LIFE OF St. STEPHEN HARDING

I.

ST. STEPHEN IN YOUTH.

 

Holy men of old who have written the lives of Saints, universally begin by professing their unworthiness to be the historians of the marvellous deeds which the Holy Spirit has wrought in the Church. What then should we say, who in these miserable times, from the bosom of our quiet homes, or in the midst of our literary ease, venture to celebrate the glories of the Saints? We have much that is amiable and domestic amongst us, but Saints, the genuine creation of the cross, with their supernatural virtues, are now to us a matter of history. Nay, we cannot give up all for Christ, if we would; and while other portions of the Church can suffer for His sake, we must find our cross in sitting still, to watch in patience the struggle which is going on about us. Yet while we wait for better days, we may comfort ourselves with the contemplation of what her sons once were, and admire their virtues, though we have not the power, even though we had the will, to imitate them. The English character has an earnestness and reality about it, capable of appreciating and of following out the most perfect way. Not only was the whole island once covered with fair monasteries, but it sent forth into foreign lands men who became the light of foreign monastic orders. Thus the Saint, whose life we have undertaken to write, was one of the first foun­ders of the Cistercian order, and the spiritual father of St. Bernard.

Little as is known of the early years of St. Stephen, all his historians especially dwell on one fact, that he was an Englishman. The date and place of his birth, and the names of his parents, are alike unknown; but his name, Harding, seems to show that he was of Saxon blood, and he is said to have been of noble birth; it also seems probable that he was born rather before than after the Norman conquest. His earthly parentage, and all that he had given up for Christ's sake, is forgotten; and he first appears as a boy, brought up from his earliest years in the monastery of Sherborne, in Dorsetshire.

The rule of St.Benedict allows parents to offer up children under fourteen years of age at God's altar, to serve Him to the end of their days in the cloister. In those lawless times, when temptations to acts of violence and rapine and reckless profligacy were so great, holy parents thought that they could not better protect the purity of their children than by placing them at once under the shadow of a monastery. Just as they had already in their name taken the solemn vows of baptism at the font, so they brought their children into the church of the convent, led them up into the sanctuary, and wrapping their hands in the linen cloth which covered the altar, gave them up solemnly to the service of God. At the same time, they took an oath never to endow them with any of their goods; they then left them with perfect security in the keeping of the superior, to follow their Lord with a light step, unencumbered by worldly possessions.

The discipline to which St. Stephen was thus subjected from his earliest years, was of the most careful kind. No prince could be brought up with greater care in a king's palace, than were these children offered up in the monastery, whether they were noble or low-born. The greatest pains were taken that the sight and even the knowledge of evil should be kept from them; they were instructed in reading, writing, and religious learning, but above all in music and psalmody. But the greater portion of their time was spent in the services of the Church, in which various constitutions of the order appoint them a princi­pal part.

Stephen thus spent his childhood, like Samuel, in the courts of the Lord's house, amidst the beauty and variety of the ceremonies with which the peaceful round of monastic life was diversified. About a hundred years before his time, St. Dunstan had roused anew the spirit of the Benedictines in England, which had in many places fallen into decay; and according to his constitutions the monastery of Sherborne was governed. In every part of his minute rules for the order of divine service, the part of the children brought up in the convent appears foremost; and there is a joyousness, and at the same time a sort of homeliness in some of them, which shows how much he consulted the English character.

All the uproarious merriment of the nation he tames down by turning it into something ecclesiastical. Bell-ringing, for instance, is ever occurring in his rule, and in one place it directs that at mass, nocturas, and vespers, from the Feast of the Innocents till the Circumcision, all the bells should be rung, as was the custom in England; "for the honest and godly customs of this country, which we have learnt from the wont of our ancestors, we have determined by no means to reject, but in every case to confirm them." Processions also from church to church, when the weather was fine, were frequent; and these were often headed by the children of the monastery.

Thus on Palm Sunday the whole community quitted the convent walls, and walked in procession, clad in albs, to some neighbouring church, with the children at their head. On arriving at their destination, the palms were blessed and the young choristers entoned the antiphons, and all quitted the church with palms in their hands. On returning to the church, the procession stopped before the porch, and the children, who walked first, chanted the Gloria Laus, after which, as the response Ingrediente Domino was raised by the cantor, the doors of the church were thrown open, and the whole line moved in to hear Mass. Such scenes as these must have sunk deep into a mind like Stephen's, and he might have lived and died in the peaceful monastery of Sherborne.

But God had other designs for His servant, and in his youth he quitted the convent for the sake of finishing his studies. From the words of St. Benedict's rule, it seems to have been intended that children received into a monastery should be considered as having taken the vows through their parents, and as dedicated to God until their life's end. Monastic discipline was not then considered so dreadful as it is now thought to have been; nor was this world looked upon as so very sweet that it was an act of madness to quit it for God's service. Rather, they were thought happy, to whom God had given the grace of a monastic vocation, and they surely were called by Him to the happy seclusion of the cloister, who were placed there by their parents' will; just as now we find that the wish of a father and mother decide on the profession or state of life of their child. Besides, monastic vows are in one sense only the completion of the vows of baptism; and it was not thought unnatural that those who, while the child was perfectly unconscious, placed him in the awful contact with the world unseen, implied by baptism, should also put him in the way of best fulfilling the rows to which they themselves had bound him in his infancy.

This was probably St. Benedict's view; but before Stephen's time, custom had in some cases relaxed the rule. St. Benedict seems not to have contemplated the case of a monk's ever leaving his monastery, except when despatched on the business of the convent. Each religious house was to be perfect in itself, and to contain, if possible, all the necessary arts of life, so that its inmates need very rarely go beyond its walls. Least of all does he seem to have thought that a monk could quit the cloister for the acquisition of learning; the end of monastic life was to follow Christ in perfect poverty and obedience; monks tilled the ground with their own hands, and wrought their food out of the hard soil by the sweat of their brow; they were therefore in very many cases what we should call rude and ignorant men, unskilled in worldly learning, though well versed in the science of divine contemplation.

The natural force of circumstances, however, made the cloister the rallying-point of learning, and monks often quitted their own convents in order to perfect themselves in the sciences. The active mind of Stephen longed for more than the poor monastery of Sherborne could afford him. He first travelled into Scotland, which at that time was the general refuge of all of Saxon race from the power of the Conqueror. It was governed by Malcolm III, who in 1070 married Margaret, a daughter of the English blood royal, and the grand-niece of St. Edward the Confessor. Her gentle virtues smoothed the rough manners of the nation, and the holy austerity of her life gave her such an ascendancy over them, that she banished many horrid customs which Christianity had as yet failed in uprooting. It was probably the peace which her holiness shed around her in Scotland which attracted Stephen thither; it formed a favourable contrast to the distracted state of England, which was suffering from the effects of the Conquest, and where a Saxon monastery could not be safe from the aggressions of their Norman lord. From Scotland he bent his steps to Paris.

Up to this time Stephen's life had been one of tranquillity, spent in the peace of a monastery or in the acquisition of learning. But he seems now to be entering on the rougher portion of his career; he had not yet found out his vocation, and with that untiring energy, of which his after-life showed so many proofs, was looking out for it. He was the disciple of a crucified Lord, and his brethren all through the world were fighting; how then could he rest in peace?

He left Paris and under­took a pilgrimage to Rome, at that time a journey of great danger and difficulty, when the roads were not smoothed by all the contrivances of modern travelling. Forests had not been cleared nor mountains cut through; and the towns and villages were far distant from each other, so that the poor pilgrims had often to depend on the hospitality of the monks and religious houses to find food and a night's rest after a long day's journey on foot or on horseback. A heavy rain was a most serious inconvenience, for it converted the road into a deep mass of mud, flooded the rivers and broke down the bridges. Another great danger was the bands of robbers who infested the forests, and the frequent wars which devastated the lands. The castle of a lawless baron or an encounter with any of the numerous bands of soldiers which crossed the country in every direction in war time, was a most serious obstacle to the defenceless traveller; no religious character could protect him, for we find that monasteries were burnt and churches pillaged with as little scruple as if the combatants were heathen Normans instead of Christians. On one occasion all the bishops and abbots of France were attacked on their way from the council of Pisa, by some petty lord; some thrown from their mules, some detained prisoners, and all rifled and plundered, notwithstanding their sacred character. A lonely pilgrim like Stephen would not be likely to find much mercy at such hands: undeterred by the dangers of the way, he set out with but one companion, a clerk, whose name is unknown.

Rome was the bourn to which the heart of all Englishmen natu­rally turned at that day across the wide tract of land and sea which separated them. Stephen had the thoughts of many illustrious examples before him to cheer him on his way; many a Saxon king had laid aside his crown and gone to assume the monastic habit at Rome. The venerable Bede, in relating one of these events, says, that it was only what many of the English, noble and low­born, clerks and laymen, men and women, vied with each other in doing; and their enthusiastic feelings are recorded in that saying which occurs so strangely in Bede's Collectanea, or Common-place Book, "When the Coliseum fells, Rome shall fell; when Rome fells, the world shall fall."

England had never forgotten, that whatever Rome might be to the rest of the world, it was her mother church; from the earliest times there was an English school in Rome, and some Saxon king, tradition said Ina, had built a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, which belonged to the English, and where Saxon pilgrims who died at Rome were buried. Stephen was therefore as much at home in St. Peter's when once he got to Rome, as he would have been in Westminster Abbey; recollections of his native kings would meet him wherever he went: there he might see the place where Alfred, when a boy of seven years old, was anointed king by Leo IV; and in "the street of the Saxons", where the English pilgrims lived, stood St. Mary's church, in which was the tomb of Burrhed, the last of the Mercian princes. Stephen, on his way to Rome, never forgot that he was a monk; it was no idle curiosity which led him so far over the sea and across the Alps. It was to imitate to the letter the life of Him who came down from heaven to be a poor man, and who had not where to lay His head; he thus courted cold and hunger and nakedness, that he might follow step by step the Virgin Lamb, as a stranger and pilgrim upon earth.

In these times, an Englishman in quitting his country finds, instead of the one home everywhere, altars at which he can only kneel as an alien, and travelling is therefore to us generally a source of dissipation. Stephen, however, found brethren wherever he went, from the parish church and the wayside chapel to the cathedral of the metropolitan city.

Still the bustle of moving from place to place, and a perpetual change of scene, are apt under the best circumstances to distract the mind from that state of habitual devotion in which it ought to rest. Good habits are very hard to gain, but very easy to lose; and nothing is so likely to destroy them as a mode of life in which every turn of the road developes something new. To guard against this danger, our pilgrims set themselves a rule, which none but the most ardent devotion could conceive. Throughout the whole of their long journey, whether they were in a crowded city, in the wilds of a forest, or clambering up the Alps, they recited together daily the whole of the Psalter. At the same time it is expressly said that they did not neglect the works of mercy which God gave them an opportunity of doing. Thus they went on their way chanting the praises of God, and walking with a joyful heart over the thorns and briers which obstructed their path; doing good as they went to their fellow-pilgrims, and to all sufferers, of whom in those times of violence there was no lack. The road which they travelled was not an unfrequented one; and they might have found much to distract their attention if they had chosen to detach their minds from their holy occupation. They not only met the lowly pilgrim who, like themselves, had left his home out of devotion; but many a bishop and abbot, too often with a lordly train, hastening to have his cause judged at Rome, would overtake and pass them by; or else they would meet the young clerk, high in hopes, going to seek his fortune as an adventurer at the Roman court. Many a more congenial companion, however, travelled the same way; their alternate chanting of the Psalms was at least not so singular as to be ostentatious; at each of the hours, the monk was bound to descend from his horse, pulled off his gloves and his cowl, and, falling on his knees, made the sign of the cross; then, after saying the Pater Noster, Deus in adjutorium, and Gloria Patri, he mounted his horse and finished the office on horseback. English monks especially, when they travelled, said the usual night hours during the day, so that other voices besides those of our pilgrims were heard chanting in the open air, as they journeyed to Rome. There were pilgrims of another sort, who, unlike Stephen and his companion, had undertaken the journey to expiate some dreadful crime; some even walked with small and cutting chains of iron round their bodies, in hopes of obtaining absolution from the successor of St. Peter.

There was then many an object, both good and bad, to arrest the attention of our pilgrims on the way, and to call for their sympathy. The road to Rome was an indication of what the city was itself; it was the head of the Catholic Church, and, like the Church, had both a heavenly and an earthly aspect. In one sense it was Christ's kingdom, holding in its hands His interests, and dispensing His mysteries; in another sense it was an earthly kingdom, with earthly interests and intrigues, the rich, powerful, and intellectual thronging its gates and endeavouring to gain the honours and the wealth which it had to dispense : and then again through this motley scene, it was Christ's kingdom working, and bringing good out of the selfishness and the avarice of men, to the wonder of the angels who look on. It was in this twofold point of view that Rome was looked upon in Stephen’s time; thus, on the one hand, William of Malmesbury, a contemporary writer, speaks in bitter terms of the Romans, as "the laziest of men, bartering justice for gold, selling the rule of the canons for a price"; and in the next page he goes on to enumerate with enthusiasm its heavenly treasures, the bodies of numberless martyrs, who rested in its bosom.

If ever there was a turbulent seditious populace, it was that of Rome; its nobles, fierce and bloody tyrants; its cardinals, too often purpled princes; but then too it was the principal treasure-house of Christ's blessings on earth, the centre of Catholic communion, and the rallying-point of all that was good; and if sometimes the side of injustice, amidst the multiplicity of causes which flowed into it, triumphed, still there was a mighty energy in its good, which at length brought good out of evil; and at all events there was ever room for the poor pilgrim to kneel at the tomb of the Apostles, from whence he went back on his way rejoicing. This was Stephen's object in going to Rome; he thought that his prayers would be most likely to be heard if he knelt near that body the very shadow of which healed the sick, and which was often so close to our most blessed Lord; and again at the tomb which contained that precious body which gave virtue to handkerchiefs and aprons, and which bore the marks of the Lord Jesus, and by its sufferings had filled up what was behindhand of the afflictions of our Lord for His Church's sake. How Stephen's prayers were answered, we shall soon see.