Page:Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (tr. Jane).djvu/19

Rh new and gracious light. Happiness, so rarely known in the old days apart from battle-rage, has gained subtlety and variety. Demons may fly on the wings of the wind, the far faint clang of their pinions recalling evil dragon-flights of old; but the former supernatural charged with terror is supplemented by another supernatural, full of sweet reassurance. Men may entertain angels unawares; celestial music echoes above those homes of prayer whence ascends in strange and piercing harmony the praise of a God who, by stooping to death, has won the world for love.

The range of feeling in Bede is indeed surprising. Here, says Aubrey de Vere, we see for the first time "the affections of Christianized humanity, affections founded on divine truths and heavenly hopes, and yet in entire harmony with affections of a merely human order which lie beneath them in an equal plane." Tenderness has been called, as it were, out of the void; it heralds that literature of sentiment, growing even to our own day, so natural a product of Christianity, so unknown to Paganism except in faint foreshadowings. True, the ties which Bede describes are spiritual rather than natural; they relate rather to the cloister than to the family. Regretting this, we may yet realize that the time had not come for the full transfiguration by spiritual light of that bond between man and woman which had in the old days been passionate but rarely tender. All through the middle ages the romance of emotion obedient to law must be sought less in the world than under the control of religious rule. Spenser is perhaps the first English author in whom we catch the pure gleam of idealized domestic affections. If in Bede we see an ideal of fellowship more ascetic than our own, and rejoice that in the fulness of time the race has been trusted with a more generous conception, we may at least consider the cloister-life he shows, a training school for those softer and more disciplined emotions which were later to be transferred to the home. These new ties, unrelated to family, tribe or natural passion, carrying the fierce devotions and loyalties of the old Saga world into higher and purer regions, mark a strange enrichment of consciousness. We are