Yes, the hermit of Gouda was the vicar of Gouda, and knew it not, so absolute was his seclusion.
My reader is aware that the moment the frenzy of his passion passed, he was seized with remorse for having been betrayed into it.But perhaps only those who have risen as high in religious spirit as he had, and suddenly fallen, can realize the terror at himself that took possession of him.He felt like one whom self-confidence had betrayed to the very edge of a precipice.
"Ah, good Jerome," he cried, "how much better you knew me than Iknew myself! How bitter yet wholesome was your admonition!"Accustomed to search his own heart, he saw at once that the true cause of his fury was Margaret."I love her then better than God,"said he despairingly; "better than the Church, From such a love what can spring to me, or to her?" He shuddered at the thought.
"Let the strong battle temptation; 'tis for the weak to flee.And who is weaker than I have shown myself? What is my penitence, my religion? A pack of cards built by degrees into a fair-seeming structure; and lo! one breath of earthly love, and it lies in the dust, I must begin again, and on a surer foundation." He resolved to leave Holland at once, and spend years of his life in some distant convent before returning to it.By that time the temptations of earthly passion would be doubly baffled; and older and a better monk, he should be more master of his earthly affections, and Margaret, seeing herself abandoned, would marry, and love another, The very anguish this last thought cost him showed the self-searcher and self-denier that he was on the path of religious duty.
But in leaving her for his immortal good and hers, he was not to neglect her temporal weal.Indeed, the sweet thought, he could make her comfortable for life, and rich in this world's goods, which she was not bound to despise, sustained him in the bitter struggle it cost him to turn his back on her without one kind word or look, "Oh, what will she think of me?" he groaned."Shall I not seem to her of all creatures the most heartless, inhuman? but so best; ay, better she should hate me, miserable that I am, Heaven is merciful, and giveth my broken heart this comfort; I can make that villain restore her own, and she shall never lose another true lover by poverty.Another? Ah me! ah me! God and the saints to mine aid!"How he fared on this errand has been related.But first, as you may perhaps remember, he went at night to shrive the hermit of Gouda.He found him dying, and never left him till he had closed his eyes and buried him beneath the floor of the little oratory attached to his cell.It was the peaceful end of a stormy life.
The hermit had been a soldier, and even now carried a steel corselet next his skin, saying he was now Christ's soldier as he had been Satan's.When Clement had shriven him and prayed by him, he, in his turn, sought counsel of one who was dying in so pious a frame, The hermit advised him to be his successor in this peaceful retreat."His had been a hard fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and he had never thoroughly baffled them till he retired into the citadel of Solitude.
These words and the hermit's pious and peaceful death, which speedily followed, and set as it were the seal of immortal truth on them, made a deep impression upon Clement.Nor in his case had they any prejudice to combat; the solitary recluse was still profoundly revered in the Church, whether immured as an anchorite or anchoress in some cave or cell belonging to a monastery, or hidden in the more savage but laxer seclusion of the independent hermitage.And Clement knew more about the hermits of the Church than most divines at his time of life; he had read much thereon at the monastery near Tergou, had devoured their lives with wonder and delight in the manuscripts of the Vatican, and conversed earnestly about them with the mendicant friars of several nations.
Before Printing these friars were the great circulators of those local annals and biographies which accumulated in the convents of every land.Then his teacher, Jerome, had been three years an anchorite on the heights of Camaldoli, where for more than four centuries the Thebaid had been revived; and Jerome, cold and curt on most religious themes, was warm with enthusiasm on this one.He had pored over the annals of St.John Baptist's abbey, round about which the hermit's caves were scattered, and told him the names of many a noble, and many a famous warrior who had ended his days there a hermit, and of many a bishop and archbishop who had passed from the see to the hermitage, or from the hermitage to the see.