The Roman and the Teuton

His life is matter of history, written by one Eigils (sainted like himself), who was his disciple and his friend.  Naturally told it is, and lovingly; but if I recollect right, without a single miracle or myth; the living contemporaneous picture of such a man, living in such a state of society, as we shall never (and happily need never) see again, but which is for that very reason worthy to be preserved, for a token that wisdom is justified of all her children.

It stands at length in Pertz’s admirable ‘Monumenta Historica,’ among many another like biography, and if I tell it here somewhat at length, readers must forgive me.

Every one has heard of little king Pepin, and many may have heard also how he was a mighty man of valour, and cut off a lion’s head at one blow; and how he was a crafty statesman, and first consolidated the temporal power of the Popes, and helped them in that detestable crime of overthrowing the noble Lombard kingdom, which cost Italy centuries of slavery and shame, and which has to be expiated even yet, it would seem, by some fearful punishment.

But every one may not know that Pepin had great excuses—if not for helping to destroy the Lombards—yet still for supporting the power of the Popes.  It seemed to him—and perhaps it was—the only practical method of uniting the German tribes into one common people, and stopping the internecine wars by which they were tearing themselves to pieces.  It seemed to him—and perhaps it was—the only practical method for civilizing and Christianizing the still wild tribes, Frisians, Saxons, and Sclaves, who pressed upon the German marches, from the mouth of the Elbe to the very Alps.  Be that as it may, he began the work; and his son Charlemagne finished it; somewhat well, and again somewhat ill—as most work, alas! is done on earth.  Now in the days of little king Pepin there was a nobleman of Bavaria, and his wife, who had a son called Sturmi; and they brought him to St. Boniface, that he might make him a priest.  And the child loved St. Boniface’s noble English face, and went with him willingly, and was to him as a son.  And who was St. Boniface?  That is a long story.  Suffice it that he was a man of Devon, brought up in a cloister at Exeter; and that he had crossed over into Frankenland, upon the lower Rhine, and become a missionary of the widest and loftiest aims; not merely a preacher and winner of souls, though that, it is said, in perfection; but a civilizer, a colonizer, a statesman.  He, and many another noble Englishman and Scot (whether Irish or Caledonian) were working under the Frank kings to convert the heathens of the marches, and carry the Cross into the far East.  They led lives of poverty and danger; they were martyred, half of them, as St. Boniface was at last.  But they did their work; and doubtless they have their reward.  They did their best, according to their light.  God grant that we, to whom so much more light has been given, may do our best likewise.  Under this great genius was young Sturmi trained.  Trained (as was perhaps needed for those who had to do such work in such a time) to have neither wife, nor child, nor home, nor penny in his purse; but to do all that he was bid, learn all that he could, and work for his living with his own hands; a life of bitter self-sacrifice.  Such a life is not needed now.  Possibly, nevertheless, it was needed then.

So St. Boniface took Sturmi about with him in his travels, and at last handed him over to Wigbert, the priest, to prepare him for the ministry.  ‘Under whom,’ says his old chronicler, ‘the boy began to know the Psalms thoroughly by heart; to understand the Holy Scriptures of Christ with spiritual sense; took care to learn most studiously the mysteries of the four Gospels, and to bury in his heart, by assiduous reading, the treasures of the Old and New Testament.  For his meditation was in the Law of the Lord day and night; profound in understanding, shrewd of thought, prudent of speech, fair of face, sober of carriage, honourable in morals, spotless in life, by sweetness, humility, and alacrity, he drew to him the love of all.’

He grew to be a man; and in due time he was ordained priest, ‘by the will and consent of all;’ and he ‘began to preach the words of Christ earnestly to the people;’ and his preaching wrought wonders among them.

Three years he preached in his Rhineland parish, winning love from all.  But in the third year ‘a heavenly thought’ came into his mind that he would turn hermit and dwell in the wild forest.  And why?  Who can tell?  He may, likely enough, have found celibacy a fearful temptation for a young and eloquent man, and longed to flee from the sight of that which must not be his.  And that, in his circumstances, was not a foolish wish.  He may have wished to escape, if but once, from the noise and crowd of outward things, and be alone with God and Christ, and his own soul.  And that was not a foolish wish.  John Bunyan so longed, and found what he wanted in Bedford Jail, and set it down and printed it in a Pilgrim’s Progress, which will live as long as man is man.  George Fox longed for it, and made himself clothes of leather which would not wear out, and lived in a hollow tree, till he, too, set down the fruit of his solitude in a diary which will live likewise as long as man is man.  Perhaps, again, young Sturmi longed to try for once in a way what he was worth upon God’s earth; how much he could endure; what power he had of helping himself, what courage to live by his own wits, and God’s mercy, on roots and fruits, as wild things live.  And surely that was not altogether a foolish wish.  At least, he longed to be a hermit; but he kept his longing to himself, however, till St. Boniface, his bishop, appeared; and then he told him all his heart.

And St. Boniface said: ‘Go; in the name of God;’ and gave him two comrades, and sent him into ‘the wilderness which is called Buchonia, the Beech Forest, to find a place fit for the servants of the Lord to dwell in.  For the Lord is able to provide his people a home in the desert.’

So those three went into the wild forest.  And ‘for three days they saw nought but earth and sky and mighty trees.  And they went on, praying Christ that He would guide their feet into the way of peace.  And on the third day they came to the place which is called Hersfelt (the hart’s down?), and searched it round, and prayed that Christ would bless the place for them to dwell in; and then they built themselves little huts of beech-bark, and abode there many days, serving God with holy fastings, and watchings, and prayers.’

Is it not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see now;—so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now?  And yet it may have been good in its time.  It looks out on us from the dim ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry.  But the old monster was good in his place and time.  God made him and had need of him.  It may be that God made those three poor monks, and had need of them likewise.

As for their purposes being superstitious, we shall be better able to judge of that when we have seen what they were—what sort of a house they meant to build to God.  As for their having self-interest in view, no doubt they thought that they should benefit their own souls in this life, and in the life to come.  But one would hardly blame them for that, surely?

One would not blame them as selfish and sordid if they had gone out on a commercial speculation?  Why, then, if on a religious one?  The merchant adventurer is often a noble type of man, and one to whom the world owes much, though his hands are not always clean, nor his eye single.  The monk adventurer of the middle age is, perhaps, a still nobler type of man, and one to whom the world owes more, though his eye, too, was not always single, nor his hands clean.

As for selfishness, one must really bear in mind that men who walked away into that doleful ‘urwarld’ had need to pray very literally ‘that Christ would guide their feet into the way of peace;’ and must have cared as much for their wordly interests as those who march up to the cannon’s mouth.  Their lives in that forest were not worth twenty-four hours’ purchase, and they knew it.  It is an ugly thing for an unarmed man, without a compass, to traverse the bush of Australia or New Zealand, where there are no wild beasts.  But it was uglier still to start out under the dark roof of that primæval wood.  Knights, when they rode it, went armed cap-à-pie, like Sintram through the dark valley, trusting in God and their good sword.  Chapmen and merchants stole through it by a few tracks in great companies, armed with bill and bow.  Peasants ventured into it a few miles, to cut timber, and find pannage for their swine, and whispered wild legends of the ugly things therein—and sometimes, too, never came home.  Away it stretched from the fair Rhineland, wave after wave of oak and alder, beech and pine, God alone knew how far, into the land of night and wonder, and the infinite unknown; full of elk and bison, bear and wolf, lynx and glutton, and perhaps of worse beasts still.  Worse beasts, certainly, Sturmi and his comrades would have met, if they had met them in human form.  For there were waifs and strays of barbarism there, uglier far than any waif and stray of civilization, border ruffian of the far west, buccaneer of the Tropic keys, Cimaroon of the Panama forests; men verbiesterte, turned into the likeness of beasts, wildfanger, hüner, ogres, wehr-wolves, strong thieves and outlaws, many of them possibly mere brutal maniacs; naked, living in caves and coverts, knowing no law but their own hunger, rage, and lust; feeding often on human flesh; and woe to the woman or child or unarmed man who fell into their ruthless clutch.  Orson, and such like human brutes of the wilderness, serve now to amuse children in fairy tales; they were then ugly facts of flesh and blood.  There were heathens there, too, in small colonies: heathen Saxons, cruelest of all the tribes; who worshipped at the Irmensul, and had an old blood-feud against the Franks; heathen Thuringer, who had murdered St. Kilian the Irishman at Wurzburg; heathen Slaves, of different tribes, who had introduced into Europe the custom of impaling their captives: and woe to the Christian priest who fell into any of their hands.  To be knocked on the head before some ugly idol was the gentlest death which they were like to have.  They would have called that martyrdom, and the gate of eternal bliss; but they were none the less brave men for going out to face it.

And beside all these, and worse than all these, there were the terrors of the unseen world; very real in those poor monks’ eyes, though not in ours.  There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in the caves, and Tannhäuser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the Christian man, and would lure him to his death.  There were fair swan-maidens and elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias the dancer, with all their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to sin, and having made him sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in hell.  There was Satan and all the devils, too, plotting to stop the Christian man from building the house of the Lord, and preaching the gospel to the heathen; ready to call up storms, and floods, and forest fires; to hurl the crag down from the cliffs, or drop the rotting tree on their defenceless heads—all real and terrible in those poor monks’ eyes, as they walked on, singing their psalms, and reading their Gospels, and praying to God to save them, for they could not save themselves; and to guide them, for they knew not, like Abraham, whither they went; and to show them the place where they should build the house of the Lord, and preach righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit to the heathen round.  We talk still, thank heaven, of heroes, and understand what that great word should mean.  But were not these poor monks heroes?  Knights-errant of God, doing his work as they best knew how.  We have a purer gospel than they: we understand our Bibles better.  But if they had not done what they did, where would have been now our gospel, and our Bible?  We cannot tell.  It was a wise old saw of our forefathers—‘Do not speak ill of the bridge which carries you over.’

If Sturmi had had a ‘holy longing’ to get into the wild wood, now he had a ‘holy longing’ to go back; and to find St. Boniface, and tell him what a pleasant place Hersfelt was, and the quality of the soil, and the direction of the watershed, and the meadows, and springs, and so forth, in a very practical way.  And St. Boniface answered, that the place seemed good enough; but that he was afraid for them, on account of the savage heathen Saxons.  They must go deeper into the forest, and then they would be safe.  So he went back to his fellow-hermits, and they made to themselves a canoe; and went paddling up and down the Fulda stream, beneath the alder boughs, ‘trying the mouths of the mountain-streams, and landing to survey the hills and ridges,’—pioneers of civilization none the less because they pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and heaven: but they found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface, save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-bah, ‘the rough brook,’ to see if it would suit; but it would not.  So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray once more.

St. Boniface sent for Sturmi after awhile, probably to Maintz, to ask of his success; and Sturmi threw himself on his face before him; and Boniface raised him up, and kissed him, and made him sit by his side—which was a mighty honour; for St. Boniface, the penniless monk, was at that moment one of the most powerful men of Europe; and he gave Sturmi a good dinner, of which, no doubt, he stood in need; and bade him keep up heart, and seek again for the place which God had surely prepared, and would reveal in His good time.

And this time Sturmi, probably wiser from experience, determined to go alone; but not on foot.  So he took to him a trusty ass, and as much food as he could pack on it; and, axe in hand, rode away into the wild wood, singing his psalms.  And every night, before he lay down to sleep, he cut boughs, and stuck them up for a ring fence round him and the ass, to the discomfiture of the wolves, which had, and have still, a great hankering after asses’ flesh.  It is a quaint picture, no doubt; but let us respect it, while we smile at it; if we, too, be brave men.

Then one day he fell into a great peril.  He came to the old road (a Roman one, I presume; for the Teutons, whether in England or elsewhere, never dreamed of making roads till three hundred years ago, but used the old Roman ones), which led out of the Thuringen land to Maintz.  And at the ford over the Fulda he met a great multitude bathing, of Sclavonian heathens, going to the fair at Maintz.  And they smelt so strong, the foul miscreants, that Sturmi’s donkey backed, and refused to face them; and Sturmi himself was much of the donkey’s mind, for they began to mock him (possibly he nearly went over the donkey’s head), and went about to hurt him.

‘But,’ says the chronicler, ‘the power of the Lord held them back.’

Then he went on, right thankful at having escaped with his life, up and down, round and round, exploring and surveying—for what purpose we shall see hereafter.  And at last he lost himself in the place which is called Aihen-loh, ‘the glade of oaks;’ and at night-fall he heard the plash of water, and knew not whether man or wild beast made it.  And not daring to call out, he tapped a tree-trunk with his axe (some backwoodsman’s sign of those days, we may presume), and he was answered.  And a forester came to him, leading his lord’s horse; a man from the Wetterau, who knew the woods far and wide, and told him all that he wanted to know.  And they slept side by side that night; and in the morning they blest each other, and each went his way.

Yes, there were not merely kings and wars, popes and councils, in those old days;—there were real human beings, just such as we might meet by the wayside any hour, with human hearts and histories within them.  And we will be thankful if but one of them, now and then, starts up out of the darkness of twelve hundred years, like that good forester, and looks at us with human eyes, and goes his way again, blessing, and not unblest.

And now Sturmi knew all that he needed to know; and after awhile, following the counsel of the forester, he came to ‘the blessed place, long ago prepared of the Lord.  And when he saw it, he was filled with immense joy, and went on exulting; for he felt that by the merits and prayers of the holy Bishop Boniface that place had been revealed to him.  And he went about it, and about it, half the day; and the more he looked on it the more he gave God thanks;’ and those who know Fulda say, that Sturmi had reason to give God thanks, and must have had a keen eye, moreover, for that which man needs for wealth and prosperity, in soil and water, meadow and wood.  So he blessed the place, and signed it with the sign of the Cross (in token that it belonged thenceforth neither to devils nor fairies, but to his rightful Lord and Maker), and went back to his cell, and thence a weary journey to St. Boniface, to tell him of the fair place which he had found at last.

And St. Boniface went his weary way, either to Paris or to Aix, to Pepin and Carloman, kings of the Franks; and begged of them a grant of the Aihen-loh, and all the land for four miles round, and had it.  And the nobles about gave up to him their rights of venison, and vert, and pasture, and pannage of swine; and Sturmi and seven brethren set out thither, ‘in the year of our Lord 744, in the first month (April, presumably), in the twelfth day of the month, unto the place prepared of the Lord,’ that they might do what?

That they might build an abbey.  Yes; but the question is, what building an abbey meant, not three hundred, nor five hundred, but eleven hundred years ago—for centuries are long matters, and men and their works change in them.

And then it meant this: Clearing the back woods for a Christian settlement; an industrial colony, in which every man was expected to spend his life in doing good—all and every good which he could for his fellow-men.  Whatever talent he had he threw into the common stock; and worked, as he was found fit to work, at farming, gardening, carpentering, writing, doctoring, teaching in the schools, or preaching to the heathen round.  In their common church they met to worship God; but also to ask for grace and strength to do their work, as Christianizers and civilizers of mankind.  What Christianity and civilization they knew (and they knew more than we are apt now to believe) they taught it freely; and therefore they were loved, and looked up to as superior beings, as modern missionaries, wherever they do their work even decently well, are looked up to now.

So because the work could be done in that way, and (as far as men then, or now, can see) in no other way, Pepin and Carloman gave Boniface the glade of oaks, that they might clear the virgin forest, and extend cultivation, and win fresh souls to Christ, instead of fighting, like the kings of this world, for the land which was already cleared, and the people who were already Christian.

In two months’ time they had cut down much of the forest; and then came St. Boniface himself to see them, and with him a great company of workmen, and chose a place for a church.  And St. Boniface went up to the hill which is yet called Bishop’s Mount, that he might read his Bible in peace, away from kings and courts, and the noise of the wicked world; and his workmen felled trees innumerable, and dug peat to burn lime withal; and then all went back again, and left the settlers to thrive and work.

And thrive and work they did, clearing more land, building their church, ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more heathen converts, more and more heathen school-children; and St. Boniface came to see them from time to time, whenever he could get a holiday, and spent happy days in prayer and study, with his pupil and friend.  And ten years after, when St. Boniface was martyred at last by the Friesland heathens, and died, as he had lived, like an apostle of God, then all the folk of Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home to their town, because he had been Archbishop there.  But he ‘appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and said: “Why delay ye to take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the wilderness which God bath prepared for me?”’

So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,—unless the French Republican armies dug up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier things, to the winds of heaven.  And all men came to worship at his tomb, after the fashion of those days.  And Fulda became a noble abbey, with its dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads, almshouses, and all the appanages of such a place, in the days when monks were monks indeed.  And Sturmi became a great man, and went through many troubles and slanders, and conquered in them all, because there was no fault found in him, as in Daniel of old; and died in a good old age, bewept by thousands, who, but for him, would have been heathens still.  And the Aihen-loh became rich corn-land and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough and a principality, where men lived in peace under mild rule, while the feudal princes quarrelled and fought outside; and a great literary centre, whose old records are now precious to the diggers among the bones of bygone times; and at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so developed themselves, that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which I have seen is this, bearing date about 1710:—

‘The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda, Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.’  Developed, certainly: and not altogether in the right direction.  For instead of the small beer, which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the world, the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best table too.  Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the Aihen-lob, and planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make St. Sturmi hope that he had not read his Bible altogether in vain.

Surely such men as St. Sturmi were children of wisdom, put what sense on the word you will.  In a dark, confused, lawless, cut-throat age, while everything was decided by the sword, they found that they could do no good to themselves, or any man, by throwing their swords into either scale.  They would be men of peace, and see what could be done so.  Was that not wise?  So they set to work.  They feared God exceedingly, and walked with God.  Was not that wise?  They wrought righteousness, and were merciful and kind, while kings and nobles were murdering around them; pure and temperate, while other men were lustful and drunken; just and equal in all their ways, while other men were unjust and capricious; serving God faithfully, according to their light, while the people round them were half or wholly heathen; content to do their work well on earth, and look for their reward in heaven, while the kings and nobles, the holders of the land, were full of insane ambition, every man trying to seize a scrap of ground from his neighbour, as if that would make them happier.  Was that not wise?  Which was the wiser, the chief killing human beings, to take from them some few square miles which men had brought into cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated land, and going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the virgin soil?  Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again?  And do not tell me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious ends.  It is not so.  I know well his fanaticism and his superstition, and the depths of its ignorance and silliness: but he had more in him than that.  Had he not, he would have worked no lasting work.  He was not only the pioneer of civilization, but he knew that he was such.  He believed that all knowledge came from God, even that which taught a man to clear the forest, and plant corn instead; and he determined to spread such knowledge as he had wherever he could.  He was a wiser man than the heathen Saxons, even than the Christian Franks, around him; a better scholar, a better thinker, better handicraftsman, better farmer; and he did not keep his knowledge to himself.  He did not, as some tell you, keep the Bible to himself.  It is not so; and those who say so, in this generation, ought to be ashamed of themselves.  The monk knew his Bible well himself, and he taught it.  Those who learnt from him to read, learnt to read their Bibles.  Those who did not learn (of course the vast majority, in days when there was no printing), he taught by sermons, by pictures, afterward by mystery and miracle plays.  The Bible was not forbidden to the laity till centuries afterwards—and forbidden then, why?  Because the laity throughout Europe knew too much about the Bible, and not too little.  Because the early monks had so ingrained the mind of the masses, throughout Christendom, with Bible stories, Bible personages, the great facts, and the great doctrines, of our Lord’s life, that the masses knew too much; that they could contrast too easily, and too freely, the fallen and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries, with those Bible examples, which the old monks of centuries before had taught their forefathers.  Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity, because it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries before they had taught them to love and know too well.  In a word, the old monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and looked on as a superior being, as they are.