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. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. HORACE. BOOK III., ODE 29. TO MECENAS. MACENAS, thou whose lineage springs From old Etruria's kings, Come to my humble dwelling. Haste; And perfumes pressed from nard divine. The smoke, the tumult, and the wealth of Rome. Come, loved Mæcenas, come ! How oft in lowly cot Uncurtained, nor with Tyrian purple spread, Has weary State pillowed its aching head And smoothed its wrinkled brow, all cares forgot? Come to my frugal feast and share my humble lot. For now returning Cepheus shoots again Of the untamed Lion blaze amain: Hang quivering: now the shepherd His panting flock to willow-bordered meads By river banks; or to those dells Remote, profound, where rough Silvanus dwells, Where by mute margins silent waters creep, Too long by civil cares opprest Wisely and justly guide thy present state, Drowned men and loosened rocks; ing; Tossing from peak to peak the sullen waters' roar. Blest is the man who dares to say, Fortune capricious, faithless, blind, I can approve her when she stays, Content with dowerless poverty. When the tall ship, with bending mast, e'er Affront the quiet of those blest abodes : My light, unburthened skiff shall sail Safe to the shore before the gale, While the twin sons of Leda point the way, And smooth the billows with benignant ray. Spectator. STEPHEN De Vere IF I WERE YOU. WHY did he look so grave? she asked, What might the trouble be? "My little maid," he sighing said, 66 Suppose that you were me, And you a weighty secret owned, But still he sighed and looked askance, "Oh, tell me, little maid," he said O then, what would you do?" "I think I'd go and tell her so," Said she, "if I were you!" "My little maid, 'tis you," he said, Chambers' Journal. G. CLIFTON BINGHAM. From The Nineteenth Century. A JESUIT REFORMER AND POET. BY THE REV. FATHER RYDER. - FREDERICK SPEE (1591-1635), Jesuit, social reformer, and national poeta threefold appellation claiming for its subject qualities very rarely found in combination should be held, on this account if on no other, deserving of general interest. That he is scarcely known in this country we may conclude from the fact that he is not once mentioned by Mr. Lecky in his account of the witch-burnings, although in Germany his name is inseparably connected with the first suc cessful attempt at their repression. pro 771 tion of the poems of the Polish Casimir Surbief, these verses are generally supposed to be little better than creditable performances, without any life or intention beyond the occasion which called them forth. Besides Fr. Spee, of Jesuit national poets- I mean poets who sang naturally in their native tongue-I can recall no one but the martyr Southwell.* He indeed, between the exercises of his thirteen rackings, found certain intervals of enforced leisure, during which, without any scruple, lest he were omitting some more excellent thing, he could pour out his melodious plaints and praises, to his own solace and God's greater glory, in verse which his countrymen would not willingly let die. Frederick Spee was born in 1591 at Kaiserswerth, near Düsseldorf, in the principality of Cologne. His father, Peter Spee, was seneschal of the little town under the Kurfurst Truchsesz. He was Jesuits, as both their friends and their enemies will, I take it, admit, are not often either reformers or poets; and the reason is not far to seek. The Jesuit in his nor mal state is absorbed in the work of individual direction: as regards institutions he is conservative, and concerned to make the best of what he finds. If only he may pursue his apostolic fishing undisturbed, he is inclined to allow the ancient pierheads and breakwaters to stand as long as wind and wave may suffer them. As to poetry, the Jesuit is for the most part without the leisure necessary for its duction. Moreover, he commits himself to no course which he cannot pursue with a definite object, and of which he cannot give an account, if called upon, minute by minute. Literature as such, except as a classical exercise for his pupils, has tendency to irritate him as a possible derogation from the unum necessarium. In theology, mathematics, physical science, in anything that admits of exact treatment, he is often an adept; but philosophy has of late become too literary and sentimental to engage his sympathy, and as to poetry, even when this is most purely religious, he is inclined to exclaim, in veriest zeal for his Master and not at all in grudging, "Ut quid perditio hæc?" Thus exceptionally brilliant. In his nineteenth it is that, although there are many hundred volumes of Jesuit verses, these are almost all ludi in the learned languages -i. e., scholastic exercises, prize poems, With the solitary and partial excep etc. • Hist. Rat. in Eur., vol. i. a a staunch and loyal man after a quiet sort, as the one incident recorded of him indicates. At a great banquet of notables, the prince, who was rapidly drifting into Lutheranism in spite of the emperor's efforts to restrain him, when warm with wine made a violent speech full of the current antipapal slang, and then asked each of his noble guests in turn, with the exception of the churchmen, if he had not said well. When they had all assented, he turned to Spee, who was in waiting, with "Now, Master Peter, how say you?" Spee answered simply that he was of another mind, receiving his master's rebuke of "Tush, thou art but a fool!" with a quiet laugh. With such a father it need hardly be said that Frederick was brought up a staunch Catholic. There is nothing recorded of his childhood except that he went at an early age to the Jesuit college at Cologne, and that his school career was year he entered his two years' novitiate at Trèves. In 1613, he is teaching grammar and belles-lettres in his old college at Silesius, a Jesuit poet, although both a Jesuit and a I do not reckon Spee's contemporary, Angelus poet, seeing that his poetic fame had certainly culminated before he joined the society. Cologne, until 1616, when he leaves in order to go through his theological course, returning to Cologne in priest's orders as professor of philosophy in 1621. With the exception of a word now and again of affectionate admiration on the part of superiors and companions, there is no sign to indicate the mighty spiritual growth that was in progress, and which was to become such a beneficent power in the land. Whilst Spee was engaged in his first professorship (1618) the Thirty Years' War had broken out, and during the occupation of Paderborn by Christian of Brunswick, the greater part of its burghers, and, generally, of the Westphalian nobility, had become Lutherans. When the country again fell into Catholic hands, Fr. Spee worked as a missionary at Paderborn and Domkanzel, in 1625 and 1626, and was the means of bringing back a large number, especially amongst the Westphalian nobility, to the Church. One incident is recorded of him during this period, too characteristic I might say too prophetic to be omitted. He had been called in to prepare a criminal for death. The picture of his past life, so empty of good works, and so choked with evil for which he had made no satisfaction, held the condemned man in a very stupor of despair, from which no efforts of his confessor could rouse him. At last Fr. Spee, almost beside himself with compassion, exclaimed: "You know the labors I have undergone for Christ: all these I freely make over to your account; only be sorry for your sins and grievous offences. Lay hold on Jesus Christ and his merits, and then you can be happy." The criminal died in peace a true penitent. The next year, 1627, introduced Spee to the great vocation of his life. Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, Bishop of Würzburg, obtained him as confessor to the witch-prisons, through which numerous victims had, since the preceding year, been passing to a fiery death. I must now proceed to give a brief sketch of the monstrous phenomenon, half real, half delusive, of mediæval witchcraft, Merit is not properly transferrable; not so good works in their satisfactory character, if God so wills. which, in the form in which Spee came across it, he does not hesitate to characterize as the Hexenwahn; a madness in which witches, accusers, and judges share alike. A belief in witchcraft- i.e., a system in which, in virtue of a contract explicit or implicit with the Evil One, persons have exercised abnormal powers has always prevailed largely in the Christian Church, although the preternatural reality of its phenomena has never been authoritatively declared. This cannot be disputed by any one who recollects the patristic tradition regarding the magical powers attributed to Simon Magus.* We hear nothing of any ecclesiastical legislation on the subject till the eighth century, when a Council of Paderdorn (785) condemned to death "any one who, blinded by the Devil, heathenwise should believe a person to be a witch and man-eater, and should on that account have burned him or eaten his flesh, or given it to others to eat."† It is sufficiently noteworthy that this earliest canon on the matter is a condemnation, not of witches, but of witch-burners. Again, in the so-called Canon of Ancyra, most probably from a ninth-century Frank or German capitulary, which made its first appearance in Regino's collection,‡ witchcraft is treated rather as a delusion than anything else. The witches are condemned for believing or professing "that they ride by night with Diana, goddess of the pagans, or with Herodias and a countless number of women upon certain beasts, and silently and in the dead of night trav erse many lands, obeying her commands as their mistress, and were on certain nights summoned to do her service." See, too, in the same sense the decree of Auger of Montfaucon, Bishop of Conferans, in the south of France, at the close of the thirteenth century.§ Unfortunately for the interests both of humanity and religion, the later mediæval decrees against witchcraft were not framed See Justin, Apol. i. 26; Hippolytus, Refut. qu. 6; St. Cyril Hieros, Cat. vi. Illum.; St. Max. Tour., Serm. in Fest. S. Petri. 26. ↑ Quoted by Diel, in Spee, Skizze Biog. und Lit., p. + Circ. 906. § Montfaucon, L'Antiq. Expliq., Lib. iii. Spee, which I believe is allowed to be strictly accurate - viz., that in central Italy but few were burned for witchcraft, in Rome itself not one single person. upon this model. They assumed, on the | justice and decency. How little the popes contrary, as the basis of their estimate of themselves had to do with initiating these facts, the confessions of the supposed horrors is proved by the statement of witches i.e., of persons whose imaginations were in such a condition of abnormal excitement as to render their statements in the main untrustworthy. The result was an infectious kindling of the popular imagination, known as one of the most terrible of the mass-manias of the Middle Ages, the Hexenwahn. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the persecution was at its height in France, whilst it culminated in Germany nearly a century later. We have the archdeacon Remigius, in his work on witchcraft, published early in the sixteenth century, boasting that in Lorraine in fifteen years he had procured the burning of eight hundred witches. It is some sat afterwards burned upon the same charge. At Geneva, when Calvin was supreme, during the three months between February 17 and May 15, 1545, there were executed thirty-five witches, and amongst them the executioner's own mother. In Scotland, the Presbyterian witch executions were peculiarly atrocious. malignant prolongation of torture night after night in order to secure sleeplessness was, I believe, a Scottish speciality. The As I have already implied, the contrast in the character of the legislation of the earlier and later Middle Ages is not to be accounted for by any change of belief in the reality of witchcraft in general, what ever might be said of certain of its phe-isfaction to know that he was himself nomena. The story of Cyprian and Jovita, in the twenty-fourth oration of St. Greg. ory Nazianzen; the famous passage of St. Augustine on the commerce of demons with women, together with the patristic passages, referred to above, on Simon Magus, were accepted as expressing the standard doctrine by such writers as Venerable Bede in the seventh century † and by Hincmar, the most enlightened and ablest of the Frank bishops in the ninth century. Various suggestions have been made by way of accounting for the growth of witchcraft, real or putative, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Such afflictions as the black death; the disturb ance arising from religious differences; the intoxication of the new learning, may each have played their part in bringing it about. Sundry of the popes, too, contributed to the disastrous movement, especially Innocent the Eighth, in his celebrated bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484). It is, however, only fair to recognize that the popes did nothing more than accede to the demand of the whole community, accepting the evidence that was given them. In the bull of Innocent the pope endeavors to bring the trials into the ecclesiastical courts. But the whole movement was far more a lay than a clerical one. The laity carried everything before them in the witch-courts, as Spee points out, to the grievous prejudice of De Civ. Dei xv. 23. ↑ See In Luc., Lib. iii., cap. 8. See De Divort. Loth. et Teth., p. 654. In this ghastly arena Protestants and Catholics were ardent rivals, as though to keep themselves in practice for one another. In the single town of Elwang, in Swabia, during the space of two years, 1611-1613, when its spiritual direction had been entrusted by its bishop to the Jesuits, three hundred witches were burned; amongst them a young girl of sixteen on her own delation, and a young bride who on her way to church gave her. self up as a witch.* At Würzburg, between the beginning of 1627 and February, 1629, one hundred and fifty-eight witches were burned in twenty-nine burnings. Amongst them we find fourteen vicars (curates) of the principal church, three canons, several town councillors, a chancellor's widow, a doctor of theology, several youths and boys of noble family, a blind maiden, a little girl of nine with her still smaller sister, many respectable burghers; Gobel Babelin, the prettiest girl in Würzburg, Hist Prov. Germ. Sup., Decas viii, No. 184. |