more sleep. When no sound broke the stillness but the quick cry of the lapwing, and the "grey sandalled morn crept over the downs,-it was at such a time that he wrote the words " My cell is to me a Paradise." Men and women of many generations and of many countries thank God for the words written in that cell, those words of communing with Christ whom he loved above all else, and with whom he conversed as with a great and beloved Friend, words that may teach others how to practise such blessed converse, and help each man in his turn to make his cell also a Paradise.

The Brothers could find no one better qualified to lead the minds of the young novices than Brother Thomas, and as Sub-Prior his pupils found that he was ready to be their friend as well as their teacher. He used to invite them to private interviews in his cell, or walk up and down with them in the pleasant garden on the brow of the hill. Sometimes in the midst of their talk he would leave them saying that some one was waiting for him in his cell. And they knew quite well that he went to take counsel with the great Master, and to be refreshed by a draught of the cooling waters of Life.

The Sub-Prior had also many duties concerning the services of the Church, and the office included that of Precentor. Thomas was an enthusiastic musician, and spared no pains to make "the singing of so many brothers in concord a sweet sound in the presence of God, and all the citizens of Heaven". In his "Manual for young Christians" he alludes to there being an organ with many pipes in the church of St. Agnes. One of his contemporaries says of him that, "when he was singing he was always to be observed with his face looking up carried away with enthusiasm, with body erect, never supporting himself with a seat, or on his arms, or leaning back. Night and day he was the first to enter the Sanctuary, and the last to depart". This writer also

adds, that his patience was such, that he had schooled his naturally quick disposition to be ready for interruptions, and that whatever annoyances came to him, he never allowed himself to be worried and ruffled by them.

Towards the end of 1425 he and his Brethren had a special opportunity for practising his instruction on the virtue of patience: "He is not truly patient who is prepared to suffer only as much as seems good to himself, and only from those whom he himself chooses". For a schism arose in the diocese at the appointment of Sweder de Culenborgh to be Bishop of Utrecht, and the towns of Zwolle and Deventer

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refusing to accept him, they were placed under an Interdict. The majority of the nobles and people rebelled against this fresh Papal tyranny. "Alas!" writes Thomas à Kempis, on St. Lambert's day it was enjoined upon us that we must suspend our singing". This was but the prelude to the Brothers being ordered to leave their house. After a short, solemn service in the church they hastily gathered their manuscripts together, and by the light of the sunset on St. Barnabas' Day walked in procession down the Mount, accompanied by groups of silent, grieving neighbours. The Sisters of the Common Life received them for the first night at Hasselt, and the townspeople wept, when they saw them passing through the streets, at the cruel force that was used in turning them out of their house. The next day they sailed for Friesland, and after a stormy passage took refuge with the Brothers at Lunenkerc.

Some of the Brothers had left their home never to return; but Brother John, one of the best singers and a man of great muscular power, who was leader in harvest-time and had been master-mason in the building of the House, feeling ill, obtained permission. to return to St. Agnes to die. About the same time a messenger came to summon Thomas à Kempis to his brother John at the house of

Bethuania. He hastened to him and nursed him until his death, which happened after a year's illness. After this Thomas was able to return to Mount St. Agnes, as the Interdict was over, and the musical services for which the House was so celebrated were services of heartfelt thanksgiving for the reunion of the Brotherhood.

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Thomas was now appointed steward, but finding that the household duties encroached too much on his time for writing, he gave up the office and returned to his old work as SubPrior. The fame of his holiness attracted many from other monasteries people of all ranks came to St. Agnes to consult the Brother who had comforted and gladdened so many, and the sick and dying sent from far to implore him to come and minister to them. He took pilgrimages to visit the dying as long as he could, but at all times he was far from strong, and as the years lengthened upon him the toil of mounting the hill after leaving Zwolle was severe. How often the sound of the tinkling bell must have cheered him as he climbed the last ascent, or the roll of music, sung by the brethren in a lively voice when Benediction had begun, telling him that his journey was over. His body was ageing, but his heart could never grow old, and his brave spirit encouraged his companions through the plague that carried off so many of the Brothers and their neighbours, the inundation that destroyed their crops, and the celebrated inroad of mice that ate the ripening corn in the year 1450. This disastrous year culminated in a most severe winter, when large numbers of the poor were constantly begging at the gate of St. Agnes, and the Brothers would have been unable to help them or to provide for their own necessities if it had not been for a remarkable store of fish, "spiringos" as Thomas calls them, which had been caught and laid by early in the year. may have been during this terrible winter that he wrote, "Do not be cast

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down, nor despair, but resign yourself to God's will, and bear all things which come upon you to the glory of Jesus Christ; for after Winter comes Summer, after night, day, and after the storm, a great calm."

Of the men who have been especially influenced by Thomas à Kempis, and who in their turn have had noted influence in their own generation, one of them must have been Wessel, often called "the Forerunner of Luther". He came as a youth to live near Mount St. Agnes that he might have the counsel and instruction of Thomas, and in after years, when he was in the heat of the battle, he returned every year to visit his revered guide. Revered, and venerable also, for he had now reached his ninety-first year! Yet his memory was still clear, his eyes bright and strong. He kept the chronicles of the House until the last three or four months of his life, recording the happy departure of his old comrades until another hand wrote that, on the Feast of St. James the Less, just after Compline, "God called him forth from his abode on Mount St. Agnes to the Mount of Eternity".

Having learnt so much of his life we begin to see the secret of his little book, the secret that makes "The Imitation of Christ" the consolation of crown-burdened kings and of workworn wayfarers alike, the secret that made it one of the last anchors to which a doubting soul could cling, and that led a lonely hero to choose it as his companion when he went out to meet an unknown fate in the desert.

Thomas à Kempis lived no useless hermit's life. He gave himself up to work for his brethren. The daily studies with the constant succession of novices, the preparation of his sermons, the diligent copying of the Bible in the language of the country, the frequent visits from people of all ranks, helped to enrich the experience from which he drew, and made his writings essentially those of a man used to work for and with men, and not those of a selfish mystic.

There are many short wise sentences that one can imagine his saying to those who came and went, "Try to get rid of one fault or one bad habit every year". "Lay not thy heart open to every one. We must have love towards all, but familiarity with all is not expedient". "Flatter not the rich. Keep company with the humble and single-hearted". "We often talk to very little good purpose. We are soon led captive by vanity. Oftentimes I wish that I had held my peace when I have spoken, and that I had not been in company". "In silence and quiet the soul grows". "Evil is more readily spoken and believed than good. It is true wisdom not to believe every report, and not always to repeat what we hear, even if we do believe it". "Whatever a man finds either in himself or in others, which cannot be altered, must be borne patiently, until God ordains otherwise ".

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Such practical advice could only have been given by one who realized the daily difficulties of life, by one who had "toiled, suffered, and renounced"; and thus his words vibrate on the heartstrings of generation after generation like the undying echoes of responsive music.

In this little book those who are living through days when each heartbeat makes itself felt with agonizing completeness may read "The whole life of Christ was a Cross and a Passion, and do you look for rest and joy? My son, I came down from heaven for your salvation, I bore your sorrows, not by necessity, but through love, that you also might learn patience and might bear sorrows without repining." And for those who are

labouring in the heat of the day is written: "My son, let not the labours which you have undertaken for my sake break your spirit. I am able to repay you beyond all measure or conception. You will not have long to labour here, wait a little while, and you will speedily see the end of your troubles. Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Write, read, watch, pray, labour diligently, bear troubles manfully. Eternal life is worth all these efforts and much greater ones. Peace will come, then there will be no day nor night, but light perpetual, brightness infinite, steadfast peace and sweet companionship with the blessed".

Can we wonder that, when every page glows with such words of wisdom and hope, the book keeps its hold on thousands of men and women in this anxious struggling world? For here they find a man who shows them that he understands the complicated variations of life, and here they find another witness to the strange likeness that exists in all human beings however diverse their outward characteristics. Are they not all Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life? However far apart their lives may seem to spring, are they not bound at the root by the same natural forces? And are they not compelled by belief in the love that is stronger than death to acknowledge that the souls of men are more precious than their bodies, that life cannot be given solely to gratify selfish desires, and that however humbly, however imperfectly carried out, they must strive towards the highest ideal, to the Imitation of Christ, and make an offering of their lives for the sake of the Brethren ?

I.

A CLERK IN ORDERS.

THE white walls of the Château of Deux-manoirs, with its precincts, composed before its dismantling at the Revolution the one prominent object which towards the South-west broke the pleasant level of La Beauce, the great corn-land of central France. Abode in those days of the family of Latour, nesting there century after century, it recorded significantly the effectiveness of their brotherly union, less by way of invasion of the rights of others than by the improvement of all gentler sentiments within.

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the sumptuous monuments of their last resting-place, backwards to every object which had encircled them in that warmer and more lightsome home it was visible they had cared for so much, even in some peculiarities of the very ground-plan of the house itselfeverywhere was the token of their anxious estimate of all those incidents of man's pathway through the world which knit the wayfarers thereon most closely together. Why this irregularity of ground-plan?-the traveller would ask; recognising indeed a certain distinction in its actual effect on the eye, and suspecting perhaps some conscious aim at such effect on the part of the builders of the place in an age indulgent of architectural caprices. And the traditional answer to the question, true for once, still showed the race of Latour making much, making the most, of the sympathetic ties of human life. The work, in large measure, of Gaston de Latour, it was left unfinished at his death, some time about the year 1594. That it was never completed could hardly be attributed to any lack of means, or of interest; for it is

plain that to the period of the Revolution, after which its scanty remnants passed into humble occupation (a few circular turrets, a crenelated curtain wall, giving a random touch of dignity to some ordinary farm-buildings) the place had been scrupulously maintained. It might seem a kind of reverence rather that had allowed the work to remain untouched for future ages precisely at this point in its growth. And the expert architectural mind, peeping acutely into recondite motives and half accomplished purposes in such matters, could detect the circumstance which had determined that so noticeable peculiarity of ground-plan. Its kernel was not, as in most similar buildings of that date, a feudal fortress, but an unfortified manor-housea double manoir-two houses, oddly associated at a right angle. Far back in the Middle Age, said a not uncertain tradition, here had been the one point of contact between two estates, intricately interlocked with alien domain, as, in the course of generations, the family of Latour and another had added field to field. In the single lonely manor then existing two brothers had grown up; and the time came when the marriage of the younger to the heiress of those neighbouring lands would divide two perfect friends. Regretting over-night so dislocating a change it was the elder who, as the drowsy hours flowed away in manifold recollection beside the fire, now suggested to the younger, himself already wistfully recalling, as from the past, the kindly motion and noise of the place like a sort of audible sunlight, the building of a second manor house-the Château d'Amour, as it came to be called-that the two families, in what should be as nearly as possible one abode, might take