HISTORY OF LATIN CHRISTIANITY. BOOK XIV. CHAPTER I. FROM the reign of Nicolas V. and the close of our history, as from a high vantage-ground, we must survey the whole realm of Latin Christendom-the political and social state, as far as the relation of Latin Christianity to the great mass of mankind; the popular religion, with its mythology; the mental development in philosophy, letters, arts. Eight centuries and a half had elapsed since the Pontificate of Gregory the Great-the epoch of the supreme dominion of Latin Christianity in the West. The great division of mankind, which at that time had become complete and absolute, into the Clergy (including the Monks, in later days the Friars) and the rest of mankind, still subsisted in all its rigorous force. They were two castes, separate and standing apart as by the irrepealable law of God. They were distinct, adverse, even antagonistic, in their theory of life, in their laws, in their corporate property, in their rights, in their immunities. In the aim and object of their existence, in their social duties and position, they were set asunder by a broad, VOL. IX. B deep, impassable line. But the ecclesiastical caste being bound, at least by its law, to celibacy, in general could not perpetuate its race in the ordinary course of nature; it was renewed by drawing forth from the laity men either endowed with or supposed to be trained to a peculiar mental turn, those in whom the intellectual capacity predominated over the physical force. Religion, which drove many out of the world within the sacred circle, might be a sentiment, a passion, an unthinking and unreasoning impulse of the inward being; holy ignorance might be the ambition, the boast of some monks, and of the lower friars; but in general the commission to teach the religion implied (though itself an infused gift or grace, and the inseparable consequence of legitimate consecration to the office) some superiority of mind. At all events the body was to be neglected, sacrificed, subdued, in order that the inner being might ripen to perfection. The occupations of the clergy were to be in general sedentary, peaceful, quiescent. Their discipline tended still further to sift, as it were, this more intellectual class: the dull and negligent sunk into the lower offices, or, if belonging by their aristocratic descent to the higher, they obtained place and influence only by their race and connexions, wealth and rank by unclerical powers of body and of mind. These were ecclesiastics by profession, temporal princes, even soldiers, by character and life. But this, according to the strict theory of the clerical privilege, was an abuse, an usurpation. Almost all minds which were gifted with or conscious of great intellectual capacity, unless kings, or nobles, or knights, whose talents might lead to military distinction, appeared predestined for, were irresistibly drawn into, or were dedicated by their prescient parents or guardians to the Church. The younger sons, especially the illegitimate sons, even of kings, far more of princes and nobles, were devoted, as the Church became wealthy and powerful, to this career as a provision. But even with this there either was, or according to general opinion there ought to have been, some vocation and some preparation : many of these were among the ablest, some even among the most austere and pious of churchmen. The worst, if they did not bring the more fitting qualifications, brought connexion, famous names (in feudal times of great importance), and thus welded together, as it were, the Church with the State. Education. Education, such as it was (and in many cases for the times it was a high education), had become, with rare exceptions, their exclusive privilege. Whoever had great capacities or strong thirst for knowledge could neither obtain nor employ it but in the peaceful retirement, under the sacred character, with the special advantages of the churchman, or in the cloister. The whole domain of the human intellect was their possession. The universities, the schools, were theirs, and theirs only. There the one strife was between the secular clergy and the regulars-the monks, or the friars the disciples of S. Dominic and S. Francis. They were the canon lawyers, and for some centuries, as far as it was known or in use, the teachers and professors of the civil law. They were the historians, the poets, the philosophers. It was the first omen of their endangered supremacy that the civil lawyers in France rose against them in bold rivalry. When in the Empire the study of the old Roman law developed principles of greater antiquity, therefore, it was asserted, of greater authority than the canon law, it was at once a sign and a proof that their absolute dominion was drawing towards its close-that human intellect was finding another road to distinction and power. Physical science alone, in general, though with some famous exceptions, they unwisely declined they would not risk the popular suspicion of magical and forbidden arts-a superstition which themselves indulged and encouraged. The profound study of the human body was thought inconsistent with the fastidious modesty of their profession. The perfection of medicine and of all cognate inquiries, indeed in general of natural philosophy itself, was left to Jews and Arabs : the great schools of medicine, Montpellier and Salerno, as they derived their chief wisdom from these sources, so they freely admitted untonsured, perhaps unbaptised, students. It is difficult to calculate the extent of this medical influence, which must have worked, if in secret, still with great power. The jealousy and hatred with which Jews or supposed unbelievers are seen at the courts of kings is a secret witness to that influence. length we find the king's physician, as under Louis XI., the rival in authority of the king's confessor. In this alone the hierarchical caste does not maintain its almost exclusive dominion over all civil as well as ecclesiastical transactions. At For it is not only from their sacred character, but from their intellectual superiority, that they are in the courts, in the councils, of kings; that they are the negotiators, the ambassadors of sovereigns; they alone can read and draw up state papers, compacts, treaties, or frame laws. Writing is almost their special mystery; the notaries, if not tonsured, as they mostly were, are directed, ordered by the Clergy: they are in general the servants and agents of ecclesiastics. In every king a The observant Chaucer gives the converse. Physicians were even then under the evil fame of irreligion. "His studie was but littel on the Bible." Prologue on the Doctor of Physique. dom of Europe the Clergy form one of the estates, balance or blindly lead the nobles; and this too not merely as churchmen and enrolled in the higher service of God, but from their felt and acknowledged pre-eminence in the administration of temporal affairs. To this recognised intellectual superiority-arising out of the power of selecting the recruits for their army according to their mental stature, their sole possession of the discipline necessary to train such men for their loftier position, and the right of choosing, as it were, their officers out of this chosen few--must be added their spiritual authority, their indefeasible power of predeclaring the eternal destiny of every living layman. To doubt the sentence of that eternal destiny was now an effort of daring as rare as it was abhorrent to the common sense of men. Those who had no religion had superstition; those who believed not trembled and were silent; the speculative unbeliever, if there were such, shrouded himself in secrecy from mankind, even from himself: the unuttered lawless thought lay deep in his own heart. Those who openly doubted the unlimited power of the clergy to absolve were sects, outcasts of society, proscribed not only by the detestation of the clergy, but by the popular hatred. The keys of heaven and hell were absolutely in the hands of the priesthood -even more, in this life they were not without influence. In the events of war, in the distribution of earthly misery or blessing, abundance or famine, health or pestilence, they were the intercessors with the saints, as the saints were intercessors with heaven. They were invested in a kind of omniscience. Confession, since the decree of the Lateran Council under Innocent III., an universal, obligatory, indispensable duty, laid open the whole heart of every one, from the Emperor to the peasant, before |