Read Ebook: Menasseh ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell Being a reprint of the pamphlets published by Menasseh ben Israel to promote the re-admission of the Jews to England 1649-1656 by Manasseh Ben Israel Wolf Lucien Editor

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"The youngest found refuge at the court of France, where ultimately the prince royal married her. But the two elder daughters, having obtained absolute power, treated their father at first with disrespect, and soon with contumely. Refused at last even the comforts necessary to his declining years, the old king, in a transport of rage, left the palace, with, it is said, only the court fool for an attendant, and wandered, frantic and half naked, during the storms of winter, in the woods of Britain.

"Hearing of these events, his youngest daughter hastily collected an army, and invaded the territory of her ungrateful sisters, with the object of restoring her father to his throne; but, being met by a well disciplined force, under the command of her eldest sister's paramour, Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, was herself defeated, thrown into prison, and soon afterwards strangled by the adulterer's order. The old king expired on receiving the news of her death; and the participators in these crimes soon after received their reward; for the two wicked queens being rivals for the affections of the bastard, the one of them who was regarded by him with less favour poisoned the other, and afterwards killed herself. Edmund afterwards met his death at the hand of his brother, the legitimate son of Gloucester, under whose rule, with that of the Earl of Kent, the kingdom remained for several succeeding years."

Imagine this succinctly graceful recital of what the historian conceived to be the facts, adorned with violently black and white woodcuts, representing the blinding of Gloucester, the phrenzy of Lear, the strangling of Cordelia, and the suicide of Goneril, and you have a type of popular history in the nineteenth century; which is, you may perceive after a little reflection, about as profitable reading for young persons as the Newgate Calendar would be; with this farther condition of incalculably greater evil, that, while the calendar of prison-crime would teach a thoughtful youth the dangers of low life and evil company, the calendar of kingly crime overthrows his respect for any manner of government, and his faith in the ordinances of Providence itself.

Books of loftier pretence, written by bankers, members of Parliament, or orthodox clergymen, are of course not wanting; and show that the progress of civilization consists in the victory of usury over ecclesiastical prejudice, or in the establishment of the Parliamentary privileges of the borough of Puddlecombe, or in the extinction of the benighted superstitions of the Papacy by the glorious light of Reformation. Finally, you have the broadly philosophical history, which proves to you that there is no evidence whatever of any overruling Providence in human affairs; that all virtuous actions have selfish motives; and that a scientific selfishness, with proper telegraphic communications, and perfect knowledge of all the species of Bacteria, will entirely secure the future well-being of the upper classes of society, and the dutiful resignation of those beneath them.

Meantime, the two ignored powers--the Providence of Heaven, and the virtue of men--have ruled, and rule, the world, not invisibly; and they are the only powers of which history has ever to tell any profitable truth. Under all sorrow, there is the force of virtue; over all ruin, the restoring charity of God. To these alone we have to look; in these alone we may understand the past, and predict the future, destiny of the ages.

I return to the story of Clovis, king now of all central France. Fix the year 500 in your minds as the approximate date of his baptism at Rheims, and of St. Remy's sermon to him, telling him of the sufferings and passion of Christ, till Clovis sprang from his throne, grasping his spear, and crying, "Had I been there with my brave Franks, I would have avenged His wrongs."

"There is little doubt," proceeds the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates who have recently taken orders in his fashionable neighbourhood, or the bishops who have lately preached to the population of its manufacturing suburbs. Frankish kings were made of other clay.

The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen's God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God's supernatural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldiership, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religions indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere.

Had either Clovis or Clotilde fully understood the precepts of their Master, the following history of France, and of Europe, would have been other than it is. What they could understand, or in any wise were taught, you will find that they obeyed, and were blessed in obeying. But their history is complicated with that of several other persons, respecting whom we must note now a few too much forgotten particulars.

If from beneath the apse of Amiens Cathedral we take the street leading due south, leaving the railroad station on the left, it brings us to the foot of a gradually ascending hill, some half a mile long--a pleasant and quiet walk enough, terminating on the level of the highest land near Amiens; whence, looking back, the Cathedral is seen beneath us, all but the fl?che, our gained hill-top being on a level with its roof-ridge: and, to the south, the plain of France.

Somewhere about this spot, or in the line between it and St. Acheul, stood the ancient Roman gate of the Twins, whereon were carved Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf; and out of which, one bitter winter's day, a hundred and seventy years ago when Clovis was baptized--had ridden a Roman soldier, wrapped in his horseman's cloak, on the causeway which was part of the great Roman road from Lyons to Boulogne.

And it is well worth your while also, some frosty autumn or winter day when the east wind is high, to feel the sweep of it at this spot, remembering what chanced here, memorable to all men, and serviceable, in that winter of the year 332, when men were dying for cold in Amiens streets:--namely, that the Roman horseman, scarce gone out of the city gate, was met by a naked beggar, shivering with cold; and that, seeing no other way of shelter for him, he drew his sword, divided his own cloak in two, and gave him half of it.

Nevertheless, that same night, he beheld in a dream the Lord Jesus, who stood before him in the midst of angels, having on his shoulders the half of the cloak he had bestowed on the beggar.

And Jesus said to the angels that were around him, "Know ye who hath thus arrayed me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptized, has done this." And Martin after this vision hastened to receive baptism, being then in his twenty-third year.

You are to understand, then, first of all, that the especial character of St. Martin is a serene and meek charity to all creatures. He is not a preaching saint--still less a persecuting one: not even an anxious one. Of his prayers we hear little--of his wishes, nothing. What he does always, is merely the right thing at the right moment;--rightness and kindness being in his mind one: an extremely exemplary saint, to my notion.

Converted and baptized--and conscious of having seen Christ--he nevertheless gives his officers no trouble whatever--does not try to make proselytes in his cohort. "It is Christ's business, surely!--if He wants them, He may appear to them as He has to me," seems the feeling of his first baptized days. He remains seventeen years in the army, on those tranquil terms.

At the end of that time, thinking it might be well to take other service, he asks for his dismissal from the Emperor Julian,--on whose accusation of faintheartedness, Martin offers, unarmed, to lead his cohort into battle, bearing only the sign of the cross. Julian takes him at his word,--keeps him in ward till time of battle comes; but, the day before he counts on putting him to that war ordeal, the barbarian enemy sends embassy with irrefusable offers of submission and peace.

Going, in his full robes, to say prayers in church, with one of his deacons, he came across some unhappily robeless person by the wayside; for whom he forthwith orders his deacon to provide some manner of coat, or gown.

The deacon objecting that no apparel of that profane nature is under his hand, St. Martin, with his customary serenity, takes off his own episcopal stole, or whatsoever flowing stateliness it might be, throws it on the destitute shoulders, and passes on to perform indecorous public service in his waistcoat, or such mediaeval nether attire as remained to him.

But, as he stood at the altar, a globe of light appeared above his head; and when he raised his bare arms with the Host--the angels were seen round him, hanging golden chains upon them, and jewels, not of the earth.

Incredible to you in the nature of things, wise reader, and too palpably a gloss of monkish folly on the older story?

Be it so: yet in this fable of monkish folly, understood with the heart, would have been the chastisement and check of every form of the church's pride and sensuality, which in our day have literally sunk the service of God and His poor into the service of the clergyman and his rich; and changed what was once the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, into the spangling of Pantaloons in an ecclesiastical Masquerade.

But one more legend,--and we have enough to show us the roots of this saint's strange and universal power over Christendom.

St. Martin, then, as the tale will have it, was dining one day at the highest of tables in the terrestrial globe--namely, with the Emperor and Empress of Germany! You need not inquire what Emperor, or which of the Emperor's wives! The Emperor of Germany is, in all early myths, the expression for the highest sacred power of the State, as the Pope is the highest sacred power of the Church. St. Martin was dining then, as aforesaid, with the Emperor, of course sitting next him on his left--Empress opposite on his right: everything orthodox. St. Martin much enjoying his dinner, and making himself generally agreeable to the company: not in the least a John Baptist sort of a saint. You are aware also that in Royal feasts in those days persons of much inferior rank in society were allowed in the hall: got behind people's chairs, and saw and heard what was going on, while they unobtrusively picked up crumbs, and licked trenchers.

For which charity--mythic if you like, but evermore exemplary--he remains, as aforesaid, the patron of good-Christian topers to this hour.

As gathering years told upon him, he seems to have felt that he had carried weight of crozier long enough--that busy Tours must now find a busier Bishop--that, for himself, he might innocently henceforward take his pleasure and his rest where the vine grew and the lark sang. For his episcopal palace, he takes a little cave in the chalk cliffs of the up-country river: arranges all matters therein, for bed and board, at small cost. Night by night the stream murmurs to him, day by day the vine-leaves give their shade; and, daily by the horizon's breadth so much nearer Heaven, the fore-running sun goes down for him beyond the glowing water;--there, where now the peasant woman trots homewards between her panniers, and the saw rests in the half-cleft wood, and the village spire rises grey against the farthest light, in Turner's 'Loireside.'

All which things, though not themselves without profit, my special reason for telling you now, has been that you might understand the significance of what chanced first on Clovis' march south against the Visigoths.

"Having passed the Loire at Tours, he traversed the lands of the abbey of St. Martin, which he declared inviolate, and refused permission to his soldiers to touch anything, save water and grass for their horses. So rigid were his orders, and the obedience he exacted in this respect, that a Frankish soldier having taken, without the consent of the owner, some hay, which belonged to a poor man, saying in raillery "that it was but grass," he caused the aggressor to be put to death, exclaiming that "Victory could not be expected, if St. Martin should be offended."

Now, mark you well, this passage of the Loire at Tours is virtually the fulfilment of the proper bounds of the French kingdom, and the sign of its approved and securely set power is "Honour to the poor!" Even a little grass is not to be stolen from a poor man, on pain of Death. So wills the Christian knight of Roman armies; throned now high with God. So wills the first Christian king of far victorious Franks;--here baptized to God in Jordan of his goodly land, as he goes over to possess it.

How long?

And be this much remembered by you, of the power over French souls, past and to come, of St. Martin of Tours.

"Of the features of English character brought to light by the spread of British dominion in Asia, there is nothing more observable than the contrast between the religious bias of Eastern thought and the innate absence of religion in the Anglo-Saxon mind. Turk and Greek, Buddhist and Armenian, Copt and Parsee, all manifest in a hundred ways of daily life the great fact of their belief in a God. In their vices as well as in their virtues the recognition of Deity is dominant.

"Into this life comes the Englishman, frequently destitute of one touch of sympathy with the prayers of any people, or the faith of any creed; hence our rule in the East has ever rested, and will ever rest, upon the bayonet. We have never yet got beyond the stage of conquest; never assimilated a people to our ways, never even civilized a single tribe around the wide dominion of our empire. It is curious how frequently a well-meaning Briton will speak of a foreign church or temple as though it had presented itself to his mind in the same light in which the City of London appeared to Blucher--as something to loot. The other idea, that a priest was a person to hang, is one which is also often observable in the British brain. On one occasion, when we were endeavouring to enlighten our minds on the Greek question, as it had presented itself to a naval officer whose vessel had been stationed in Greek and Adriatic waters during our occupation of Corfu and the other Ionian Isles, we could only elicit from our informant the fact that one morning before breakfast he had hanged seventeen priests."

The second passage which I store in these notes for future use, is the supremely magnificent one, out of a book full of magnificence,--if truth be counted as having in it the strength of deed: Alphonse Karr's "Grains de Bon Sens." I cannot praise either this or his more recent "Bourdonnements" to my own heart's content, simply because they are by a man utterly after my own heart, who has been saying in France, this many a year, what I also, this many a year, have been saying in England, neither of us knowing of the other, and both of us vainly. The passage here given is the sixty-third clause in "Grains de Bon Sens."

"Et tout cela, monsieur, vient de ce qu'il n'y a plus de croyances--de ce qu'on ne croit plus ? rien.

"Ah! saperlipopette, monsieur, vous me la baillez belle! Vous dites qu'on ne croit plus ? rien! Mais jamais, ? aucune ?poque, on n'a cru ? tant de billeves?es, de bourdes, de mensonges, de sottises, d'absurdit?s qu'aujourd'hui.

"Tous deux, il est vrai, en m?me temps protecteurs hypocrites, et prot?g?s dup?s.

"Les croyances out subi le sort de ce serpent de la fable--coup?, hach? par morceaux, dont chaque tron?on devenait un serpent.

"Les croyances se sont chang?es en monnaie--en billon de cr?dulit?s.

UNDER THE DRACHENFELS.

Thus, it will be found primarily a most simple and convenient arrangement of the years since the birth of Christ, to divide them by fives of centuries,--that is to say, by the marked periods of the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and, now fast nearing us, twentieth centuries.

And this--at first seemingly formal and arithmetical--division, will be found, as we use it, very singularly emphasized by signs of most notable change in the knowledge, disciplines, and morals of the human race.

In our immediate subject of study, we are concerned with the first of these marked centuries--the fifth--of which I will therefore ask you to observe two very interesting divisions.

All dates of years in that century, we said, must begin with the number 4.

If you halve it for the second figure, you get 42.

And if you double it for the second figure, you get 48.

Add 1, for the third figure, to each of these numbers, and you get 421 and 481, which two dates you will please fasten well down, and let there be no drifting about of them in your heads.

For the first is the date of the birth of Venice herself, and her dukedom, ; and the second is the date of birth of the French Venice, and her kingdom; Clovis being in that year crowned in Amiens.

Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom, only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom--St. Genevieve, and St. Benedict.

Genevieve, the 'white wave' --the purest of all the maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple, unsullied,--not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the Leucothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.

White wave on the blue--whether of pure lake or sunny sea--, she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the entire soul and life--,--and all the traditions of sorrow in the trial or failure of noble womanhood are connected with her name; Ginevra, in Italian, passing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you, lugubriously useless;--but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory and might of this white wave of France.

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