“He lieth in ambush, that he may catch the poor man; he will crouch and fall, when he shall have power over the poor.”
1.
Who has not heard of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, and Confessor? In our part of the world at least he is well known, as far as name goes, by the churches dedicated to him. Even from British times a church has existed under his tutelage in the afterwards metropolitan city of Canterbury; though we know little or nothing of churches to St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Basil, or St. Athanasius. Considering how many of our temples are called after the Apostles, and how many of them piously preserve the earthly name of those who may be said to “have no memorial,” and are “as if they had never been,” as St. George, or St. Nicolas; it is a peculiarity in St. Martin’s history that he should be at once so well known and so widely venerated; renowned in this life, yet honoured after it. And such honour has been paid him from the first. He died in the last years of the fourth century; his successor at Tours built a chapel over his tomb in that city; St. Perpetuus, also of Tours, about seventy years afterwards built a church and conveyed his relics thither. In the course of another seventy years his name had taken up its abode in Canterbury, where it remains. Soon after a church was dedicated to him at Rome, and soon after in Spain. He alone of the Confessors had a service of his own in the more ancient breviaries; he is named, too, in the mass of Pope Gregory, which commemorates, after our Lady and the Apostles, “Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sextus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Laurence, Chrysostom, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, Hilary, Martin, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, Benedict, and all Saints.”
I am not going to present the reader with more than a slight sketch of his history, which we have received on very authentic testimony, as in St. Antony’s case, though St. Martin, like St. Antony, has left no writings behind him. Nay, the biographer of St. Martin is not merely a friend (such as St. Athanasius), who saw him only now and then, but he was a disciple, an intimate, an eye-witness, as well as a man of cultivated mind and classical attainments,—Sulpicius Severus, who wrote his memoir even while the subject of it was alive, and while his memory was fresh.
2.
Martin was born about the year 316, in Pannonia, in a town which now forms part of Hungary; his father was a pagan, and had risen from the ranks to the command of a cohort. A soldier has no home, and his son was brought up at Pavia in North Italy with very little education. What influenced Martin is not known; but at the age of ten he fled to the Church against the wish of his parents, and enrolled himself as a catechumen. Under these first impressions of religion, he formed the desire of retiring to the desert as a solitary; however, things do not happen here below after our wishes; so at fifteen he was seized, upon his father’s instance, and enlisted in the army. In consequence, he remained a soldier five years, and, in the course of them, was sent into Gaul. It is recorded of him, that at a time when he was stationed at Amiens, being then eighteen, he encountered at the gate of the city a poor man without clothes. It was mid-winter, and the weather more than ordinarily severe; he had nothing on him but his single military cloak and his arms. The youth took his sword, cut the cloak in two, and gave half to the beggar. The bystanders jeered or admired, according to their turn of mind; and he went away. Next night he had a dream: he saw our Lord clad in the half cloak which he had bestowed on the poor man. The Divine Vision commanded the youth’s attention, and then said to the Angels who stood around, “Martin, yet a catechumen, hath wrapped Me in this garment.” On this Martin proceeded forthwith to baptism, and two years afterwards left the army.
Of the next fourteen years we know nothing; then, he had recourse to the celebrated St. Hilary, who was afterwards bishop of Poictiers, and an illustrious confessor in the Arian troubles. Martin, however, was destined to precede him in suffering, and that in the same holy cause. He undertook a visit to his parents, who now seem to have retired into Pannonia, with a view to their conversion. When he was in the passes of the Alps he fell in with bandits. Sulpicius gives this account of what happened:
“One of them raised an axe and aimed it at his head, but another intercepted the blow. However, his hands were bound behind him, and he was given in custody to one of them for plunder. This man took him aside, and began to ask him who
he was. He answered, ‘A Christian.’ He then inquired whether he felt afraid. He avowed, without wavering, that he never felt so much at ease, being confident that the Lord’s mercy would be specially with him in temptations; rather he felt sorry for him, who, living by robbery, was unworthy of the mercy of Christ. Entering, then, on the subject of the Gospel, he preached the Word of God to him. To be brief, the robber believed, attended on him, and set him on his way, begging his prayers. This man afterwards was seen in the profession of religion; so that the above narrative is given as he was heard to state it.”—Vit. M. c. 4.