Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/200

174 This extreme religious sensibility shows itself by copious weeping. Devotion, says Denis the Carthusian, is a sort of tenderness of heart, which easily moves to tears of piety. We should pray God to have “the daily baptism of tears.” They are the wings of prayer and, according to Saint Bernard, the wine of angels. We should give ourselves up to the grace of meritorious tears, get ready for them and let ourselves be carried away by them all the year round, but especially during Lent, so that we may say with the psalmist: Fuerunt mihi lacrimae meae panis die ac nocte. Sometimes they come so easily, that we pray sobbing and groaning. If they do not come, we should not force them; we should then content ourselves with the tears of the heart. In the presence of others we should avoid these signs of extraordinary devotion.

Vincent Ferrer shed so many tears every time he consecrated the Host that the whole congregation also wept, insomuch that a general wailing was heard as if in the house of one dead.

Popular devotion in France did not take a special form as we notice in the Netherlands, where it was standardized, so to say, in the pietistic movement of the Brethren of the Common Life and the regular canons of the Congregation of Windesheim. This was the circle whence proceeded the “Imitation of Christ.” The regulations which the Dutch devout bound themselves to obey, gave their piety a conventional form and preserved them from dangerous excesses of fervour. French devotion, although very similar, kept more of its passionate and spasmodic character, and led more easily to fantastic aberrations, in those cases where it did not speedily wear itself out.

Nowhere do we notice its character better than in the writings of Gerson. The chancellor of the university was the great dogmatic and moral censor of his time. His prudent, scrupulous, slightly academic mind was admirably fitted to distinguish between true piety and exaggerated religious manifestations. This was, indeed, his favourite occupation. Benevolent, sincere and pure, he had that meticulous carefulness in point of good style and form which so often reminds us of his modest origin in the case of a man who has raised himself by his own talents from humble circumstances to an aristocratic mentality. He