He sees the glory of his God,
Sigheth for that blest abode,
Pressing forward to the prize.
Jesus on God's right hand standing,
Standing and for thee contending-
Stephen, lift thine eyes and see!
Jesus to thy vision given,
Christ for thee unclosing heaven;
Call on Him, He watcheth thee!

Then his spirit he commends
To that Saviour, Friend of friends,
For whose sake he deems it sweet
All that rage and pain to meet,

Sweet to die beneath those stones!
Saul the murderers' raiment keepeth,
In that crime his heart he steepeth,
As his own each blow he owns.

Lest the sin to them be laid,

By whose hands his blood was shed,
Kneeling down, for them he pray'd,

Rendering pity for the wrong.

Thus in Christ he calmly slept
Who so true to Christ had kept,
And with Christ he reigneth ever—
Ever since, and still for ever,

First-fruits of the martyr throng!

ON AFFLICTION.

FROM A HYMN ON THE MARTYRDOM OF ST LAWRENCE, BY ADAM OF ST VICTOR.

(Sicut chorda musicorum.)

As the harp-strings only render

All their treasures of sweet sound,

All their music, glad or tender,
Firmly struck and tightly bound:

So the hearts of Christians owe
Each its deepest, sweetest strain,
To the pressure firm of woe,
And the tension tight of pain.

Spices crush'd their pungence yield,
Trodden scents their sweets respire;
Would you have its strength reveal'd,
Cast the incense in the fire:

Thus the crush'd and broken frame
Oft doth sweetest graces yield;
And through suffering, toil, and shame,
From the martyr's keenest flame
Heavenly incense is distill'd!

ALLELUIA DULCE CARMEN.

Alleluia! sweetest music, voice of everlasting joy!
Alleluia is the language which the heavenly choirs employ,
As they ever sing to God, in that pure and blest abode.

Alleluia! joyful mother, true Jerusalem above!

Alleluia is the music which thy happy children love;
Exiles, tears our songs must steep; oft by Babel's streams we

weep.

Alleluia cannot ever be our joyous psalm below;

Alleluia!-sin will cross it often here with tones of woe;

Many a mournful hour we know, when our tears for sin must flow.

Therefore, 'mid our tears still praising, grant us, Blessed Trinity, Thy true Paschal Feast hereafter in the heavenly home to see, Where our song shall ever be, Alleluia unto Thee!

CHAPTER IX.

MEDIEVAL RELIGION.

WHEN Clive, and Warren Hastings, and the Indian adventurers of the last century, returned from the East Indies with princely fortunes, the popular conclusion was, that India must be a land of fabulous wealth, instead of being, as it is, a country whose rare oases of magnificence are surrounded by wide wastes of poverty, such as England never dreamed of. In gathering together all the treasures of faith and pure devotion which we can find in the hymn literature of the middle ages, we must be careful not to make a similar mistake. These gems and this gold do not come from a land of gold and gems, where they can be picked up everywhere at random; they are often dug from deep mines, and they too frequently flash across a chaos of ignorance and darkness. They shew, indeed, what true Christian life was in the middle ages, but they do not shew what mediæval religion was. They prove that "all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all ate the same spiritual meat, and all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual Rock which followed them: and that Rock was Christ." But they by

no means illustrate what the common religious food of the middle ages unhappily was. To form to ourselves a true picture of this, we may glance through the general mass of the hymns of those centuries. "Out of the heart are the issues of life," bitter or sweet; and, long before error has been stereotyped into a creed, it has echoed from the hearts of the people in hymns. We need only study the sacred poetry of the middle ages to understand why the Reformation was needed.

One painfully expressive fact meets us at the outset. Of Mone's "Collection of the Latin Hymns of the Middle Ages," in three volumes, one is filled with hymns to God and the angels; one with hymns to the blessed Virgin Mary; and one with hymns to the saints. Among the hymns to God, in themselves not sufficient to fill one of these volumes, are included invocations to the transubstantiated host, and to the material cross; and in the hymns to our Saviour are introduced, not seldom, invocations to the Virgin Mary. At the same time, it should be said that some of the more beautiful hymns here translated have been selected from Daniel's "Thesaurus" and Trench's "Latin Poetry of the Middle Ages," and are not contained in Mone's collection.

The hymns to the saints are of every variety of tone, from tender commemorations of the forgiveness and love of the Magdalene, or a heart-stirring narrative of the martyrdom and rejoicing faith of Stephen, to sentimental spiritual love-songs, or repulsive catalogues of tortures, which may perhaps have served as copy-books to the Inquisition. Of all the lives of the saints, the truest comprehension of the only title by which any fallen man can

enter heaven seems to have been preserved in that of Mary Magdalene. She is spoken of in the hymns and sequences as the forgiven sinner (the incident in Luke vii. being ascribed to her), loving much because forgiven much; fearing not the scornful crowd of Pharisees, if only she could reach Jesus; bathing with her tears the feet of Him who washed her from her sins in His own blood; receiving the assurance of absolution; and, full of undying gratitude, the first at the sepulchre, and the first to see the risen Lord,-the great example of His grace and pity. And although, even here, her love is sometimes more dwelt on than the love of Christ in pardoning her, yet enough is left to direct any heart burdened with sin to the Fountain of love and forgiveness which was opened to her. The following sentence, from one of the sequences in commemoration of her, enters deeply into the blessed meaning of that incident in the house of Simon the Pharisee. It is a concentration of many truths in one brief sentence :

Thou, who

"The sinner condemns his fellow-sinner. knowest no sin, receivest the penitent, purifiest the impure, lovest that Thou mayest make beautiful!"

But through the greater number of these rhymed narratives and invocations, little, indeed, of the light of God's love penetrates; in many of them we can trace little even of the true conception of human heroism. The glory of the martyrdom is too often made to consist rather in the tortures than in the love, and the confession, and the courage it inspired. There is a kind of revelling in the number and intensity of the torments inflicted, as if pain were the coin for which God gave heavenly honours in