ligence. Nor was the higher office of training the soul of man to communion with Christ by faith, purity, and love, altogether left to what may be called Scholastic Mysticism. In one remarkable book was gathered and concentered all that was elevating, passionate, profoundly pious, in all the older mystics. Gerson, Rysbroek, Tauler, all who addressed the heart in later times, were summed up, and brought into one circle of light and heat, in the single small volume, the

Imitation

Imitation of Christ.' That this book supplies of Christ. some imperious want in the Christianity of mankind, that it supplied it with a fullness and felicity, which left nothing, at this period of Christianity, to be desired, its boundless popularity is the one unanswerable testimony. No book has been so often reprinted, no book has been so often translated, or into so many languages, as the Imitation of Christ.' The mystery of its authorship, as in other cases, might have added to its fame and circulation; but that mystery was not wanted in regard to the Imitation.' Who was the author-Italian, German, French, Fleming? With each of these races it is taken up as a question of national vanity. Was it the work of Priest, Canon, Monk? This, too, in former times, was debated with the eagerness of rival Orders. The size of the book, the manner, the style, the arrange

n

According to M. Michelet (whose M. Onésime Roy, 'Etudes sur les Mysrhapsody, as usual, contains much which is striking truth, much of his peculiar sentimentalism) there are sixty translations into French; in some respects he thinks the French translation, the Consolation,' more pious and touching than the original.

tères,' have thought that they have proved it to be by the famous Gerson. If any judgement is to be formed from Gerson's other writings, the internal evidence is conclusive against him. M. Michelet has some quotations from Thomas à Kempis, the author at least

• Italian, French, German idioms of a thick volume published under that have been detected.

name, which might seem equally to

P Several recent writers, especially endanger his claim. But to me, though VOL. IX.

M

ment, as well as its profound sympathy with all the religious feelings, wants, and passions; its vivid and natural expressions, to monastic Christianity what the Hebrew Psalms are to our common religion, and to our common Christianity; its contagious piety; all conspired to its universal dissemination, its universal use. This one little volume contained in its few pages the whole essence of the St. Victors, of Bonaventura without his Franciscan peculiarities, and of the later Mystic school. Yet it might be easily held in the hand, carried about where no other book was borne,-in the narrow cell or chamber, on the journey, into the solitude, among the crowd and throng of men, in the prison. Its manner; its short, quivering sentences, which went at once to the heart, and laid hold of and clung tenaciously to the memory with the compression and completeness of proverbs; its axioms, each of which suggested endless thought; its imagery, scriptural and simple, were alike original, unique. The style is ecclesiastical Latin, but the perfection of ecclesiastical Latin,-brief, pregnant, picturesque; expressing profound thoughts in the fewest words, and those words, if compared with the scholastics, of purer Latin sound or construction.. The facility with which it passed into all other languages, those especially of Roman descent, bears witness to its perspicuity, vivacity, and energy. Its arrangement has something of the consecutive progress of an ancient initiation; it has its commencement,

inferior, the other devotional works there ascribed to Thomas à Kempis, the Soliloquium Animæ, the Hortulus Rosarum, and Vallis Liliorum, even the Sermons, if not quite so pure, are more than kindred, absolutely the same, in

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thought and language and style. See the Opera T. à Kempis: Antwerp, 1515.

q It is singular how it almost escapes or avoids that fatal vulgarism of most mystic works, metaphors taken from our lower senses, the taste, the touch.

its middle, and its close; discriminating yet leading up the student in constant ascent; it is an epopee of the internal history of the human soul.

The Imitation of Christ' both advanced and arrested the development of Teutonic Christianity; it was prophetic of its approach, as showing what was demanded of the human soul, and as endeavouring, in its own way, to supply that imperative necessity; yet by its deficiency, as a manual of universal religion, of eternal Christianity, it showed as clearly that the human mind, the human heart, could not rest in the Imitation. It acknowledged, it endeavoured to fill up the void of personal religion. The Imitation is the soul of man working out its own salvation, with hardly any aid but the confessed necessity of divine grace. It may be because it is the work of an ecclesiastic, a priest, or monk; but, with the exception of the exhortation to frequent communion, there is nothing whatever of sacerdotal intervention: all is the act, the obedience, the aspiration, the self-purification, self-exaltation of the soul. It is the Confessional in which the soul confesses to itself, absolves itself; it is the Direction by whose sole guidance the soul directs itself. The Book absolutely and entirely supersedes and supplies the place of the spiritual teacher, the spiritual guide, the spiritual comforter it is itself that teacher, guide, comforter. No manual of Teutonic devotion is more absolutely sufficient. According to its notion of Christian perfection, Christian perfection is attainable by its study, and by the performance of its precepts: the soul needs no other mediator, at least no earthly mediator, for its union with the Lord.

But The Imitation of Christ,' the last effort of Latin Christianity, is still monastic Christianity. It is abso

lutely and entirely selfish in its aim, as in its acts. Its sole, single, exclusive object, is the purification, the elevation of the individual soul, of the man absolutely isolated from his kind, of the man dwelling alone in the solitude, in the hermitage of his own thoughts; with no fears or hopes, no sympathies of our common nature : he has absolutely withdrawn and secluded himself not only from the cares, the sins, the trials, but from the duties, the connexions, the moral and religious fate of the world. Never was misnomer so glaring, if justly considered, as the title of the book, the 'Imitation of Christ.' That which distinguishes Christ, that which distinguishes Christ's Apostles, that which distinguishes Christ's religion-the Love of Man-is entirely and absolutely left out. Had this been the whole of Christianity, our Lord himself (with reverence be it said) had lived, like an Essene, working out or displaying his own sinless perfection by the Dead Sea: neither on the Mount, nor in the Temple, nor even on the Cross. The Apostles had dwelt entirely on the internal emotions of their own souls, each by himself, St. Peter still by the Lake of Gennesaret, St. Paul in the desert of Arabia, St. John in Patmos. Christianity had been without any exquisite precept for the purity, the happiness of social or domestic life; without self-sacrifice for the good of others; without the higher Christian patriotism, devotion on evangelic principles to the public weal; without even the devotion of the missionary for the dissemination of Gospel truth; without the humbler and gentler daily self-sacrifice for relatives, for the wife, the parent, the child. Christianity had never soared to be the civiliser of the world. "Let the world perish, so he single soul can escape on its solitary plank from the neral wreck," such had been its final axiom. The

'Imitation of Christ' begins in self-terminates in self. The simple exemplary sentence, "He went about doing good," is wanting in the monastic gospel of this pious zealot. Of feeding the hungry, of clothing the naked, of visiting the prisoner, even of preaching, there is profound, total silence. The world is dead to the votary of the Imitation, and he is dead to the world, dead in a sense absolutely repudiated by the first vital principles of the Christian faith. Christianity, to be herself again, must not merely shake off indignantly the barbarism, the vices, but even the virtues of the Medieval, of Monastic, of Latin, Christianity.