the priesthood; the entire moral being of man, undistinguishable from his religious being, was under their supervision and control, asserted on one side, acknowledged on the other. No act was beyond their cognisance, no act, hardly any thought, was secret. They were at once a government and a police, to which every one was bound to inform against himself, to be the agent of the most rigid self-delation, to endure the closest scrutiny, to be denied the least evasion or equivocation, to be submitted to the moral torture of menaced, of dreaded damnation if he concealed or disguised the truth, to undergo the most crushing, humiliating penance. Absolution, after which the soul thirsted with insatiable thirst, might be delayed, held in suspense, refused; if granted it was of inestimable price. The sacraments, absolutely necessary to spiritual life, were at their disposal. Baptism to the infant would hardly be refused; but the Eucharist, Christ himself offered on the altar, God made by consecrated hands, God materialised down to the rudest apprehension, could be granted or withheld according to the arbitrary, irresponsible judgement of the priest. The body, after death, might repose in consecrated ground with the saints, or be cast out, to be within the domain, the uncontested prey of devils. The Excommunication cut the man off, whatever his rank or station, from the Church, beyond whose pale was utter impossibility of salvation. No one could presume to have hope for a man who died under excommunication. Such were the inculcated, by most recognised, at least apprehended, doctrines. The Interdict, the special prerogative of the Pope, as the antagonist, the controller of Sovereigns, smote a kingdom with spiritual desolation, during which the niggardly and imperfect rites, the baptism sparingly administered, the rest of the life without any religious

ceremony, the extreme unction or the last sacrament coldly vouchsafed to the chosen few, the churchyard closed against the dead, seemed to consign a whole nation, a whole generation, to irrevocable perdition.

Thus throughout the world no man could stand alone; the priest was the universal lord of the universal human conscience. The inward assurance of faith, of rectitude, of virtue, of love of man or love of God, without the ratification of the confessor; the witness of the spirit within, unless confirmed, avouched by the priest, was nothing. Without the passport to everlasting life, everlasting life must recede from the hopes, from the attainment of man. And by a strange yet perhaps unavoidable anomaly, the sacredness of the priest was inalienable, indelible, altogether irrespective of his life, his habits, his personal holiness or unholiness. There might be secret murmurs at the avarice, pride, licentiousness of the priest; public opinion might even in some cases boldly hold him up to shame and obloquy, he was still priest, bishop, pope; his sacraments lost not their efficacy, his verdict of condemnation or absolution was equally valid; all the acts of John XXIII., till his deposal, were the acts of the successor of St. Peter. And if this triumph over the latent moral indignation of mankind was the manifestation of its strength, so its oppugnancy to that indignation was its fall; it was the premonition, the proclamation of its silent abrogation in the hearts of men. The historian has to state the fact, rather than curiously and judicially to balance the good and evil (for good there undoubtedly was, vast good in such ages of class tyrannising over class, of unintermitting war on a wide or a narrow scale, of violence, lawlessness, brutality) in this universal sacerdotal domination.

It is impossible to estimate the fluctuating proportion

Monks and

between these two castes of the Christian population to each other. The number of the Secular Clergy Friars. was of course, to a certain extent, limited by the spiritual wants of the community and the means of maintenance. But it comprehended within the sacred circle of immunity and privilege a vast host of unenrolled and subordinate retainers, those who had received for some purpose of their own, some who in the ruder ages had been compelled to take the simple tonsure, some admitted to what were called the lower orders, and who in all large churches, as subdeacons, acolyths, singers, were very numerous, down to those who held more menial offices, sacristans, beadles, servants of all classes. But there was absolutely nothing to limit the number of Monks, still less that of the Friars in their four Orders, especially the disciples of S. Dominic and S. Francis. No one was too poor or too low to become a privileged and sacred Mendicant. No qualification was necessary but piety or its semblance, and that might too easily be imitated. While these Orders in the Universities boasted of the most erudite and subtle, and all-accomplished of the Schoolmen, they could not disdain or altogether reject those who in the spirit, at least of one of their Founders, maintained the superiority of holy ignorance. Instead of being amazed that the Friars swarmed in such hordes over Christendom, it is rather wonderful that the whole abject and wretched peasantry, rather than be trampled to the earth, or maddened to Flagellantism, Jacquerie, or Communism, did not all turn ablebodied religious Beggars, so the strong English sense of Wycliffe designates the great mass of the lower Franciscans in England. The Orders themselves, as was natural when they became wealthy and powerful, must have repressed rather than encouraged the enrolment of

such persons; instead of prompting to the utmost, they must have made it a distinction, a difficulty, a privilege, to be allowed to enter upon the enjoyment of their comparatively easy, roving, not by all accounts too severe, life. To the serf inured to the scanty fare and not unfrequent famine, the rude toil and miserable lodg ing; and to the peasant with his skin hard to callousness and his weather-beaten frame, the fast, the maceration, even the flagellation of the Friar, if really religious (and) to the religious these self-inflicted miseries were not without their gratification), must have been no very rigorous exchange; while the freedom to the serf, the power of wandering from the soil to which he was bound down, the being his own property, not that of another, must have been a strong temptation. The door must have been closed with some care; some stern examination, probation, or inquiry, must have preceded the initiation and the adoption of brethren into the fraternity, or the still enlarging houses had been too nar row; they would have multiplied into unmanageable numbers. Yet, if more cold and repulsive in the admission of those humbler votaries, the protests of the Universities, and other proofs, show that the more promising and higher youth were sought with ardent proselytism." The property, especially the territorial and landed property of the Hierarchy and the Monastic Orders, it is equally impossible to estimate. It varied, of course, in different ages, and in every kingdom in Christendom.

b On the degenerate state of the Friars the serious prose and the satirical poetry are full of details. Read too the Supplication of Beggars (a later production, temp. Henry VIII.), and the inimitable Colloquies of Eras

mus. One of the reasons alleged at the Council of Trent against submitting the regulars to episcopal discipline was their "numero eccessivo."-Sarpi, lii. p. 158. Ed. Helmstadt.

Nor if we knew at any one time the proportionate extent of Church lands to that not under mortmain, would it be any measure, or any sure criterion, of their relative value. This property, instead of standing secure in its theoretic inalienability, was in a constant fluctuation : the Papal territory itself was frequently during the darker centuries usurped, recovered, granted away, resumed. Throughout Christendom the legal inalienability of Church lands was perpetually assailed in earlier times by bold depredators, and baffled by ingenious devices of granting away the usufruct. We have heard perpetual complaints against these kinds of endowments of their sons or descendants by the married clergy; the unmarried yet dissolute or extravagant beneficiaries, were no doubt as regardless of the sanctity of ecclesiastical property, and as subtle in conveying away its value to their kinsmen, or for their own immediate advantage. Besides all these estates, held in absolute property, was the tithe of the produce of all other lands. The whole sacerdotal system of Latin Christianity, first from analogy, afterwards as direct precedent, assumed all the privileges, powers, rights, endowments of the Levitical priesthood; and thus arraying itself in the irrefragable authority of God's older Word, of which it did not acknowledge the abrogation where its interests were so nearly concerned, claimed the tithe as of inherent, perpetual, divine law. From an early period Christians had been urged to devote this proportion of their wealth to religious uses; a proportion so easy and natural that it had prevailed, and had obtained a prescriptive autho

Hallam has summed up (Middle Ages, c. vii.) with his usual judgement and accuracy what is most im

portant on this subject, in Father Paul, Muratori, Giannone, Fleury, and Schmidt.