follows, in which words are illegible or wanting; but it seems to be from Ps. xlii., verse i: " Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks; so longeth my soul after Thee, 0 God." But in the history of Robert Southwell, a Jesuit and an Elizabethan poet, the power of the Psalms is illustrated in fullest detail. Born in 1560, he came to England twenty-six years later, knowing well the peril that he ran. To be a Roman Catholic was a crime; to be a priest, high treason; to be a Jesuit was to be a wild beast and hunted down as vermin. In a letter, written in January 1590, he describes the fate of two priests and other brethren in Bride- well, a fate which at any moment might be his own. " Some," he says, " are there hung up, for whole days, by the hands, in such manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of their toes. In fine, they that are kept in that prison truly live in the horrible pit, in the mire and clay (Ps. xl., verse a). This purgatory we hourly look for, in which Top- cliffe and Young . . . exercise all manners of torments. But come what pleaseth God, we hope that we shall be able to bear all in Him that strengthens us. In the meantime, we pray that they may be put to confusion that work iniquity;
and that the Lord may speak peace to His people, that, as the royal prophet says, < His glory may dwell in our land'" (Ps. Ixxxv., verse 9).
In a later letter he alludes to the martyrdoms of Bayles and Horner, and the effect which their holy ends had produced upon the people, "With such dews as these the Church is watered, ut in stillicidiis hujusmodi Icetetur germinans (Ps. Ixv., verse n). We also look for the time (if we are not unworthy of so great a glory) when our day (like that of the hired servant) shall come."
He had not long to wait. In 1592 he was betrayed by a woman, Anne Bellamy, into the hands of Topcliffe, who boasted that " he never did take so weighty a; man, if he be rightly considered." Thirteen times tortured, no word was wrung from him. Not even would he confess the colour of the horse on which he had ridden, lest his enemies should gain
a clue to his companion. Thus, to quote his own words, with "murd'red life" he couched in "Death's abode," sighing for the kindly touch of death to end his misery:
<( 0 Life! what letts thee from a quicke decease? 0 Death! what drawes thee from a present praye? My feast is done, my soule would be at ease, My grace is said; 0 death! come take away.
"I live, but such a life as ever dyes;
I dye, but such a death as never endes;
My death to end my dying life denyes, And life my living death no whitt amends."
In his lonely misery, he compares himself like David to the sparrow and the pelican (Ps. cii., verses 6, 7):
<( In eaves sole sparrowe sitts not more alone, Nor mourning pelican in desert wilde, Than sely I, that solitary mone, From highest hopes to hardest happ exii'd:
Sometyme, 0 blisfull tyme! was Vertue's meede Ayme to my thoughtes, guide to my word and deede. But feares are now my pheares1, greife my delight, My teares my drinke, my famisht thoughtes my bredd;
Day full of dumpes, nurse of unrest the nighte, My garmentes gives 2, a bloony feilde my bedd;
My sleape is rather death than deathe's allye, Yet kili'd with murd'ring pangues I cannot dye."
Three years he lingered in prison, first in a filthy dungeon in the Tower, and then in a better cell, where he was allowed the books for which he asked-the Bible and the Works of St Bernard. At last his end came. On February aist, 1595, he was drawn on a sledge from Newgate through the streets to Tybum. Rising up in the cart, with pinioned hands, and with the rope round his neck, he made a short address to the people who had flocked to see his execution. Then, looking for the cart to be drawn away, he blessed himself as well as his bonds allowed, and "with his eyes rais'd up to heaven, repeated, with great calmness of mind and countenance, these words of the Psalmist, ' Into Thy hands, 0 Lord, I commend my spirit'" (Ps. xxxi., verse 6). Such was the effect produced by his courage, that the bystanders interfered to prevent the executioner from cutting the rope till he was dead, in order that the ghastly formalities of disembowelling and quartering might not be carried out on his living body.
1 I.e., companions or bedfellows. 2 I.e., fetters.