rejection by his countrymen, "we hid our faces from him, he was despised, and we esteemed him not ;" his meek endurance and unmerited death, "brought as a lamb to the slaughter, taken from1 oppressive judgment, and cut off from the land of the living;" his death between the malefactors, and his sepulture in the rich man's tomb, "his grave was appointed with the wicked, but with the rich man was his tomb;" his exultation and triumph in beholding the fruits of the travail of his soul, in the final removal of the vail of sin and ignorance, in the abolition of death, when death shall be swallowed up in victory, and the Lord God, his Father, shall wipe away tears from off all faces in the day when the cry, Oh death, where is thy sting, oh hell, where thy victory, shall fill the all embracing heaven; such strains as these form the chorus, the refrain, the continually recurring "owerword," as our Scottish ballads have it, the key note, and burthen of his song.

He had, in intense possession, and in unbounded measure, the faculty with which the soul of every true poet is instinct, of pervading all he foresaw, of identifying himself with the forms and beings who rose before his vision. He himself is the herald and conductor of the Babylonian exiles across the weary desert, to the graves of their fathers, and their own future homes in the land of their hearts, -the land of the coming Messiah! And again, as the dimly apprehended John the Baptist, as if his own shade had returned from Hades, taking shape in the form and character fittest and most familiar to him, he walks the desert of Judea pealing forth the "Repent ye, repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," and waits by Jordan to inaugurate his Lord. But amid all the characters his prophetic fancy conjures from the bosom of coming ages, amid all the surgings of the future which tumultuate upon his sight, and into the midst of which he casts himself with such vehement earnestness, as spectator, actor, sufferer in them all, amid all the personalities he appropriates, and the forms in which he invests himself, the voice, the cry, the ever-recurrent note and controlling tone sounds on through all, "Prepare ye, prepare ye the way of the Lord; the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and

1 Lowth's Isaiah.

all flesh shall see it together; the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." Vision after vision swells upon his gifted sight, waxing, waning, disappearing-Samaria in ruins, Damascus in flames, Edom, Moab, a swept wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation, and Babylon overthrown,-but behind each scene, perfusing it, and as it fades and dissolves, streaming through and supplanting it, there pour upon his constant eye, the breaking glories of the advent, the weeping tempest of the passion, and the long sweeping splendors of the reign and redemption of the Messiah.

Let us be as faithful to our Christ, as Isaiah was to his, habitually recognizing Him through the actualities of the life about us, as Isaiah through the prospects of the future; like the prophet, constituting Him the master thought, the controlling force, the pervading necessity and destiny of our hearts, and we need no death to let us into heaven; heaven is ours, and God is ours, for we are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

A. G. L.

ART. XXII.

Hildebrand.

[Originally delivered as a Lecture before the "Young Men's Christian Union," in Boston.]

THE career of the man who will engage our attention, admits us to the heart of the eleventh century; for his influence was felt powerfully in Europe from the year 1040 to 1085. The proper background, therefore, for a knowledge of his life, is a conception of the state of civilization in the early part of the eleventh century, and the relations of that period in the middle ages to the centuries before. The "dark ages," as we call them, commenced with the sixth century, when Europe was completely disorganized by the settlement of the barbarians over the domain of the Roman empire. There were more than four hundred years of night. The darkness was deepest at the close of the tenth century, after the empire of Charlemagne had dissolved. Indeed humanity seemed

then in a hopeless condition. A writer of the middle ages describes that time, as an age that ought to be called "iron," from its fierceness, and "leaden," for its gross wickedness. To understand the condition of Europe, as the year 1000, of our era, dawned upon it, you must form a picture of society destitute of every feature, and seemingly of every force, that belongs to what we consider civilization, that can be thought to make life a privilege, or even tolerable. There was no such thing as education, for there was no literature, no press, no books. There was no science even for the highest classes. For many centuries it had been rare for a layman of whatever rank to know how to sign his name. It was a striking exception when an emperor could read. The Latin language, which held all the treasures of learning, had died out of common use. The ravages of pirates during the previous century had destroyed many of the libraries of the church. All books were written then on parchments, and they were so costly that only the most princely fortunes could purchase them. And most of them contained nothing more valuable than legends of Saints, or homilies, or works of Jerome or Augustine, perhaps written over the noblest treatises of Cicero or Plato. We read that a certain princess in the tenth century, the Countess of Anjou, gave two hundred sheep, a load of wheat, a load of rye, and a load of millet, with several skins of costly fur, for a copy of the sermons of a German monk.

Nothing that we generally associate with the middle ages as the glory of that period, had appeared, then, in Europe. There were no grand cathedrals, for Gothic architecture had not yet germinated. There was no scholastic philosophy, for Abelard was yet a hundred years in futurity. There was no painting, no poetry, and no promise of the Crusades. There were no methods of quick travel; few good roads from state to state, (and such as there were infested by robbers) ;-of course, therefore, there could be no great commerce; in fact there was scarcely any trade. What we understand by government had no existence. Feudal fortresses were rising as the promi nent features in every landscape, where nobles, who could not spell their names and did not know a letter of the alphabet, revelled in a brutal power, and looked out over

the dependent serfs in their miserable huts; and these barons were somehow aggregated into what was called a kingdom, or an empire. But there was no country then that was organized socially, even so well as any district of Russia is to-day; and there is no mechanic's family in this city that is not far more richly provided with what we all esteem the comforts of life, than the average noblemen of Europe and their households were at the close of the tenth century. Europe, in the earlier portions of the dark ages, was morally, to use a geological figure, in the Silurian Epoch,-every thing insular and irregular, chaotic patches of the future continent swelling out of the sea of barbarous passion, bearing only the lowest types of life.

In the middle ages, it had changed into the tertiary period, showing larger organizations, enriched with higher forms, and plainly promising the states, the culture, and the civilization of modern Europe. The eleventh century saw the transition to this latter epoch. And yet when it dawned there seemed to be no symptoms of any latent beneficent forces at work for the race. There seemed to be no reason why the wide spread superstition might not be realized-that the year 1000 would wind up human affairs on the planet, introduce the day of judgment, and inaugurate the millennium by vindictive and cleansing fire. The church from which the only possible help, it should seem, could spring, appears more deeply tainted than society itself.

We must not forget that both the doctrines and polity of the Roman Catholic Church were of slow growth. With the very commencement of the dark ages, we find the germ of a pretension sprouting in Rome, which found congenial soil for its roots in the decaying ancient civilization, and the precise nutriment it needed in the heavy air of barbarism. Century by century, while society and states dissolved, it stretched under ground its fibres, and strengthened its stalk, and shot out leaf after leaf of doctrine, discipline, and ritual-putting forth, now its canon of the mass, and, in another season, its sanction for the worship of the Virgin and of images; budding next with its forged decretals and claim of the title of "sovereign pontiff" for its bishop; then with the doctrine of transubstantiation, and soon with its law for the canonization

of saints and the system of auricular confession; letting no century slip by without some large leafy sign of its slow and secret energy, till we shall see it, when the dark ages culminate, like a huge night-blooming Cereus ripen with its "consummate flower"-the pretension to universal authority over conscience, and to supremacy over kings.

It was in the middle of the eleventh century that a vigorous attempt was made to purify the ecclesiastical spirit and to complete and confirm the ecclesiastical system of the Roman Catholic Church. That century, remarkable for so many signs promising a greater future for the world, streaked on its horizon with the grey pulsations of a dawn, is chiefly distinguished by this movement within the church. The introduction of cotton paper made from rags which it inaugurated; the commencement of the gothic style of architecture which it witnessed; the Norman conquest of England, changing the destiny of that island, which belongs to its annals; the invention of the musical scale, which is one of its trophies; the birth of the scholastic philosophy, which dignifies its records; the building in England of Westminster Hall, which is one of its monuments-none of these, nor even the cheers of the crusaders, under Godfrey of Bouillon, pouring through the battered walls of Jerusalem in the year 1099, which is its last and jubilant memorialpresents so striking a claim upon our notice and our study, as the efforts made for the cleansing of the morals, and the widening of the power, of the Catholic Church through the genius of Hildebrand.

Hildebrand was born about the year 1013, in a Tuscan village in Italy, and was the son of a carpenter. He was educated in Rome, in one of its forty monasteries,— in an institution of which his uncle was abbot. Faithful in the stern discipline of the cloisters, he zealously sought by all its helps to chastise and subdue his passions; and he felt his own pride in a monastic purity stimulated and justified by what he saw of the disorders and corruptions of Rome, and even of the church of Rome. Entering manhood, he betook himself to the monastery of Clugny in France, celebrated then as the severest of all the ascetic schools. There he labored diligently, for some years, in