The contributions of Holland to the devotional poetry of Christendom have not been extensive; but in the Middle Ages she could show several Latin hymn-writers. The best known of these, however, is by far more famous for his prose works. Thomas Hemerken, called afterward Thomas À Kempis, was not by birth a Hollander. He was born in 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, a small city in the diocese of Koeln (Cologne), not far from what became the boundary line between the two nations. But in those days, and, indeed, until the Peace of Westphalia, Holland, like Switzerland, was reckoned a part of Germany. His father, John Hemerken, was an artisan of the poorer class, probably a silversmith; and both his parents were devout and God-fearing people. His elder brother John had gone to Deventer to obtain an education, after the fashion of the times, when boys wandered from city to city in search of instruction, and supported themselves by singing, begging, and sometimes by thieving. But at Deventer John had fallen in with some good people who had pity upon these wandering scholars, and had made arrangements to furnish them lodgings and copying-work in addition to what they would earn by singing in the choir.

The chief person in this group was Gerard Groote, a man of wealthy family and some strange vicissitudes in life. He had studied at the universities of Paris and Prague, and had taken minor orders to qualify himself to hold the two canonries family influence secured to him, but without giving any indication of a vocation to the sacred office. He seems even to have led a dissolute life. Then a great change came over him, chiefly through the influence of a friend of his youth named Henry Eger, now the prior of a Cistercian convent at Munkhuisen. Gerard resigned his benefices, and spent five years in a monastic retreat, from which he emerged as a zealous preacher of the Gospel to the clergy and people of what now is Holland, using both Latin and Dutch as occasion served. He especially dwelt on the utter worldliness of that dreary time, when priests, nobles, and tradesmen alike had lost all idea of serving God and men, and had set up gain and pleasure as the recognized ends of life. His sharp rebukes, and his exaltation of humility, simplicity, and poverty, attracted the lower classes, but roused the opposition of both the burghers and the Mendicants against him. After a brief and stormy career he was silenced by the Archbishop of Utrecht, and was obliged to find vent for his zeal in some other channel.

His purity and unworldliness had gathered around him, in his native Deventer, men and women like-minded with him, who, according to the tendency of the time, drifted naturally into a kind of monastic life. Brother-houses and sister-houses were organized, and they became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. They took no vows, and yet practised celibacy, common ownership and labor, and obedience to the rector of the house. They adopted no common dress, but came to wear the simplest gray robe of the same cut. Both laymen and clergy lived together in the brother-houses, and each took his turn in the common services of the brotherhood. They observed no canonical hours beyond what the Church exacted of the priests among them. They assumed none of the professions of the monks, and yet they realized the monkish ideal better than did the monks themselves. The four principles which governed Gerard’s own life and became the four corner-stones of this fraternity, were “contempt of the world and of self, imitation of the lowly life of Christ, good-will, and the grace of devoutness” (contemptus mundi et sui ipsius, imitatio humilis vitae Christi, bona voluntas, gratia devotionis). All this was summed up in the phrase moderna devotio, used both by the brethren and the outside world to designate the distinctive character of the order.

The experience Christendom had had of the results of mendicancy led Groote and his associates to base the new brotherhood on honest labor. The shape this took reflects his own character. He was a great book-lover—semper avarus et peravarus librorum, he says himself. When in peril of his life in a storm by sea, he managed to save the six books he had with him. He possessed a considerable library, and when the brotherhood came to adopt the principle of community of goods, he and the rest put their books into the common stock. And all who were able to write were to labor in copying books for sale—the clergy in Latin, the laymen in Dutch. It was this employment he extended to the poor scholars of the Deventer school. Indeed, it seems not improbable that he began it with them, and that the first brotherhood was composed of young friends of this class, who had grown to manhood in this employment. It is certain that in Deventer, in Zwolle, and for all we know in the other cities where the brotherhood took root, near by the brother-house stood a poor-scholars’ house, in which the boys attending the school of the city were lodged, kept under discipline, and to some degree given work also. But the Brethren of the Common Life were not an educating body, as has been very generally supposed. They aimed only at saving boys from the moral injury which too often attended their homeless life, at keeping good discipline over them, and at imparting moral and religious training. They aimed to do for the school-boys what the founders of colleges in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris tried to do for the myriads of students who lived like vagrants in those seats of learning.

But before Gerard Groote died the question was raised whether it would not be advisable to establish a strictly monastic order of life for those of the brethren who felt a vocation to it. To this he agreed, but dissuaded his friends from adopting the severe rules of the Cistercians and the Carthusians for the new order. Rather he suggested that of the Canons Regular under the rule of St. Augustine as preferable, since it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the brotherhood, and would bind on no one too heavy burdens. This advice marks an advance upon Dominic, Francis, and the “reformers” of the Benedictine and Mendicant orders, in an evangelical direction. They all sought progress to perfection in deeper austerity. In his case the preference perhaps was caused by his friendship for the monastery of Canons Regular at Groenendal, in Flanders, whose prior was Jan Rusbroek, the great Flemish mystic. Gerard made several visits to Groenendal after his conversion, and translated two of his friend’s books into Latin.

Gerard Groote was carried off by the great pestilence of 1384, in his forty-fourth year. But he left the work in good hands, for a Deventer priest named Florens Radewinzoon succeeded him as rector of the brother-house, and proceeded with the building of the new monastery at Windesheim, near Deventer. It was opened in 1386, and John À Kempis, who had become a member of the brotherhood, was one of the six who first assumed the monastic vows.

It was six years later, in 1392, that Thomas set out to seek his brother at Deventer; for although the distance was not much over a hundred miles, he had heard nothing of John’s profession at Windesheim, so uncertain and irregular were the means of communication. On learning what had happened, he proceeded to Windesheim, where his brother welcomed him warmly. But there was no school at Windesheim, and John advised him to return to Deventer to attend the city school and place himself under the care of Florens. He did so and became an inmate of the poor-scholars’ house, which had been given to the brotherhood by a devout matron of the city. Here he lived for six years, attending school under Master Johann Boehme, singing in the choir of the church of which Florens was vicar, and earning a little money by copying books for him. The good rector showed him very great kindness, and in 1398, when his school studies were complete, he received him into the brotherhood. The year before this another pestilence had visited Deventer, carrying off Johann Kessel, the saintly cook of the brother-house, and prostrating Thomas himself, who recovered with difficulty. Indeed, it seemed as though the brotherhood would become extinct, and Florens and six others withdrew for a time from the plague-smitten city to guard against this catastrophe.

In 1399 Thomas, at Florens’s instance, decided to assume the monastic vows. A second house of the order had been established at Agnietenberg (or Mount St. Agnes) near the city of Zwolle. Of this John À Kempis had been made the second prior in 1398, and held that office until 1408. Thither Thomas proceeded in 1399, stopping at Zwolle to obtain the indulgence lately proclaimed by the Pope for the benefit of a new church in that city. After a novitiate of seven years he took the vows in 1406, and in 1414 was ordained to the priesthood.

The monastic life is studiously and intentionally monotonous. It aims at the exclusion of all that gives zest and interest to ordinary existence, and at the reduction of life’s employments to a routine. Its variety and color are to be sought in the inner life of its members, and that of Thomas was not wanting in these elements. If his inner experience be reflected in his Soliloquy of the Soul, he passed through those shifting seasons of gloom and gladness which characterize the experience of an introverted religion. His religious character was formed on the lines of the modern devotion, as defined by Gerard Groote, and as reflected in the lives and the writings of Florens Radewinzoon, Gerard Zerbolt, Johann Mande, Gerlach Peterszoon, and Johann Brinckerinck, the earlier notable men of the brotherhood or of the Windesheim congregation. His was not a bold and originative mind to strike out new paths for himself. He had not even those gifts of practical administration for which Florens, John À Kempis, and others of the order were notable. Even when he had attained recognition as the most eminent man at Agnietenberg, his brethren twice passed him by in selecting their prior, and never gave him any dignity higher than the sub-priorate, which probably was a sinecure. An early biographer goes so far as to describe him as sitting silent whenever ordinary and worldly matters were discussed, because of his ignorance of the very terms used at such times. But this is an exaggeration. His Chronicle of the Monastery of Mt. St. Agnes shows him taking a mild and not unintelligent interest in the secular side of the monastic life, and sharing the joy of his brethren in the fine apple-crop or the large take of fish, and the like. But this Chronicle shows how limited his range of vision and interest. He lived through the Papal Schism, the Asiatic conquests of Timour, the Council of Constance, the Hussite wars, Henry the Fifth’s invasion of France, the exploits of Jeanne d’Arc, the Council of Basle, the rise of the Medici in Florence, and of the Duchy of Burgundy, the Council of Florence, the exploits of Scanderberg and Hunyadi Janos, the Wars of the Roses, the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the fall of Constantinople, the Florentine Academy, the Portuguese discoveries in the Atlantic, and much more that might be thought likely to be discussed even within the walls of a Dutch monastery. But the record is silent as to all these things; for the most part they are part of the doings of that “world” which the disciples of the modern devotion trained themselves to despise.