Subsequently the Beard was alternately commended to the clergy for its becoming gravity, or condemned from the ascetic notion that pride was apt to lurk in a fine Beard. In some of the monasteries lay members wore the Beard, while those in orders were shaved, and the hairs, remnant of an earlier superstition, devoutly consecrated to God with special prayers and imposing ceremonies.
One order of the Cistercians were specially allowed to wear their Beards, and were hence called “fratres barbati” or Bearded brethren.
The military orders of the Church, as the Knights of St. John and the Templars, were always full Bearded.
To touch the Beard, was at one time a solemnity by which a godfather acknowledged the child of his adoption.
One of the fertile sources of dispute between the Roman and Greek Churches has been this subject of wearing or not wearing the Beard. The Greek Church, with a firm faithfulness which does credit to its orthodoxy, has stood manfully by the early Church decisions and refused to admit any shaven saint into its calendar, heartily despising the Romish Church for its weakness in this respect. On the other hand, the Popes, to mark the distinction between Eastern and Western christianity, early introduced statutes “de radendis barbis,” or concerning shaving the Beard. Here and there, however, a manly old fellow, like Pope Julius II, who made Michael Angelo sculpture him with a drawn sword in his hand, or a Cardinal, like Pole or Allen, and many Bishops, managed to believe that faith and nature might be reconciled by taking a comprehensive and truly Catholic view of both.
The leading English and German Reformers wore their Beards; (if Luther confined himself to a moustache, it was because his Monkish habit of shaving was too strong for him,) and most of the Martyrs to the Protestant Faith were burnt in their Beards.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE Britons “like their neighbours the Gauls”[16] (two of whose heads were shewn copied from Roman monuments,) were Bearded, though, probably, for some purpose of distinction, their Chiefs, as stated by Cæsar and others, had merely an enormous twisted moustache. The Druids and their successors, the native British Clergy, regarded this natural covering as adding to their dignity and gracing their office and their age.[17]