Earl Hubert's Daughter: The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century — John Shaqi
Earl Hubert's Daughter: The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th CenturyHolt, Emily Sarah
General
Earl Hubert's Daughter: The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century
Holt, Emily Sarah
England -- Social life and customs -- 1066-1485 -- Fiction; Historical fiction
On the 7th of February 1235, died Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, "the enemy of
all monks." He had not, however, by any means been the enemy of all
superstition. He was remarkably easy to take in by young women who had
sustained personal encounters with Satan, nuns who had been favoured
with apparitions of the Virgin, and monks to whom Saint Peter or Saint
Lawrence had made revelations. It is little wonder that he was
canonised, and perhaps not much that a touch of his bones, or a shred of
his chasuble, were asserted to be possessed of miraculous power. A very
different man filled the see of Lincoln in his stead. On the 3rd of
June following, Robert Grosteste was appointed to the vacant episcopal
throne.
Grosteste was a man who had learned his life-lessons, not from priest or
monk, from Fathers or Decretals, but direct from God. I do not presume
to say that he held no false doctrine, or that he made no mistakes: but
considering the time at which he lived, and the corruption all around
him, his teaching was singularly free from "wood, hay, stubble"--
singularly clear, evangelical, and true to the one Foundation.
Especially he set himself in opposition to the most popular doctrine of
the day--that which was termed grace of congruity. And for a man in
such a position to set himself in entire and active opposition to
popular taste and belief, and to persevere in it, requires supplies
either of vast pride from Satan, or of great grace from God. Grace of
congruity is simply a variety of the old heresy of human merit. It clad
its proud self in the silver robe of humility, by professing to possess
only an _imperfect_ degree of qualification for the reception of God's
grace. Grace of condignity, on the other hand, put itself on an
equality with the Divine gift, by its pretension to possess that
qualification to the uttermost.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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