INTRODUCTION.

THE See of Canterbury, in a period of hardly more than one hundred years, was held by three of the greatest Saints of England—St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and St. Edmund. These three, wonderful in their perfection, each distinct from the other, and in the gifts which constituted that perfection, had all one task, which was to vindicate the liberty and purity of the Church by suffering, by exile, and, though only one received the martyr’s crown, by the sacrifice of a martyr’s will. Yet how variously the Holy Ghost ripened and formed them! St. Anselm’s chief perfection was the illumination of the speculative intellect by the gifts of science and understanding: that of St. Thomas the elevation and grandeur of the will by fortitude and holy fear: that of St. Edmund the sanctification of the xiipractical intellect by the gifts of counsel and of wisdom.

The works of St. Anselm exhibit an intellectual light, order, subtilty, penetration, and precision which give him a high place among the scholastic theologians of whom he was the forerunner and the guide. But even in the purest intellectual exercise of the reason, his writings are pervaded by the gift of piety, which makes its warmth sensibly felt. He may be regarded as the type of faith, rendering to God the reasonable service of the intellect. This rationabile obsequium, which is the highest perfection of the human intelligence, springs from faith. Reason precedes faith indeed in judging of the motives of credibility: and the last act of reason judging of evidence precedes the first act of faith in believing the revelation of God. But when revelation has been once received, the grace of faith is unfolded by the gift of intellect into the faith which is one of the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost. Faith as a virtue illuminates the intelligence, but faith as a fruit of the Holy Ghost understands, so far as God permits, the intrinsic xiiireason of what it believes. St. Anselm explains his whole method in these words: ‘As the right order demands that we should first believe the deep things of the Christian faith before we venture to discuss them by reasoning, so it appears to me to be negligence, if, after we are confirmed in faith, we should not endeavour to understand what we believe.’¹¹   Cur Deus Homo, lib. i. c. 2. Here we have his method in direct contradiction to the rationalism of these later days, which makes reason the test, the measure, and the criterion of faith, destroying thereby the essence of faith, as well as the matter proposed to its belief. As St. Augustine says, ‘If you ask of me, or of any other Doctor, not unreasonably, that you may understand what you believe, correct your definition, not so as to reject faith, but so as to perceive by the light of reason the things which by the firmness of faith you already hold. . . . Therefore it was reasonably said by the Prophet, "Unless you believe, you will not understand,”’²²   De peccat. merites, c. xxi. 16, tom. x. p. 16. so St. Anselm xvibegin where he prefers. And, indeed, it is for this reason that they have been divided into sections;³³   [‘Ad hoc enim ipsum paragraphis sunt distinctæ;’ divided into sections by means of marks in the margin; or, divided into sections by means of inserted headings. Thus in one of his letters (i. 20), writing of some prayers to the Mother of God composed by him, he says, ‘Denique idcirco volui eas ipsas orationes per sententias paragraphis distinguere, ut anticipando longitudinis fastidium, ubi volueris, possis eas legendo incidere.’
   Of the meditations attributed to St. Anselm, the majority, as we find them in the printed editions, are not characterised by bracketed headings or by subtitles; nor are their obvious subdivisions indicated by what we should call unbroken paragraphs. The translator has therefore ventured to insert into such of the meditations as do not in the printed editions show where they are capable of an unforced subdivision, a suitable subtitle, or at least a numerical indication. He has done this not irreverently, he trusts, to the saint, nor impertinently, he ventures to hope, to the reader. To the compassion of the one and to the indulgence of the other does he commit himself; adding only this, that whatever has been inserted by him is included within square brackets.] that the reader may easily choose a place for beginning or for stopping, and so avoid the weariness and annoyance which would be produced by too prolonged application to the book, or by repeated reperusal of one and the same passage; and that he may thus be the more likely to reap some pious dispositions from them; for this was the end had in view in their composition.