Satanism and Witchcraft E-Book

Jules Michelet

• Herausgeber: Passerino
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Satanism and Witchcraft is a book written by Jules Michelet, a French historian and philosopher, and first published in French in 1862 under the title " La Sorcière" ("The Witch"). The book explores the history of witchcraft and Satanism, with a focus on the persecution of witches during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Michelet's work was notable for its sympathetic portrayal of witches, which was a departure from the prevailing view of the time that saw witches as evil, devil-worshipping agents of Satan. Instead, Michelet presented witches as victims of superstition and social prejudice, who were often persecuted for their non-conformity to prevailing societal norms.

The book was controversial when it was first published, and it remains a significant work in the study of witchcraft and the history of religion. It has been translated into many languages and has been influential in shaping popular perceptions of witchcraft and Satanism.

Jules Michelet (21 August 1798 – 9 February 1874) was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work History of France, which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. He is considered one of the founders of modern historiography. 

Leseprobe

Jules Michelet

Satanism and Witchcraft

The sky is the limit

UUID: 36c73d38-00fc-4105-b6cb-94cdacf343dd

This ebook was created with StreetLib Writehttps://writeapp.io

Table of contents

Introduction

PART ONE

1. Death Of The Gods

2. What Drove The Middle Ages To Despair

3. The Little Demon Of The Hearth And Home

4. Temptations

5. Diabolical Possession

6. The Pact With Satan

7. King Of The Dead

8. Prince Of Nature

9. Satan The Healer

10. Charms And Love Potions

11. Communion Of Revolt Witches’ Sabbaths The Black Mass

12. Black Mass Continued, Love And Death, Satan Disappears

PART TWO

13. The Sorceress In Her Decadence, Satan Multiplied And Vulgarised

14. Persecutions

15. A Hundred Years’ Toleration In France

16. The Basque Witches 1609

17. Satan Turns Ecclesiastic 1610

18. Gauffridi 1610

19. The Nuns Of Loudun Urbain Grandier 1633, 1634

20. The Nuns Of Louviers And Satanic Possession, Madeleine Bavent 1640-1647

21. Satan Triumphant In The Seventeenth Century

22. Father Girard And Charlotte Cadière

23. Charlotte Cadière At The Convent Of Ollioules

24. Trial Of Charlotte Cadière 1730, 1731

Epilogue

Notes And Elucidations

Principal Authorities

Introduction

SPRENGER said, before 1500: "We should speak of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers; the latter are of small account." So another writer under Louis XIII.: "For one Sorcerer, ten thousand Sorceresses."

"Nature makes them Sorceresses,"—the genius peculiar to woman and her temperament. She is born a creature of Enchantment. In virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.

All primitive peoples start alike; this we see again and again in the accounts given by travellers. Man hunts and fights. Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the gods. She possesses glimpses of the second sight, and has wings to soar into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to count the seasons, she scans the sky. But earth has her heart as well. Her eyes stoop to the amorous flowers; a flower herself in her young beauty, she learns to know them as playfellows and intimates. A woman, she asks them to heal the men she loves.

Pathetic in their simplicity these first beginnings of Religion and Science! Later on, each province will be separated, we shall see mankind specialise—as medicine-man, astrologer or prophet, necromancer, priest, physician. But in these earliest days woman is all in all, and plays every part.

A strong and bright and vigorous religion, such as was Greek Paganism, begins with the Sibyl, to end with the Sorceress. The first, a virgin fair and beautiful, brilliant in the full blaze of dawn, cradled it, gave it its charm and glamour. In later days, when sick and fallen, in the gloom of the Dark Ages, on heaths and in forests, it was concealed and protected by the Sorceress; her dauntless pity fed its needs and kept it still alive. Thus for religions it is woman is mother, tender protectress and faithful nurse. Gods are like men; they are born and they die on a woman's breast.

But what a price she paid for her fidelity! . . . Magian queens of Persia, enchanting Circé, sublime Sibyl, alas! how are you fallen, how barbarous the transformation you have suffered! . . . She who, from the throne of the Orient, taught mankind the virtues of plants and the motions of the stars, she who, seated on the Delphic tripod and, illumined by the very god of light, gave oracles to a kneeling world, is the same that, a thousand years later, is hunted like a wild beast, chased from street to street, reviled, buffeted, stoned, scorched with red-hot embers! . . .

The clergy has not stakes enough, the people insults, the child stones, for the unhappy being. The poet, no less a child, throws yet another stone at her, a crueller one still for a woman. Gratuitously insulting, he makes her out always old and ugly. The very word Sorceress or Witch calls up the image of the Weird Sisters of Macbeth. Yet the cruel witch trials prove exactly the opposite; many perished just because they were young and pretty.

The Sibyl foretold the future; but the Sorceress makes it. Here is the great, the vital distinction. She evokes, conjures, guides Destiny. She is not like Cassandra of old, who foresaw the coming doom so clearly, and deplored it and awaited its approach; she creates the future. Greater than Circé, greater than Medea, she holds in her hand the magic wand of natural miracle, she has Nature to aid and abet her like a sister. Foreshadowings of the modern Prometheus are to be seen in her,—a beginning of industry, above all of the sovereign industry that heals and revivifies men. Unlike the Sibyl, who seemed ever gazing towards the dayspring, she fixes her eyes on the setting sun; but it is just this sombre orb of the declining luminary that shows long before the dawn (like the glow on the peaks of the High Alps) a dawn anticipatory of the true day.

The Priest realises clearly where the danger lies, that an enemy, a menacing rival, is to be feared in this High-priestess of Nature he pretends to despise. Of the old gods she has invented new ones. Beside the old Satan of the past, a new Satan is seen burgeoning in her, a Satan of the future.

For a thousand years the people had one healer and one only,—the Sorceress. Emperors and kings and popes, and the richest barons, had sundry Doctors of Salerno, or Moorish and Jewish physicians; but the main body of every State, the whole world we may say, consulted no one but the Saga, the Wise Woman. If her cure failed, they abused her and called her a Witch. But more generally, through a combination of respect and terror, she was spoken of as the Good Lady, or Beautiful Lady (Bella Donna), the same name as that given to fairies.

Her fate resembled that which still often befalls her favourite herb, the belladonna, and other beneficent poisons she made use of, and which were antidotes of the great scourges of the Middle Ages. Children and ignorant passers-by cursed these sombre flowers, without understanding their virtues, scared by their suspicious colour. They shudder and fly the spot; yet these are the Comforting plants ( Solanaceæ), which, wisely administered, have worked so many cures and soothed so much human agony.

They are found growing in the most sinister localities, in lonely, ill-reputed spots, amid ruins and rubbish heaps,—yet another resemblance with the Sorceress who utilises them. Where, indeed, could she have taken up her habitation, except on savage heaths, this child of calamity, so fiercely persecuted, so bitterly cursed and proscribed? She gathered poisons to heal and save; she was the Devil's bride, the mistress of the Incarnate Evil One, yet how much good she effected, if we are to credit the great physician of the Renaissance! Paracelsus, when in 1527, at Bâle, he burned the whole pharmacopœia of his day, declared he had learned from the Sorceresses all he knew.

Had they not earned some reward? Yes! and reward they had. Their recompense was torture and the stake. New punishments were devised for their especial benefit, new torments invented. They were brought to trial en masse, condemned on the slightest pretext. Never was such lavish waste of human life. To say nothing of Spain, the classic land of the auto-da-fé, where Moor and Jew are always associated with Witches, seven thousand were burned at Trèves, and I know not how many at Toulouse; at Geneva five hundred in three months (1513); eight hundred at Wurzburg, in one batch almost, and fifteen hundred at Bamberg,—both of these quite small bishoprics! Ferdinand II. himself, the bigot, the cruel Emperor of the Thirty Years’ War, was forced to restrain these worthy bishops, else they would have burned all their subjects. I find, in the Wurzburg list, a wizard of eleven, a schoolboy, and a witch of fifteen, at Bayonne, two sorceresses of seventeen, damnably pretty.

Mark this, at certain epochs the mere word of Sorceress or Witch is an arm wherewith Hate can kill at discretion. Female jealousy, masculine avarice, are only too ready to grasp so convenient a weapon. Such and such a neighbour is rich? . . . Witch! witch! Such and such is pretty? . . . Ah! witch! We shall see Murgin, a little beggar-girl, casting this terrible stone at a great lady, whose only crime was being too beautiful, the Châtelaine de Lancinena, and marking her white forehead with the death sign.

Accused of sorcery, women anticipate, if they can, the torture that is inevitable by killing themselves. Remy, that worthy judge of Lorraine who burned eight hundred of them, boasts of this Reign of Terror: "So sure is my justice," he declared, "that sixteen witches arrested the other day, never hesitated, but strangled themselves incontinently."

In the long course of study for my history during the thirty years I have devoted to it, this horrible literature of Sorcery, or Witchcraft, has passed through my hands again and again. First I exhausted the Manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine collections of the Dominicans—the Whips, Hammers, Ant-Swarms, Fustigations, Lanterns, etc., to give some of the absurd titles these books bear. Next I read the men of the Law, the lay judges who take the place of these monks, and who despise them without being much less idiotic themselves. I say a word or two of these elsewhere; for the present I have only one observation to make, viz. that from 1300 down to 1600, and even later, the administration of justice is identically the same. With the exception of one small interlude in the Parlement of Paris, we find always and everywhere the same ferocity of folly. Ability and talent make no difference. The wise and witty De Lancre, a magistrate of Bordeaux under Henri IV., a man of enlightened ideas in politics, directly he has to deal with witchcraft, falls back to the level of a Nider or a Sprenger, two imbecile monks of the fifteenth century.

One is filled with amazement to see all these widely different epochs, all these men of varying cultivation, unable to make one step in advance. But the explanation is simple; they were one and all arrested, let us rather say, blinded, hopelessly intoxicated and made cruel savages of, by the poison of their first principle, the doctrine of Original Sin. This is the fundamental dogma of universal injustice: "All lost for one alone, not only punished but deserving punishment, undone even before they were born and desperately wicked, dead to God from the beginning. The babe at its mother's breast is a damned soul already."

Who says so? All do, even Bossuet. A Roman theologian of weight, Spina, Master of the Sacred Palace, formulates the doctrine in precise words: "Why does God permit the death of the innocent? He does so justly. For if they do not die by reason of the sins they have committed, yet they are guilty of death by reason of original sin" 1

From this monstrous theory two consequences follow, in justice and in logic. The judge is always sure of doing justice; anyone brought before him is inevitably guilty, and if he defends himself, doubly guilty. No call for Justice to sweat, and rack its brains in order to distinguish true and false; in every case the decision is a foregone conclusion. The logician likewise and the schoolman may spare themselves the trouble of analysing the soul of man, of examining the phases through which it passes, of considering its complexity, its internal disparities and self-contradictions. No need, as we feel ourselves bound to do, to explain how, by slow and subtle degrees, the soul may grow vicious instead of virtuous. These refinements, these doubts and difficulties and scruples, if they understood them at all, how they would laugh at them, and shake their heads in scorn, and how gracefully would the fine long ears that ornament their empty pates waggle to and fro!

Particularly when the Compact with the Devil comes into question, that ghastly covenant where, for some small ephemeral gain, the soul sells itself into everlasting torment, we philosophers should endeavour to trace out the accursed path, the appalling ladder of calamities and crimes, capable of having brought it so low. But our theologian can ignore all such considerations! For him Soul and Devil were created for each other; so that at the first temptation, for a caprice, a sudden longing, a passing fancy, the soul flies headlong to this dreadful extremity.

Nor can I see any traces of modern writers having made much inquiry into the moral chronology of Sorcery. They confine themselves far too much to the connections between the Middle Ages and Classical Antiquity. The connection is real enough, but slight and of quite minor importance. Neither the ancient Enchantress, nor yet the Celtic and Germanic Seeress, are yet the true Sorceress. The harmless Sabasia (festivals of Bacchus Sabasius), a miniature rustic "Sabbath" which survived down to Mediæval times, are far from identical with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, that deliberate and deadly defiance of Jesus. These gloomy conceptions were not passed on down the long thread of tradition; they sprang ready made from the horrors of the time.

From when does the Sorceress date? I answer unhesitatingly, "From the ages of despair."

From the profound despair the World owed to the Church. I say again unhesitatingly, "The Sorceress is the Church's crime."

I pass over the string of plausible explanations by which the priests attempt to mitigate her guilt: "Weak and frivolous by nature, open to every temptation, women were led astray by concupiscence." Alas! in the wretchedness and famine of those dreadful times, this was no force sufficient to rouse to demoniac frenzy. Loving women, jealous and forsaken, children driven out of doors by a cruel stepmother, mothers beaten by their sons (all hackneyed subjects of legendary tales), may indeed have been tempted to invoke the Evil Spirit; but all this does not constitute the Sorceress, the Witch. Because the unhappy creatures call upon Satan, it does not follow that he accepts their service. They are still far, very far, from being ripe for him. They have yet to learn to hate God.

To understand this better, read the accursed Registers still extant of the Inquisition, not in the extracts compiled by Llorente, Lamotte-Langon, etc., but in what is extant of the original Registers of Toulouse. Read them in their vapid sameness, their dismal aridity, their shocking unconscious savagery. A few pages, and you are cold at heart, a cruel chill strikes home to the vitals. Death, death, always death, you feel it in every page. You are already in the tomb, or immured in a little chamber of stone with damp-stained walls. The happiest gate is death. The dreadful thing is the in pace. One word recurs continually, like a bell of horror tolled, and tolled again, to drive the dead in life into despair,—always the same word, Immured.

Dread apparatus for crushing and annihilating souls, cruel press for breaking hearts. The screw turns, and turns, till breath fails and the very bones crack, and she springs from the horrid engine a mystery in an unknown world!

The Sorceress has neither father nor mother, neither son, nor mate, nor kindred. She appears none knows from whence, a monster, an aërolite from the skies. Who so bold, great God! as to come nigh her?

Where is her lurking-place? In untracked wilds, in impenetrable forests of bramble, on blasted heaths, where entangled thistles suffer no foot to pass. She must be sought by night, cowering beneath some old-world dolmen. If you find her, she is isolated still by the common horror of the countryside; she has, as it were, a ring of fire round her haunts.

’Tis hard to credit it, but she is a woman still. Even this fearful life has its spring of womanhood, its feminine electricity, in virtue of which she is dowered with two gifts

Thehalf-sane, half-insane madness, illuminism, of the seer, which according to its degree is poetry, second sight, preternatural vision, a faculty of speech at once simple and astute, above all else the power of believing in her own falsehoods. This gift is unknown to the male Sorcerer; the Wizard fails to comprehend its very elements.

From it flows a second, the sublime faculty of solitary conception, that parthenogenesis our physiologists of to-day recognise as existing among the females of numerous species. The same fecundity of body is no less procreative where conceptions of the spirit are involved.

All alone, she conceived and brought forth. Whom or what? Another of her own kind, so like the original as to cheat the eyes.

Child of hate, conceived of love; for without love nothing can be created. The Sorceress, terror-struck as she is at her strange offspring, yet sees herself so faithfully reproduced, finds such content in contemplating this new idol, that instantly she sets it on the altar, worships it, immolates herself to it, giving her own body as victim and living sacrifice.

We shall often and often find her telling the judge: "There is only one thing I am afraid of,—not to suffer enough for him." 2

Do you know how the newborn infant salutes the new world he enters? With a horrid scream of laughter. And has he not good cause to be glad, there on the free and open plains, far from the dungeons of Spain, and the immured victims of Toulouse? His in pace is wide as the world itself. He comes and goes, roaming where he will. His the boundless forest! his the vast heath that stretches away to the farthest horizon! his the round world and the riches thereof! The Sorceress calls him tenderly, " Robin, Robin mine! "—from the name of that gallant outlaw, the gay Robin Hood, that lived under the greenwood tree. Another pet name she loves to give him is Verdelet, Joli-Bois, Vert-Bois. The green woods, indeed, are the frolicsome scamp's favourite haunts; one glimpse of bush and briar, and he is off, a wild truant of Nature.

The astounding thing is that at the first essay the Sorceress really and truly made a living being. He has every mark of actuality. He has been seen and heard, and everybody can describe him.

The saints, those children of affection, the sons of the house, pay little heed, only watch and dream; they wait in patient waiting, confident of getting their share of the Elect in God's good time. The small degree of activity they possess is concentrated within the narrow circle of Imitation—the word sums up the Middle Ages. But for him, the bastard all curse, whose share is only the lash, he has no thought of waiting. He is for ever prying and searching, never an instant still, trying all things in heaven and earth. He is to the last degree curious and inquisitive, scrutinising, rummaging, sounding, poking his nose everywhere. At the solemn Consummatum est he grins, and makes a derisive mow. His word is always "Not yet!" and "Forward still!"

All the same, he is not hard to please. Nothing rebuffs him; what Heaven throws in his way, he picks up with alacrity. For instance the Church has rejected Nature as something impure and suspect. Satan seizes on it, and makes it his pride and ornament. Better still, he utilises it, turns it to profit, originates the arts from it, accepting gladly the great name they would fain cast at him as a stigma and a disgrace, that of Prince of this World.

"Alas for them that laugh!"—they had declared with startling unwisdom; for what was this but giving Satan a fine initial advantage to start with, the monopoly of laughter, and proclaiming him amusing? Let us say necessary at once; for laughter is an essential function of human nature. How support life at all, if we cannot laugh,—at any rate when we are in sorrow?

The Church, which sees in our life below only a test and trial for one to come, takes care not to prolong it needlessly. Her medicine is resignation, a waiting and a hoping for death. Here is a great field opened to Satan; he becomes physician, healer of living men. Nay more! consoler as well; he has the compassion to show us our dead, to evoke the shades of the dear ones we have loved and lost.

Another trifle the Church has cast away and condemned—Logic, the free exercise of Reason. Here again is an appetising dainty the Enemy snaps up greedily.

The Church had built of solid stone and tempered mortar a narrow in pace, vaulted, low-browed and confined, lighted by the merest glimmer of day through a tiny slit. This they called the schools. A few shavelings were let loose in it, and told "to be free"; they one and all grew halting cripples. Three hundred, four hundred years, only made them more helplessly paralysed. Between Abelard and Occam the progress made is—nil!

A pretty tale, to say we must look there for the origin of the Renaissance! The Renaissance came about, no doubt of that; but how? by the satanic effort of men who broke through the vault, the struggles of condemned criminals who would see the light of heaven. It came about in the main far away from schools and scholastics, in that school of wild nature where Satan lectured a truant band of Sorceresses and shepherd lads.

A dangerous curriculum, if ever there was one! But its very risks stimulated the love of knowledge, the frantic longing to see and know. It was there began the black sciences, the forbidden Chemistry of poisons, and the accursed thing, Anatomy. The shepherd, first to scan the stars, along with his discoveries in Astronomy, brought to the common stock his sinister recipes and his experiments on animals. Then the Sorceress would contribute a corpse filched from the nearest graveyard; and for the first time—at the risk of the stake—men could contemplate that miracle of God's handicraft "which" (as M. Serres so well said) "we hide in silly prudishness instead of trying to understand."

The only Doctor admitted to these classes, Paracelsus, noted a third as well, who now and again would glide in to join the sinister conclave, bringing Surgery with him as his contribution. This was the surgeon of those gentle times,—the Public Executioner, the man of unflinching hand, whose plaything was the branding-iron, who broke men's bones and could set them again, who could slay and make alive, and hang a felon up to a certain point and no further.

This criminal University of the Sorceress, the Shepherd, and the Hangman, by means of its experiments—a sacrilege every one—emboldened the other and rival seat of learning and forced its scholars to study. For each was fain to live; and otherwise the Witch would have monopolised all, and the Schoolmen turned their backs for good and all on Medicine. The Church had to submit, and wink at these crimes. She allowed there were good poisons (Grillandus); she permitted dissection in public, though reluctantly and under dire constraint. In 1306 the Italian Mondino opened and dissected a woman, and another in 1315. It was a solemn and beneficent revelation, the veritable discovery of a new world,—far more so than Christopher Columbus's. Fools shuddered, and howled in protest; wise men dropped on their knees.

With victories like these to his credit, Satan could not but live. Alone the Church would never have had strength to crush him. Fire and stake were of no avail, but a certain line of policy was more successful.

With no little astuteness the kingdom of Satan was divided against itself. In opposition to his daughter and bride, the Sorceress, was set her son, the Healer.

The Church, deeply and from the bottom of her heart as she hated the latter, none the less established his monopoly, to secure the Sorceress's ruin. She declares, in the fourteenth century, that if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a Witch and must die.

But how should she study publicly? Imagine the scene, at once ludicrous and terrible, that would have occurred if the poor savage creature had ventured to enter the schools! What merriment and wild gaiety! In the bale-fires of St. John's day, cats chained together were burned to death. But think of the Sorceress bound to this caterwauling rout of hell, the Witch screaming and roasting in the flames, what a treat for the gentle band of young shavelings and sucking pedants!

We shall see Satan's decadence all in good time,—a sorry tale. We shall see him pacified, grown a good old sort. He is robbed and pillaged, till at last, of the two masks he wore at the Witches’ Sabbath, the foulest is adopted by Tartuffe.

His spirit is everywhere. But for himself, for his own personality, in losing the Witch, he lost all. The Wizards were bores, and nothing more.

Now that his fall has been so far consummated, do his foes quite realise what they have done? Was he not a necessary actor, an indispensable factor in the great engine of religious faith,—something out of gear nowadays? Every organism that works well is double, has two sides; life is hardly possible otherwise. A certain balance between two forces is necessary, forces mutually opposed and symmetrical, but unequal. The inferior acts as counterpoise, corresponding to the other. The superior grows impatient at the check, and is for abolishing it altogether. But the wish is a mistaken one.

When Colbert, in 1672, shelved Satan with so little ceremony, forbidding the Judges of the Realm to hear cases of Witchcraft, the Norman Parlement, in its obstinate conservatism, its sound Norman logicality, demonstrated the dangers attending such a decision. The Devil is nothing less than a dogma closely bound up with all the rest. Touch the vanquished of the ages—are you not touching the victor too? Doubt the acts of the one—is not this paving the way to doubt those of the other, those very miracles he did to fight the Devil? The pillars of heaven are based in the abyss. The rash man who shakes this infernal foundation may well crack the walls of paradise.

Colbert paid no heed; he had so many other things to do. But it may be the Devil heard. And his wounded spirit is greatly consoled. In the petty trades where he now gains his living—Spiritualism, Table-turning, and the like—he resigns himself to insignificance, and thinks, at any rate, he is not the only time-hallowed institution that is a-dying.

PART ONE

1. Death Of The Gods

THERE are authors who assure us that a little while before the final victory of Christianity a mysterious voice was heard along the shores of the Ægean Sea, proclaiming: "Great Pan is dead!"

The old universal god of Nature is no more. Great the jubilation; it was fancied that, Nature being defunct, Temptation was dead too. Storm-tossed for so many years, the human soul was to enjoy peace at last.

Was it simply a question of the termination of the ancient worship, the defeat of the old faith, the eclipse of time-honoured religious forms? No! it was more than this. Consulting the earliest Christian monuments, we find in every line the hope expressed, that Nature is to disappear and life die out—in a word, that the end of the world is at hand.

The game is up for the gods of life, who have so long kept up a vain simulacrum of vitality. Their world is falling round them in crumbling ruin. All is swallowed up in nothingness: "Great Pan is dead!"

It was no new evangel that the gods must die. More than one ancient cult is based on this very notion of the death of the gods. Osiris dies, Adonis dies—it is true, in this case, to rise again. Æschylus, on the stage itself, in those dramas that were played only on the feast-days of the gods, expressly warns them, by the voice of Prometheus, that one day they must die. Die! but how?—vanquished, subjugated to the Titans, the antique powers of Nature.

Here it is an entirely different matter. The early Christians, as a whole and individually, in the past and in the future, hold Nature herself accursed. They condemn her as a whole and in every part, going so far as to see Evil incarnate, the Demon himself, in a flower. 3 So, welcome—and the sooner the better—the angel-hosts that of old destroyed the Cities of the Plain. Let them destroy, fold away like a veil, the empty image of the world, and at length deliver the saints from the long-drawn ordeal of temptation.

The Gospel says: "The day is at hand." The Fathers say: "Soon, very soon." The disintegration of the Roman Empire and the inroads of the barbarian invaders raise hopes in St. Augustine's breast, that soon there will be no city left but the City of God.

Yet how long a-dying the world is, how obstinately determined to live on! Like Hezekiah, it craves a respite, a going backward of the dial. So be it then, till the year One Thousand,—but not a day longer.

Is it so certain, as we have been told over and over again, that the old gods were exhausted, sick of themselves and weary of existence? that out of sheer discouragement they as good as gave in their own abdication? that Christianity was able with a breath to blow away these empty phantoms?

They point to the gods at Rome, the gods of the Capitol, where they were only admitted in virtue of an anticipatory death, I mean on condition of resigning all they had of local sap, of renouncing their home and country, of ceasing to be deities representative of such and such a nation. Indeed, in order to receive them, Rome had had to submit them to a cruel operation, that left them poor, enervated, bloodless creatures. These great centralised Divinities had become, in their official life, mere dismal functionaries of the Roman Empire. But, though fallen from its high estate, this Aristocracy of Olympus had in nowise involved in its own decay the host of indigenous gods, the crowd of deities still holding possession of the boundless plains, of woods and hills and springs, inextricably blended with the life of the countryside. These divinities, enshrined in the heart of oaks, lurking in rushing streams and deep pools, could not be driven out.

Who says so? The Church herself, contradicting herself flatly. She first proclaims them dead, then waxes indignant because they are still alive. From century to century, by the threatening voice of her Councils, 4 she orders them to die. . . . And lo! they are as much alive as ever!

"They are demons . . ."—and therefore alive. Unable to kill them, the Church suffers the innocent-hearted countryfolk to dress them up and disguise their true nature. Legends grow round them, they are baptised, actually admitted into the Christian hierarchy. But are they converted? Not yet by any means. We catch them still on the sly continuing their old heathen ways and Pagan nature.

Where are they to be found? In the desert, on lonely heaths, in wild forests? Certainly, but above all in the house. They cling to the most domestic of domestic habits; women guard and hide them at board and even bed. They still possess the best stronghold in the world—better than the temple, to wit the hearth.

History knows of no other revolution so violent and unsparing as that of Theodosius. There is no trace elsewhere in antiquity of so wholesale a proscription of a religion. The Persian fire-worship, in its high-wrought purity, might outrage the visible gods of other creeds; but at any rate it suffered them to remain. Under it the Jews were treated with great clemency, and were protected and employed. Greece, daughter of the light, made merry over the gods of darkness, the grotesque pot-bellied Cabiri; but still she tolerated them, and even adopted them as working gnomes, making her own Vulcan in their likeness. Rome, in the pride of her might, welcomed not only Etruria, but the rustic gods as well of the old Italian husbandman. The Druids she persecuted only as embodying a national resistance dangerous to her dominion.

Victorious Christianity, on the contrary, was fain to slaughter the enemy outright, and thought to do so. She abolished the Schools of Philosophy by her proscription of Logic and the physical extermination of the philosophers, who were massacred under the Emperor Valens. She destroyed or stripped the temples, and broke up the sacred images. Quite conceivably the new legend might have proved favourable to family life, if only the father had not been humiliated and annulled in St. Joseph, if the mother had been given prominence as the trainer, the moral parent of the child Jesus. But this path, so full of rich promise, was from the first abandoned for the barren ambition of a high, immaculate purity.

Thus Christianity deliberately entered on the lonely road of celibacy, one the then world was making for of its own impulse—a tendency the imperial rescripts fought against in vain. And Monasticism helped it on the downward slope.

Men fled to the desert; but they were not alone. The Devil went with them, ready with every form of temptation. They must needs revolutionise society, found cities of solitaries,—it was of no avail. Everyone has heard of the gloomy cities of anchorites that grew up in the Thebaïd, of the turbulent, savage spirit that animated them, and of their murderous descents upon Alexandria. They declared they were possessed of the Devil, impelled by demons,—and they told only the truth.

There was an enormous void arisen in Nature's plan. Who or what should fill it? The Christian Church is ready with an answer: The Demon, everywhere the Demon— Ubique Dæmon. 5

Greece no doubt, like all other countries, had had its energumens, men tormented, possessed by spirits. But the similarity is purely external and accidental, the resemblance more apparent than real. In the Thebaïd it is no case of spirits either good or bad, but of the gloomy children of the pit, wilfully perverse and malignant. Everywhere, for years to come, these unhappy hypochondriacs are to be seen roaming the desert, full of self-loathing and self-horror. Try to realise, indeed, what it means,—to be conscious of a double personality, to really believe in this second self, this cruel indweller that comes and goes and expiates within you, and drives you to wander forth in desert places and over precipices. Thinner and weaker grows the sufferer; and the feebler his wretched body, the more fiercely the demon harries it. Women in particular are filled, distended, inflated by these tyrants, who impregnate them with the infernal aura, stir up internal storm and tempest, make them the sport and plaything of their every caprice, force them into sin and despair.

Nor is it human beings only that are demoniac. Alas! all Nature is tainted with the horror. If the devil is in a flower, how much more in the gloomy forest! The light that seemed so clear and pure is full of the creatures of night. The Heavens full of Hell,—what blasphemy! The divine morning star, that has shed its sparkling beam on Socrates, Archimedes, Plato, and once and again inspired them to sublimer effort, what is it now?—a devil, the great devil Lucifer. At eve, it is the devil Venus, whose soft and gentle light leads mortals into temptation.

I am not surprised at such a society turning mad and savage. Furious to feel itself so weak against the demons, it pursues them everywhere, in the temples and altars of the old faith to begin with, later in the heathen martyrs. Festivals are abolished; for may they not be assemblages for idolatrous worship? Even the family is suspect; for might not the force of habit draw the household together round the old classic Lares? And why a family at all? The empire is an empire of monks.

Yet the individual man, isolated and struck silent as he is, still gazes at the skies, and in the heavenly host finds once more the old gods of his adoration. "This is what causes the famines," the Emperor Theodosius declares, "and all the other scourges of the Empire,"—a terrible dictum that lets loose the blind rage of the fanatic populace on the heads of their inoffensive Pagan fellow-citizens. The Law blindly unchains all the savagery of mob-law.

Old gods of Heathendom, the grave gapes for you! Gods of Love, of Life, of Light, darkness waits to engulf you! The cowl is the only wear. Maidens must turn nuns; wives leave their husbands, or if they still keep the domestic hearth, be cold and continent as sisters.

But is all this possible? Who shall be strong enough with one breath to blow out the glowing lamp of God? So reckless an enterprise of impious piety may well bring about strange, monstrous, and astounding results. . . . Let the guilty tremble!

Repeatedly in the Middle Ages shall we find the gloomy story recurring of the Bride of Corinth. First told in quite early days by Phlegon, the Emperor Hadrian's freedman, it reappears in the twelfth century, and again in the sixteenth,—the deep reproach, as it were, the irrepressible protest of outraged Nature.

"A young Athenian goes to Corinth, to the house of the man who promises him his daughter in marriage. He is still a Pagan, and is not aware that the family he hopes to become a member of has just turned Christian. He arrives late at night. All are in bed, except the mother, who serves the meal hospitality demands, and then leaves him to slumber, half dead with fatigue. But hardly is he asleep, when a figure enters the room,—a maiden, clad in white, wearing a white veil and on her brow a fillet of black and gold. Seeing him, she raises her white hand in surprise: 'Am I then already so much a stranger in the house? . . . Alas! poor recluse. . . . But I am filled with shame, I must begone.' 'Nay! stay, fair maiden; here are Ceres and Bacchus, and with you, love! Fear not, and never look so pale!' 'Back, back, I say! I have no right to happiness any more. By a vow my sick mother made, youth and life are for ever fettered. The gods are no more, and the only sacrifices now are human souls.' 'What! can this be you? You, my promised bride I love so well, promised me from a child? Our fathers’ oath bound us indissolubly together under Heaven's blessing. Maiden! be mine!' 'No! dear heart, I cannot. You shall have my young sister. If I groan in my chill prison-house, you in her arms must think of me, me who waste away in thoughts of you, and who will soon be beneath the sod.' 'No! no! I call to witness yonder flame; it is the torch of Hymen. You shall come with me to my father's house. Stay with me, my best beloved!' For wedding gift he offers her a golden cup. She gives him her neck-chain; but chooses rather than the cup a curl of his hair.

"’Tis the home of spirits; she drinks with death-pale lips the dark, blood-red wine. He drinks eagerly after her, invoking the God of Love. Her poor heart is breaking, but still she resists. At last in despair he falls weeping on the bed. Then throwing herself down beside him: 'Ah! how your grief hurts me! Yet the horror of it, if you so much as touched me! White as snow, and cold as ice, such alas! and alas! is your promised bride.' 'Come to me! I will warm you, though you should be leaving the very tomb itself. . . .' Sighs, kisses pass between the pair. 'Cannot you feel how I burn?' Love unites them, binds them in one close embrace, while tears of mingled pain and pleasure flow. Thirstily she drinks the fire of his burning mouth; her chilled blood is fired with amorous ardours, but the heart stands still within her bosom.

"But the mother was there, though they knew it not, listening to their tender protestations, their cries of sorrow and delight. 'Hark! the cock-crow! Farewell till to-morrow, to-morrow night!' A lingering farewell, and kisses upon kisses!

"The mother enters furious, to find her daughter! Her lover strives to enfold her, to hide her, from the other's view; but she struggles free, and towering aloft from the couch to the vaulted roof: 'Oh! mother, mother! so you begrudge me my night of joy, you hunt me from this warm nest. Was it not enough to have wrapped me in the cold shroud, and borne me so untimely to the tomb? But a power beyond you has lifted the stone. In vain your priests droned their prayers over the grave; of what avail the holy water and the salt, where youth burns hot in the heart? Cold earth cannot freeze true Love! . . . You promised; I am returned to claim my promised happiness. . . .

"'Alack! dear heart, you must die. You would languish here and pine away. I have your hair; ’twill be white to-morrow. 6 . . . Mother, one last prayer! Open my dark dungeon, raise a funeral pyre, and let my loving heart win the repose the flames alone can give. Let the sparks fly upward and the embers glow! We will back to our old gods again.'"

2. What Drove The Middle Ages To Despair

"BE YE like unto new-born babes" ( quasi modo geniti infantes); be little children for innocence of heart, and peacefulness and forgetfulness of all causes of offence, calm and serene, under the hand of Jesus.

Such is the sweet counsel the Church gives this stormy world on the morrow of the great catastrophe. In other words: "Volcanoes, scoriæ, ashes, lava, grow green and lush with grass. Fields burned up with fire, come, carpet yourselves with flowers."

One circumstance, it is true, then was promised the peace that revivifies,—all the schools were ended, the path of logic abandoned and deserted. A method of infinite simplicity rendered all discussion futile, and set before the feet of all the easy downward road they must needs follow henceforth. If the Credo was of doubtful interpretation, still life was all traced out plainly enough in the track of legend. The first word, and the last, was the same,— Imitation.

" Imitate, and all will be well; only repeat and copy." Yes! but is this really and truly the way of genuine infancy, the infancy that vivifies the heart of man, makes him find new sources of refreshment and fertility? To begin with, I can see in this world that moulds childhood and infancy only attributes of senility, over-refinement, servility, impotence. What is this literature compared with the sublime monuments of Greeks and Jews? even compared with the Roman genius? We find precisely the same literary decline that befell in India, from Brahminism to Buddhism; a garrulous verbiage succeeding to lofty inspiration. One book plagiarises another, till presently they cannot even copy correctly. They rob one from the other, and the marbles of Ravenna are torn down to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle. The whole fabric of society is of a piece; the bishop who is lord of a city, the barbarian prince of a half-savage tribe, model themselves on the Roman magistrature. Our monks we think so original, are only repeating in their monastery the villa of an earlier day, as Chateaubriand well observes. They have no notion of fashioning a new society, any more than of refertilising the old. Mere imitators of the Eastern monks, they would fain have had their dependants poor monkish taskmen, a sterile population of celibate lay brothers. It was in their despite family life renewed itself, and so renewed the world.

When we observe how quickly these old monks are ageing, how in a single century the level drops from the wise monk St. Benedict to the pedant Benedict of Ariane, we clearly realise that these gentry were purely and entirely innocent of the grand popular creation that grew up about the ruins; I refer to the Lives of the Saints. The monks wrote them, but it was the people made them. This young vegetation may throw its luxuriance of leaf and blossom over the crumbling walls of the old Roman building converted into a monastery, but it does not grow out of it, we may be very sure. It has roots deep in the soil; the people sowed it there, the family worked the ground, all took a hand in its production—men, women, and children. The precarious, restless life of those times of violence made these poor countryfolk imaginative, ready to put faith in their own dreams that consoled them in their misery,—wild dreams, teeming with wonders and full of absurdities, equally ludicrous and delightful.

These families, living isolated in the woods or on the mountains (as men live still in the Tyrol and the High Alps), coming down to the plains but one day in the week, were filled with the hallucinations their loneliness encouraged. A child had seen this, a woman had dreamed that. A brand-new Saint arose in the district; his story ran through the countryside, like a ballad, in rough-and-ready rhyme. It was sung and danced at evening under the oak by the fountain. The priest who came on Sunday to say Mass in the forest chapel found the legendary song in every mouth already. Then he said to himself: "Well! after all, the tale is a beautiful one and an edifying; . . . it does honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei! . . . But however did they come across it?" Then would they show him authentic witnesses, of unimpeachable veracity,—the tree, the rock, that saw the apparition, the miracle. What more could be said after that?

Reported at the Abbey, the legend will soon find a monk, good for nothing better, whose only craft is the pen, both curious and credulous, ready to believe anything and everything miraculous. He writes it all out, embroiders the simple tale with his vapid rhetoric, spoils it somewhat. But at any rate here it is duly recorded and recognised, read in refectory, and before long in church. Recopied, loaded, overloaded with embellishments, often grotesque embellishments, it will descend from age to age, till at last it takes honourable rank and place in the Golden Legend.

Even to-day, when we read these beautiful tales, when we listen to the simple, artless, solemn melodies into which these rustic populations put all their young enthusiasm, we cannot but recognise a very real inspiration, and bewail the irony of fate when we think what was to be their eventual lot.

These people had taken literally the Church's touching appeal: "Be ye as little children." But they applied it to the very thing least dreamed in the original conception. The more Christianity had feared and abhorred Nature, the more these folk loved her and held her good and harmless,—even sanctified her, giving her a part to play in the legend.

The animals which the Bible so harshly calls hairy beasts, and which the monk mistrusts, fearing to find demons incarnated in them, come into these charming tales in the most touching way, as, for instance, the hind that warms and comforts Geneviève de Brabant.

Even apart from the life of legends, in everyday existence, these humble fireside friends, these gallant helpers in the day's work, gain a higher place in men's esteem. They have their proper rights, 7 and their proper estate. If in God's infinite goodness there is room for the lowliest, if He ever seems to have a preference for such out of pity, why should not my ass be allowed in church? He has his defects, no doubt,—which makes him only the more like me. He is a sturdy fellow to work, but thickskulled; he is intractable and obstinate, in one word, he is my very counterpart.

Hence those grand festivals, the most beautiful of the Middle Ages, of the Innocents, of Fools, of the Ass. It is the very people of that day which in the ass presents its own likeness in person before the altar, ugly, ludicrous, and down-trodden! Truly a touching sight! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between the Sibyl and Virgil, 8 enters to bear witness. If of old he kicked against Balaam, this was because he saw flashing before him the sword of the old Law. But here the Law is abrogated and done with, and the world of Grace seems to open wide its doors to receive the lowliest, the simple ones of the earth. The people believes it all in the innocency of its heart. Hence the sublime canticle, in which it addressed the ass, as it might have addressed itself:—

A genoux, et dis Amen!Assez mangé d'herbe et de foin! Laisse les vieilles choses, et va! 9

Le neuf emporte le vieux! La vérité fait fuir l’ombre! La lumière chasse la nuit! 10

What insolence and wrong-headedness! Is this what they required of you, disobedient, unruly children, when they told you to be as little children? They offered you milk; you drink strong wine instead. They would lead you gently, bridle in hand, by the narrow way. Gentle, timid creatures, you seemed afraid to put one foot before another. Then behold! of a sudden the bridle is broken . . . one leap, and you swap over the course.

Ah! how unwise it was to let you invent your saints, and raise your altar, then bedeck and load and bury it in flowers, till its original form is all but indistinguishable. What can be discerned is the old heresy, long ago condemned by the Church, the innocence of Nature. An old heresy do I say? Nay! rather a new heresy that will live many a long day yet,—the emancipation of mankind.

Now listen and obey:

It is expressly forbidden to invent, to create. No more originality; no more legends; no more new saints. There are enough already. Forbidden to innovate in the forms of worship with new melodies; inspiration is prohibited. Any martyrs that should come to light are to keep quiet in their graves, and wait with becoming humility till the Church recognises them. Forbidden for clergy or monks to confer on peasants the tonsure that enfranchises them. Such the narrow, timid spirit of the Carlovingian Church, 11 which deliberately contradicts herself, gives herself the lie, now says to little children, "Be ye old men!"

What a change is here! But can it be meant seriously? Did they not tell us to be young? Nay! the priest is no longer identical with the people. A mighty divorce is beginning, an infinite gulf of separation. Henceforth the priest, a great lord now or a prince, will sing the Office in a golden cope, using the sovereign tongue of the great empire that is no more. We, poor cattle of the field, having lost the language of mankind, the only one God will deign to hear, what can we do now but low and bleat, in company with the innocent companion that never scorns us, that in wintertime warms us in the stall and covers us with his fleece? We will live with the dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.

In very truth, we have then the less need to go to Church. But she will not let us off; she orders us back, to listen to words we cannot understand.

From that day forth a monstrous fog, a heavy, grey, leaden fog, enwraps the world. Say, for how long? for a thousand long, dreary, terrible years! For ten whole centuries, a languor no previous age has known oppressed the Middle Ages, even to some extent later times, in a condition midway between sleep and waking, under the empire of a dismal, an intolerable phenomenon,—that convulsion of supreme boredom we call a yawn.

The indefatigable church bell rings out the accustomed hours,—and folks yawn; a nasal chant drones on in antiquated Latin,—and folks yawn. Everything is foreseen; no room is left for hope in all the world. Day after day events will recur in identically the same way. The inevitable oppression of to-morrow makes men yawn before to-day is done, and the never-ending perspective of days, and years, of weary sameness still to come, weighs on the spirits beforehand and sickens of life. From brain to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the automatic, the fatally irresistible, convulsion travels, distending the jaws in an endless and cureless gape. A veritable disease, which pious Bretons openly avow, imputing it, it is true, to the Devil's machinations. He lies crouching in the woods, say the Breton peasants; to the herdsman as he passes with his beasts, he sings Vespers and all the other Offices, and sets him yawning, yawning till he is like to die. 12

To be old is to be feeble. When the Saracens, when the North-men, threaten us, what will be our fate, if the people is still old and decrepit? Charlemagne weeps unavailing tears, and the Church with him, confessing that the holy relics, against these barbarian demons, can no longer protect the altars. 13 Were it not well to appeal to the arm of the intractable child they were going to bind, the arm of the young giant they were fain to paralyse? A self-contradictory movement marks the ninth century throughout,—at one time the people is held back, at another pushed forward, at one time feared, at another appealed to for help. With the people's aid, by the people's hands, barriers are thrown up, shelters contrived, to stop the barbarian invaders, to protect the priests, and the saints, escaped from their churches.

Despite the Bald Emperor's prohibition, a castle-keep rises on the mountain height. There the fugitive arrives, "Take me in, in God's name,—at any rate my wife and children. I will camp with my bestial in your outer bailey." The castle restores his courage and he feels himself a man at last. It shelters him; he defends it, and so protects his protector.

In earlier days the poor, under stress of famine, surrendered themselves to the rich and powerful as serfs. Now it is very different; he gives himself as vassal, that is to say, brave and valiant champion. 14

He gives himself, yet remains his own man, keeping the right to renounce his allegiance. "I am for higher things; the world is wide. I too, as well as another, may raise my castle on the steep. . . . I have defended the outside; I shall know how to guard my head in the inside."

Here we have the grand, noble origin of the Feudal world. The man of the keep received his vassals, but said to them, "You shall leave me when you will, and I will even help you to do it, if needful; so far, indeed, that if you are mired, I will get down off my horse myself to succour you." This is the ancient formula word for word. 15

But one morning what is this I see? Do my eyes deceive me? The Lord of the Valley sallies forth to raid the lands round about, sets up landmarks none may overpass, and even invisible lines of demarcation. "What is it? What does it mean?" . . . It means that the Lordship is enclosed: "The Feudal Lord, under lock and key, holds all immured, between sky and earth."

Alas! alas! By virtue of what right is the vassus (the valiant man, that is) henceforth to be a prisoner? Nay! vassus, they will maintain, may equally be equivalent to slave.

In the same way servus, meaning servant (often a high-born servant, a Count or Prince of the Empire), will signify for the weak and lowly, a serf, a villein whose life is valued at a denier.

This is the hateful net they are taken in. But yonder on his plot of ground is one who maintains his land is free, an allod ( allodium, aleu), a "fief of the sun." He sits on his boundary-stone, crushes his hat down firm on his head, and watches the Feudal Lord, the Emperor himself, pass by. 16

"Go your ways, ride on, Emperor, you sit tight in your saddle, and I on my boundary-stone yet tighter. You pass, but I remain. . . . For I am Freedom."

But . . . I have not the heart to tell the man's eventual fate. The air thickens round him, and his breath fails more and more. He seems bewitched. He cannot move, he is as if paralysed. His beasts too grow thinner and thinner, as though a spell were on them. His servants die of hunger. His land is fallen barren. He is hag-ridden o’ nights.

Still he holds on; he says, "A poor man's house is his castle."

But they will not leave him alone. He is cited, and must answer, to the Imperial Court. He repairs thither, a survival from a vanished world, a spectre of the past, a thing unrecognisable. "What is it?" the younger men ask each other. "He is neither Seigneur nor serf! Why, then, what is he? He is nothing."

"'Who am I?' ask you? I am he who built the first castle-keep, and defended it in your behoof; he who, leaving its walls, strode bravely to the bridge to meet the heathen Northmen. . . . More than that, I dammed the river, I reclaimed the alluvial waste, I created the very soil, like God who made 'the dry land appear.' . . . This soil, who shall drive me off it?"

"Nay, my friend," answered his neighbour, "you shall not be driven off it. You shall cultivate it still, this soil . . . only on other conditions from what you think. . . . Remember, good friend, how in the heedlessness of youth (it is fifty years agone now) you wedded Jacqueline, a little maid of my father's serfs. . . . Remember the maxim: 'Who treads my hen, is my cock.' You belong to my hen-roost. Come, off belt and away sword! . . . Henceforth you are my serf."

There is no invention here; it is all bare truth. The atrocious story recurs over and over again in the Middle Ages. And what a bitter weapon of tyranny it was! I have abridged and omitted much, for every time one returns to these incidents, the same sharp point of pity and indignation pierces the heart.

One there was who, under so dire an outrage, fell into such a passion of fury he could find never a word to say. ’Twas like Roland betrayed at Roncesvaux. All the blood of his body rose to his throat and choked him. . . . His eyes flashed fire, his poor dumb mouth, dumb but so fiercely eloquent, turned all the assemblage pale. . . . They shrank back in terror. . . . He was dead. His veins had burst. . . . His arteries shot the red blood into the very faces of his murderers. 17

This instability of condition and tenure, this horrid, shelving declivity, down which a man slips from free man to vassal,—from vassal to servant,—from servant to serf, is the great terror of the Middle Ages, the basis of its despair. There is no way of escape; one step, and the man is lost. He is an alien, a waif and stray, a head of wild game; serfdom or death, these are the only alternatives. The heavy soil clogs the feet, and entangles and engulfs the passer-by in its miry depths. The poisoned air kills him, lays its dead hand on him, turns him into a dead man, a nonentity, a brute beast, a life priced at ten farthings,—a life anyone may take and expiate the murder for ten farthings down. Such were the two main, external features of Mediæval wretchedness, the two great hardships that drove men to give themselves to Satan. Now to look at the internal aspect, to examine the foundations of life and character, and sound the depths of human existence, at the same unhappy period.

3. The Little Demon Of The Hearth And Home

THE early centuries of the Middle Ages, when the legends were in making, give all the impression of a dream. Among rustic populations, deeply submissive to the Church and of a gentle spirit (the legends themselves attest this), we would gladly assume a high degree of innocence. Surely it must have been God's own time, this. Nevertheless, in the Penitentiaries, where the most ordinary sins are noted down, strange and dishonouring forms of depravity are mentioned too, of rare occurrence under the reign of Satan.

This is due to two causes—utter ignorance, and the habit of living in common, which brought near relatives into the closest contiguity. They seem to have had scarce an inkling of our morality. Their own, in spite of ecclesiastical prohibitions, appears to have been that of the Patriarchs, of the remotest antiquity, which looks upon marriage with strange women as wicked, and only allows the kinswoman to be a lawful bride. Allied families formed only a single household. Not daring as yet to disperse their dwellings over the wastes that surrounded them, tilling merely the outlying demesne of a Merovingian palace or of a monastery, they retired every night together with their beasts under the roof of a vast villa. Hence inconveniences similar to those of the ergastulum of classical antiquity, in which slaves were herded promiscuously. More than one of these communities still existed in the Middle Ages, and even later. The Lord of the Soil recked little of what resulted from the arrangement. He regarded as forming a single family this tribe, this mass of human beings "getting up and going to bed together,"—"eating bread off one platter and meat out of one pot."

In this indiscriminate way of living, woman met with very little care or protection; the place she occupied was an extremely humble one. True, the virgin, the ideal woman, rose higher from century to century, but the woman of real life counted for mighty little in these rustic communities, these massed aggregates of men and cattle. Such was the unhappy but inevitable outcome of a state of things which could only change for the better when the common habitation was subdivided, when at length men plucked up courage to live apart, in separate hamlets, or to settle as isolated cultivators of fertile lands at a distance, and build huts in clearings of the forest. The separate hearth created true family life; the nest made the bird. Henceforth they have ceased to be chattels—they are living souls. . . . The wife and mother has come into existence.

A touching moment. At length she has a home; she can therefore be pure and holy at last, poor creature. She can brood quietly over a thought, and undisturbed, as she sits spinning, dream dreams while he is abroad in the forest. The hut is wretched enough, damp and ill-built, and the winter wind whistles through it; but to make up for all defects it is silent. There are dim corners in it where her dreams can find a lodgement.

She is an owner now, possesses something of her very own. Distaff, bed, chest is all the household has, as the old song says. 18