51. Salve, caput cruentatum] I shall have occasion once or twice again to observe, as indeed I have observed already (p. 83), how these great hymns of the early or medieval Church served as the foundation of some of the noblest hymns which have been composed since the Reformation; how the later poet, no slavish copyist nor mere translator, has yet rejoiced to find his inspiration in these early sources. It has been so in the present instance. Paul Gerhard's Passion Hymn O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, is freely composed upon the model of what follows now. 55 55 In tremendâ mortis horâ 95 100 BONAVENTURA. ONAVENTURA, a Tuscan by birth, was born in 1221, BON a Tuscan h was still the most illustrious school of theology in Europe. Entering the order of St Francis, he changed his family name, John of Fidanza, to that by which he is known to the after world. In 1245 he became himself professor of theology at Paris, in 1256 General of his Order, and in 1273 cardinal-bishop of Alba. He died in 1274 at Lyons, during the council which was held there, to which he had accompanied pope Gregory the 10th. At once a master in the scholastic and mystical theology, though far greater in the last, he received from the Church of the middle ages the title Doctor Seraphicus, and his own Order set him against the yet greater Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. His Biblia Pauperum is an honourable testimony to his zeal for the spread of Scriptural knowledge through the ministry of the Word among the common people: nor can any one have even that very slightest knowledge of his writings, which is all that I myself would claim, without entirest conviction that he who could thus write, must have possessed a richest personal familiarity with all the deeper mysteries of the spiritual life whereof he speaks. Yet this ought not to tempt us to deny, but rather the more freely to declare, that he shared, and shared largely, in the error as well as in the truth of his age. At the same time, if we except the Psaltery of the Virgin, there is no work of his by which he could be so unfavourably known as his Meditations on the |