Part 13

Even warriors sought to have their alms blessed by the Church; they bound themselves not to fight on holy-days, such as Fridays and Sundays; and before they could be made knights, they were obliged to vow before God that they would always help the weak, never fight in a bad cause, and always speak the truth. So that all would have been like perfect fulfilment of Isaiah's promises of the glory of the Church, save that man will still follow the devices of his own heart; and there were shrines and altars where undue honour was paid to the Saints, and too many superstitious observances were carried on before their images. Prayers and alms were offered for departed souls, in the notion that they were gone to Purgatory, a place where it was said their sins would be purged away by suffering before the Day of Judgment, and whence their friends might, as they imagined, assist them by their offerings.

People used to go on pilgrimage, and especially such as had fallen into any great sin, would go through everything to pray at the Holy Sepulchre for forgiveness. The Saracens, who had not been unkind to the pilgrims, were subdued by a much fiercer set of Mahometans, the Turcomans, who did everything to profane the holy places, and robbed and misused the Christians who came to worship there. The news of this profanation stirred up all Europe to deliver the Sanctuary from the unbeliever. Monks went about preaching the holy war, and multitudes took the cross, that is, fastened on their shoulder one cut out in cloth, and vowed to win back Jerusalem. The Pope took upon himself to say that whoever was killed in such a cause, would have all his sins forgiven, and be in no danger of purgatory; and this be called an indulgence. These wars were called Crusades. In the first, in 1098, Jerusalem was conquered, and a very good and pious man, named Godfrey, set up to be king, though he would not be crowned, saying he would never wear a crown of gold where his Master had worn a crown of thorns. But as the Greek Christians who already lived there, would not own the Pope, but held to their own Patriarch, a Latin Patriarch was thrust in and was in subjection to the Pope; and thus the unhappy schism grew wider. After Godfrey's death, the Christians in Palestine did not behave well, nor show themselves worthy to have the keeping of Jerusalem; and though St. Bernard preached a second Crusade, and the Emperor of Germany and King of France came to help them, their affairs only grew worse and worse.

In 1186, after they had possessed the Holy City only eighty-eight years, they were deprived of it; it was taken again by the Saracens, and they retained only a few towns on the coast. All devout people mourned that the unbeliever should again be defiling the sanctuary; but the Pope had a great quarrel with the Emperor of Germany, and told the poor credulous people that fighting his battles was as good as a Crusade; and they began to forsake the Holy Land, and leave it to its fate. Our own Richard the Lion Heart did his best, and so did the excellent French king, St. Louis, who died in Africa on his way to the Crusade, but all in vain; and finally the Christians were driven out of Acre, their last town, and Palestine became Mahometan again with only a few oppressed Christians here and there. Then came a much more rude, dull, and violent race of Mahometans, the Turks, who burst out of the East, conquered the Saracens, gained all Asia Minor, and at last, in the year 1453, they took the city of Constantinople, killed the last emperor, Constantine, in the assault, and won all the country we now call Turkey, where they sadly oppressed the Greeks, though they could not make them turn from their true Catholic faith. It was then that the light of truth faded entirely away from Ephesus and the Churches of Asia; a blight fell wherever the Turks went, and cities, once prosperous, were deserted and ruined. Tyre was one of these; and she has now become a mere rock, where fishermen spread their nets to dry upon the sea-shore, as Ezekiel had foretold. However, it was only forty years afterwards, that the last remains of the Mahometan conquerors were chased out of Spain, so that it became again an entirely Christian country.

LESSON XXXII.

THE REFORMATION.

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a treasure hid in a field."--_Matt_. xiii. 44.

When the Services of the Church were first drawn up, almost everyone in the East spoke Greek, and most people in the West understood Latin; and when the Teutons learnt Christianity, they also, with it, learnt a little Latin. Thus the Prayers and the Scriptures remained in that tongue, but the people themselves spoke each their own language. German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian are mixtures in different degrees of Latin and Teuton, and only learned persons who understood the old language, could follow the Prayers, or read the Bible. So the people missed more and more of the real truth and meaning of sacred things; and some of the clergy who had grown corrupt, took advantage of their ignorance and deceived them. Whereas the Pope had once declared that those who went on a Crusade were sure of dying in a state of salvation, he now declared, that to give alms for building the great Church of St. Peter at Rome, would answer the same purpose; and indulgences, namely, promises of so many years less of purgatory, used to be absolutely sold; and it was very difficult to set these errors right, for anyone who was thought to speak against the doctrine of the Church, was liable to be punished by being burnt to death. This was quite contrary to the ways of the early Church, which, however bad a heretic might have been, never attempted to harm his person, but only separated him from her Communion.

As the Holy Spirit within the Church is ever cleansing and sanctifying it, witnesses against these errors began to be raised up. The way to print books, instead of writing them out, had been discovered in the fifteenth century; and as this art made them much more cheap and common, many more people began to read and to think. In the year 1517, a German monk, named Martin Luther, began to declare how far the selling of indulgences was from the doctrine of the Apostles; and he spoke such plain truth, that he convinced a great number of Germans, and there was a great longing for the cleansing of the Church, especially after Luther had translated the Bible into his own tongue, and everyone could see how unlike the teaching there was to what had been so long believed.

In England, King Henry VIII. separated from the Roman Church because the Pope would not please him by breaking a marriage, which certainly never ought to have been sanctioned; but which having been permitted by the Pope, and having continued twenty years, it was very wrong to dissolve. He called himself Head of the Church in England; and though he believed all the later errors, he allowed the Lessons to be read from a new English translation of the Bible. He pretended to reform the convents, some of which were in a very bad state, and had forgotten their rules; but instead of setting them to rights, he seized their wealth, and turned all the monks and nuns adrift.

The new notions were favoured by his break with the Pope. The whole Western Church was in a ferment; the reformers were constantly writing and preaching against the many errors of the Roman Church, and were rejoicing over the real treasure of true faith they had found hidden within her. Many other sincere and good men were shocked at such disobedience to what they had once respected; and unhappily, almost all the Italian clergy and cardinals were so food of the riches and power in which they were maintained by misleading the people, that they dreaded nothing so much as having them set right.

The Emperor, Charles V., strove hard to bring about a General Council of the Church, as the only hope of making matters right, but he was much hindered by his wars with the King of France, and by the double dealing of the Pope; and in the meantime Luther and his friends drew up a protest against the false doctrines of Rome, and were, for that reason, called Protestants. In Switzerland and France, another reformer, named John Calvin, was preaching against the doctrine of the Pope; and though he neglected what the Church of old pure times had decided, and thus threw away much that was good, as well as much that was untrue, great numbers followed him; but unfortunately, none of the higher clergy on the Continent would listen to these views, and there seemed no choice but to accept falsehood, or to break into a schism. After many trials, Charles V. got together some Italian, Spanish, and German clergy at Trent, in the Tyrol, and called them a council; but this was far from being a true General Council, as there was nobody from the Eastern Church, nor from many branches of the Western. The Protestants knew they should not be fairly treated, and that if these Italians should decide that they were heretics, they might very probably be burnt; so, instead of coming to it, they acted as the early Christians never did, they took up arms and fought, and this attempt at a council broke up in confusion.

Things were happier in England. After the death of Henry VIII., Archbishop Cranmer, and the other guardians of his little son, Edward VI., set to work to clear away the corruptions from the Church in England, so as to make it as like as they could to what it had been in the Apostles' time. The Bible had been translated, and they put the whole Prayer-Book into English, leaving out all that savoured of idolatry, all the notions about purgatory, and everything of error, and keeping the real old precious services of the early Church, restoring to the people the blessed privilege of the Cup, while the Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, went on in an uninterrupted line, as from the beginning. On Edward's early death, his sister, Queen Mary, who was married to Philip II., the son of the Emperor, thought all these changes very wicked, and endeavoured to put them down. Four Bishops, Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and Hooper, were burnt for their share in them, with many other persons, and England was again reconciled to Rome; but Mary only reigned five years, and her sister Elizabeth was a sound Churchwoman, and held fast by the Catholic English Church in her reformed state.

Philip II., the son of Charles V., managed to accomplish another sitting of the Council of Trent, and the Church of Rome considers it a true council, though there were only two hundred and fifty-five Bishops, and they condemned the Protestants without hearing their defence. It did some good to the Romish Church by putting down the sale of indulgences, and some bad practices of the clergy; but it bound her to all the errors renounced by the Reformers, and put her into a state of schism from the Catholic Church.

The Lutheran Protestants in Germany, and the Calvinists in France, Holland, and Scotland, as they could have no bishops, made up their minds that none were needed, though this was quite contrary to Scripture, and to the ways of the Apostles. There was a sad time of warfare through all the centre of Europe; and the Spaniards and French horribly persecuted the Protestants and Calvinists, thinking in their blindness that they were thus doing God service; but Queen Elizabeth stood up as the firm friend of all the distressed Reformers; and at last matters settled down again, though not till all Christianity had been grievously shattered and rent, and there was no more outward unity.

There were four branches of the Church Catholic keeping their Bishops, the Greek, the Roman, the English, the Swedish; but none of these were in outward communion the one with the other, though still owning one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, and waging the same fight with the Devil and his works. The Roman Church was spread over all Italy, Spain, France, and great part of Germany, and tried to force down all differences of opinion by cruel and bloody means, caring more for unity than for truth, and boasting of being the only Catholic Church, instead of only one branch of it. The Lutheran doctrine was taught in Norway, Denmark, and many parts of Germany, and the Calvinist teaching gained a great hold in Holland, Scotland, and on such French as were not Roman Catholic. The Greek Church meanwhile stood fast through much tribulation in the Turkish dominions, and had gradually won the whole great Russian Empire, where, as the people ceased to be barbarous, they became most devout members of the ancient unchanging Greek Catholic Church.

LESSON XXXIII.

COLONIZATION.

"Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations; spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes."--_Isaiah_, liv. 2.

Just as the Reformation was beginning, fresh lands were being found beyond the Atlantic Ocean, where the knowledge of the Gospel might reach. Christopher Columbus, a gallant Genoese mariner, and deeply religious man, was full of the notion that by sailing westwards he might come round to India, and thence make a way for winning back the Holy Land. After much weary waiting, and many entreaties, he obtained three little ships from Queen Isabel of Spain; and with them, in the year 1492, came to the islands which he named the West Indies, lovely places, full of gentle natives with skins of a dark ruddy colour, wearing, for their misfortune, golden ornaments. To get gold was the great longing of the Spaniards, and they did not care what cruelties they used so that they could obtain it. The Pope, finding in the prophecies that the isles of the sea should belong to the Church, considered that this gave him a right to give them away to whomsoever he pleased; so he made a grant of all to the west to the Spaniards, all to the east to the Portuguese. Thereupon great numbers of the Spaniards went over to America; they conquered the two great empires of Mexico and Peru, and settled in the West-Indian Islands, robbing the poor natives of their gold and silver, making slaves of them, and hunting them with blood-hounds when they tried to run away. Many good priests who went out as missionaries did all they could to hinder these horrors, but in vain; and when at last the poor delicate Indians began to dwindle away and die off, the plan was resorted to of bringing negroes from Africa to work in their stead. Though it was a good man who thought of it, in the hope of saving the Indians and making the negroes Christians, it came to most horrible cruelty, and was a disgrace to Christian Europe.

However, these faithful priests worked hard in teaching and converting the Indians all over South America. One brotherhood, called the Jesuits, had great establishments, where they trained up large villages of Indiana in Christian habits, and taught them to be very faithful and industrious. But at home, in Europe, these Jesuits did harm by stepping out of their work as ministers, interfering with governments more than was right, and trying to keep up the authority of the Pope more than real Catholic truth. They taught so many false stories as articles of faith, that at last clever people, wise in their own conceit, began to believe nothing, and became like the fool who said in his heart, "There is no God." So there came to be a bad feeling against all the clergy, and the Jesuits, who had made themselves very meddling and troublesome, were put down at the entreaty of several kings. When they were taken away from their converts in South America, it turned out that the poor Indians had not steadfastness enough to take care of themselves; so all their well-ordered establishments were broken up, and the people ran wild again. All the Spanish settlers, of whom there were many, still held fast to their Church, and all the coast of the Continent of South America is Roman Catholic.

The English and Dutch had not been slow to find their way to the West, but they went to the colder North instead of to the South, and sought good land more than gold. Some of the English had, during Queen Mary's reign, made friends with some of the Dutch and German Calvinists, who fancied that whatever Roman Catholics had done must be wrong, instead of only a part, and who cared nothing for the ways of the Apostolic Primitive Church. So when the true Catholic faith was upheld by Queen Elizabeth; by James I., who caused our translation of the Bible to be made by forty-eight learned Hebrew and Greek scholars; and by Charles I., who gave Bishops and a Prayer-Book to Scotland, there were many persons who grew impatient and angry that more changes were not made. These broke away from the Church, calling themselves Puritans and Independants, and living in a state of schism. Some, too, thought the king had too much power; and in Charles's time a great many went away and settled in North America, that they might have freedom, and worship in their own way. Those who stayed at home went on to that rebellion against Church and King, which ended in the Scottish Calvinists betraying King Charles, and the English Independants putting him to death for upholding the Bishops, after Archbishop Laud had been beheaded. For nearly eleven years the Bishops were put down, the clergy persecuted, and the use of the Prayer-Book forbidden in England, while all sorts of sects rose up and explained the Bible as they pleased. When, at length, Charles II. came back, and the Church was re-established in England, many more went to the colonies; and though there was a Church settlement in Virginia, the great mass of the North American colonists were Calvinists or Presbyterians, as they are called, because presbyters are their highest order of their ministry, though they cannot be really commissioned priests, never having been ordained by Bishops come down from the Apostles.

The English began to spread fast on every side, as their nation grew stronger and more numerous. They conquered several of the West-Indian Isles, and the Church was there established; but, to their disgrace, they carried on the slave-trade, to supply the settlers with workmen. In the East-Indies, too, they began to acquire large tracts by conquest and by treaty, and a few churches were built there; but they had not tried to convert the great number of heathens who became subject to them, fearing that, should they take offence, they would shake off their dominion. Such clergy as did go out were ordained in England. There was as yet no Bishop to overlook the colonial Churches, so that they could not take deep root.

Still the English Church was living as a witness of the truth at home, with many a great and holy man within her, such as Bishop Taylor, whose beautiful writings are loved by all; Bishop Ken, whose loyalty to Church and King witnessed a good confession, and whose hymns are like part of the Prayer-Book; Bishop Wilson, whose devotions for home and at the Holy Eucharist are our great guide, with more good and humble men and women than the world will ever know of; and this, under God's mercy, saved the nation from falling into the unbelieving state of France, where people thought it fine to laugh at all religion. There, in the end of the eighteenth century, a terrible outbreak took place against all authority, human or Divine; the King and Queen perished by the hands of their subjects; quantities of blood was shed, and for a time it seemed as if the country was given up to demons; the faithful clergy fled or remained hidden; and though at last people began to return to their senses, the shock to loyalty and religion has never been entirely recovered in that country.

LESSON XXXIV.

THE SPREAD OF THE GOSPEL.

The fearful effects of infidelity in France roused good men everywhere; and the Church began to show that power of reviving and purifying herself, which proves that the Lord abideth with her for ever.

Some time before things had come to this pass, an English clergyman, named John Wesley, had been striving to awaken people to a more religious life; but he did not sufficiently heed the authority of the Church; and his followers, after his death, quite separated themselves from her, and became absolute schismatics, with meeting-houses and ministers of their own, calling themselves Methodists. Still his fervour and earnestness stirred up many within the Church; and from that time there was much more desire to fulfil the mission of Christians by bringing others to the knowledge of the truth. Sunday-schools began to be set up to assist the catechizing in Church enjoined in the Prayer-Book, and often instead of it; and there was a growing eagerness to convert the heathen abroad. The great possessions and wide trade of England seemed to mark her as especially intended for this work. Some persons went about it by giving their money to any Missionary Society that made fair promises, without heeding whether it were schismatic or not; others had more patience, and trusted their alms to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was managed by the English Bishops.

The American colonies had, by this time, grown impatient of the English Government, and had shaken it off, calling themselves the United States. The Church people among them obtained some Bishops from the Scottish branch of the Church, which the Calvinists had never been able to put down; and every one of the many United States has now a Bishop of its own.

Calcutta was the first English colony to receive a Bishop, in the year 1814. The second Bishop was Reginald Heber, whose beautiful hymns seem the birthright of our Church, like those of Bishop Ken, one hundred and fifty years before. Still very little was done with the natives of India; they were attached to their foul old religion, and Government forbade any open measures against it, though here and there was a conversion; and there have at length come to be three Bishops' Sees, and in the south of the peninsula, in the See of Madras, there are a hopeful number of Christians. The work would everywhere proceed better if there were no schism, so that all Christians could work together. Ceylon also has a Bishop, and many are there gathered in. On the borders of China likewise there is an English Bishopric; and within that empire the French Roman Catholics have been working steadily for many years to win a few of those obstinate heathen to the faith, but with little success, and often receiving the crown of martyrdom.

The French are very ardent missionaries, bearing joyously all kinds of privations, and forming their stations wherever they see any hope of gaining converts. The Sisters of Charity--good women under a vow to spend their lives in nursing and teaching--do much to show what the real fruit of Christianity is; and they are to be found wherever there is trouble or distress. There is a great college at Rome, called the _Propaganda_, where every language under the sun is taught, in order to fit persons for missionary work,

Our own St. Augustine's College at Canterbury is intended to prepare young men to become English missionaries; and north, south, east, and west, are the good tidings spreading, now that the days are come of which Daniel said: "Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."

The English West Indies were first forbidden to import slaves; next, all the slaves were set free; and there are now four Bishoprics for their black and white population. All negroes seized in the ships of other nations, on their way to be made slaves, are brought back to Sierra Leone, on the coast of Africa, there set free, and taught to be Christians under a Bishop of our Church; and the Christian blacks are beginning to carry the message of salvation into the other parts of Africa, where the climate is so hurtful to Englishmen, that only the negro race could there do the work.