For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Singic Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Race after race to dust is hurled, While Death, with oriflamme unfurled, And higher yet, and ever higher, A speechless voice from every stone Nor even yet may man aspire The shadow of God's hand is laid Earth's myriad temples all at last While truth outlives the judgment blast. Eternal worship is the end For which man's being doth contend, The heaven towards which his hopes ascend. For God's own presence, shining fair, GENEVIEVE IRONS. FROM the rim it trickles down Keen and eager though it go Where dark water-cresses grow With no slimy dregs to trouble Then down the sloping side Till it gather strength to leap Then bends beneath the boulders Through a country rough and shaggy, Full of hummocks and of hunches, Through rich green solitudes, And the pride Of the mountain daisy there, From The Contemporary Review. THE TURNING-POINT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. PART THE FIRST. I. IN the history of modern Europe, four great events stand out as landmarks upon which the student who desires accurately to explore that great field will do well to fix his earnest attention. The first is the coronation of Charles the Great on Christmas day, A. D. 800; the second the election of Hildebrand to the papal chair on the 22nd of April, 1073; the third, the fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May, 1453; the fourth, the sacking of the Bastille on the 14th of July, 1789. The bestowal of the imperial crown upon the great Frankish monarch by Pope St. Leo III. was the outward visible sign of that new order which had "been made secretly and fashioned beneath in the earth," amid the decay and dissolution of the Roman world: it was the beginning of the Middle Ages. The pontificate of St. Gregory VII. was the turning-point of those ages, determining, in vitally important matters, the course they were to run. The tak ing of Constantinople by Mohammed II. marks their close; it was this event that by scattering Greek scholars over Italy, contributed more than anything else to the revival of materialism, called the Renaissance, and to all that came therefrom, including the Protestant Reformation, which, in Germany* at all events, certainly was, in part, a reaction against the new heathenism of humanist popes and prelates. And the passing-bell of the Cæsarism which had arisen upon the ruins of the medieval order is sounded in the presageful words of the Duke of Liancourt, when announcing to Louis XVI. the capture of the royal fortress and the murder of its little garrison: Sire, it is not a revolt; it is a revolution." Perhaps of all these great events, the second is that the significance of which is least understood. And yet, certainly, it is by no means the least worthy of careful and exact study. This Europe of this nineteenth century into which we 66 • See Möhler's Symbolik, 5th edition, p. 9. have been born "is made and moulded of things past." Every death is but a transformation of life. And the mediæval period, dead though it is in one sense, in another and as true a sense is living and working in our midst. The generations pass away; but their doing remains. To borrow a phrase from Buddhism, "We inherit the karma of the countless multitudes who have lived and died, who have struggled and suffered, in the long ages of the past."* And, as I venture to think, by far the most important part of our heritage in this new time is that which has come to us directly from the mediaval period. Of that period the greatest figure, beyond all question, is Hildebrand, and its most momentous struggle the conflict to which he received his supreme consecration upon the day when the papal tiara was set upon his head. Moreover, the great issue in which he bore so masterful a part is still before the world, under other names. The battle yet rages, though waged under different conditions. It is not so long since the foremost of English statesmen made it matter of complaint that the late pontiff had "refurbished the rusty tools" of his predecessors, conspicuous among the ecclesiastical arms thus opprobriously designated being the spiritual weapons of Gregory VII. And, as we all know, the German chancellor has for years been haunted by the bugbear of Canossa. I think, therefore, I may justly claim for my subject the merit of actuality a quality which, perhaps, may fairly be looked for in a contribution to a review bearing the title of "Contemporary." So much by way of apology for the topic which I am about to discuss. Let me add that now, perhaps, the time has arrived when, without undue confidence, one may hope to obtain a patient hearing for its discussion. For centuries the memory of Hildebrand lay under reprobation as the very type of insatiable ambition and spiritual pride. Instead of the aureole of sanctity, a kind of diabolical splendor encircled him, and the grim pun, borrowed from the German, whereby he is described in the Anglican Book of Mr. Rhys Davids' Hibbert Lectures, p. 215. Homilies as "the brand of Hell" did but | between the papacy and the Empire. It express the general estimate of him is, indeed, but a mere sketch which he formed alike by Teutonic and English has given us of the character and actions historians. Nor was he judged more of Gregory VII. But the outlines are favorably in France. "The Church has there traced as by a few strokes of a numbered him among the saints. The pencil in the hand of a master, and it has wise have numbered him among mad- been a tolerably easy task for later scholmen," ,"* writes Voltaire. And even among ars to complete the picture. The laboriFrench ecclesiastical writers of authority ous erudition of Germany has placed there are those who have recorded a before the world a mass of authentic docscarcely more favorable verdict upon uments, among which Jaffé's "Regesta him. But Time has at length retried his Pontificum Romanorum and "Monucause - Time, menta Gregoriana" deserve especial mention; while Gförer's massive work, which solves all doubt By bringing Truth, his glorious daughter, out. Within the last half-century investigators more thorough, exact, judicial, in a word, scientific, have examined, with most fruitful results, the question what manner of man Hildebrand was, and of what kind his work was. So long ago, indeed, as 1815, Voigt, in his " Hildebrand als Papst Gregor VII.," opened out to his astonished countrymen quite a new view of the great pontiff: but it is perhaps to M. Guizot, more than to any one else, that we owe the passing away of the old error from the European mind. It was in 1828 that this illustrious teacher, setting at nought the inveterate Gallican tradition, exhibited Hildebrand to his hearers at the Sorbonne, not in the guise of a reactionary, an obscurantist, a foe of intellectual development and of social progress, but as a reformer alike of the Church and civil society, upon the basis of morality, of justice, of order; as a great constructive genius, who did a work parallel to that of Charlemagne or Peter the Great. It is not easy to over-estimate — and just now the tendency appears to be greatly to underrate-the services which M. Guizot's calm courage, judicial mind, wide learning, and singular power of generalization have rendered to the cause of scientific history. But of all those services none deserves to be more highly valued than the effort made by him to mete out even justice to the heroic champion of the Church, in the great struggle "L'Eglise dont il fut le vengeur et la victime, l'a mis au nombre des saints. Les sages l'ont mis au ... nombre des fous."- Essai sur les Mœurs. Papst Gregorius VII. und sein Zeitalter," is a perfect treasure-house of learning; and Giesebrecht's "Geschichte der Deutschen Kaiserzcit," the production of an author formed in a different school, and written under the influence of other convictions, merits hardly less attention. To France, too, we owe several important contributions to the subject with which I am concerned. It must suffice here to speak briefly of three of them. First, there is M. Mignet's series of articles entiled, "La Lutte des Papes contre les Empereurs d'Allemagne," which attracted so much attention when they appeared in the Journal des Savants, and in which, whether we assent or dissent, as we read them, we find everywhere tokens of careful research and conscientious thought. Then there are the two brilliant volumes of M. Villemain's "Histoire de Grégoire VII.," which, begun so long ago as 1827, were not given to the world until 1873two years after the author's death. M. Villemain, we are told by his editor, regarded this work as pre-eminently his contribution to history (comme son œuvre historique), and no doubt it is in many respects a very valuable contribution. Nowhere, perhaps, do his characteristic excellences come out more strikingly than in some portions of it- for example, in his description of the death of St. Leo IX., or in his account of the great Countess Matilda his taste for picturesque details, the vividness and beauty of his coloring, the luminousness and distinctness of his images. But on the other hand, he has great defects. He is no psychologist. He draws from without rather than within. He never loses him- | Another posthumous contribution to the self in his subject; he displays little of history of Gregory VII. is supplied by that self-effacement which allows events the sixth and seventh volumes of M. de to tell their own story. M. Taine has Montalembert's "Moines d'Occident somewhere remarked, with much happi- volumes which, left incomplete and unreness, that the historian should have in vised by their illustrious author, are him five or six poets. M. Villemain has hardly a fair subject for rigorous critibut one; and that is a poet after the or- cism. Here it must suffice to say of der of Lucan, not of Virgil- a rhetori- them that they are marked by the same. cian rather than a creator. Then, again, warmth of sympathy, indefatigable indushis purely critical faculty cannot be try, and lofty thought which distinguish ranked very high. Thus he receives as the earlier portions of his unfinished genuine, apparently without misgiving, task, while they cannot be said to be exthe famous "Dictatus Papa," the spuri-empt from what has been called the ousness of which, pretty generally recog-religious romanticism which was, as it nized by the most competent of the ear- would seem, a natural constituent of his lier critics, has been conclusively estab- beautiful and noble character. Among lished by Giesebrecht; while his intro- English writers upon the life and times ductory discourse on the history of the of Hildebrand, the first place must still, I papacy certainly reveals both a very de- think, be conceded to the late Mr. Bowfective acquaintance with the mass of den. He has not, indeed, the brilliancy authorities he cites, and a very imper- of Dean Milman; but he is far more fect power of appreciating evidence.* accurate, and far less under the influence of that tendency to "people past history with phantasms, and color it with lines which belong to our own times" borrow a phrase from Milman's distinguished successor which so greatly I feel that one ought not to express this opinion without assigning grounds for it. Adequately to do that would require a volume. Here, in a note, I can only adduce one or two examples of the faults which I censure. Thus M. Villemain writes: "Le Concile de Nicée, sous l'inspiration de Constantine, qui voulait que l'Eglise eût des assemblées, mais pas d'autres chefs que lui-même, avait déclaré le patriarche d'Alexandrie égal en honneurs et en privilèges à l'évêque de Rome" (vol. i., p. 47). He is, of course, referring to the sixth canon of the Nicene Council, but it is difficult to be lieve that he can have read it. That canon merely provides for the maintenance of the ancient custom whereby the great sees of Alexandria and Antioch exercised over the whole civil diocese, the one of Egypt, the other of the East, original jurisdiction, similar to that exercised by the Church of Rome in the West. There is not one syllable in the canon about equality in honors and privileges, and the declaration which the Council made was of nothing new (as M. Villemain implies) but merely of an existing fact. In another place (vol. i., p. 72) M. Villemain quotes a passage from a letter of St. Augustine, in which the saint relates a saying of St. Ambrose: "Cum Romam venio jejuno sabbatis. Cum Mediolani sum non jejuno. Sic enim tu (it is Monica who is addressed) ad quam forte ecclesiam veneris ejus morem serva." From this he infers, "Pautorité de la chaire de Milan égalait presque celle de Rome." To show the absurdity of the inference it may be sufficient to say that Cardinal Manning would give of himself in the present day an account as to this matter similar to that given by St. Ambrose. "I abstain from flesh on Saturday when I am in Rome because it is the custom there. I do not abstain on Saturday in England because it is not the English cusTherefore (according to M. Villemain) the authority of the see of Westminster almost equals that of Rome. Once more. It is not easy to imagine how any one who had really studied the ecclesiastical history of the early Christian centuries could have written the tom." to mars the work of the historian of "Latin following sentence: "Ouvrez l'histoire de la grande |