§ 114. For my own part, so far from regarding the existence of the prose translation of Boethius’ Metra as inconsistent with Alfred’s authorship of the alliterative version, I am inclined to regard the former as intended from the first to serve as the basis of the latter. I would bring into connexion with this the interesting statement of William of Malmesbury, that Asser, for Alfred’s benefit, unravelled the meaning of the De Consolatione in plainer words; ‘a labour,’ says Malmesbury, with the sniff of the superior person, ‘in those days necessary, in ours ridiculous[898].’ Zimmermann understood this as meaning a preliminary translation made by Asser. ‘Entschieden falsch,’ cries Professor Wülker[899], with the usual brusqueness of a German critic. But the criticism may be retorted on his own explanation that Asser glossed a manuscript for the king’s use. The passage clearly refers to a paraphrase of the original in simpler language, and more natural order, like that which occupies the margin of some of the Delphin Classics, an illustration which had occurred to myself before I knew that Dr. Schepss had also made use of it in his admirable essay referred to above[900]. It is an interesting fact that in the case of early High German we possess just such a paraphrase of this very work. This is how Mr. Stewart, in his excellent monograph on Boethius, describes the translation of the Consolatio made by Notker III of St. Gallen, about a century after Alfred’s time: ‘His method of translation is to give a sentence or group of words of the original, which he arranges for the sake of his pupils in as simple and straightforward a form as possible, followed by the German equivalent. This last is expanded, as the occasion seems to require, by passages of explanation and paraphrase of varying length[901].’ Except as to the ‘German equivalent,’ this illustrates very aptly what I conceive to have been Asser’s procedure. It also illustrates the way in which many of Alfred’s additions may have found their way into his translation. And it would be especially in the poetical portions of the work that such a paraphrase, giving the words of the original in a less intricate order, would be required. So that while Asser paraphrased Boethius’ poetry in prose, Alfred, by a reverse process, first translated Asser’s prose into prose, and then at a later time paraphrased his own prose version in verse. That, in the interval which elapsed between the two versions, the earlier edition should have been copied and circulated, that at a later time scribes should have prefixed to copies of the first edition the prose proem which in strictness is only applicable to the second, is easily intelligible[902]; and it is curious that to this also an almost exact parallel can be produced from the fortunes of the Consolatio in another European country. There exist in French two thirteenth-century translations of the Consolatio. To quote Mr. Stewart once more: ‘The one is in prose, a word-for-word rendering; … the other, a more scholarly performance, follows the scheme of the Latin original’; i.e. in the alternation of verse and prose. Yet to both versions the same prologue is prefixed, in which the translation which follows is in each case attributed to Jehan de Meun[903]. That Alfred intended from the first to give a verse rendering of the Metra, and that he did not see his way at once to carry out his intention, seems to me to be hinted at in a passage near the end of the book, which has very little corresponding to it in the original: ‘It is nigh unto the time when I had purposed to take other work in hand, and I have not yet done with this; … I cannot now so soon sing it, nor have I leisure therefor[904].’
Another point which, as Hartmann showed[905], tells in favour of Alfred’s authorship is the way in which in the poems references are made to the prose portions of the work.
On the whole I regard the attack on Alfred’s authorship of the Metra as having decidedly broken down[906]; and in this opinion I am glad to have the concurrence of a very competent critic in the Times of August 20, 1901. I am breaking no confidence in identifying that critic with my friend and teacher Professor Earle.
§ 115. The last undoubted work of Alfred’s that has come down to us is one which bears the title ‘Blooms,’ or, as we might say, ‘Anthology[907].’ The first two books are derived mainly from St. Augustine’s two books of Soliloquies. The first book and part of the second follow the original fairly closely, but the remainder of the second book is very free, and is mainly Alfred’s own. The third book is based to some extent on St. Augustine’s Epistle to Paulina on the Vision of God, with additions from the De Ciuitate Dei, St. Gregory’s Dialogues, the Moralia, together with reflexions of Alfred’s own[908]. The use of the De Ciuitate Dei is especially interesting, as it was the favourite book of Charles the Great[909]. It is a noteworthy proof of Alfred’s advance in literary art, that whereas in this third book his materials were not originally in dialogue form, he has very skilfully thrown them into that form in order to make them harmonise with the first two books.
The work has come down to us in a pitiable condition, in a single late and corrupt manuscript, mutilated both at the beginning and end, and with evident lacunae in other places. At the beginning part of the preface is gone; at the end I do not myself think that more is lost than part of the final colophon; the concluding words of the actual text seem to me to mark undoubtedly the close of the work. Professor Wülker indeed thought otherwise; but he was led to his conclusion partly by the wish to give greater probability to his theory which would identify this work with Alfred’s Encheiridion or Commonplace Book; a theory from which, as already stated[910], I strongly dissent, and which Wülker himself has since withdrawn[911]. Still even in its ruin the work reflects clearly the features of its author. The Preface in particular is so characteristic that, as it is comparatively little known, I give it here:—
‘I gathered me then staves, and props, and bars, and helves for each of my tools, and boughs; and for each of the works that I could work, I took the fairest trees, so far as I might carry them away. Nor did I ever bring any burden home without longing to bring home the whole wood, if that might be; for in every tree I saw something of which I had need at home. Wherefore I exhort every one who is strong and has many wains, that he direct his steps to the same wood where I cut the props. Let him there get him others, and load his wains with fair twigs, that he may weave thereof many a goodly wain, and set up many a noble house, and build many a pleasant town, and dwell therein in mirth, and ease, both winter and summer, as I could never do hitherto. But He who taught me to love that wood, He may cause me to dwell more easily, both in this transitory dwelling … while I am in the world, and also in the eternal home which He has promised us through … the holy fathers. And so I believe He will do for their merits, both make this [earthly] way better than it was ere this, or at least enlighten the eyes of my mind, that I may find the right way to the eternal home, and to the eternal country, and to the eternal rest, which is promised to us through the holy fathers. So be it.’
§ 116. It is Alfred looking back over the whole of his storm-tossed life, and realising that the calm haven is close at hand[912], and that he must leave it to others to carry on the work which he had begun. Professor Wülker, in the interest of the theory alluded to above, says that this preface refers to a larger collection than any to be found in these three books of ‘Blooms[913].’ True; most true. But the larger collection to which it refers is not this, or any other single work of his, however hypothetically enlarged; but the whole of his literary works. And just as the Preface to the Pastoral Care is in some sense a Prologue to the whole collection, so this is, in a very real sense, the Epilogue. We may not, here in Oxford, claim Alfred as our founder; but surely our hearts may be uplifted at the thought, that in all that we do here in the cause of true learning and of genuine education, we are carrying on the work which Alfred left us to do.
The book is in other ways also the most mature of Alfred’s works. It is very closely related to the Boethius both in thought and diction[914]. And just as in the Orosius we had a foretaste of the discussion on fate which holds so prominent a place in the Boethius[915], so the subject of the immortality of the soul, which is only just touched on in the Boethius[916], is here developed at length[917]. And here, as in the Boethius, Alfred’s conclusion is much more distinctly Christian than that of his original. The Soliloquies is one of Augustine’s earliest works, written at a time when a good deal of the gentile rhetorician still hung about him[918]. It must be confessed that his philosophical arguments on this subject are not very convincing, but in Alfred they are strongly reinforced by the authority of Scripture and of the fathers.
Here, too, many of the additions which Alfred makes to his original consist of those similes and parables[919] which he loved so well; the most beautiful perhaps being one in which the soul made fast to God is compared to a ship riding securely on her anchor[920].
§ 117. I have said that in the third book Alfred casts into a dialogue form materials which have not that shape in the original. The interlocutors still remain as before, Augustine and Reason. It is a quaint proof of the completeness with which Alfred lost the sense of translation in the consciousness of authorship, that in a passage where the De uidendo Deo is spoken of, the Augustine of the dialogue is made to say: ‘I have not now leisure to go through all that book[921],’ although the historical Augustine was the actual author of it.
Of thoughts characteristic of Alfred I will quote but two. The first is this: ‘No man may do aught of good unless God work with him. And yet no one should be idle and not attempt something in proportion to the powers which God gives him[922].’ The other is contained in the last sentence of the book[923]. And I think you will feel with me that we have here ‘the conclusion of the whole matter’; that anything added to this would be of the nature of an anticlimax: ‘Therefore he seems to me a very foolish man, and very wretched, who will not increase his understanding while he is in the world, and ever wish and long to reach that endless life where all shall be made clear.’
They are the last words not merely of this book; they are the last words of Alfred to us all across the chasm of a thousand years. We have seen some reason for thinking that the earliest of Alfred’s own works, the Pastoral Care, cannot be earlier than 894[924]; and as the years 894-6 were largely occupied with warfare[925], it is probable that Alfred’s literary activity falls mainly into the last four years of his reign, those four silent years for which our authorities fail us almost wholly, but in which Alfred had something of that ‘stillness’ for which he wishes in the Preface to the Pastoral Care.
One little glimpse we do get of him during his later years. William of Malmesbury, who had special materials for the life of Athelstan[926], tells us how he, a child, like Alfred himself, of singular beauty and attractiveness, was invested by his famous grandsire, who discerned his early promise, with a scarlet cloak, a jewelled belt, and a Saxon sword with golden scabbard[927]. And thus Alfred inherited the twofold blessing of the Psalmist: ‘Thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel.’ Nor was it least among Alfred’s blessings that he left a son like Edward, and a grandson like Athelstan, to carry on his work.
§ 118. It was while he was occupied with these high thoughts of Providence and immortality, that he passed away. How the call came to him to quit these shadows for the ‘life where all things are made clear’ we do not know. We only know that it came on October 26, and probably in the year 900[928]. He was only fifty-two. But even if the tradition of his constant illness be rejected, he had been through what might well have worn out even a strong man in a shorter time. Those who witnessed the extinction of so great a light might have exclaimed with Shakespeare’s tawny queen:
Florence’s noble panegyric on Alfred is well known, where he tells how there passed away ‘Alfred the king of the Anglo-Saxons, the son of the most pious king Æthelwulf, the famous, the warlike, the victorious, the careful provider for the widow, the helpless[930], the orphan and the poor; the most skilled of Saxon poets, most dear to his own nation, courteous to all, most liberal; endowed with prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance; most patient in the infirmity from which he continually suffered; the most discerning investigator in executing justice, most watchful and devout in the service of God[931].’ Even the turgid, tasteless Ethelwerd becomes simple and dignified in the face of this great event. ‘There passed from the world,’ he says, ‘the high-souled Alfred, the immovable pillar of the West Saxons; a man full of justice, learned in discourse, imbued especially with the sacred Scriptures, … whose body rests at Winchester in peace. O reader, breathe the prayer “Christ, the Redeemer, save his soul[932].”’ He must be a stern Protestant who would refuse to obey Ethelwerd’s behest.
§ 119. Some of us probably know the story of the little boy who, when asked in an examination paper a foolish question as to what Alfred, if he were alive now, would think of certain present-day problems, made the sage reply: ‘If King Alfred were alive now, he would be much too old to take any interest in politics.’ It was an instance, sublime, though unconscious, of answering a fool according to his folly. And yet we should surely be wrong if we thought that, because Alfred died a thousand years ago, his life and work have therefore no lessons for ourselves.
The question may not be of dividing the national militia into two parts, one to be at home and one out; but the problem still confronts us how to provide an army which shall both defend our shores at home, and also be adequate to the needs of the empire abroad. The question may not be whether our ships shall be built on Frisian or on Danish lines; but there are problems of naval construction on the right solution of which the safety of England may very largely depend. The knowledge of Latin is happily not extinct among us now, as it practically was in Alfred’s day; but the necessity still exists, which he felt so strongly, to mediate between the best thoughts of the past and the needs and aspirations of the present; while in education we have hardly perhaps fully realised even Alfred’s modest wish that ‘all the youth of England of free men … be set to learn … until that they are well able to read English writing[933].’
Again, few things are more striking in Alfred, than the way in which he keeps an equal hand on all branches of the national life, army, navy, church, justice, finance, education, learning. It is no doubt a harder task to co-ordinate the administration of an empire with world-wide possessions and world-wide responsibilities, than of a little state like Wessex. But we need something of this unifying guidance from above, if our government is not to fall apart into a chaos of independent, and possibly jealous and hostile departments. But above all we need Alfred’s high faith; a faith first of all, unswerving, unfaltering, in an over-ruling Providence, the guidance of a Higher Hand; but faith also in the destiny of his country and his people. Had he, like Burgred of Mercia, given up the struggle in despair, and gone as a pilgrim to Rome, no one in his own day would have thought the worse of him; and he might have won that pale halo of mediaeval saintship, which, as it was, he did not gain[934]. But England would have been lost to Christianity[935]; and Alfred had faith that it was not in the purposes of God so far to roll back the tide of progress, as to let England become once more a heathen land. Surely Alfred stands high in the muster roll of those ‘Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, … turned to flight the armies of the aliens[936].’
And we need scarcely less that force of individual character which was the secret, as we have seen, of so much of Alfred’s power. To realise this, we have only to compare him for instance with Henry II, a man who in mere intellectual capacity was possibly his superior, and whose reign conferred incalculable benefits upon England. But his aims were merely selfish, and his life impure; and so the greatness of his achievement is known to few beyond professed students of history[937].
§ 120. Of some points in which our late Queen resembled her great ancestor I had the honour of speaking before the University in another place[938]. But when we think of kings and emperors worthy to be compared with our own Alfred, the four names which perhaps most readily occur to us are Marcus Aurelius, the imperial saint of paganism, Louis IX, the royal saint of mediaevalism, Charles the Great, and our own Edward I. But the sad self-suppression of Marcus Aurelius, the melancholy refrain which seems to sigh through the golden book of his thoughts,
is as unlike Alfred’s glad and willing service as anything can be.
Charles the Great is of course one of the most towering figures in the whole of history. Alike in physical and intellectual strength he is head and shoulders above all his predecessors and successors. We have noticed several points of taste and character in which Alfred resembled him[940], and they were alike too in the large and generous activities of their many-sided natures. Charles worked no doubt on a gigantic scale, to which Alfred can make no pretence. But this very fact has given to Alfred’s work a permanence which is wanting to that of Charles. Every succeeding century has but verified more and more Alfred’s vision of a united England, and has led her on gradually to an empire of which neither Charles nor Alfred could have dreamed[941]. Every succeeding century has given the lie to Charles’s system of a united Germany and France:
But, apart from this, there are stains on Charles’s character, from which Alfred is free; the lax morality for which Walafrid Strabo in a curious passage places him in purgatory[943], the occasional outbursts of cruelty which on one occasion led him to execute 4,500 rebel Saxons on a single day[944], have no counterpart in our English hero-king.
Edward I is one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon an earthly throne; brave, and dutiful, and true. But we have only to think of his lawyerlike, almost tradesmanlike, way of suing for his pound of flesh on the letter of his bond, and then recall Alfred’s comment on the golden rule: ‘by this one law every one may know how he ought to judge another, he needs no other law book[945],’ in order to feel the difference between them.
It is only when I think of St. Louis that my heart becomes a little divided. St. Louis is, to my thinking, one of the most beautiful characters in the whole of history. His saintliness is no doubt of the mediaeval type. But this is not surprising, seeing that he lived in the thirteenth century, the central and culminating period of the Middle Ages. Dante, and Joan of Arc, and Thomas à Kempis are mediaeval too. And he went on Crusade, when, according to every utilitarian standard, he would have been better employed in governing his own kingdom. Yet I, at least, cannot love him less, because as a ‘young man’ he ‘saw visions,’ and went on the quest of the Holy Grail. And he was fortunate in his biographer. What would we not give to have, instead of Asser’s stilted and confused Latin, a memoir of Alfred in our native tongue which might rank with Joinville’s picture of his master? And yet in some ways the very saintliness of Louis became a curse to France; for it shed a consecration on an evil despotism, which finally exploded in one of the most hideous convulsions in history:
It seems a hard thing to say, but there is a very real connexion between St. Louis and the French Revolution.
Alfred on the other hand is one of the very few rulers whose work in life, and whose memory after death have been, as far as may be said of anything here below, an unmixed blessing to their peoples. Alfred’s aspiration has indeed been abundantly fulfilled: ‘My will was to live worthily as long as I lived; and after my life to leave to them that should come after my memory in good works[947].’ If I have done something in these lectures to place so great a memory in a clearer light, and to sweep away some of the false traditions by which it has been obscured, I shall regard myself as having done a real, if humble, service, not only to historical truth, but also to the national life. We need to keep our historical memories not only fresh but true. For, in the words of the great historian, with the remembrance of whom I began these lectures: ‘The healthy nation has a memory as well as aspirations involved in the consciousness of its identity; it has a past no less living than its future[948].’
Subjection to the Higher Powers
A Sermon
Preached before the University of Oxford
on Sunday, January 27, 1901
BEING THE SUNDAY AFTER THE DEATH OF OUR LATE
MOST GRACIOUS SOVEREIGN
QUEEN VICTORIA
BY THE
REV. CHARLES PLUMMER, M.A.
FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD
APPENDIX
‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.… Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.’—Rom. xiii. 1, 7.
It is impossible, I think, to read the Epistles of the New Testament with any degree of attention, and not to see how anxious the writers are that the Christianity which they preach should not be regarded as a revolutionary and explosive force, upsetting and destroying existing institutions, social and political; how concerned they are that their converts should give no offence (beyond what was involved in the fact of their religion) to the heathen neighbours among whom they lived; that they should ‘Walk in wisdom toward them that are without[949],’ and have their ‘conversation honest among the Gentiles[950]’; how careful they are to say no word which should disturb the existing relations of slaves and masters, of wives and husbands, of subjects and sovereigns; even though the sovereign, the husband, the master might be heathen, and the slave, the wife, the subject might be Christian. If there must be a breach, let it come from the heathen member of the bond. The rule for the Christian was: ‘let him not depart[951].’
And, in thus writing, the Apostles were but following out the teaching and example of our Lord Himself. When He compares the kingdom of Heaven to leaven[952], He means, I suppose, that the working of His doctrine was to be, as a rule, gradual and assimilative, not sudden and explosive.
And He Himself always refused to assume the part of a political agitator, or even of a social reformer, which His followers sometimes wished to thrust upon Him. ‘He withdrew Himself,’ when the multitudes threatened to ‘take Him by force, to make Him a king[953]’; He would not be ‘a judge or a divider’ in matters of inheritance[954]. All social and political problems He left men to work out for themselves with the powers which God has given them, under the guidance and control of God’s ordinary providence; and to apply for themselves to the solution of these problems the principles of His teaching, under the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit. And this refusal to interfere with the normal development of human society emphasises all the more, as has been remarked[955]. His uncompromising vindication of the law of marriage, as the one social institution the sanctity of which is above all human laws: ‘God made them male and female[956].’
He would not agitate against the tribute[957]; though the refusal probably cost Him the popularity which had manifested itself so noisily in the triumphal entry. And, in His trial before Pilate, He distinctly recognised the Roman provincial government of Judaea, heathen and foreign though it was, as being divinely ordered: ‘Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above[958].’
When the publicists of the middle ages, with Dante at their head, laid stress on the birth and death of Christ under the Roman Empire as giving a divine authority to that Empire, and to the mediaeval Empire which claimed to be its successor[959], they were but carrying to somewhat fanciful extremes an argument based upon undoubted facts.
And so St. Paul, in the passage which I have taken for my text, claims no less than a divine sanction for the civil power: ‘The powers that be are ordained of God.… Render therefore to all their dues.’ And the magnitude of the claim is enhanced, if we remember that this was written, not under any of the better Roman emperors; not under Trajan, whose virtues so touched the heart of the Middle Ages, that they represented his soul as transferred to Paradise through the intercession of St. Gregory, the apostle of the English[960]; not under a philosophic saint like Marcus Aurelius; but, probably, under the vain and vicious Nero.
If then such was the claim on the duty of subjects then, how much greater the claim on us, who, for more than sixty years, have lived under one of the very best of Christian sovereigns.
We can most of us remember the kind of thought and speech which was prevalent not so many years ago. It was a common impression then that the part to be played by the institution of Royalty in the future history of the world was a very slight one. The growth of popular power, the spread of education, and other causes, would reduce it to be nothing more than the veil, and a very transparent veil, of a Democracy.
The history of the last quarter of a century has signally falsified this forecast; and the present state of Europe gives it an emphatic contradiction. At the present moment the question of war or peace, that is for thousands, if not millions, the question of life or death, hangs upon the fiat of some four or five men.
Nor is the view of the insignificance of Royalty borne out by the history of England as a whole.
The story of English Royalty reaches back some fourteen hundred years. In 519, according to the traditional account, Certic and Cynric assumed the kingship of the West Saxons; and the reflexion of the compiler of the Saxon Chronicle, writing probably under Alfred, that ‘the royal house of the West Saxons has ruled ever since that day,’ has, with the exception of the Norman period, remained almost literally true down to the present time. For it was Wessex which grew into England; and the first idea of union, loosely and imperfectly realised under Egbert, was gradually wrought out in many years of suffering. Alfred saved England from the Danes, though at a tremendous sacrifice, and holds in real history the place which romance assigns to Arthur; a Christian king,
who rolls back the tide of heathen conquest from his native land. We call him, and we call him rightly, ‘Alfred the Great.’ But in days nearer his own he was known as ‘England’s Darling.’ Will not the historian of the future see a certain sad appropriateness in the fact that the Queen should have died in the year which is to celebrate the millenary of the death of this, the greatest of her ancestors, the one whom she so much resembled in her unswerving loyalty to duty, her constant labour for the good of her people, her unfaltering allegiance to truth? ‘The most thoughtful provider for the widow, the defenceless, the orphan, and the poor, … most beloved by his people,’ says Florence of Alfred. Asser calls him ‘Alfred the truth-teller’; and we all remember how the great tribune of the people, as he was sometimes called, declared that the Queen was the most truthful person he had ever known.
So too after the fierce suffering of the Norman Conquest, it was Henry II who knit the framework of the country together by an administrative system, under the forms of which we, to a large extent, still live; while Edward I, taking up the idea, which Simon de Montfort seemed to have lighted upon almost by accident, made popular representation the permanent basis of our constitution, on the express ground that ‘what touches all, should be approved by all.’
Once more, in the religious crisis of the sixteenth century, Henry VIII and Elizabeth, whatever their shortcomings, did much to impress upon the English Church that sane and sober character of a via media, which, in spite of extremists on either side, it has kept ever since.
We do not, at this stage of our national history, expect services quite of this kind from the Crown. And yet the services which it has rendered during the late reign have been simply immense. To take only two of the most obvious; two, on which the late Mr. Bagehot was fond of dwelling:—(1) It has been the symbol and sign of our unity, not only as a nation, but as an empire. In every quarter of the globe, millions upon millions of her subjects, who knew little or nothing of the nature of Parliaments, of the theory of constitutional government, of the responsibility of ministers, of the rise and fall of parties, looked up to the Queen as the bond of union between them, the mother and head of a vast family dispersed throughout the whole world; and this feeling had been deepened and strengthened to an extraordinary degree by the events of the last fifteen months.
(2) And closely connected with this is the second point. The experience of more than three-and-sixty years has taught us to look up to the Crown as the head of our home and family life. This has not always, indeed has not often been the case, in English, or in any other history. The feeling in our own case has owed something to the homely virtues of King George III, but almost everything to the unfailing love and sympathy of the Queen. In joy and sorrow, the humblest of her subjects might feel that they had a share in her sympathy and care. And this sympathy was not of that easy kind which stoops from painless heights to look upon the woes of others, but had been won through depths of suffering and sorrow; and the comfort which she gave to others was, in the Apostle’s words, ‘the comfort wherewith’ she herself had been ‘comforted of God[961].’
Perhaps it is these two elements which come out most strongly in the universal grief called forth by the heavy blow which has fallen upon us. We have lost our mother, the head of our vast family; and we go forth, like orphans in the night, to meet the unknown trials of a new century, without the guidance of that wisely moderating hand, without the sympathy of that feeling heart, to which we had learned to turn with a habit which had become an instinct.
‘Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; … fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.’ May we not add, what was hardly possible in the then circumstances of the Roman world, ‘love to whom love’?
‘I exhort therefore,’ says the Apostle in another place, ‘that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty[962].’ Surely we have need, at the present time, to obey this exhortation. ‘Supplications, prayers, intercessions,’ shall we not offer these for our new ruler and all his subjects? One of the earliest Christian prayers which has come down to us is a prayer for rulers in the Epistle of St. Clement of Rome[963]:—‘Do Thou, Lord, direct their counsel, according to that which is good and well-pleasing in Thy sight; that, administering in peace and gentleness, with godliness, the power which Thou hast given them, they may obtain Thy favour.’ Eighteen centuries have not made that prayer obsolete, or unnecessary. If there is much that is hopeful and encouraging in the opening of the new era, there is also not a little to cause anxiety even to the most buoyant; and problems have to be faced, which may affect not merely the well-being, but the very existence of our Church and Empire.
‘And giving of thanks.’ Shall we not render that too? Shall we not thank God that for more than three-and-sixty years He gave us such a Queen?
I dare say many of us read with absorbing interest those extracts, covering the past century, which the Times reprinted from its own columns at the end of the year. But, among all those extracts, there was nothing, I think, more interesting than to read the proclamation issued by the Queen at her accession, three-and-sixty years before, and to note how exactly her hopes and promises were fulfilled. It is one of the sternest tests which can be applied to a life of any length. To most of us, if confronted in middle or declining years with the hopes and resolutions of our youth, would they not sound more like sarcasms than like prophecies?
Lastly, let us remember, that every great life, and every great example which is lived before us, brings with it a corresponding weight of obligation and responsibility. Let us pray with St. Ignatius that it may not turn to a witness against ourselves: εὔχομαι ἵνα μὴ εἰς μαρτύριον αὐτὸ κτήσωνται[964].
ADDENDA
Page 19. If the view taken in the text is correct, we might borrow a phrase from the Saxon Chronicle, and say that Asser was bishop at Exeter, rather than bishop of Exeter. See Chron. 897 and note.
Page 28. The medical friend who is cited on p. 21 has also given me his opinion with reference to the passage in Asser describing the mysterious disease with which Alfred was said to have been attacked during his marriage festivities. He thinks the malady indicated was probably stone in the bladder; and that it possibly was connected with the ‘ficus’ from which Alfred is said to have suffered. The latter was either piles or prolapsus of the rectum, conditions often caused in the young by the straining induced sympathetically by the presence of a stone in the bladder. This makes the medical aspect of the case more intelligible. It does not, however, affect the literary and historical inconsistencies of the account which I have pointed out in the text.
Page 52. Opponents of the genuineness of Asser endeavour to meet some of the arguments advanced in the text, by saying that the forger made use of genuine documents. This does not touch the argument from the unity of style and diction. Waiving this, the difference between us is reduced to the question: Is Asser a genuine work which has been largely interpolated? or is it a spurious work embodying many genuine elements? The former seems to me more probable. But thus stated, the question rather resembles the famous problem in the Oxford Spectator, whether a certain College ribbon was a blue ribbon with two white stripes, or a white ribbon with three blue stripes. And there I am content to leave the matter.