The Pleasures of England | Page 5

Normans and Lombards still farther remote from
any such skill. More and more, it seems to me wonderful that under
your British block-temple, grimly extant on its pastoral plain, or beside
the first crosses engraved on the rock at Whithorn--you English and
Scots do not oftener consider what you might or could have come to,
left to yourselves.
Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it generally
pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions. If we could get into
the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and more of their
virtues, we should have a better chance of learning the true laws alike
of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is to assure ourselves that
true knowledge of any thing or any creature is only of the good of it;
that its nature and life are in that, and that what is diseased,--that is to

say, unnatural and mortal,--you must cut away from it in contemplation,
as you would in surgery.
Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence of
Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and St.
Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St.
Augustine, St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.
St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by birth,
in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric and fixed
as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all; these are,
indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but St. Augustine
especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic, Christianity to the
Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into the treatise of the City
of God, is taken for guide of life and policy by Charlemagne, and
becomes certainly the fountain of Evangelical Christianity, distinctively
so called, (and broadly the lay Christianity of Europe, since, in the
purest form of it, that is to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously
applicable, kindly wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, St.
Martin of Tours, whose character is sketched, I think in the main
rightly, in the Bible of Amiens; and you may bind together your
thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies
in the Abbey of St. Martin, at Tours; that as St. Augustine was in his
writings Charlemagne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in living
presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other
physical sciences.
A hundred years later than St. Augustine, comes the rule of St.
Benedict--the Monastic rule, virtually, of European Christianity, ever
since--and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the
Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine tell
Christians what they should feel and think: St. Benedict and all the
disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and do.
In the briefest, but also the perfectest distinction, the disciples of St.
Augustine are those who open the door to Christ--"If any man hear my
voice"; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the door--"To
him that knocketh it shall be opened."

Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines
with the older one. St. Augustine's, accepted heartily by Clovis, and,
with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens of the
Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in their
conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to Christianity
to this day; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among them, down from
St. Clotilde to her great grand-daughter Bertha, who in becoming
Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own little chapel to St.
Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently useful missionary to
the Saxons, the beginner of English Erudition,--the first laid corner
stone of beautiful English character.
I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I
have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those
confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events,
which form the indices of common history.
From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years to
the birth of Alfred, 849. You have no difficulty in remembering those
cardinal years. Then, you have Four great men and great events to
remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, and the founding of
Frank Kingdom; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic Kingdom;
Justinian and the founding of Civil law; St. Benedict and the founding
of Religious law.
Of, Justinian, and his work, I