1329, after Eckart's death. Groote visited Ruyscbroek in the Green Valley for conference about the Christian life, and received from him such benefit that he never ceased to cherish a high regard for his memory. We find him in later years, after Ruysebroek's death, exhorting the monks of Green Valley to defend their prior's memory from the charge of heresy. Ruysebroek's influence upon Groote was purely beneficial. Although the more learned man of the two, Groote had no disposition to follow the Brabanter into the regions of theological speculation, in which he seemed at times to lose himself. His own experience had given him a horror of all speculation that did not bear immediate fruit in the amendment of life. He took what he found of useful and instructive in Ruysebroek's writings, and passed by the rest. What he learned was needed to impart a less gloomy and legal tone to his own thinking. Ruysebroek, like the other great mystics of his age, aimed to attain for themselves and to guide others into what they called the friendship of God, a state in which the soul welcomes gladly whatever God chooses to send it, and has cast behind it all fear of hell and its punishments. What Groote heard on the subject from Ruysebroek startled him at first. He thought, and told Ruysebroek, that the fear of hell was a motive to holy living, which every one needed; but the Brabanter replied that he had no longer any fear of what God might chose to send him, be it life or death. It was not Ruysebroek, but the monks of the monastery where he had taken refuge, that called Groote away from spiritual exercises to active service for others. They discovered his gifts as a preacher and exhorted him to put it to use. From the responsibilities of the priesthood he shrank as too great for his weakness; but an old custom sanctioned the preaching of deacons in the archdiocese of Utrecht, to which Deventer belongs; and the Synod of Tournay had enacted that every curate who could not himself preach should provide his congregation with a preacher at least twice a month. There was then an opening for Groote, and, hav Divine inspiration. He objects to its author's statement that when the soul reaches the fulness of contemplation, the third and highest stage in the spiritual life, it not only beholds God through the brightness of His divine being, but is itself transformed into that brightness, putting off the form of creaturely existence. One of Ruysebroek's immediate disciples, Jan van Schönhoven, defended his master. ing received deacon's orders in 1379, he went forth as a preacher to his countrymen in 1381. Like Richard Rolle of Hampoole [ob1349], in the North of England, and Berthold of Regensburg [ob. 1272], in Southern Germany, he was a mighty preacher of repentance, whose words found access to the consciences of priests and laymen. His sermons lasted three hours, and he often preached twice a day. Through all the cities and towns of Holland and Guilderland, he passed like a second John the Baptist, speaking at first in Latin, but afterwards abandoning that language for his native Low Dutch.* His plain speaking won him fast friends and made him bitter enemies. The former perpetuated his influence, and the latter soon closed his mouth as a preacher. The archbishop, in 1383, was induced to withdraw from deacons the right to preach, and no intercession could induce him to give Groote even a special license which would allow him to exercise his gift where the curate of the parish gave permission. An appeal was taken to the Pope, but before an answer came Groote had died (in 1384). sense. His preaching had already, in two short years, produced effects which his enemies could not touch. It had gathered around him a body of devout men, who looked up to him as their spiritual guide. This term "devout" (devotus) came to be used to designate those who had come under Groote's influence, and the movement itself was called "the modern devotion" (moderna devotio), as it often happens in religious history that common words are given a special The devoti were mostly laymen, although a few were priests; and they grew naturally into an informal association, with Groote at their head. The most notable were his friend Jan Brinckenrick, who had accompanied him on his journeys as a preacher, Floris Radewynzoon, whom he induced to become a priest, and Jan Voss. Floris exhorted him to found a community whose members should not assume irrevocable vows, but should have all things in common, and should accept the rule of a common master. Groote objected at first that the mendicant monks would wage bitter war upon such an irregular community, and finally consented only upon the condition that there should be formed in close connection with the new brotherhood, a branch of some regular monastic order. * The picture Charles Reade gives in The Cloister and Hearth of the success of his hero Gerard, as a preacher in these same cities, seems to be borrowed from the life of Groote. The order selected was that of the Canons Regular, living under the rule of St. Augustine, and the name given to the free community was that of "Brethren of the Common Life" (Fratres Communis Vita). Its members were forbidden to ask alms except in cases of the direst necessity, and were required to live by the labor of their hands. The great experiment made by Francis of Assizi was thus declared a failure by a man whom Francis would have recognized as a mind kindred to his own. Groote reaffirmed the wiser maxim of Benedict of Nursia, that honest toil is better for the human soul than the idle beggary by which Francis vainly hoped to insure the poverty and spirituality of his order. The manufacture of books was the industry which Groote commended as best, especially for the clerical members of the new brotherhood. To this he was moved partly by its suitableness to the dignity of the priesthood, but partly also by a motive which, perhaps, he hardly owned to himself. He was a passionate lover of books, and he stamped that love upon his order. We have seen the part his books of magic played in his conversion. His spiritual exercises in the years following were interrupted by a visit to Paris, "in his penitential garb, during which he bought many books with which our library is enriched, and paid for them gold enough to fill a wine-cup, as I myself heard him say." (Rud. de Dier.) When he went out preaching, he could not bear to be separated from them. The storm by which Satan tried to prevent his passage by water from Utrecht to Holland was so great that he was hardly able to save from the water his books which he had with him in a cask." Before his death he associated with himself, in the care of his books, of which he had no small store, Master Floris and Jan van Gronde, on condition that there should always be three trustees to keep them. . . And it was his desire, as I have heard from Jan Brinckenrick, that they should be generous in giving others leave to use them." The library grew because his associates and successors followed his example. Jan van Gronde "having books of no small value, gave them over to the common stock. Master Floris had few books, but what he had he gave over to the stock; so that those brethren had all things in common, even to their books." Groote's own taste, for what was best in the literature he knew, fastened upon Augustine and Bernard as the best of the ecclesiastical authors. He knew Bernard's works so intimately that he was able to distinguish between his genuine writings and the spurious productions which in that hardly critical age passed under his name. When dying of the plague, in 1384, he remembered that it was Bernard's day, and said to his friends, "the Lord is calling for me. Augustine and Bernard are knocking at the door." Floris, his successor, had neither his learning nor his power as a preacher. But he surpassed Groote in tact, in mildness, and in many practical gifts. He carried out faithfully Groote's idea as to the character of the new Brotherhood, and the establishment of religious houses of the Augustinian Canons in connection with it. The first was opened at Windesheim, half way between Deventer and Zwolle, in 1387, and one of the little group of new canons was John Hamerken, from Kempen, a little town in the neighborhood of Köln. This was followed by others, wherever the Brotherhood was established, while Windesheim became so famous that it was accepted, not only in the Low Countries, but in the adjacent parts of Germany and France, as the chief monastery of the order, and had at one time forty-eight others affiliated with it. Meanwhile the Brotherhood continued its career of multiplying good books and instructing the common people. Its members worked in the fields and the workshops. They held, especially on Sunday evenings, "collations" (French, conferences), in which the common people were taught in their own "Dietsch" language. They took great interest in the young scholars, who came up by hundreds to the towns to attend the public school, which had been recently established. They found proper lodging-places for them; they often fed them at their own tables; they paid the tuition fees of the poorer class. But it is a common mistake to suppose that they started many schools of their own, or regarded the education of the young an especial work of their Brotherhood. Still grosser is the mistake which represents them as especial promoters of "the new learning," afterward represented in the Low Countries by Rudolph Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus. Every page of their writings shows how indifferent they were to the matter which the Humanists of the Renaissance regarded as of primary importance. It was their care for poor scholars that first brought the author of the Imitation under their influence. Thomas Hamerken was the brother of the John we have mentioned. His native place is the little town of Kempen, in Westphalia, then an appanage of the Archbishop of Köln, and there he had first seen the light in the year 1380, or, as some say, in the year 1379. In 1395 he came to attend the school at Deventer, and by the advice of his brother, whom he had visited at Windesheim, he waited upon Master Floris. Floris kept him for a little while in the Brother-House, got him ready for the school, and supplied him with books which he judged the lad would need. He then found him free lodging with a respectable and "devout" matron, who was fond of showing kindness to such students as he. But the Brother-House was still open to his visits, and he received profound impressions from what he saw of the Brethren's lives and heard of their teaching. He found them men who lived in the world, but were not of it, overflowing with love to God and to men. He saw them diligent in business in their manufacture of books, and fervent in spirit in all that concerned their religious duties. The young man's heart was filled with a desire for a life which was presented to him in such an attractive form, and he was open to Master Floris's exhortation to join one of the religious houses which had been established in connection with the Brotherhood. He chose the monastery of Mount St. Agnes, where he became a novice in the year 1400, the year of Master Floris's death. In 1406 he took the vows of a Canon Regular. It was in 1414 that he gave the world the little book which has made his name so notable as the author of the De Imitatione Christi. The later life of Thomas à Kempis is singularly uneventful. He lived through a period of great confusion in Church and State, in many of whose changes he must have felt a lively interest. But you will search his works in vain for traces of that interest. He saw the beginning and the end of the Great Schism, the sessions. of the three great reforming councils, the end of the Wyckliffite or Lollard movement, the rise and fall of the Hussites, the invention of printing, the fall of Constantinople, the rise and power of the Italian Renaissance. But all these events have not employed one line of his pen. None of them reached him personally, except when Gerson and d'Ailly defended the Brethren of the Common Life, in 1418, before the Council of Constance, against their Dominican assailant, and again, in 1429, when the loyalty of the Windesheim and Mount St. Agnes monks to the Papal authority forced them to leave their houses and take refuge in Friesland, in the time of the Utrecht schism. It is this event which breaks in upon the |