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With Father and with Holy Ghost

Withouten ord and end,'

That am come to choose many for

My brethren upon earth

That cheerfully shall persevere

And do my Father's will,

So that he shall hold all of them
For children of His own
And give them to abide with me
Heirs of the heavenly realm,
That am the only son of Him

All one with him in kind,—
The man who wholly shall refuse

To trust this and believe,

That man is now condemned and set To suffer pain of hell,

Unless he can escape therefrom

Before he come to die,

Believing that I am true God,

True Saviour on earth.

And that he there to Nicodem?

Yet spake thus of himself:

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That is the doom, that light and gleam Is come upon the earth,

And men have no love for the light,

But love the darkness more, Because that their own deed is all

Evil and all unclean;

That was as if he had said thus

To him with other words: All that that any man shall be Condemned to bear in hell,

All that shall be for that he shall Neglect, scorn, and refuse

To come unto the Christendom

And to the right belief,

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To know me and to follow me,

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1 Ord and end, beginning and end. This is the original of our phrase "odds and ends." "Ord" was a First-English noun that meant "beginning." When it became obsolete, and the old phrase "ords and ends" still held its ground, the obsolete word was at last confounded with the nearest known word that resembled it. That is a not unusual process, to which we owe such phrases as "under the rose," "set the Thames on fire," &c.

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That they so long in heathendom
Had angered the true Lord.
And so they came into the light,
Into the right belief

In Jesus Christ our Saviour,
Whose name is Faithfulness:
For all that's ever true and right
And good, and pleases God,
Salvation for His handiwork,

All comes by grace of Christ.
And so they come into the light

To shew and to make known

That their deeds have been done aright

By pattern of our Lord;

For all together did one thing

Both Christ and they themselves,—

Christ has rebuked them for their wrong

By teaching righteousness,

And they also rebuke their wrong

By shrift and penitence,

So all together did one thing

Both Christ and they themselves.

And so through that was plainly seen
That any good they did

Was all in God and all through God,
Effected by His help.

And God Almighty grant us here

To please Christ while we live,

All pure in thought and pure in word, Pure mannered, pure in deed,

So that we may be worthy found

To win the grace of Christ. Amen.

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And how a man might please his God And earn the bliss of heaven,

And stand against the evil one,

And turn himself from hell. And after our Lord Christ was come

To be a man on earth, Thereafter was this middle earth

Filled full of heaven's light,

Because that our Lord Christ himself

And his Disciples too,

Both what was right and what was wrong

Made known in all the lands,

And how a man might please his God

And earn the bliss of heaven.

And many peoples haughtily
Withstood and still denied,

And turned them from the light of heaven
And from the heavenly lore,
Because they rather chose to be
In darkness that they loved,
To follow lusts of their own flesh

In every kind of sin,
Because they rather hated light

That brought rebuke of sin.
And other peoples well received
The gift of heavenly lore,

And turned them to the Christendom
And to the right belief;

That is that very light and gleam
That leadeth man to heaven;

And it received full inwardly
By shrift and penitence,
Accusing all their own misdeed
And punishing themselves,

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Side by side with this faithful work there was much darkness gathering where light should have been brightest. At the beginning of the thirteenth century both the Dominican and the Franciscan brotherhoods were founded to meet needs of the time with higher spiritual effort than had come of late from the chief teachers in a church weakened by wealth and luxury. The founder of the Dominicans was a Spaniard, Domingo, of the noble family of Guzmans, in the valley of the Douro. He pitied the poor. In a famine year he sold even his cherished books to relieve them. But he had learnt in his books that the way to heaven was along one narrow line of orthodox opinion; and when, after nine years of study at Osma, he travelled with his prior across a region of France cursed with the persecution of pure-minded heretics by orthodox priests who had neither knowledge wherewith to set forth, nor lives that would recommend, the opinions of which they sought brutally to compel acceptance, Dominic felt the need of a right power to convince of error thoughtful and well-meaning men whom he devoutly believed to be astray on a path leading to eternal punishment. Most of us now believe with Milton that there is more light in the world than shines in at our own windows. Few thought so then, and Dominic was profoundly sincere, true also in deeds of life to his own deepest convictions, when he founded the order of Preaching Friars called after him Dominicans. They were not to be monks, named from a Greek word that implied life in seclusion, but Fratres

Friars, Brothers of men going amongst them, putting aside all worldly ambitions, and devoting themselves wholly to diffusion of what they held to be the vital truths of God. They were to be practised in a profound study of the Scriptures, armed with knowledge, and trained to skill in its use that they might detect heresy in its beginnings, and triumph over it when at its strongest. The followers of Dominic, in the Black robe which gave them their name of Black Friars, were to be devoted guardians of the faith. Dominic's first followers adopted the rule of St. Augustine. They were first embodied with Papal assent in 1215 and 1216 as Predicants or Preaching Friars, afterwards called Dominicans from their founder, and Black Friars from their dress. This order also degenerated in the course of time. It had a great house in the part of London still known as Black Friars, and from this house came, as we shall find, from the custodians of orthodoxy condemnation of what were regarded as the heresies of Wiclif.

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A DOMINICAN. (From Dugdale's "Monasticon.")1 The Franciscan Order of Gray Friars or Minorites was founded nearly at the same time as the Dominican, and represented another form of effort to put truer life into the ministrations of the Church. Francis, son of a wealthy merchant, was born in 1182 at Assisi, in Umbria. He was twelve years younger than Dominic, whose birth year was 1170. Francis of Assisi, bred as a merchant, became deeply devout, pitied the poor, abandoned his own worldly wealth, and made it the work of his life to bring home to the poor the comforts of religion, as one

1 Representations of the several religious orders that first appeared in the "Monasticon" were used again for the "History of Warwickshire."

A FRANCISCAN. (From Dugdale's "Monasticon.')

the Church, gathered so many to his ranks, that at a chapter of the order held in 1219, 5,000 Franciscan Friars were present. The Franciscans in their early days would not allow great houses to be built for them. When a house of stone was built for them at Oxford, they had it pulled down and replaced by a building with mud walls, and it was placed in the lowest haunts of the poor. In London they lived by the shambles in a place called "Stinking Lane." They put aside the pride of knowledge, left book-learning to the Dominicans, called themselves the Lesser Friars, Fratres Minores, Minorites, and trusted to humility of love. This order also degenerated as the days of the pure enthusiasm that established it were left more and more in the past. But it is a significant fact that the putting away of books in which science lay as petrified, and from which people took forms of opinion to be exactly reproduced, caused the Franciscans presently to become leaders of knowledge. They went among the poor, and sought to win from them goodwill and confidence. They sympathised with their troubles, sought to pacify their quarrels, and heal their infirmities of body or of mind. In seeking means to

heal the bodily infirmities the Franciscans were led to observe nature, to draw knowledge from experience; and minds of active, intellectual men thus trained in a forced contact with Nature alone as their chief teacher, were soon on the way to many a truth that was not written in the books they might not read. After some years Franciscans were teaching in the universities, and drew the largest audiences to their lecture-rooms. As the order lost its singleness of purpose, the positions fairly won were weakly held; and Wiclif, in his earlier years at Oxford, earned much goodwill in the university by opposing what was then undue predominance of the Franciscans, and of the Dominicans who arrogated to themselves the teaching of theology.

In the earlier half of the thirteenth century, not very long after the establishment of the Franciscan order, its first rector in Oxford was Robert Grosseteste, who was appointed to that office in 1224, when he was about fifty years old. Grosseteste

only about five years younger than Dominic, and seven years older than Francis of Assisi-was a great scholar, born of poor parents in Suffolk. He studied at Paris and Oxford, graduated in Divinity, was rector at one time of St. Margaret's, Leicester, became afterwards Archdeacon of Leicester, and had other preferment when the corruption of self-seeking among churchmen caused him to begin his own efforts towards reform by resigning all that he held himself except one office, a prebend at Lincoln.

In

1235 he was made Bishop of Lincoln, but caused violent agitation among the monks and clergy of his diocese by bold punishment and repression of corruption. A monk tried to poison him; the canons preached against him in his own cathedral; the king's power was used to check the strictness with which he enforced their duties on his clergy. He opposed the bestowal of English benefices, as mere pieces of income, upon Italians nominated by the Pope; and in the last year of his life boldly refused to induct a nephew of the Pope himself into a canonry at Lincoln. Grosseteste died in 1253, leaving to the Franciscans his library, and to his country a memory of which the good fame might rest upon his patriotic and religious zeal in the contest for Church reform; but he was also one of the profoundest scholars and teachers of his ageRoger Bacon was among his pupils-and he had a keen sense of the graces of life, a love of music and of old romance. This caused him to put in the form of French romance a religious poem upon the Virgin. It was written in French and called the "Chasteau d'Amour." There was more than one early version of it translated into English.1

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Grosseteste's pupil, the famous Franciscan, Roger Bacon, was born in 1214, and died in 1292. In the year 1267 he was pouring out his knowledge for the Pope in a spirit of philosophy, kindred in some respects to that of the Francis Bacon who was born three centuries later. Roger Bacon dwelt upon the need of exact knowledge by Churchmen. He condemned the ignorance that propagated false translations for want of right training in language, and when he spoke emphatically of mathematics as a most essential study, he argued that it was essential to divines if they would read and explain the Bible with intelligence, and help men rightly to admire the works of the Creator.

Roger Bacon had spent a little fortune upon study before he became a Franciscan at Oxford, denied the use of books, and of pens, ink, and paper. The fame of his knowledge reached Pope Clement IV., who asked him to write down what he knew. The result was a sequence of writings, poured out with wonderful rapidity, in which he went the round of all the knowledge of his day, with additions of his own, and philosophial suggestions of the highest interest. Even the four "Idols" condemned by Francis Bacon were almost anticipated in the assertion of Roger Bacon that there are four grounds of human ignorance— trust in inadequate authority, the force of custom, the opinion of the inexperienced crowd, and the hiding of one's own ignorance with the parading of a superficial wisdom. When in passing through the sciences he comes to music, we have these notes from Roger Bacon on

Then follows prayer that God will grant us to think and work as we should, before statement of the subject of the poem, which is first the happiness of Adam in Paradise till all was lost; and then how all was redeemed by the High King's Son.

The High King had four daughters-Mercy, Truth, Right, and Peace. He had also a thrall, who having done amiss was set in prison and delivered to his foes. Mercy pleaded for him, but Right had called for his punishment, and this Truth urged. Right then judged in accordance with the words of Truth. Then Peace-who was banished by the execution of the Righteous dooms-joined in the plea of Mercy. The King's Son, when he had heard the pleading. offered to wear the clothing of the thrall, and suffer for him all that Truth and Right required, so that Peace might come back into the land, and Righteousness and Peace might kiss each other. The parable is then applied to the sacred story, and through praise of the love of God the poem passes to the birth of Christ. When God came to bless us he chose to alight

"In a castel wel comeliche

Muche and feir and loveliche;
That is the castel of alle flour,
Of solas and of socour."

Then follows a description of the castle wherein God "chose his inn"

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TO A.D. 1267.]

CHURCH MUSIC AND PREACHING.1

RELIGION.

[He had said that there were three kinds of harmony, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, the last-named adopted by the Church; had dwelt on the importance of music, and complained that church singing in his time had lost gravity, and slipped into a voluptuous softness; that the old manly tone was in some of our greatest cathedrals spoilt by falsetto voices and the womanish singing of boys. He then dwelt on music as an aid to devotion, as allayer of evil passions, and as healer of disease, and spoke of its power over irrational creatures. But, he went on, besides all this]

The force of music is very agreeable and useful in the Church. It has been said that one kind of music is by metre, another by rhythm. But hymns, and histories, and prose narratives of the saints ought to be made according to the true art of metre and rhythm, as the saints made them from Common metres are of hexameter and the beginning. pentameter verses, which are alone now used by the community of the Latins. But hymns and rhythmical prosewritings, and pieces of that kind, do not follow common laws of metre and rhythm, but have special methods; as, when it is said:

Ut queant laxis Re-sonare fibris
Mi-ra gestorum Fa-muli tuorum,
Sol-ve pollutos La-bii reatus

Sancte Johannes 2

Here is a beautiful metre with distinct verses, but of fewer feet, five and six; and so of the hymns, &c. And these metres are not only used with the three recognised feet, dactyl, spondee, and trochee, but with others which mount up to twenty-eight, of which Augustine teaches in his books of music, and other musical writers. When, therefore, hymns, &c., of this kind resound sweetly in the Church of God, and excite the souls of the faithful to devotion, and this, chiefly, because of the charm of metre and rhythm, it is necessary that the Church should have knowledge of this metrical and rhythmical science for church use, that when saints are canonised, or churches dedicated, or other solemnities appointed, which for special devotion require hymns and rhythms of their own in the divine offices, the devout handmaid of the church, called Music, may be ready to do her aptest service.

But if it may be said that these things can be done, and are done, without the science of music; that its grammar is sufficient. Clearly that is not so, for reasons already given, because it is the business of the musician to give cause and reason of these things that they may rightly produce rhythmic and metrical work; but grammar is only mechanical in this respect, ignorant of these causes and reasons.

And if it may be said that no great art is required for this, because men easily produce such things in the offices of the saints and others whenever they please, it is to be said of them that they do nothing rightly nor truly, but it is a mockery of divine service. For all that has been done during the last thirty years is false to art and truth, because composers of this kind know neither what feet they ought to use, nor how many feet, nor what kind of metre, nor how they are to be put together according to the ways of art; but after the

1 Chapter lxxiv. and part of chapter lxxv. of the "Opus Tertium," first edited by Professor Brewer in the important series of "Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages," published under direction of the Master of the Rolls. Roger Bacon wrote, of course, in Latin.

The verses are an appeal to St. John to loosen lips that they may sound his praise, so worded as to introduce the syllables of the scale -Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La.

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pattern of other hymns and such pieces so made, they count syllables at haphazard, and do not in anything observe metrical law. And, therefore, this is a mockery before God and the holy angels, and all who have any real knowledge of this art. For the saints who first composed in this way, as St. Ambrose, and Augustine, and Beda, and others, knew perfectly the laws and principles of metre and rhythm; and wrote according to the ways of art as having the power of science, and not working at haphazard as the moderns do, who fashion as they please.

The next thing in which the philosophy of Music can powerfully serve the Church is in the office of preaching, But this office although at first sight that may seem absurd.

does not belong to study, because it consists in reading and disputation. But preaching is to the faithful and to the faithless, to laity and clergy.

Now, some cannot preach unless they are sent by the authority of prelates. Whence this is the office proper to prelates, and conceded by them to others, who exercise it in their place; and, therefore, it does not pertain to study absolutely, but to the Church. But that philosophy will minister to a great power of persuasion is patent enough from what I have said when speaking of Moral Philosophy; for there I have traced the roots of persuasion, according to the doctrines both of the saints and of the philosophers, and because of the ignorance of these roots, the whole method of preaching to the people comes to nothing, and the art itself is unknown. And since the infidels have proper methods of persuasion in those things which concern them, therefore this manner of persuasion is philosophical, because it is common to Christian and Pagan. And, therefore, there descends from the springs of philosophy one method special for this purpose, though also another method may be taken from the teaching of the saints. But the method of philosophy is first, and leads us towards the higher way, and is necessary to it as the servant to the master. Wherefore, if philosophy in other things is necessary to the Church, it is most so in this, seeing that the first intention of the Church and its last end is the work of preaching; that infidels may be converted to the faith, and that believers be maintained in faith and honesty of living. But because the crowd knows nothing of either way, it turns all to supreme and unending curiousness, as by Porphyrian divisions, by foolish consonances of words and little clauses, and by vocal concords, in which is nothing but a wordy vanity, wanting in every ornament of rhetoric and power of persuasion. Some phantasm is displayed in puerile fashion, invented by boys void of all wisdom and power of eloquence, as is plain to any one who looks at it; such as I have set forth in my second work, and this my third, among the sins of theology. Nevertheless, over all this there is the greatest consumption of time. For on account of the superfluity of curiousness they labour ten times more over the construction of this sort of spider's web than over the thought of the sermon. Since the books of Aristotle's Logic on these matters, and the commentaries of Avicenna, are not to be had in Latin, and the few things that are translated are not brought into use or read, it is not easy to express what ought to be done. But that Aristotle did write two books of Logic on this kind of persuasion, concerning sects and morals, I have shown in the third part of the "Opus Majus," and in the seventh; and there can be no doubt that they were excellent books, though the Latin writers are ignorant of them, as they were ignorant of the new logic when they only had the old. For in them would be taught how sublime discourses should be made, as well in the utterance as in the thought, with all true ornaments of speech, in metre, rhythm, or prose; that the soul may be hurried unexpectedly towards that for which the

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