7,8. Clichtoveus: Nocturna lux est viantibus quantùm ad munus et officium, quod noctu iter agentibus nocturnas significat horas, perinde atque interdiu viam carpentibus lux solis eas insinuat conspicantibus solem....A nocte noctem segregare memoratur, quoniam priorem noctis partem à posteriore suo cantu dirimit ac disseparat, quasi noctis discretor. 11. erronum] A preferable reading to the more commonly received errorum, which might have so easily supplanted it, but which it, the rarer word, would scarcely have supplanted. In the parallel hymn of Prudentius we find a corroboration of this reading: Ferunt vagantes dæmones, Invisa nam vicinitas 15. petra Ecclesia] That St Ambrose was very far from drawing out of Christ's words, Matt. xvi. 18, what Rome has Surgamus ergo strenuè, 20 since drawn out, or believing in a Church which was built upon a man, even though that man were Peter, and that therefore in this verse he can mean no such thing, is plain from other words of his, as De Incarn. Dom., c. 5: Fides ergo est Ecclesiæ fundamentum: non enim de carne Petri, sed de fide dictum est, quia portæ mortis ei non prævalebunt. 17. Surgamus ergo] The cock-crowing had for the early Christians a mystical significance. It said to them, in no ordinary sense, "the night is far spent, the day is at hand." This, its mystical significance, comes out yet more plainly in the first Cathemerinōn of Prudentius, already quoted, and with more distinct allusion to the breaking of the great day of God, in which all darkness should for ever be chased away. Men learned to regard it as a continual summons to the casting away of all works of darkness, and to the putting on of the armour of light. And thus the cock became, in the middle ages, the standing emblem of the preachers of God's Word. The old heathen notion, that the lion could not bear the sight of the cock, to which St Ambrose alludes (Hexaëm., 1.6, c. 4: Leo gallum et maximè album veretur,) and which we meet in Lucretius, 4, 716, and Pliny, H. N., 1. 8, c. 19, easily adapted itself to this new symbolism. Satan, the roaring lion, fled away terrified, at the faithful preaching of God's Word. Nor did those, who used this image, fail to note this further fitness in the cock for setting forth the faithful preacher, that this bird, clapping its wings upon its sides, first rouses itself, before it seeks to rouse others. Thus Gregory the Great (Reg. Pastor., p. 3, c. 40): Gallus, cùm jam edere cantus parat, prius alas excutit, et semetipsum feriens vigilantiorem reddit: quia nimirum necesse est, ut hi, qui verba sanctæ prædicationis movent, prius studio bonæ actionis evigilent, ne in semetipsis torpentes opere, alios excitent voce. We have here the explanation of the cock surmounting so many of our churches. See the Gallus et Vulpes in Grimm's Latein. Gedichte des x. und xi. J.H. Gallo canente, spes redit, Jesu, labantes respice, Tu lux refulge sensibus, Te nostra vox primùm sonet, Et vota solvamus tibi. p. 351, and a curious poem, not without poetical merit, in Edélestand du Méril's Poés. Popul. Lat., 1847, p. 12-16. This is one stanza: Quasi rex in capite gallus coronatur ; In nocte dum concinat, leo conturbatur: which all, and much more of the kind, is then allegorized. L. Bernardi Opp., ed. Bened., 1719, v. 2, p. 914.—This poem, among those of St Bernard perhaps the most eminently characteristic of its author, consists, in its original form, of nearly fifty quatrains, and unabridged would have been too long for insertion here-not to say that, with all the beauty of the stanzas in particular, the composition, as a whole, lies under the defect of a certain monotony and want of progress. Where all was beautiful, the task of selection could not indeed be other than a hard one; but only in this way could the poem have found place in this volume; nor, for the reasons just stated, did I feel that it would be merely a loss to it to present it in this briefer form. |