of the North. The spiritual expedient, far the more potent of the two, was the foundation of the Mendicant Orders.

We are too much accustomed to figure to ourselves what are called religious revivals, as a feature peculiar to Protestantism and to recent times. The phenomenon is universal. In no Christian church has the religious spirit flowed like a perennial fountain; it had ever its flux and reflux, like the tide. Its history is a series of alternations between religious laxity and religious earnestness. Monkery itself, in the organized form impressed upon it by St Benedict, was one of the incidents of a religious revival. We have already spoken of the great revival under Hildebrand. Ranke has made us understand the religious revival within the pale of Romanism itself, which turned back the advancing torrent of the Reformation. As this was characterized by the foundation of the order of Jesuits, so were the Franciscans and Dominicans the result of a similar revival, and became its powerful instrument.

The mendicant orders-especially the most popular of them, the Franciscans-were the offspring of the freethinking which had already taken strong root in the European mind; but the freedom which they represented was freedom in alliance with the Church, rising up against the freedom which was at enmity with the Church, and anathematizing it. What is called, in France, mysticism-in England, religious enthusiasm-consists essentially in looking within instead of without; in relying upon an internal revelation from God to the individual believer, and receiving its principal inspirations from that, rather than from the authority of priests and teachers. St Francis of Assisi was such a man. Disowned by the Church, he might have been a heresiarch instead of a saint; but the Church needed men like him, and had the skill to make its instrument of the spirit which was preparing its destruction. In proportion to the decline of authority,' says M. Michelet, and the diminution of the priestly influence ' on the popular mind, religious feeling, being no longer under the restraint of forms, expanded itself into mysticism.'* Making room for these mystics in the ecclesiastical system itself, directing their enthusiasm into the path for which it peculiarly qualified them, that of popular preaching, and never parting with the power of repressing any dangerous excess in those whom it retained in its allegiance, the Papacy could afford to give them the rein, and indulge within certain limits their most unsacerdotal preference of grace to the law.

VOL. LXXIX. NO. CLIX.

* Vol. iii. p. 195,

The career and character of St Francis and his early followers are graphically delineated by M. Michelet.* As usual with devotees of his class, his great practical precept was the love of God; love which sought all means of demonstrating itself-now by ecstasies, now by austerities- like those of an Indian fakeer-but also by love and charity to all creatures. In all things which had life, and in many which had not, he recognized children of God: he invoked the birds to join in gratitude and praise; he parted with his cloak to redeem a lamb from the slaughter. His followers wandered barefooted over Europe, always run after by the crowd: in their sermons, they brought the sacred mysteries, as it were, on the stage; laughing at Christmas, weeping on Good Friday, developing, without reserve, all that Christianity possesses of dramatic elements.' The effect of such a band of missionaries must have been great in rousing and feeding dormant devotional feelings; they were not less influential in regulating those feelings, and turning into the established catholic channels those vagaries of private enthusiasm which might well endanger the Church, since they already threatened society itself. The spirit of religious independence had descended to the miserable, and was teaching them that God had not commanded them to endure their misery. It was a lesson for which they were not yet ripe. Mysticism,' says our author, had already produced its most terrible fruit, hatred of the law; the wild enthusiasm of religious and politi'cal liberty. This demagogic character of mysticism, which so 'clearly manifested itself in the Jacqueries of the subsequent ages, especially in the revolt of the Swabian peasants in 1525, and of the Anabaptists in 1538, appeared already in the 'insurrection of the Pastoureaux,' during the reign of St Louis. These unhappy people, who were peasantry of the lowest class, and, like all other insurgents of that class, perished miserablydispersi sunt, et quasi canes rabidi passim detruncati, are the words of Matthew Paris-were avowed enemies of the priests, whom they are said to have massacred, and administered the sacraments themselves. They recognized as their chief, a man whom they called the grand master of Hungary, and who pretended to hold in his hand, which he kept constantly closed, a written commission from the Virgin Mary. So contradictory to history is that superficial notion of the middle ages, which looks upon the popular mind as strictly orthodox, and implicitly obedient to the Pope.

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* Vol. ii. pp. 538-543.

† Ib. 579.

Though the Papacy survived, in apparently undiminished splendour, the crisis of which we have now spoken, the mental ascendency of the priesthood was never again what it had been before. The most orthodox of the laity, even men whom the Church has canonized, were now comparatively emancipated; they thought with the Church, but they no longer let the Church think for them. This change in the times is exemplified in the character of St Louis-himself a lay brother of the Franciscan order; perhaps of all kings the one whose religious conscience was the most scrupulous, yet who learned his religious duty from his own strong and upright judgment, not from his confessor, nor from the Pope. He never shrank from resisting the Church when he had right on his side; and was himself a better sample, than any Pope contemporary with him, of the religious character of his age. The influences of the mystical spirit are easily discernible in his remarkable freedom, so rare in that age, from the slavery of the letter; which, as many anecdotes prove, he was always capable of sacrificing to the spirit, when any conflict arose between them.*

We are obliged to pass rapidly over some other topics, which justice to M. Michelet forbids us entirely to omit. We could extract many passages more illustrative than those we have quoted of his powers as a writer and an artist; such as the highly finished sketch of the greatness and ruin of the unfortunate house of Hohenstaufen. We prefer to quote the remarks, of greater philosophical interest, with which he winds up one great period of history, and introduces another.

The Crusade of St Louis was the last Crusade. The middle age had produced its ideal, its flower, and its fruit: the time was come for it to perish. In Philippe-le-Bel, grandson of St Louis, modern times commence the middle age is insulted in Boniface VIII., the Crusade burned at the stake in the persons of the Templars.

Crusades will be talked about for some time longer, the word will be often repeated; it is a sounding word, good for levying tenths and taxes. But princes, nobles, and popes know well, among themselves, what to think of it. In 1327, we find the Venetian, Sanuto, proposing to the Pope a commercial crusade. "It is not enough," he said, " to invade Egypt," he proposed "to ruin it." The means he urged was to reopen to the Indian trade the channel of Persia, so that merchandize might no longer pass through Alexandria and Damietta. Thus does the modern spirit announce its approach: trade, not religion, will soon become the moving principle of great expeditions.'—(Vol. ii. pp. 607, 8.)

* Vol. ii. p.

612.

† Ib. 587-589.

And further on, after quoting the bitter denunciation of Dante. against the royal family of France

This furious Ghibelline invective, full of truth and of calumny, is the protest of the old perishing world against the ugly new world which succeeds it. This new world begins towards 1300; it opens with France, and with the odious figure of Philippe-le-Bel.

When the French monarchy, founded by Philippe-Auguste, became extinguished in Louis XVI., at least it perished in the immense glory of a young republic, which, at its first onset, vanquished and revolutionized Europe. But the poor middle age, its Papacy, its chivalry, its feudality, under what hands did they perish? Under those of the attorney, the fraudulent bankrupt, the false coiner.

one.

The bitterness of the poet is excusable; this new world is a repulsive If it is more legitimate than that which it replaces, what eye, even that of a Dante, could see this at the time? It is the offspring of the decrepit Roman law, of the old imperial fiscality. It is born a lawyer, a usurer; it is a born Gascon, Lombard, and Jew.

What is most revolting in this modern system, represented especially by France, is its perpetual self-contradiction, its instinctive duplicity, the naïve hypocrisy, so to speak, with which it attests by turns its two sets of principles, Roman and feudal. France looks like a lawyer in a cuirass, an attorney clad in mail; she employs the feudal power to execute the sentences of the Roman and canon law. If this obedient daughter of the Church seizes upon Italy and chastises the Church, she chastises her as a daughter, obliged in conscience to correct her mother's misconduct.'-(Vol. iii. pp. 31, 2.)

Yet this revolting exterior is but the mask of a great and necessary transformation; the substitution of legal authority in the room of feudal violence and the arbitrium of the seigneur; the formation, in short, for the first time, of a government. This government could not be carried on without money. The feudal jurisdictions, the feudal armies, cost nothing to the treasury; the wages of all feudal services were the land: but the king's judges and administrators, of whom he has now a host, must all be paid. It is not the fault of this government if it is 'greedy and ravenous. Ravenousness is its nature, its necessity, the foundation of its temperament. To satisfy this, it must alternately make use of cunning and force: the prince must be ' at once the Reynard and Isengrim of the old satire. To do him 'justice, he is not a lover of war: he prefers any other means of acquisition-purchase, for instance, or usury. He traffics, he buys, he exchanges; these are means by which the strong man ' can honourably plunder his weaker friends.'*

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* Vol. iii. p. 42.

This need of money was, for several centuries, the primum mobile of European history. In England, it is the hinge on which our constitutional history has wholly turned in France and elsewhere, it was the source, from this time forward, of all quarrels between the Kings and the Church. The clergy alone were rich, and money must be had. The confiscation of Church 'property was the idea of kings from the thirteenth century. The only difference is, that the Protestants took, and the Catholics made the Church give. Henry VIII. had recourse to schism-Francis I. to the Concordat. Who, in the fourteenth century, the King or the Church, was thenceforth to prey upon France ?-that was the question.'-(Vol. iii. p. 50.)

To get money, was the purpose of Philip's quarrel with Boniface; to get money, he destroyed the Templars.

His view of

The proceedings against this celebrated Society occupy two most interesting chapters of M. Michelet's work. the subject seems just and reasonable.

The suppression of the Order, if this had been all, was both inevitable and justifiable. Since the Crusades had ceased, and the crusading spirit died out, their existence and their vast wealth were grounded on false pretences. Among the mass of calumnies which, in order to make out a case for their destruction, their oppressor accumulated against them, there were probably some truths. It is not in the members of rich and powerful bodies which have outlived the ostensible purposes of their exis tence, that high examples of virtue need be sought. But it was not their private misconduct, real or imputed, that gave most aid to royal rapacity in effecting their ruin. What roused opinion against them what gave something like a popular sanction to that atrocious trial in its early stages, before the sufferings and constancy of the victims had excited a general sympathy, was, according to our author, a mere mistake-a mal-entendu, arising from a change in the spirit of the times.

The

The forms of reception into the Order were borrowed from the whimsical dramatic rites, the mysteries, which the ancient Church did not dread to connect with the most sacred doctrines and objects. The candidate for admission was presented in the character of a sinner, a bad Christian, a renegade. In imitation of St Peter, he denied Christ; the denial was pantomimically represented by spitting on the cross. Order undertook to restore this renegade-to lift him to a height as great as the depth to which he had fallen. Thus, in the Feast of Fools, man offered to the Church which was to regenerate him, the homage even of his imbecility, of his infamy. These religious comedies, every day less understood, became more and more dangerous, more capable of scandalizing a prosaic age, which saw only the letter, and lost the meaning of the symbol.'-(Vol. iii. pp. 127, 128.)