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the bishop, he under the archbishop, and the archbishop in turn responsible to the pope, who thus held in his hand the converging reins of ecclesiastical control. While the prelates, each within his respective sphere, were encroaching little by little upon the laity, the Church of Rome was forming and maturing her plans to enthrall both the national churches and the temporal governments. A prime condition of conquest is a replete exchequer. Covetousness was characteristic. Gifts by the rich on assuming the cowl, by some before entering upon military expeditions, bequests by many in the terrors of dissolution; the commutation for money of penance imposed upon repentant offenders, were a few of the various sources of her revenue. No atonement, she taught, could be so acceptable to Heaven as liberal donations to its earthly delegates. The rich widow was surrounded by a swarm of clerical sycophants who addressed her in terms of endearment and, under the guise of piety, lay in wait for a legacy. A special place, it was said, was reserved in purgatory for those who had been slow in paying their tithes. A man who in a contested election for the popedom had supported the wrong candidate, was placed after death in boiling water. The bereft widow, in the first dark hour of anguish, was told that he who was dearer to her than all the world besides, was now writhing in the flames that encircled him, and could be relieved only by a pecuniary present. Masterly adaptation of means to ends. The end of the twelfth century saw the Church at the zenith of territorial possession. She enjoyed nearly one-half of England, and a still greater portion in some countries of the Continent. To her John solemnly resigned his crown, and humbly received it as a fief. But landed acquisitions scarcely contributed so much to her greatness as ecclesiastical jurisdiction and immunity. Her spiritual court, claiming a loftier origin than the civil, acquired absolute exemption from secular authority, and ended by usurping almost the whole administration of justice. Kings were expected to obtain its sanction as a security to their thrones, and to hold those thrones by compliance with its demands. It could try citizens, but ecclesiastics were amenable to it only. The mainspring of her machinery was excommunication and interdict. The former was equivalent to outlawry. The victim was shunned, as one infected with the leprosy, by his servants, his friends, his

family. Two attendants only remained with an excommunicated king of France, and these threw all the meats that passed his table into the fire. By the latter-inflicted perhaps to revenge a wounded pride—a county or a kingdom was under suspension of religious offices; churches were closed, bells silent, and the dead unburied. She also derived material support from the multitudinous monks, who, in return for extensive favors, vied with each other in magnifying the papal supremacy. The thirteenth century was the noonday of her predominance. Rome was once more the Niobe of nations; and kings, as of old, paid her homage. Vast sums from England flowed into her treasury, carried by pilgrims; by suitors with appeals in all manner of disputes; by prelates going thither for consecration and for the confirmation of their elections; by applicants for church preferment, which was almost exclusively at the Pope's disposal, and must be bought; by Italian priests who, pasturing on the richest benefices, drew an annual sum far exceeding the royal revenue. 1300, Boniface VIII, straining to a higher pitch the despotic pretensions of former pontiffs, is said to have appeared at a festival dressed in imperial habits, with two swords borne before him, emblems of his temporal as well as spiritual sovereignty over the earth.

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As the Church rose in splendor, she sank in vice. All her institutions had been noble in their first years, but success had ruined them. The monastic movement, inspired by a strong religious motive, tended to soften every sentiment of pride, to repress all worldly desires, to make preeminent the practice of charity, to give humility a foremost place in the hierarchy of virtues. Every monastery was a focus which radiated benevolence. By the monk, savage nobles were overawed, the poor protected, wayfarers comforted. Legend tells how St. Christopher planted himself, with his little boat, by a bridgeless stream, to ferry over travellers. Not without reward, for once, embarking on a very stormy and dangerous night, at the voice of distress, he received Christ. When hideous leprosy extended its ravages over Europe, while the minds of men were filled with terror by its contagion and supposed supernatural character, monks flocked in multitudes to serve in the hospitals. Sometimes, the legends say, the leper was in a moment transfigured, and he who came in mercy to the

most loathsome of mortals, found himself in the presence of his Lord. As organized later by St. Benedict, the monastery was the asylum of peaceful industry, the refuge of the flying peasant, the retreat of the timid, the abode of the princely, the portal to knowledge and dignity for the inquisitive and ambitious, a field of civilizing activity to the ardent and philanthropic, the symbol of moral power in an age of turbulence and war, the fountain whence issued far and wide a constant stream of missionaries,—often the nucleus of a city, where had been gigantic forests and inhospitable marshes. In the tenth century, when the English Church, inundated by the Danes, had fallen into worldliness and ignorance, Dunstan the reformer saw in vision a tree of wondrous height stretching its branches over Britain, its boughs laden with countless cowls. In the revival of a stricter monasticism, he fancied, lay the remedy for Church abuses. The clergy were displaced by monks, bound by vows to a life of celibacy and religious exercise. Freed ere long by the popes from the control of the bishops, they speedily became ascendant in the Church, and so continued till the Reformation. Parish endowments were transferred to monasteries, of which Dunstan himself established fortyeight, setting an example widely followed in every quarter of the land. Pious, learned, and energetic as were the prelates of William's appointment, they were not English. In language, manner, and sympathy, they were thus severed from the lower priesthood and the people; and the whole influence of the Church was for the moment paralyzed. In the twelfth century a new spirit of devotion woke the slumber of the religious houses, and changed the aspect of town and country. Everywhere men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order. Their rule was one of the most severe mortification and self-denial. Their lives were spent in labor and prayer, and their one frugal daily meal was eaten in silence. They humbly asked for grants of land in the most solitary places, where they could meditate in retirement, amidst desolate moors and the wild gorges of inaccessible mountains. A hundred years later, when the administration of forms had become the sole occupation of the clergy, came the Friars,-Dominicans and Franciscans, to win back the public esteem and reanimate a waning religion.

They called the wind their brother, the water their sister, and poverty their bride. Incapable by the principle of their foundation of possessing estates, they subsisted on alms and pious remunerations. You need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven,' was the scornful reply of Francis to a request for pillows. Only the sick went shod. Oxford Friar, found a pair At night he dreamed that 'Kill, kill!' I am a Friar,'

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of shoes one morning, and wore them. robbers leaped on him, with shouts of shrieked the terror-stricken brother. 'You lie,' was the instant answer, 'for you go shod.' In disproof he lifted up his foot, saw the shoe, and in an agony of repentance flung the pair out of the window. Says a contemporary:

'The Lord added, not so much a new order, as renewed the old, raised the fallen, and revived religion, now almost dead, in the evening of the world, hastening to its end, in the near time of the Son of Perdition. . . . They have no monasteries or churches, no fields, or vines, or beasts, or houses, or lands, or even where they may lay their head. They wear no furs or linen, only woolen gowns with a hood; no head-coverings, or cloaks, or mantles, or any other garments have they. If any one invite them, they eat and drink what is set before them. If any one, in charity, give them anything, they keep nothing of it to the morrow.'

Self-sacrificing love, for Christ, was the sum of their lives, food and shelter their reward. The recluse of the cloister was exchanged for the preacher. As the older orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. In frocks of serge and girdles of rope, they wandered bare-foot on errands of salvation, fixed themselves in haunts where fever and pestilence festered, in huts of mud and timber mean as the huts around them. Το the burgher and artisan, who had heard the mass-priest in an unknown tongue, spelling out what instruction they might from gorgeous ritual and graven wall, their preaching, fluent and familiar, was a wonder and a delight. Not deviating from the current faith, they professed rather to teach it in greater purity, while they imputed supineness and debasement to the secular clergy. They addressed the crowd in the public streets, with fervid appeal, rough wit, or telling anecdote, and administered the communion on a portable altar, carrying the multitude by their enthusiasm and novelty. Disinterested sincerity is at all times attractive to the popular heart, and, when associated with the hopes and fears of life, is irresistible. These Methodists started a revolution. There will be another such five hundred years hence. Had they been as faithful to their mission as the Wesleys to theirs, it had

been well. Seeing their power to move the masses, the pontiffs accumulated privileges upon them. The bishops were ordered to secure them a hearty reception. They were exempted from episcopal supervision; were permitted to preach or hear confessions without leave of the ordinary, to accept legacies, to inter any who desired it in their enclosure. The door was thus open to wealth, and wealth brought ruin. Even so early as 1243, Matthew Paris writes of them:

'It is only twenty-four years since they built their first houses in England, and now they raise buildings like palaces, and show their boundless wealth by making them daily more sumptuous, with great rooms and lofty ceilings, impudently transgressing the vows of poverty which are the very basis of their order. If a great or rich man is like to die, they take care to crowd in, to the injury and slight of the, clergy, that they may hunt up money, extort confessions, and make secret wills, always seeking the good of their order, as their one end. They have got it believed that no one can hope to be saved if he do not follow the Dominicans or Franciscans. They are restless in trying to get privileges; to get the ear of kings and princes, to be chamberlains, treasurers, bridesmen, and match-makers, and agents of papal extortions. In their preaching, they either flatter or abuse without bounds, or reveal confessions, or gabble nonsense.'

So had it ever been,-so, under a similar constitution, must it ever be. Vast societies living in enforced celibacy, exercising an unbounded influence, and possessing enormous riches, inevitably become hot-beds of corruption, when the zeal that created them expires. Monk, friar, clergy, pope, and Church reached ultimately one level. You are a worthy man, though you be a priest,' says a female speaker in a poem of the times. A bishop of the thirteenth century, while consecrating a church, was addressed by the devil, who stood behind the altar in a pontifical vestment: Cease from consecrating the church; for it pertaineth to my jurisdiction, since it is built from the fruits of usuries and robberies.' To give money to the priests was the chief article of the moral code, the surest means of atoning for crime and gaining Paradise. The ecclesiastical courts were perennial fountains, feeding the ecclesiastical coffers. Instituted to visit with temporal penalties the breach of the moral law, they were implements of mischief, a public scandal and oppression, when saints had ceased to wield them. So corrupt were both priests and monks, that an English bishop had to forbid those of his diocese from 'haunting taverns, gambling, or drinking, and from rioting or debauchery.' The common degeneracy was the normal result of the profound corruption at the centre of the Church-the See of Rome. Says Dante, addressing the popes:

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