poisoned. The next was Clement V., in whom, for the first time, the Church sank into the abject tool of secular tyranny. With him commenced that new era of the Papacy, which made it the horror and disgust of the then rapidly improving European mind, until the Reformation and its consequences closed the period which we commonly call the middle age.

We know it may be said, that, long before this time, venality was a current and merited accusation against the Papal court. We often find Rome denounced, by the indignation of contemporaries, as a market in which every thing might be bought. All periods of supposed purity in the administration of human affairs are the dreams of a golden age. We well know that there was only occasionally a Pope who acted consistently on any high ideal of the pontifical character; that many were sordid and vicious, and those who were not, had often sordid and vicious. persons around them. Who can estimate the extent to which the power of the Church, for realizing the noble aims of its more illustrious ornaments, was crippled and made infirm by these shortcomings? But, to the time of Innocent III., and even of Boniface VIII., we are unable to doubt that it was on the whole a source of good, and of such good as could not have been provided, for that age, by any other means with which we can conceive such an age to be compatible.

Among the Epochs in the progressive movement of middle-age history, which M. Michelet has been the first to bring clearly and vividly before us, there is none more interesting than the great awakening of the human mind which immediately followed the period of the First Crusade. Others before him had pointed out the influence of the Crusade in generating the feeling of a common Christendom; in counteracting the localizing influence of the feudal institutions, and raising up a kind of republic of chivalry and Christianity; in drawing closer the ties between chiefs and vassals, or even serfs, by the need which they mutually experienced of each other's services; in giving to the rude barons of Western Europe a more varied range of ideas, and a taste for at least the material civilization, which they beheld for the first time in the dominions of the Greek Emperors and the Saracen Soldans. M. Michelet remarks, that the effect even upon the religion of the time, was to soften its antipathies and weaken its superstitions. The hatred of Mussulmans was far less intense after the Crusade than at the beginning of it. The notion of a peculiar sanctity inherent in places, was greatly weakened when Christians had become the masters of the Holy Sepulchre, and found themselves neither better nor happier in consequence.

But these special results bear no proportion to the general start which was taken, about this time, by the human mind, and which, though it cannot be ascribed to the Crusade, was without doubt greatly favoured by it. That remarkable expedition was the first great event of modern times, which had an European and a Christian interest-an interest not of nation, or place, or rank, but which the lowest serfs had in common, and more than in common, with the loftiest barons. When the soil is moved, all sorts of seeds fructify. The serfs now began to think themselves human beings. The beginning of the great popular political movement of the middle ages--the formation of the Communesis almost coincident with the First Crusade. Some fragments of the eminently dramatic history of this movement are related in the concluding portion of M. Thierry's Letters on the History 'of France.' Contemporaneously with this temporal enfranchisement began the emancipation of the human mind. Formidable heresies broke out it was the era of Berengarius, who doubted Transubstantiation-of Roscelinus, the founder of Nominalism, and questioner of the received doctrine respecting the Trinity. The very answers of the orthodox to these heretical writings, as may be seen in M. Michelet,* were lessons of free-thinking. The principle of free speculation found a still more remarkable representative, though clear of actual heresy, in the most celebrated of the schoolmen, Abailard. The popularity and European influence of his rationalizing metaphysics, as described by contemporary authorities, must surprise those who conceive the age as one of rare and difficult communications, and without interest in letters. To silence this one man, required the eminent religious ascendency of the most illustrious churchman of the age, Bernard of Clairvaux. The acquirements and talents of the noble-minded woman, whose name is linked for all time with that of Abailard—a man, so far as we have the means of judging, not her superior even in intellect, and in every other respect unworthy of her-are illustrative of M. Michelet's views on the change which was taking place in the social condition and estimation of women :—

The restoration of woman, which had commenced with Christianity, took place chiefly in the twelfth century. A slave in the East, even in the Greek gynæceum a recluse, emancipated by the jurisprudence of the Roman empire, she was recognized by the new religion as the equal of man. Still Christianity, but just escaped from the sensuality of Paganism, dreaded woman, and distrusted her; or rather, men were conscious

* Vol. ii. pp. 279, 280.

of weakness, and endeavoured by hardness and scornfulness to fortify themselves against their strongest temptation. . . When Gregory VII. aimed at detaching the clergy from the ties of a worldly life, there was a new outburst of feeling against that dangerous Eve, whose seductions had ruined Adam, and still pursued him in his sons.

A movement in the contrary direction commenced in the twelfth century. Free mysticism undertook to upraise what sacerdotal severity had dragged in the mire. It was especially a Breton, Robert d'Arbrissel, who fulfilled this mission of love. He re-opened to women the bosom of Christ; he founded asylums for them; he built Fontévrault; and there were soon other Fontévraults throughout Christendom. . There took place insensibly a great religious revolution. The Virgin became the deity of the world: she usurped almost all the temples and the altars. Piety turned itself into an enthusiasm of chivalrous gallantry. The mother of God was proclaimed pure and without taint. The Church of Lyons, always mystical in its tendencies, celebrated, in 1134, the feast of the Immaculate Conception-thus exalting woman in the character of divine maternity, at the precise time when Héloïse was giving expression, in her letters, to the pure disinterestedness of love. Woman reigned in heaven, and reigned on earth. We see her taking a part, and a leading part, in the affairs of the world.. . Louis VII. dates his acts from the coronation of his wife Adela. Women sat as judges not only in poetical contests and courts of love, but, with and on a par with their husbands, in serious affairs: the King of France expressly recognized it as their right. . . . Excluded up to that time from successions by the feudal barbarism, they every where became admitted to them in the first half of the twelfth century in England, in Castile, in Arragon, at Jerusalem, in Burgundy, Flanders, Hainault, Vermandois, Aquitaine, Provence, and the Lower Languedoc. The rapid extinction of males, the softening of manners, and the progress of equity, re-opened inheritances to women. They transported sovereignties into foreign houses, accelerated the agglomeration of states, and prepared the consolidation of great monarchies.'-(Vol. ii. pp. 297– 302.)

We

Half a century further on, the scene is changed. A new act of the great drama is now transacting. The seeds, scattered fifty years before, have grown up and overshadow the world. are no longer in the childhood, but in the stormy youth of free speculation :

The face of the world was sombre at the close of the twelfth century. The old order was in peril, and the new had not yet begun. It was no longer the mere material struggle of the Pope and the emperor, chasing each other alternately from Rome, as in the days of Henry IV. and Gregory VII. In the eleventh century the evil was on the surface; in 1200, at the core. A deep and terrible malady had seized upon Christendom. Gladly would it have consented to return to the quarrel of investitures, and have had to combat only on the question of the ring and crosier. In Gregory's time, the cause of the Church was the cause

of liberty; it had maintained that character to the time of Alexander III., the chief of the Lombard league. But Alexander himself had not dared to support Thomas Becket; he had defended the liberties of Italy, and betrayed those of England. The Church was about to detach herself from the great movement of the world. Instead of preceding and guiding it, as she had done hitherto, she strove to fix it, to arrest time on its passage, to stop the earth which was revolving under her feet. Innocent III. seemed to succeed in the attempt; Boniface VIII. perished in it.

A solemn moment, and of infinite sadness. The hopes which inspired the Crusade had abandoned the earth. Authority no longer seemed unassailable; it had promised, and had deceived. Liberty began to dawn, but in a hundred fantastical and repulsive shapes, confused and convulsive, multiform, deformed.

In this spiritual anarchy of the twelfth century, which the irritated and trembling Church had to attempt to govern, one thing shone forth above others a prodigiously audacious sentiment of the moral power and greatness of man. The hardy expression of the Pelagians--" Christ had nothing more than I; I, too, by virtue, can raise myself to divinity" -is reproduced in the twelfth century in barbarous and mystical forms. .. A Messiah appears

Messiahs every where arise.

in Antwerp, and all the populace follow him; another, in Bretagne, seems to revive the ancient gnosticism of Ireland. Amaury of Chartres, and his Breton disciple, David of Dinan, teach that every Christian is materially a member of Christ; in other words, that God is perpetually incarnated in the human race. The Son, say they, has reigned long enough; let the Holy Ghost now reign. Nothing equals

the audacity of these doctors, who mostly teach in the University of Paris, (authorized by Philippe-Auguste in 1200.) Abailard, supposed to be crushed, lives and speaks in his disciple Peter Lombard, who from Paris gives the law to European philosophy; they reckon nearly five hundred commentators upon this schoolman. The spirit of innovation has now acquired two powerful auxiliaries. Jurisprudence is growing up by the side of theology, which it undermines; the Popes forbid the clergy to be professors of law, and, by so doing, merely open public teaching to laymen. The metaphysics of Aristotle are brought from Constantinople, while his commentators, imported from Spain, will presently be translated from the Arabic by order of the kings of Castile, and the Italian princes of the house of Suabia, Frederic II., and Manfred. This is no less than the invasion of Greece and the East into Christian philosophy. Aristotle takes his place almost beside the Saviour. At first prohibited by the Popes, afterwards tolerated, he reigns in the professorial chairs: Aristotle publicly, secretly the Arabs and the Jews, with the pantheism of Averroes and the subtleties of the Cabala. Dialectics enters into possession of all subjects, and stirs up all the boldest questions. Simon of Tournai teaches at pleasure the pour and the contre. One day when he had delighted the school of Paris, by proving marvellously the truth of the Christian religion, he suddenly exclaimed,

"O little Jesus, little Jesus! how I have glorified thy law! If I chose, I could still more easily depreciate it." (Vol. ii. pp. 392-396.)

He then vigorously sketches the religious enthusiasts of Flanders and the Rhine, the Vaudois of the Alps, and the Albigeois of Southern France, and proceeds :—

What must not have been, in this danger of the Church, the trouble and inquietude of its visible head?

The Pope at that time was a Roman, Innocent III.: a man fitted to the time. A great lawyer, accustomed on all questions to consult established right, he examined himself, and believed that the right was on his side. And, in truth, the Church had still in her favour the immense majority-the voice of the people, which is that of God. She had actual possession, ancient, so ancient that it might be deemed prescriptive. The Church was the defendant in the cause, the recognized proprietor, who was in present occupancy, and had the title-deeds; the written law seemed to speak for her. The plaintiff was human intellect; but it came too late, and, in its inexperience, took the wrong road, chicaning on texts instead of invoking principles. If asked what it would have, it could make no intelligible answer. All sorts of confused voices called for different things, and most of the assailants wished to retrograde rather than to advance. In politics, their ideas were modelled on the ancient republics; that is, town liberties, to the exclusion of the country. In religion, some wished to suppress the externals of worship, and revert, as they said, to the Apostles; others went further back, and returned to the Asiatic spirit, contending for two gods, or preferring the strict unity of Islamism.'-(Pp. 419-21.)

And, after describing the popular detestation which pursued these heretics-

Such appeared at that time the enemies of the Church-and the Church was people'-(l'église était peuple.) The prejudices of the people, the sanguinary intoxication of their hatred and their terror, ascended through all ranks of the clergy to the Pope himself. It would be too unjust to human nature to deem that egoism or class-interest alone animated the chiefs of the Church. No-all indicates, that in the thirteenth century they were still convinced of their right. That right admitted, all means seemed good to them for defending it. Not for a mere human interest did St Dominic traverse the regions of the south, alone and unarmed, in the midst of a sectarian population whom he doomed to death, courting martyrdom with the same avidity with which he inflicted it; and, whatever may have been in the great and terrible Innocent III. the temptations of pride and vengeance, other motives animated him in the crusade against the Albigeois and the foundation of the Dominican Inquisition.'-(Pp. 422, 3.)

The temporal means by which the Church obtained a brief respite from the dangers which beset it, consisted in letting loose against the rich and heretical South, the fanaticism and rapacity