and hamlet. The Dominicans did not confine themselves to popular teaching: the more dangerous, if as yet not absolutely disloyal seats of the new learning, of inquiry, of intellectual movement, the universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford are invaded, and compelled to admit these stern apostles of unswerving orthodoxy; their zeal soon overleaped the pale of Christendom: they plunge fearlessly into the remote darkness of heathen and Mohammedan lands, from whence come back rumours, which are constantly stirring the minds of their votaries, of wonderful conversions and not less wonderful martyrdoms.

The other, St. Francis of Assisi, was endowed with that fervour of mystic devotion, which spread like an epidemic with irresistible contagion among the lower orders throughout Christendom; it was a superstition, but a superstition which had such an earnestness, warmth, tenderness, as to raise the religious feeling to an intense but gentle passion; it supplied a never-failing counter excitement to rebellious reasoning, which gladly fell asleep again on its bosom. After the death of its author and example, it raised a new object of adoration, more near, more familiar, and second only, if second, to the Redeemer himself. Jesus was supposed to have lived again in St. Francis with at least as bright a halo of miracle around him, in absolute, almost surpassing perfection.

In one important respect the founders of these new orders absolutely agreed, in their entire identification with the lowest of mankind. At first amicable, afterwards emulous, eventually hostile, they, or rather their Orders, rivalled each other in sinking below poverty into beggary. They were to live upon alms; the coarsest imaginable dress, the hardest fare, the narrowest cell, was to keep them down to the level of the humblest. Though Dominic himself was of high birth, and many of his followers of noble blood, St. Francis of decent even wealthy parentage, according to the irrepealable constitution of both orders, they were still to be the poorest of mankind, instructing or consorting in religious fellowship with the very meanest outcasts of society. Both the new Orders differed in the same manner, and greatly to the advantage of the

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hierarchical faith, from the old monkish institutions. Their primary object was not the salvation of the individual monk, but the salvation of others through him. Though, therefore, their rules within their monasteries were strictly and severely monastic, bound by the common vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, seclusion was no part of their discipline. Their business was abroad rather than at home; their dwelling was not like that of the old Benedictines or others, in the uncultivated swamps and forests of the North, on the dreary Apennine, or the exhausted soil of Italy, in order to subdue their bodies, and occupy their dangerously unoccupied time, merely as a secondary consequence to compel the desert into fertile land. Their work was among their fellow men; in the village, in the town, in the city, in the market, even in the camp. In every Dominican convent the Superior had the power to dispense even with the ordinary internal discipline, if he thought the brother might be more usefully employed in his special avocation of a Preacher. It might seem the ambition of these men, instead of cooping up a chosen few in high-walled and secure monasteries, to subdue the whole world into one vast cloister; monastic Christianity would no longer flee the world, it would subjugate it, or win it by gentle violence.

In Dominic Spain began to exercise that remarkable influence over Latin Christianity, to display that Dominic a peculiar character which culminated as it were in Spaniard. Ignatius Loyola, in Philip II., and in Torquemada, of which the code of the Inquisition was the statutary law; of which Calderon was the poet. The life of every devout. Spaniard was a perpetual crusade. By temperament and by position he was in constant adventurous warfare against the enemies of the Cross: hatred of the Jew, of the Mohammedan, was the herrban under which he served; it was the oath of his chivalry: that hatred, in all its intensity, was soon and easily extended to the heretic. Hereafter it was to comprehend the heathen Mexican, the Peruvian. St. Dominic was, as it were, a Cortez, bound by his sense of duty, urged by an inward voice, to invade older Christendom. And Dominic was a man of as profound sagacity

as of adventurous enthusiasm. He intuitively perceived, or the circumstances of his early career forced upon him, the necessities of the age, and showed him the arms in which himself and his forces must be arrayed to achieve their conquest.

Birth.

St. Dominic was born in 1170, in the village of Calaroga, between Aranda and Osma, in Old Castile. His parents were of noble name, that of Guzman, if not of noble race. Prophecies (we must not disdain legend, though manifest legend) proclaimed his birth. It was a tenet of his disciples that he was born without original sin, sanctified in his mother's womb. His mother dreamed that she bore a dog with a torch in his mouth, which set the world on fire. His votaries borrowed too the old classical fable; the bees settled on his lips foreshowing his exquisite eloquence. Even in his infancy, his severe nature, among other wonders, began to betray itself. He crept from his soft couch to lie on the hard cold ground. The first part of his education Dominic received from his uncle, a churchman at Gamiel d'Izan. At fifteen years old he was sent to the university of Palencia; he studied, chiefly theology, for ten years. He was laborious, devout, abstemious. Two stories are recorded, which show the dawn of religious strength in his character. During a famine, he sold his clothes to feed the poor: he offered in compassion to a woman who deplored the slavery of her brother to the Moors, to be sold for his redemption. He had not what may be strictly called a monastic training. The Bishop of Osma had changed his chapter into regular canons, those who lived in common, and under a rule approaching to a monastic institute. Dominic became a canon in this rigorous house: there he soon excelled the others in austerity. This was in his twenty-fifth year: he remained in Osma, not much known, for nine years longer. Diego de Azevedo had succeeded to

This point is contested. The Father Bremond wrote to confute the Bollandists, who had cast a profane doubt on the noble descent of Dominic.

The Chapter of his order was shocked by, and carefully erased from the authorised Legend of the Saint, a

passage, "Ubi semetipsum asserit licet in integritate carnis divinâ gratiâ conservatum, nondum illam imperfectionem evadere potuisse, quia magis afficiebatur juvencularum colloquiis quam affatibus vetularum.”—Apud Bolland. c. 1.

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the Bishopric of Osma. He was a prelate of great ability, and of strong religious enthusiasm. He was sent to Denmark to negotiate the marriage of Alfonso VIII. of Castile, with a princess of that kingdom. He chose the congenial Dominic as his companion. No sooner In Languehad they crossed the Pyrenees than they found doc. themselves in the midst of the Albigensian heresy; they could not close their eyes to the contempt into which the clergy had fallen, or on the prosperity of the sectarians; their very host at Toulouse was an Albigensian; Dominic is said to have converted him before the morning.

A.D. 1203.

The mission of the Bishop in Denmark was frustrated by the unexpected death of the Princess. Before he returned to Spain, Azevedo, with his companion, resolved upon a pilgrimage to Rome. The character of the Bishop of Osma appears from his proposal to Pope Innocent. He wished to abandon his tranquil bishopric, and to devote himself to the perilous life of a missionary, among the Cumans and fierce people which occupied part of Hungary, or in some other infidel country. That Dominic would have been his companion in this adventurous spiritual enterprise none can doubt. Innocent commanded the Bishop to return to his diocese: on their way the Bishop and Dominic stopped at Montpellier. There, as has been said, they encountered in all their pomp the three Legates of the Pope, Abbot Arnold, the Brother Raoul, and Peter of Castelnau. The Legates were returning discomfited, and almost desperate, from their progress in Languedoc. Then it was that Dominic uttered his bold and memorable rebuke: "It is not by the display of power and pomp, cavalcades of retainers, and richly houseled palfreys, by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes; it is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity, by seeming, it is true, but yet seeming holiness. Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility, false sanctity by real sanctity; preaching falsehood by preaching truth." From that day Dominic devoted himself to preaching the religion which he believed. Even the Legates were for a time put to shame

A.D. 1205.

by his precept and example, dismissed their splendid equipages, and set forth with bare feet; yet if with some humility of dress and demeanour, with none of language or of heart. As the preacher of orthodoxy, Dominic is said, in the pulpit, at the conference, to have argued with irresistible force: but his mission at last seems to have made no profound impression on the obstinate unbelievers. Ere long the Bishop Azevedo retired to Osma and died. Dominic remained alone.

Miracles.

But now the murder of Peter of Castelnau roused other powers and other passions. That more irresistible preacher, the sword of the Crusader, was sent forth it becomes impossible to discriminate between the successes of one and of the other. The voice of the Apostle is drowned in the din of war; even the conduct of Dominic himself, the manner in which he bore himself amidst these unevangelic allies, is clouded with doubt and uncertainty. His career is darkened too by the splendour of miracle, with which it is invested. These miracles must not be passed by: they are largely borrowed from the life of the Saviour, and those of the Saints; they sometimes sink into the ludicrous. A schedule, which he had written during one conference, of scriptural proofs, leaped out of the fire, while the discriminating flames consumed the writings of his adversaries. He exorcised the devil who possessed three noble matrons, in the shape of a great black cat with large black eyes, who at last ran up the bell-rope and disappeared. A lady of extreme beauty wished to leave her monastery, and resisted all the preacher's arguments. She blew her nose, it remained in the handkerchief. Horrorstricken, she implored the prayers of Dominic: at his intercession the nose resumed its place; the lady remained in the convent. Dominic raised the dead, frequently fed his disciples in a manner even more wonderful than the Lord in the desert. His miracles equal, if not transcend those in the Gospel. It must indeed have been a stubborn generation, to need besides these wonders the sword of Simon de Montfort.

All these and much more may be found in the lives of St. Dominic, in the Bollandists and elsewhere.