§ 132. THE SEKMON. 857
to his memory. Bonaventura was present. The body was found to have wholly dissolved except the tongue.1
Berthold of Regensburg, d. 1272, had for his teacher David of Augsburg, d. 1271, also a preacher of renown. A member of the Franciscan order, Berthold itinerated from Thuringia to Bohemia, and from Spires to the upper Rhine regions as far as the Swiss canton of the Grisons. He was familiarly known as rusticanus, "the field preacher." According to contemporaries, he was listened to by sixty thousand at a time. His sermons were taken down by others and, to correct mistakes, he was obliged to edit an edition with his own hand.2
This celebrated preacher's style is exceedingly pictorial. He drew illustrations from the stars and the fields, the forests and the waters. The most secret motives of the heart seemed to lie open before him. Cruel, the historian of the mediaeval German pulpit, gives as the three elements of his power : his popular speech easily understood by the laity, his personality which he never hid behind a quoted authority, and his burning love for God and man. He preached un sparingly against the vices of his age : usury, avarice, unchastity, drunkenness, the dance, and the tournament, and everything adapted to destroy the sanctity of the home.
He urged as motives the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. But especially did he appeal to the fear of perdition and its torments. If your whole body, he said, was glowing iron and the whole world on fire, yet are the pains of the lost many times greater, and when the soul is reunited with the body in hell, then it will be as passing from dew to a burning mountain. The sermons are enlivened by vivacious dialogues in which the devil is a
1 The writer in Wetzer-Welte, I. 995, declares that the tongue remains whole to this day. See Lempp, Leben d. hi. Antonius v. Padua.
2 The works and collections of Berthold's sermons are numerous. Cruel, pp. 307-322 ; Linsenmayer, pp. 333-354 ; E. Bernhardfc, Bruder Berthold von Regensb., etc., Erf., 1905. Ed. of his sermons by Kling, Berlin, 1824; Pfeiffer, Vienna, 1862 ; J. Strobel, 2 vols. Vienna, 1880 ; Gobel, 2 vols. Schaffh., 1850 ; 4th ed., Kegensb., 1905 ; also Predigten a. d. Sonn und Festtagen, 2 vols. 1884; G. Jacob, D. latein. Reden d. Berthold, etc., Regensb., 1880.
858 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
leading figure. Berthold demanded penitence as well as works of penance. But he was a child of his time, was hard on heretics, and did not oppose any of the accepted dogmas.
A considerable number of sermons, many of them anony mous, are preserved from the mediseval pulpit of Germany, where preaching seemed to be most in vogue.1 Among the preachers were Gottfried, abbot of Admont, d. 1165, Honorius of Autun, d. 1152, and Werner of St. Blasius in the Black Forest, d. 1126. Gottfried's sermons, of which about two hun dred are preserved, occupy more than a thousand columns in Migne (174. 21-1133), and are as full of exegetical and edi fying material as any other discourses of the Middle Ages.
Honorius and Werner both prepared homiliaria, or collec tions of sermons which were meant to be a homiletical arsenal for preachers. Honorius' collection, the Mirror of the Church — /Speculum ecclesice 2 — is made up of his own discourses, most of the texts being taken from the Psalms. The sermons are arranged under thirty-six Sundays or festi val days, with as many as three or four sermons under a single head. In one of them he addresses himself to one class after another, calling them by name. One of the interesting things about these model discourses is the homiletical hints that are thrown in here and there. The following two show that it was necessary, even in those good old times, to adapt the length of the sermon to the patience of the hearers. " You may finish here if you choose, or if time permits, you may add the following things." " For the sake of brevity you must sometimes shorten this sermon and at other times you may prolong it."
Werner's collection, the Deflorationes sanctorum patrum, or Flowers from the Fathers, fills more than five hundred columns in Migne (151. 734-1294), and joins, with discourses from patristic times, other sermons, some of them probably by Werner himself. Thirteen are taken from Honorius of
1 See Cruel, 146-208 ; Linsenmayer, 191-320.
2 Migne, vol. 172. See Rocholl, in Herzog, VIII. 327-331; Endres, Honor. August., Leip., 1903. Honorius called himself Augustoduniensis, but it is doubtful whether Autun or Strassburg is meant.