Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/95

79 ILLUSTRATIONS OF TUET ORIGIN OF CY PRES. 79 Through all these wills, as through all the mediaeval testaments, sounds the keynote of salvation by church agencies at a price. Every one of these is paid for, " for the health of my soul." Nor was it confined to wills or the donations of individuals. In many of the statutes the same form obtains, and "charitable deeds to be done by their executors for the health of their souls " [thrice repeated], and that " debts remain unpaid to the great damage and perils of the souls" of the testators is the staple and burden of these enactments even as late as the reign of Henry VIII.^ This peril of the soul was no mere phrase to them ; it meant the active agency of real fiends, whose grotesque, misshapen, and frightful figures taxed the utmost inventions of art to depict; who swarmed about the death-bed, and whose audacity knew no limits, — not even the soul of the Virgin mother being exempt from their attacks ; and which only the immediate and most strenuous efforts of the guardian angel and saints could repel. Mediaeval art in sculpture, church-stall, and missal abounds in representations of these con- flicts. As was early taught by the Fathers ^ the air was full of devils; one inhaled them in the act of sneezing; was beset by them in the visions of the night, or in unfrequented wastes by day ; or might precipitate their malevolent agency by a wicked or even a thoughtless word.^ The blessed Reichelm, abbot of Schongau about the year 1270, had received the gift of being able to discern the aerial bodies of these creatures,* and often saw them as a thick dust, or as motes in a sunbeam, or as thickly falling rain. Perhaps to-day science would call them bacteria, microbes, or bacilli. At the death of the monk of 'Hemmenrode we are in- formed that fifteen thousand demons gathered together.^ In the famous poem, the " Prick of Conscience," by Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole, which enjoyed unbounded. popularity in the fourteenth century, the picture is drawn in lurid colors : — " For when the lyf sal pas fra a man, Devils sal gadir about hym than To ravissche the saul with them away To pyne of Helle if thai may Als wode lyons thSi sal than fare And rampe on hym & skoul and stare And grymly gryn on hym and blere And hydus braydes make hym to fere. Thai sal fande at hys last endyng Hym into wanhope for to bringe Thrugh thretynges that thai sal mak And thrugh the ferdnes that he sal tak." 1 Stat. Hen. VHI., ch. 4 ; i Stat. Realm, p. 285. 2 Origen, Sup. Jesu Nave, Homil. xv. 5, 6. 8 Lecky, Rationalism, i. 40, 47, 89 ; Lea, Hist. Inquisition, iii. 380. 6 lb.
 * Caesarius Heisterbach, Dial. Dist. iv., v., xi. 17 ; xii. 5.