216 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
the translations of the Waldenses, Beghards and other sectaries.^ The text needs the authority of the Church, as Augustine indicated when he said, " I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Church did not compel me."
Great as Gerson's services were in other departments, it was, to follow his sympathetic and scholarly biographer, Schwab, from the pulpit that he exercised most influence on his generation.^He preached in Frenchas well as Latin, and his sernions had, for the most part, a practical intent, being occupied with ethical themes such as pride, idleness, anger, the commandments of the Decalogue, the marital state. He held that the ordinary priest should confine himself to a simple explanation of the Decalogue, the greater sins and the articles of faith.
During the last ten years of his life, spent in seclusion at Lyons, he continued his literary activity, writing more particularly in the vein of mystical theology. His last work was on the Canticles.
The tradition runs that the great teacher in his last years conducted a catechetical school for children in St. Paul's at Lyons, and that he taught them to offer for himself the daily prayer, " God, my creator, have pity upon Thy poor servant, Jean Gerson " — Mo7i Dieu, man Createur^ ayez jntiS de vostre pauvre serviteur, Jean Gerson."^ It was for young boys and perhaps for boys spending their first years in the university that he wrote his tractate entitled Leading Children to Christ.* It opens with an exposition of the words, " Suffer little children to come unto me " and proceeds to show how much more seemly it is to offer to God our best in youth than the dregs of sickly
^ Si propositio aliqua s. scriptunv pnsita assertive per auctorem sinim, qtii est Sp. sanrtus, esset falsa, tota s. scrtpturce vaciUaret nuctoritas, quoted by Schwab, p. ol4.
■^ Gerson hatte seine einflussreiche Stelhing vorziujsircise dem llnfe zu dnnken den er als Prediger genoss, Schwab,- p. 376.
3 See Schwab, p. 773, who neither accepts nor rejects the tradition. Dr. Philip Schaff used to bring the last literary activity of President Theodore D. Wolsey, of Yale College, into comparison with the activity of Gerson. In his last years Dr. Wolsey wrote the expositions of the Sunday school lessons for the Sxinday School Times.
* De parvnlis ad Christum trahendis, written according to Schwab, 1409- 1412, Du I'in, III. 278-291.
§ 23. JOHN GERSON. 217
old age. The author takes up the sins children should be admonished to avoid, especially unchastity, and holds up to reprobation the principle that vice is venial if it is kept secret, the principle expressed in the words si non caste tamen caute.
In a threefold work, giving a brief exposition of the Ten Commandments, a statement of the seven mortal sins and some short meditations on death and the way to meet it, Gerson gives a sort of catechism, although it is not thrown into the form of questions and answers. As the author states, it was intended for the benefit of poorly instructed curates who heard confessions, for parents who had children to instruct, for per- • sons not interested in tlie public services of worship and for those who had the care of the sick in hospitals. i
The title, most Christian doctor — doctor christianissimus — given to John Gerson is intended to emphasize the evangelical temper of his teaching. To a clear intellect, he added warm religious fervor. With a love for the Church, which it would be hard to find excelled, he magnified the body of Christian people as possessing the mind and immediate guidance of Christ and threw himself into the advocacy of the principle that the judgment of Christendom, as expressed in a general council, is the final authority of religious matters on the earth. •
He opposed some of the superstitions inherited from another time. He emphasized the authority of the sacred text. In these views as in others he was in sympathy with the progressive spirit of his age. But he stopped short of the principles of the Reformers. He knew nothing of the principles of individual sovereignty and the rights of conscience. His thinking moved along churchly lines. He had none of the bold original thought of Wyclif and little of that spirit which sets itself against the current errors of the times in which we live. His vote for Huss' burning proves sufficiently that the light of the new age had not dawned upon his mind. He was not, like them, a forerunner of the movement of the sixteenth century.
^ Opusciilum tripartittim : de preceptis decalogi, de confessione, et de arte moriendi, Du Pin, I., 425-460. Bess, in Herzog, VI. 615, calls it " the first catechism."