THE AGE OF

EXPRESSION
THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION TO
THEIR NEWLY DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED THEIR
HAPPINESS IN POETRY AND IN SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITECTURE AND
IN PAINTING AND IN THE BOOKS THEY PRINTED
IN the year 1471 there died a pious old man who had spent seventy-two of his
ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes near
the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Ysel. He was
known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born in the village of Kempen, he
was called Thomas a Kempis. At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer,
where Gerhard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and
Prague, and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers
of the Common Life. The good brothers were humble laymen who tried to live the
simple life of the early Apostles of Christ while working at their regular jobs as
carpenters and house-painters and stone masons. They maintained an excellent school,
that deserving boys of poor parents might be taught the wisdom of the Fathers of the
church. At this school, little Thomas had learned how to conjugate Latin verbs and
how to copy manuscripts. Then he had taken his vows, had put his little bundle of
books upon his back, had wandered to Zwolle and with a sigh of relief he had closed
the door upon a turbulent world which did not attract him.
Thomas lived in an age of turmoil, pestilence and sudden death. In central Europe,
in Bohemia, the devoted disciples of Johannus Huss, the friend and follower of John
Wycliffe, the English reformer, were avenging with a terrible warfare the death of
their beloved leader who had been burned at the stake by order of that same Council
of Constance, which had promised him a safe-conduct if he would come to
Switzerland and explain his doctrines to the Pope, the Emperor, twenty-three
cardinals, thirty-three archbishops and bishops, one hundred and fifty abbots and more
than a hundred princes and dukes who had gathered together to reform their church.
In the west, France had been fighting for a hundred years that she might drive the
English from her territories and just then was saved from utter defeat by the fortunate
appearance of Joan of Arc. And no sooner had this struggle come to an end than
France and Burgundy were at each other's throats, engaged upon a struggle of life and
death for the supremacy of western Europe.
In the south, a Pope at Rome was calling the curses of Heaven down upon a second
Pope who resided at Avignon, in southern France, and who retaliated in kind. In the
far east the Turks were destroying the last remnants of the Roman Empire and the
Russians had started upon a final crusade to crush the power of their Tartar masters.
 But of all this, Brother Thomas in his quiet cell never heard. He had his manuscripts
and his own thoughts and he was contented. He poured his love of God into a little
volume. He called it the Imitation of Christ. It has since been translated into more
languages than any other book save the Bible. It has been read by quite as many
people as ever studied the Holy Scriptures. It has influenced the lives of countless
millions. And it was the work of a man whose highest ideal of existence was
expressed in the simple wish that "he might quietly spend his days sitting in a little
corner with a little book."