The Century of Columbus Part 16

It would be easy to think that these books are mere compilations and that they were probably scarcely more than small hand-books of the imperfect knowledge of the time. On the contrary, they are magnificent large volumes beautifully printed, finely ill.u.s.trated, bibliographic treasures full of original observation. They are some of the best text-books ever issued. Father Kircher's originality is demonstrated by the fact that he is the perfecter of the projecting stereoscope or magic lantern, which he was led to invent in his desire to be able to make demonstrations to his cla.s.ses. He also founded the Kircherian Museum, by which the teaching of anthropology and ethnology were greatly furthered through the curiosities sent to Rome by the Jesuit missionaries all over the world. His book, "On the Pest," is full of observations of great value and contains the first suggestions that infectious diseases are carried by insects. There was no subject that he touched that he did not illuminate.

Since that time there have been many distinguished Jesuit scientists, and they have continued their work down to our own day. At the present time, one of the best known of biologists in the special field of entomology is Father Wasmann, S.J., who has published some seven hundred papers on ants, their hosts and guests, and who, taking advantage of the help of his brethren all over the world, has described many hundreds of new species. How successful the Jesuits have been in their pursuit of science will perhaps be best realized from the fact that, while in Poggendorff's "Biographical Dictionary of Science" out of something less than nine thousand names nearly one thousand are Catholic clergymen, about five hundred of these are Jesuits. Their occupations first of all as priests often left them but little leisure {220} for scientific investigations, and yet they succeeded in stamping their names upon the history of science.

Two departments of modern science owe much to them. Father Secchi's wonderful inventions of instruments for meteorology were awarded prizes by the French Academy of Sciences, and other members of the order made successful investigations in the science. The Jesuits in the Philippines and the West Indies have done more to study out the conditions which precede cyclones and hurricanes so as to give warning with regard to them than any others. Their work was fully recognized by the United States Government. Many of the Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the world now have seismological observatories for the study of earthquakes, and undoubtedly their intimate connection and wide distribution will bring important details of information into this department of knowledge from which significant conclusions may be reached.

The work of the Jesuits has come to be better appreciated in English-speaking countries, where old religious prejudices hampered its proper recognition, until comparatively recent times. Macaulay, in his essay on Ranke's "History of the Popes," has summed up the achievements of the Jesuits in his own striking way. When he wrote the Jesuits were unknown personally in England, and so it is not surprising that there are pa.s.sages in his panegyric that are full of the old prejudices which had acc.u.mulated in English history and by which the term Jesuitic has become a word of the worst reproach.

Macaulay's wide reading, however, had brought to him a very extensive knowledge of the wonderful work accomplished by Loyola and his sons during the two centuries after their foundation. The pa.s.sage is too well known to be more than referred to here.

His tribute to their successful work as missionaries all over the world, which undoubtedly set the fashion after which Protestant historians in English-speaking countries have come to acknowledge the marvellous work of the Jesuits among the savages, is not so well known: "The old world was not wide enough for this strange activity.

The Jesuits invaded all the countries which the great marine discoveries of the preceding {221} age had laid open to European enterprise. In the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African slave-caravans, on the sh.o.r.es of the Spice Islands, in the observatories of China, they were to be found. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter, and preached and disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a word."

No wonder that Parkman, who in some ways has helped to make us Americans understand them better but who in many ways is utterly lacking in proper sympathy for them probably because he failed to know them well personally, said of them:

"The Jesuit was, and is, everywhere--in the schoolroom, in the library, in the cabinets of princes and ministers, in the huts of savages, in the tropics, in the frozen north, in India, in China, in j.a.pan, in Africa, in America; now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a mathematician, an astrologer, a Brahmin, a mandarin, under countless disguises, by a thousand arts, luring, persuading, or compelling souls into the fold of Rome."

He feels sure that there must be much to condemn in them, since they have been the subject of so much criticism and persecution. Like many another, he cannot bring himself to think that their founder's last wish for them, that they should be persecuted even as their Lord and Master was, should be the symbol of their fate. Where he knows them best, however, as in Canada, he has unmixed praise for them, though he declares that it is not for him to eulogize them, but to portray them as they were.

At once the keynote for the proper appreciation of the Jesuits and the summary of what Loyola accomplished through them is to be found in the closing paragraphs of Francis Thompson's "Life of St. Ignatius"

(Benzigers': New York, 1909, pp. 318):

"Issuing from this Manresan cave, forgotten by the world which he had forgotten, and rejected in the land which bore him, single and unaided he constructed and set in motion a force that stemmed and rolled back the reformation which had engulfed the North and threatened to conquer {222} Christendom. He cast the foundations of his Order deep; and, satisfied that his work was good, died--leaving it for legacy only the G.o.d-required gift that all men should speak ill of it.

"Most singular bequest that Founder ever transmitted, it has singularly been fulfilled. The union of energy and patience, sagacity and a self-devotion which held nothing impossible that was bidden it, were the leading qualities of St. Ignatius; and so far as his Order has prospered, it has been because it incarnated the qualities of its Founder. The administrative genius which, among the princes of Europe or the 'untutored minds' of Paraguay, is perhaps its most striking secular feature, comes to it direct from the man who might have ruled provinces in the greatest empire of the sixteenth century; but chose rather to rule, from the altars of the Church, an army which has outlasted the armies of Spain, and made conquests more perdurable than the vast empire which drifted to its fall in the wake of the broken galleons of the Armada."

The Jesuits are literally one of the greatest creations of this great period. Not to know them as such is to miss the significance of their order and not a little of the true spirit of the epoch from which they sprang. The arts and literature of the Renaissance produced no work destined to live so vividly, nor to influence men in all succeeding generations so deeply, as "the little company of Jesus," as Ignatius of Loyola conceived and organized it.

{223}

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOLBEIN, SIR THOMAS MORE]

CHAPTER IV

SIR THOMAS MORE AND SOME CONTEMPORARIES

While in this great period of the Renaissance, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and so many others, were demonstrating the power of the human mind to express itself in aesthetic modes of all kinds, and Copernicus and Regiomonta.n.u.s and Vesalius and Paracelsus were showing how man's intellect might penetrate the mysteries of the universe without him and that smaller universe the microcosm that he is himself, and Erasmus and Pico della Mirandola and Linacre were exhibiting human scholarship at its highest, a great contemporary in England expressed human life at its best in strong terms of the human will. This was Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, put to death by Henry VIII, but not until he had succeeded in making out of his life a wonderful work of living art of the profoundest significance, to which men of all cla.s.ses have been attracted ever since. He was a great scholar, a great lawyer, a great judge--the only man who ever cleared the docket of the English Court of Chancery,--a writer of distinguished ability not only in his own language but in Latin, a philosopher who so far as the consideration of social problems was concerned deserves a place beside Plato: yet not for any of these attainments is he famous, but for his unflinching following of what he saw to be his duty even though it cost him everything that men usually hold dear--life, reputation, property and even the possibility of poverty and suffering for those he held dear after his death.

Sir Thomas More was born in London, February 7, 1478. We are likely to think of the Wars of the Roses as farther away from us, but they were not yet over. Edward the Fourth was now firmly fixed on the throne, but there had been stormy times for the monarchy in his reign. Edward {224} originally ascended the throne in March, 1461, but the revolt of the Kingmaker Earl of Warwick had led to the restoration of poor Henry VI in 1470, and Edward had to flee the country. He returned in 1471, defeated Warwick at Barnet, April 14, 1471, and Margaret of Anjou at Tewkesbury, May 4, 1471. There was tranquillity for a dozen of years after this, but it was not until Henry VII defeated Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, and then married the Yorkist Princess Elizabeth, that peace was a.s.sured to England. It was into a very disturbed England, then, that Sir Thomas More was born. As a boy he had as teacher Nicholas Holt, who seems, with the true Renaissance spirit, to have been thoroughly able to arouse the youth's interest. At the age of twelve he entered the household of Cardinal Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the good old custom at that time to have boys brought up in the households of distinguished n.o.bles or high ecclesiastical dignitaries, with the idea that a.s.sociation with men of parts represented the best stimulus for that development of the intellectual faculties which const.i.tutes real education.

It was not long before young More attracted the attention of the distinguished old Cardinal, who prophesied his future greatness.

Roper, who married More's daughter Margaret, tells an incident of the boy's life at this time and adds that, as a consequence of the Cardinal's appreciation of him. More was sent to the university. He says in a famous paragraph that shows us More's precocity and that sense of humor that was to characterize him all his life:

"Though More were young of years, yet would he at Christmas suddenly sometimes step in among the players, and never studying for the matter, make a part of his own there presently among them which made the lookers on more sport than all the players beside. In whose wit and towardness the Cardinal much delighting, would often say of him to the n.o.bles that divers times dine with him: 'This child here waiting at the table, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.' Whereupon for his better furtherance in learning, he placed him at Oxford."

After some four years in the Cardinal's household, More {225} went to the university on the bounty of his patron, and afterwards took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar.

When he was twenty-six More became a member of Parliament, and the next year, in 1505, he married. The story of his marriage has an interest rather unique of its kind. He had gone down to the home of John Colt of Newhall, in Ess.e.x, with the avowed purpose of getting him a wife. He had been told that John's elder daughter was just the person for him. When he got down there he liked the second daughter better, but married her elder sister so as not to subject her to the discredit of being pa.s.sed over. There are those who have said that his sanct.i.ty began right there. It is to be hoped that his wife knew nothing of it until much later.

The year of his marriage, when he might reasonably have been expected to be circ.u.mspect as to his political future, More strenuously opposed in Parliament King Henry's (VII) proposal for a very large subsidy as the marriage portion of his daughter Margaret. In spite of his youth, his arguments in the matter were so forcible and in accord with old-time custom and law in England that the House of Commons reduced the subsidy to scarcely more than a quarter of the amount demanded.

When his favorite courtiers brought to Henry VII the news that a man whom he would deem scarcely more than a beardless boy had brought about the disappointment of his hopes and schemes and deprived him of an opportunity to fill his coffers, than which nothing was dearer to the miserly King's heart, it is easy to understand that More was not a favorite at Court.

More seems to have considered it advisable to absent himself from England for a while at this time, because of the king's displeasure.

This provided an opportunity to spend some time at Paris, and also at Louvain. At Louvain he began that acquaintance with Erasmus which ripened into the enduring intimacy of later life. No opportunity seems to have been missed by him to develop his intellect and broaden his intellectual interests. While he was a lawyer, the Greek authors became a favorite subject of study and philosophy and science his diversions. Literally, it might be said of {226} him, that there was nothing that was human that did not interest him.

After some time, More returned to London and took up the practice of law. After the death of Henry VII, in 1509, he became the most popular barrister of the day and very soon obtained an immensely lucrative practice. He refused to receive fees from the poor, and especially from widows and orphans who seemed to him to be oppressed in any way.

Tradition shows him as a sort of legal aid society for the city of London at that time. He absolutely refused to plead in cases which he thought unjust. Such punctilious practice of the law is sometimes said to hamper a successful career and, above all, lead to the loss of the opportunities that bring a lawyer into prominence. The very opposite happened with More, and he became the best known of his profession before he was forty.

The pleasantest part of More's life was these years of his professional career. He then had the opportunity to a.s.sociate frequently in the most charming of friendly and literary intercourse with the group of men whose names are famous in the English Renaissance. He and Erasmus were life-long friends, and perhaps there is no greater tribute to Erasmus' character than More's devoted affection for him, and his sympathetic devotion to More. Erasmus himself, though a much greater scholar, had nothing like the depth and strength of character possessed by More. The men were in many ways almost exact opposites of each other, and perhaps they felt how complementary their qualities were. More was eminently practical, Erasmus was rather impractical; More was humorous, Erasmus was witty.

More sympathized with all humanity, even when he found something to criticise; Erasmus' criticism was likely to be bitter and he laughed at rather than with people, so that he did not make himself generally loved, but quite the contrary, except for a few close friends, while the most typical characteristic of More's life is the love and affection it aroused.

More's family life is one of the most interesting features of his career. Erasmus has spoken of it with enthusiastic admiration and, as he had personal experience of it for rather {227} long periods at several different times and was himself a highly sensitive, readily irritable individual, his testimony in the matter is all the more significant. It may be due to Erasmus' enthusiastic admiration for More, but in any case it shows us how thoroughly he appreciated and was ready to place on record his enjoyment of the privilege of being received as a friend into the household:

"Does my friend regulate his household, where misunderstandings and quarrels are altogether unknown! Indeed, he is looked up to as a general healer of all differences, and he was never known to part from any on terms of unkindness. His house seems to enjoy the peculiar happiness that all who dwell under its roof go forth into the world bettered in their morals as well as improved in their condition; and no spot was ever known to fall on the reputation of any of its fortunate inhabitants. Here you might imagine yourself in the academy of Plato. But, indeed, I should do injustice to his house by comparing it with the school of that philosopher where nothing but abstract questions, and occasional moral virtues, were the subjects of discussion; it would be truer to call it a school of religion, and an arena for the exercise of all Christian virtues.

All its inmates apply themselves to liberal studies, though piety is their first care. No wrangling or angry word is ever heard within the walls. No one is idle; everyone does his duty with alacrity, and regularity and good order are prescribed by the mere force of kindness and courtesy. Everyone performs his allotted task, and yet all are as cheerful as if mirth were their only employment. Surely such a household deserves to be called a school of the Christian religion."

Some who have found a lack in the chancellor's life of what may be called romance, for both his courtships were eminently matter-of-fact, may find adequate compensation for this and material for the proper appreciation of More's affectionate nature in the contemplation of the intense affection which he displayed for his children, and especially for his daughter Margaret. Margaret More richly deserved all this affection of her father, but there is probably not a case in history where such affection has been so charmingly expressed. {228} Fortunately for us, the extensive correspondence that pa.s.sed between father and daughter is largely preserved for us. The letters are charming expressions of paternal and daughterly affection. Perhaps the one that may interest the young folks of this generation the most is that in which Sir Thomas replies to a letter of his daughter's asking for money. Probably there would be rather ready agreement that, in the great majority of cases, paternal answers to filial requests for money in our time are couched in somewhat different terms. The father wrote with cla.s.sic references that are meant to make her studies seem all the more valuable:

"You ask me, my dear Margaret, for money with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father that is eager to give, and since you have written to me a letter such that I would not only repay each line of it with a golden philippine, as Alexander did the verses of Cherilos, but, if my means were as great as my desire, I would reward each syllable with two gold ounces. As it is, I send you only what you have asked, but would have added more, only that as I am eager to give, so am I desirous to be asked and coaxed by my daughter, especially by you, whom virtue and learning have made so dear to my soul. So the sooner you spend this money well, as you are wont to do, and the sooner you ask for more, the more you will be sure of pleasing your father."

Linacre, the second of the group with whom More was a.s.sociated to a considerable extent, is one of the great characters of the England of that time. Like More, he had attracted the attention of a great Churchman, Bishop Selling; when young, he had gone to Italy in his train and there had had the advantage of intimate a.s.sociation with the family of the Medici when Lorenzo the Magnificent was training his boys to be rulers of Italy, political and ecclesiastical. Linacre stayed some ten years in Italy, mainly during the pontificate of Pope Alexander VI, of whom so much that is derogatory has been said, but, instead of having his devotion to the Church lessened by the abuses that are said to have existed in Italy at this time, he came back to England as a fervent Catholic. Years afterwards, when toward the end of life {229} he felt its emptiness, he distributed his property for educational purposes and became a priest. His foundations in both Cambridge and Oxford, and especially his foundation of the Royal College of Physicians, were very valuable contributions to the intellectual life of England. The College of Physicians lives on under the const.i.tutions that he provided. His chairs founded at Oxford and Cambridge were not so fortunate, because the disturbances of the end of Henry VIII's reign and the time of Edward VI led to the confiscation of many of these educational foundations, or at least of their diversion to the King's private purposes.

Erasmus was the greatest scholar of the time, Linacre was looked up to as perhaps the best Greek scholar of the period, and, while in Italy, Manutius in Venice had taken advantage of his knowledge for the editing of certain of the Greek cla.s.sics. He himself translated a number of volumes of Galen into Latin, and the translation was proclaimed, in Erasmus's words, to be better than the original Greek.

The third of this group of friends of More was scarcely less distinguished than the other two. It was Dean Colet of St. Paul's. He, too, had been touched by the spirit of the Renaissance, but like all the others of this group, instead of being attracted towards Paganism or away from Christianity, his devotion to the Church and his faith had been broadened and deepened by his knowledge. His sermons at St.

Paul's attracted widespread attention. But his personal influence was perhaps even more telling.

According to tradition, these men and certain others, as Lyly and at some times probably John Caius, who afterwards founded Caius College at Cambridge, used to meet for an afternoon's discussion of things literary, social and philosophic at the home of Colet's mother in Stepney. There we have a picture of them arguing over literary questions with that intense seriousness which characterized the Renaissance, and in the midst of which Colet had sometimes to restrain the ardent enthusiasm of the others lest argument should run into strife. Here, according to tradition, Dame Colet, mother of the Dean, used sometimes to bring them for a collation some of the strawberries that had been introduced into England {230} from Holland, probably by Erasmus himself or through his influence, and some of which were grown in the Colet garden. With English milk and the sweet cakes of the time, they made a pleasant interlude in the afternoon or served as a fitting smoothing apparatus for the end of a discussion that had waxed hot.

Such a group of men make an Academy in the best sense of the word.

When Plato led his scholars through the groves of Academus and discussed high thoughts with them, the first Academy came into existence and the English Renaissance furnished another striking example of how the friction of various many-sided minds may serve to bring out what is best in all of them. The pleasure of such intercourse only those who have had opportunities of sharing it can properly appreciate. The meetings must, indeed, have been events in the lives of the men, and More, who had not had the opportunity to go to Italy, must have drunk in with special enthusiasm all that their long years of Italian experience had given to the others. These interludes from his more serious practical duties at the bar must have been most happy and marvellously broadening in their effects.

A good idea of More's interests as a young man between twenty-five and thirty can be obtained from his setting himself to make a translation of Pico della Mirandola's "Life, Letters and Works." While Pico was one of the most learned men of the Renaissance, he was also one of the most pious. And more than any other he showed the possibility of being profoundly acquainted with Greek culture, and yet retaining a deep devotion to religion. More's praise of him in the life that he wrote shows better than anything else the drift of his own thoughts. The pa.s.sage affords a good idea of More's prose style in English, with the spelling somewhat but not entirely modernized:

"Oh very happy mind," he writes, "which none adversity might oppress, which no prosperity might enhance: Not the cunning of all philosophy was able to make him proud, not the knowledge of the hebrewe chaldey and arabie language besides greke and latin could make him vain gloriuse, not his great substance, not his n.o.ble blood coulde blow up his heart, {231} not the beauty of his body, not the great occasions of sin were able to pull him back into the voluptous broad way that lead us to h.e.l.l: what thing was there of so marvelous strength that might overturn that mind of him which now: as Seneca saith was gotten above fortune as he which as well her favor as her malice hath, saitheth nought, that he might be coupled with a spiritual knot unto Christ and his heavenly citizens."

More also wrote some verses on the vicissitudes of fortune, in which he describes her as distributing brittle gifts among men only to amuse herself by suddenly taking them back again. It was the literal expression of his own career, and his advice as to how to defy her is best ill.u.s.trated by his own life:

"This is her sport, thus proveth she her might; Great boast she mak'th if one be by her power Wealthy and wretched both within an hour.

Wherefore if thou in surety l.u.s.t to stand.

Take poverty's part and let proud fortune go.

Receive nothing that cometh from her hand.

Love, manner and virtue: they be only tho, Which double Fortune may not take thee fro': Then may'st thou boldly defy her turning chance.

She can thee neither hinder nor advance.'"

The young King Henry VIII became deeply interested in More because of his brilliancy of intellect, his successful conduct of affairs, his sterling character and, above all, for his wit and humor. He wanted to have him as a member of his Court, but this More long resisted. He preferred independence to a courtier's life, and in spite of the urging of Wolsey, who had been made a Cardinal by Leo X in 1515, and alleged how dear his service would be to his majesty, continued to refuse. After an emba.s.sy to Flanders, however, on which he went with Cuthbert Tunstal to confer with the amba.s.sadors of Charles V, who was then, however, only Archduke of Austria, upon a renewal of the alliance with the English Monarch and a further emba.s.sy of the same kind in 1516, {232} More consented to enter the Royal Court. On his emba.s.sy in Flanders he had probably taken the leisure to write out his "Utopia" in Latin, and it was published on the Continent, though not published in England until nearly twenty years after his death. The contact with Erasmus woke More's literary spirit, and Erasmus felt that there were magnificent possibilities for literature in More's intellect. Erasmus bewailed his becoming a courtier and says in his letters "the King really dragged him to his Court. No one ever strove more eagerly to gain admission there than More did to avoid it."

More's literary reputation rests more particularly on his "Utopia,"