The Sorbonne assembled, and Beda, holding the heretical poem in his hand, read the most flagrant passages to his colleagues. 'Listen,' he said, and the attentive doctors kept their eyes fixed on the syndic. Beda read:
Jesus, true fisher thou of souls!
My only Saviour, only advocate!
Since thou God's righteousness hast satisfied,
I fear no more to fail at heaven's gate.
My Spouse bears all my sins, though great they be,
And all his merits places upon me....
Come, Saviour, make thy mercies known....
Jesus for me was crucified:
For me the bitter death endured,
For me eternal life procured. 401
It has been said that Margaret's poems are theology in rhyme. It is true that her verses are not so elegant as those of our age, and that their spirit is more theological than the poetry of our days; but the theology is not that of the schools, it is that of the heart. What specially irritated the Sorbonne was the peace and assurance that Margaret enjoyed, precious privilege of a redeemed soul, which scholasticism had condemned beforehand. The queen, leaning upon the Saviour, seemed to have no more fear. 'Listen again,' said Beda:
Satan, where is now thy tower?
Sin, all withered is thy power.
Pain or death no more I fear,
While Jesus Christ is with me here.
Of myself no strength have I,
But God, my shield, is ever nigh. 402
=ASSURANCE OF SALVATION.=
Thus, argued the doctors of the Sorbonne, the queen imagines that sins are remitted gratuitously, no satisfaction being required of sinners. 'Observe the foolish assurance,' said the syndic, 'into which the new doctrine may bring souls. This is what we find in the Mirror :
'Not hell's black depth, nor heaven's vast height,
Nor sin with which I wage continual fight,
Me for a single day can move,
O holy Father, from thy perfect love.' 403
This simple faith, supported by the promises of God, scandalised the doctors. 'No one,' said they, 'can promise himself anything certain as regards his own salvation, unless he has learnt it by a special revelation from God.' The council of Trent made this declaration an article of faith. 'The queen,' continued her accuser, 'speaks as if she longed for nothing but heaven:
'How beautiful is death,
That brings to weary me the hour of rest!
Oh! hear my cry and hasten, Lord, to me,
And put an end to all my misery.' 404
Some one having observed that the Queen of Navarre had not appended her name to the title of her work, her accuser replied: 'Wait until the end, the signature is there;' and then he read the last line:
The good that he has done to me, his Margaret. 405
In a short time insinuations and accusations against the sister of the king were heard from every pulpit. Here a monk made his hearers shudder as he described Margaret's wicked heresies ; and there another tried to make them laugh. 'These things,' says Theodore Beza, 'irritated the Sorbonne extremely, and especially Beda and those of his temper, and they could not refrain from attacking the Queen of Navarre in their sermons.' 406
Other circumstances excited the anger of the monks. Margaret did not love them. Monachism was one of the institutions which the reformers wished to see disappear from the Church, and the Queen of Navarre, in spite of her conservative character, did not desire to preserve it. The numerous abuses of the monastic life, the constraint with which its vows were often accompanied, the mechanical vocation of most of the conventuals, their idleness and sensuality, their practice of mendicancy as a trade, their extravagant pretensions to merit eternal life and to atone for their sins by their discipline, their proud conviction that they had attained a piety which went beyond the exigencies of the divine law, the discredit which the monastic institution cast upon the institutions appointed by God, on marriage, family, labour, and the state politic; finally, the bodily observances and macerations set above that living charity which proceeds from faith, and above the fruits of the Spirit of God in man:—all these things were, according to the reformers, entirely opposed to the doctrine of the Gospel.
=THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE'S TALES.=
Margaret went further still. She had not spared the monks, but on the contrary had scourged them soundly. If Erasmus and Ulrich von Hutten had overwhelmed them with ridicule, the Queen of Navarre had in several tales depicted their grovelling character and dissolute life. She had, indeed, as yet communicated these stories to few besides her brother and mother, and never intended publishing them; but, some copies having been circulated among the attendants of the court, a few leaves had fallen into the hands of the monks, and this was the cause of their anger. Margaret, like many others of her time, was mistaken—such at least is our opinion—as to the manner in which the vices of the monasteries ought to be combated. Following the example of Menot, the most famous preacher of the middle ages, she had described faithfully, unaffectedly, and sometimes too broadly the avarice, debauchery, pride, and other vices of the convents. She had done better than this, however; to the silly nonsense and indecent discourses of the grey friars she had opposed the simple, severe, and spiritual teaching of the Gospel. 'They are moral tales,' says a contemporary author (who is not over favourable to Margaret); 'they often degenerate into real sermons, so that each story is in truth only the preface to a homily .' 407After a narrative in illustration of human frailty, Margaret begins her application thus: 'Know that the first step man takes in confidence in himself, by so much he diverges from confidence in God.' After describing a false miracle by which an incestuous monk had tried to deceive Margaret's father, the Count of Angoulême, she added: 'His faith was proof against these external miracles. We have but one Saviour who, by saying consummatum est (it is finished), showed that we must wait for no successor to work out our salvation.' No one but the monks thought, in the sixteenth century, of being scandalised by these tales. There was then a freedom of language which is impossible in our times; and everybody felt that if the queen faithfully painted the disorders of the monks and other classes of society, she was equally faithful in describing the strict morality of her own principles and the living purity of her faith. It was her daughter, the austere Jeanne d'Albret, who published the first correct edition of these Novels ; and certainly she would not have done so, if such a publication had been likely to injure her mother's memory. 408But times have changed; the book, harmless then, is so no longer; in our days the tales will be read and the sermons passed over: the youth of our generation would only derive harm from them. We acquit the author as regards her intentions, but we condemn her work. And (apologising to the friends of letters who will accuse us of barbarism) if we had to decide on the fate of this book, we would willingly see it experience a fate similar to that which is spoken of in the Bible, where we are told that many Corinthians brought their books together and burned them . 409
=THE MIRROR SEIZED BY THE SORBONNE.=
Let us return to the Mirror , in which the pious soul of Margaret is reflected.
The Faculty decided that the first thing to be done was to search every bookseller's shop in the city and seize all the copies found there. 410Here Beda disappeared: he no longer played the principal part. It is probable that the proceedings against him had already begun; but this persecution, by removing its leader, helped to increase the anger of the Romish party, and consequently the efforts of the Sorbonne to ruin the Queen of Navarre. As Beda was absent, the priest Le Clerq was ordered to make the search. Accompanied by the university beadles, he went to every bookseller's shop, seized the Mirror of the Sinful Soul , wherever the tradesman had not put it out of sight, and returned to the Sorbonne laden with his spoils. After this the Faculty deliberated upon the measures to be taken against the author.
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