Excerpt from The Pearl: An Interpretation When we study the poetry of the Middle Ages, especially the religious verse, without taking into account the vital teachings of the Eucharist, we are doing violence to the age - we are taking both color and fragrance from the flower. Men based their hopes of heaven upon the Eucharist; they found therein the full and perfect revelation of Deity; they looked to it as the key of heaven; they found therein union with their own loved ones who were dead; they experienced therethrough day by day a personal relationship with the Incarnate God; they built their churches as a setting for the great drama of love enacted within; they developed their art to do honor to that great Mystery which was the sacred heart Of the Middle Ages. At once we think Of the great tributes to the Eucharist: the sublime Mass of Corpus Christi prepared by St. Thomas Aquinas, with its marvelous hymns; the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon which is brought to a climax by an argument for the sacrament of the altar as containing in itself the highest good that is, the union Of God with man; the Legend of the Holy Grail; (2) and the Ghent Altar - the adora tion Of the Lamb, by the brothers Van Eyck. TO this goodly fellowship I am convinced that we should add the fourteenth century poem of The Pearl. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.