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Monks that Call Themselves Religious
And next these come those that commonly call themselves the
religious and monks, most false in both titles, when both a great part
of them are farthest from religion, and no men swarm thicker in all
places than themselves. Nor can I think of anything that could be more
miserable did not I support them so many several ways. For whereas all
men detest them to the height, that they take it for ill luck to
meet one of them by chance, yet such is their happiness that they
flatter themselves. For first, they reckon it one of the main points
of piety if they are so illiterate that they can't so much as read.
And then when they run over their offices, which they carry about
them, rather by tale than understanding, they believe the gods more
than ordinarily pleased with their braying. And some there are among
them that put off their trumperies at vast rates, yet rove up and down
for the bread they eat; nay, there is scarce an inn, wagon, or ship
into which they intrude not, to the no small damage of the
commonwealth of beggars. And yet, like pleasant fellows, with all this
vileness, ignorance, rudeness, and impudence, they represent to us,
for so they call it, the lives of the apostles.
Yet what is more pleasant than that they do all things by rule and,
as it were, a kind of mathematics, the least swerving from which
were a crime beyond forgiveness- as how many knots their shoes must be
tied with, of what color everything is, what distinction of habits, of
what stuff made, how many straws broad their girdles and of what
fashion, how many bushels wide their cowl, how many fingers long their
hair, and how many hours sleep; which exact equality, how
disproportionate it is, among such variety of bodies and tempers,
who is there that does not perceive it? And yet by reason of these
fooleries they not only set slight by others, but each different
order, men otherwise professing apostolical charity, despise one
another, and for the different wearing of a habit, or that 'tis of
darker color, they put all things in combustion. And among these there
are some so rigidly religious that their upper garment is haircloth,
their inner of the finest linen; and, on the contrary, others wear
linen without and hair next their skins. Others, again, are as
afraid to touch money as poison, and yet neither forbear wine nor
dallying with women. In a word, 'tis their only care that none of them
come near one another in their manner of living, nor do they
endeavor how they may be like Christ, but how they may differ among
themselves.
And another great happiness they conceive in their names, while
they call themselves Cordiliers, and among these too, some are
Colletes, some Minors, some Minims, some Crossed; and again, these are
Benedictines, those Bernardines; these Carmelites, those Augustines;
these Williamites, and those Jacobines; as if it were not worth the
while to be called Christians. And of these, a great part build so
much on their ceremonies and petty traditions of men that they think
one heaven is too poor a reward for so great merit, little dreaming
that the time will come when Christ, not regarding any of these
trifles, will call them to account for His precept of charity.
One shall show you a large trough full of all kinds of fish;
another tumble you out so many bushels of prayers; another reckon
you so many myriads of fasts, and fetch them up again in one dinner by
eating till he cracks again; another produces more bundles of
ceremonies than seven of the stoutest ships would be able to carry;
another brags he has not touched a penny these three score years
without two pair of gloves at least upon his hands; another wears a
cowl so lined with grease that the poorest tarpaulin would not stoop
to take it up; another will tell you he has lived these fifty-five
years like a sponge, continually fastened to the same place; another
is grown hoarse with his daily chanting; another has contracted a
lethargy by his solitary living; and another the palsy in his tongue
for want of speaking.
But Christ, interrupting them in their vanities, which otherwise
were endless, will ask them, "Whence this new kind of Jews? I
acknowledge one commandment, which is truly mine, of which alone I
hear nothing. I promised, 'tis true, my Father's heritage, and that
without parables, not to cowls, odd prayers, and fastings, but to
the duties of faith and charity. Nor can I acknowledge them that least
acknowledge their faults. They that would seem holier than myself, let
them if they like possess to themselves those three hundred sixty-five
heavens of Basilides the heretic's invention, or command them whose
foolish traditions they have preferred before my precepts to erect
them a new one." When they shall hear these things and see common
ordinary persons preferred before them, with what countenance, think
you, will they behold one another? In the meantime they are happy in
their hopes, and for this also they are beholding to me.
And yet these kind of people, though they are as it were of another
commonwealth, no man dares despise, especially those begging friars,
because they are privy to all men's secrets by means of confessions,
as they call them. Which yet were no less than treason to discover,
unless, being got drunk, they have a mind to be pleasant, and then all
comes out, that is to say by hints and conjectures but suppressing the
names. But if anyone should anger these wasps, they'll sufficiently
revenge themselves in their public sermons and so point out their
enemy by circumlocutions that there's no one but understands whom 'tis
they mean, unless he understand nothing at all; nor will they give
over their barking till you throw the dogs a bone.
And now tell me, what juggler or mountebank you had rather behold
than hear them rhetorically play the fool in their preachments, and
yet most sweetly imitating what rhetoricians have written touching the
art of good speaking? Good God! what several postures they have! How
they shift their voice, sing out their words, skip up and down, and
are ever and anon making such new faces that they confound all
things with noise! And yet this knack of theirs is no less a mystery
that runs in succession from one brother to another; which though it
be not lawful for me to know, however I'll venture at it by
conjectures. And first they invoke whatever they have scraped from the
poets; and in the next place, if they are to discourse of charity,
they take their rise from the river Nilus; or to set out the mystery
of the cross, from Bel and the Dragon; or to dispute of fasting,
from the twelve signs of the zodiac; or, being to preach of faith,
ground their matter on the square of a circle.
I have heard myself one, and he no small fool- I was mistaken, I
would have said scholar- that being in a famous assembly explaining
the mystery of the Trinity, that he might both let them see his
learning was not ordinary and withal satisfy some theological ears, he
took a new way, to wit from the letters, syllables, and the word
itself; then from the coherence of the nominative case and the verb,
and the adjective and substantive: and while most of the audience
wondered, and some of them muttered that of Horace, "What does all
this trumpery drive at?" at last he brought the matter to this head,
that he would demonstrate that the mystery of the Trinity was so
clearly expressed in the very rudiments of grammar that the best
mathematician could not chalk it out more plainly. And in this
discourse did this most superlative theologian beat his brains for
eight whole months that at this hour he's as blind as a beetle, to
wit, all the sight of his eyes being run into the sharpness of his
wit. But for all that he thinks nothing of his blindness, rather
taking the same for too cheap a price of such a glory as he won
thereby.
And besides him I met with another, some eighty years of age, and
such a divine that you'd have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him.
He, being upon the point of unfolding the mystery of the name Jesus,
did with wonderful subtlety demonstrate that there lay hidden in those
letters whatever could be said of him; for that it was only declined
with three cases, he said, it was a manifest token of the Divine
Trinity; and then, that the first ended in S, the second in M, the
third in U, there was in it an ineffable mystery, to wit, those
three letters declaring to us that he was the beginning, middle, and
end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more
abstruse; for he so mathematically split the word Jesus into two equal
parts that he left the middle letter by itself, and then told us
that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the
Scotch tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence
he gathered that it was Jesus that took away the sins of the world. At
which new exposition the audience were so wonderfully intent and
struck with admiration, especially the theologians, that there
wanted little but that Niobe-like they had been turned to stones;
whereas the like has almost happened to me, as befell the Priapus in
Horace.
And not without cause, for when were the Grecian Demosthenes or
Roman Cicero ever guilty of the like? They thought that introduction
faulty that was wide of the matter, as if it were not the way of
carters and swineherds that have no more wit than God sent them. But
these learned men think their preamble, for so they call it, then
chiefly rhetorical when it has least coherence with the rest of the
argument, that the admiring audience may in the meanwhile whisper to
themselves, "What will he be at now?" In the third place, they bring
in instead of narration some texts of Scripture, but handle them
cursorily, and as it were by the bye, when yet it is the only thing
they should have insisted on. And fourthly, as it were changing a part
in the play, they bolt out with some question in divinity, and many
times relating neither to earth nor heaven, and this they look upon as
a piece of art.
Here they erect their theological crests and beat into the people's
ears those magnificent titles of illustrious doctors, subtle
doctors, most subtle doctors, seraphic doctors, cherubin doctors, holy
doctors, unquestionable doctors, and the like; and then throw abroad
among the ignorant people syllogisms, majors, minors, conclusions,
corollaries, suppositions, and those so weak and foolish that they are
below pedantry. There remains yet the fifth act in which one would
think they should show their mastery. And here they bring in some
foolish insipid fable out of Speculum Historiale or Gesta Romanorum
and expound it allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically. And
after this manner do they and their chimera, and such as Horace
despaired of compassing when he wrote "Humano capiti," etc.
But they have heard from somebody, I know not whom, that the
beginning of a speech should be sober and grave and least given to
noise. And therefore they begin theirs at that rate they can scarce
hear themselves, as if it were not matter whether anyone understood
them. They have learned somewhere that to move the affections a louder
voice is requisite. Whereupon they that otherwise would speak like a
mouse in a cheese start out of a sudden into a downright fury, even
there too, where there's the least need of it. A man would swear
they were past the power of hellebore, so little do they consider
where 'tis they run out.
Again, because they have heard that as a speech comes up to
something, a man should press it more earnestly, they, however they
begin, use a strange contention of voice in every part, though the
matter itself be never so flat, and end in that manner as if they'd
run themselves out of breath. Lastly, they have learned that among
rhetoricians there is some mention of laughter, and therefore they
study to prick in a jest here and there; but, O Venus! so void of
wit and so little to the purpose that it may be truly called an
ass's playing on the harp. And sometimes also they use somewhat of a
sting, but so nevertheless that they rather tickle than would; nor
do they ever more truly flatter than when they would seem to use the
greatest freedom of speech.
Lastly, such is their whole action that a man would swear they
had learned it from our common tumblers, though yet they come short of
them in every respect. However, they are both so like that no man will
dispute but that either these learned their rhetoric from them, or
they theirs from these. And yet they light on some that, when they
hear them, conceive they hear very Demosthenes and Ciceroes: of
which sort chiefly are our merchants and women, whose ears only they
endeavor to please, because as to the first, if they stroke them
handsomely, some part or other of their ill-gotten goods is wont to
fall to their share. And the women, though for many other things
they favor this order, this is not the least, that they commit to
their breasts whatever discontents they have against their husbands.
And now, I conceive me, you see how much this kind of people are
beholding to me, that with their petty ceremonies, ridiculous trifles,
and noise exercise a kind of tyranny among mankind, believing
themselves very Pauls and Anthonies.
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