49 II. ing;40 of their vagrancy, their living with concubines, CHAP. their drunkenness and gluttony; their disregard of the appointed fasting days; their being even more earnest than secular persons in unlawful sports." 50 But this honest prelate maintained zealous struggles with the popedom itself on two great abuses of its arrogated authority: one was, its granting dispensations to hold several ecclesiastical benefices, in order to enrich its dependents or favorites, without any regard to the spiritual welfare of those who were thus sacrificed to mercenary pretenders. The other scandal which he reprobated, was the Pope's assumption of the right of appointing whom he pleased to vacant livings in every country,52 and the unhesi 51 49 We send you here two monks, one taken in adultery, and the other as having confessed it; both just like laymen, venationi et sagittationi solebant intendere.' Ep. Abb. Fl. p. 343. 50 See his Ep. p. 382, 3. The incontinent clergy might, however, fairly ascribe some part of their vicious habits to their ruling superiors, for in the decretals of Gratian, which, tho nearly surreptitious, were upheld in credit by the papacy, it is actually laid down on the alleged authority of a council at Toledo, Qui non habet uxorem, loco illius, concubinam DEBET habere.' Dict. 34. Ed. Paris. 1519. 51 He advises H. Pattishul not to be misled by the delusion of obtaining a dispensation to hold so many ecclesiastical benefices. p. 324. He resisted Cardinal Otho's request for such grants, and reminds him that spiritual appointments should not be given nec humana gratia, nec humano favore, seu timore.' p. 354. He refused to license the friend of cardinal St. Eustachius to be in his service, while another priest was employed in his vicarage. 349. Erasmus complained that in his time some ecclesiastics were so heavy laden with preferments and pluralities, that they could not walk upright under them. Jortin's Eras. v. 2. p. 424. We can hardly believe what we read, of the extent to which this abuse was carried. Yet N. Clamangius, in 1398, wrote of the Cardinals, that their avidity was so great, as to become both monks and canons, to have a greater accumulation of benefices. They have them from all the religious orders, not only two, three, ten or twenty, but even a hundred and two hundred, nay, sometimes four hundred or five hundred, or more; and these, non parva, vel tenuia, sed omnium pinguissima et optima.' p. 559. 52 Grostete could not deny that the pope had this power, even non requisito prius patronum assensu;' but he remarks that great scandal would arise if he exerted it. Yet he adds, that soon after his own BOOK tating practice of nominating to them even children. under age. 53 II. These corruptions, which the most Catholic saint of the twelfth century, and our most patriotic bishop of the thirteenth, so forcibly censured, were of those species of evils which defy vindication, and are certain to produce both self-perpetuation and an offspring more deteriorated. But truth compels us to remark, that altho rooted in the hierarchy, and never expunged from it until after the English and German Reformation, they did not spring naturally from it, nor from the benign and pure religion which it was established to promote. They arose from the excited cupidity of the great laity of Europe forcing their families and dependents into church preferments, consecration, a nephew of the pope's had been thus promoted to one of the best prebends in his diocese. Ep. Otho, p. 339. Clamangius states, that the pontiffs were taking away from all diocesans and patrons their faculty of presentation, and interdicted them, sub pœna anathematis, from exercising their right to it. 557. 33 Thus Innocent IV. in his letter to the archdeacon of Canterbury, in 1251, states, that a canonry and a prebend in Lincoln cathedral had been conferred on his nephew, by his special command; and he orders the archdeacon to put the youth in corporalem possessionem' of them, altho he was adolescentis impuberis.' p. 394. Grostete opposed this. See Ann. Burt. 326; 402. 54 As we should never forget the distinction between the good and the bad of all classes, it will be just to our antient clergy to quote our Fisher's speech on such charges in the House of Lords, in 1529: My Lords, There are certain bills exhibited against the clergy, complaining against the viciousness, the idleness, the rapacity, and the cruelty of bishops, abbots, priests and their officials. But, my lords, are all vicious? are all ravenous and cruel priests or bishops? Is there any abuse that we do not seek to redress?' Dr. Bailey's Life of Fisher. This prelate, tho bigoted to Rome, was an instance that all were not of this disgraceful character. Erasmus marks this difference, There are many monks who have no religion, but in their dress and frigid ceremonies; some abbots and bishops, who differ little from lords and princes; but there are many also pious, temperate, learned and worthy, poor with their wealth, modest in their dignity, and meek amid all their power.' De annal. Concord. p. 458. because the incomes of these were so large, as to give wealth or enjoyment to the unprovided; and their power so great, as to make it politic to have them occupied by their relatives or friends.55 Hence the hierarchy became filled with men who entered it merely for its pecuniary resources and worldly consequence, and who never meant nor wished to perform its religious obligations. They were not clergymen in education, taste or purpose; they were the busy, voluptuous and fashionable men of their ruder day, seated in cathedral stalls and bearing ecclesiastical titles; but seeking only, and not hypocritically, to receive the appended revenues, and to spend them on their pleasures. They made no disguise of their characters. It was the custom to do what they did; and it was immoral only in the eyes of those who envied because they did not share, or of others who were sincerely pious, or who suffered from their exactions, or who wished to have from their pastor religious instruction and consolation. The SIMONY against which the popes so stoutly battled in the eleventh and succeeding centuries, was against these worldly preferments of the affluent laity and their pecuniary purchase. In this counteraction the pontiffs acted as the guardians of the Christian commonwealth. It is only to be regretted, that when their exertions had prevailed to repress $5 Several writers have remarked this desecration of religious dignities; but as the rich and great have in all ages the right and power of preferment, it must always depend upon their own rectitude how they will confer it; and upon the education of the preferred, how they will use what they obtain. In 1541, we see by Contareni's Letters, that the bishop of Fresingensis was the brother of the elector palatine, and that the archbishop of Salzburg was in the same relation to the duke of Bavaria. 3. Ép. Poli. Quir. p. 227. Such prelates were princes, not clergymen, as our duke of York was bishop of Osnaburg. СНАР. II. BOOK the mischief, they should have been induced to transfer to themselves the right and habit of practising it.56 The censures of Bernard and Grostete are reiterated, with the additions of other corruptions, by many ecclesiastical critics, from their times to the days of Luther. The popular Franciscan prophet, John de Rupecissa, whom Froissard thought a learned and gifted man, but whose lucubrations mark him to have been a visionary more honest than wise," was imprisoned by Clement VI. for 56 Grostete is another impressive instance, that every bishop was not of the immoral kind which he denounced. His feelings on religion, as he expressed them in his address to his clergy, were of the most elevated and spiritual description : Our duty is first by the loftiness of our contemplations, and by the fervor of our affections, to penetrate into heavenly things, and to listen to what the Divine voice within us may suggest to us. Then, what we may thus receive in our secret meditation, it is for us to expand externally to others, for their edification-considering diligently that sin is the parent of death; the corruption of nature; the privation of good; the captivity of the mind. It transforms the superior loveliness of the soul, which ought ever to wear the re-formed image of the highest and ineffable beauty, into the deformity of debasing turpitude. It sinks to the similitude of the brute that interior man which ought always to exhibit the renewed image of the united Godhead.' p. 271. In a letter to a religious lady, he thus expresses his feelings: You have in yourself, as I hope, the treasures of true religion; but true religion endeavors to attain the height of perfection, that it may produce no evil to others, and may endure with magnanimity what they may inflict. The soul should be neither relaxed by its joy, when temporal goods occur, nor regret them if they should be withdrawn. 6 It seeks not to draw to itself the shadowy things of the body, but perhaps would rather, with the hand of discretion, turn them away; for sincere religion renounces the world. Pious minds brave not temporal things when they are absent, and bear them as burthens when they occur, because they are afraid of being drawn out of themselves by the cares of the external world. For, unless the mind secludes itself from these, it does not penetrate the interior things. It is not induced to contemplate those which are above us and within us, unless it be studiously withdrawn from whatever would involve it in worldly concerns.' ib. p. 310. 57 We see the impression which the victories of Edward III. and his son made on the mind of Europe, in the predictions which this once His contemporary, his presumptuous rebukes 58 much celebrated man issued from his prison at Avignon. In 1356, he chose to declare that the weight of the English scourge would be increased, till every part of the French kingdom was struck by it, and that an Englishman would reform the clergy, and bring on a millennium. 'Before six years are completed from the present year 1356, all the pride of the clergy will be trampled in the mud, and all the depravity of the world will be destroyed. The city of delight will be turned into mourning: but mercy will come to the desolate nation, because AN ENGLISHMAN, a Vicar of Christ, who will know all his wishes, and reduce all ecclesiastics to the apostolic manner of life, will extirpate almost all crimes, sow all the evangelical virtues in the world, convert most of the Jews; destroy the Saracens; convert the Tartars, and extinguish the Turks. All the earth will then be at peace, and the peace will last a thousand years.' Prophetiæ I. de Rup. ap. Browne's Fascic. App. 494. He dates his prophetic career from 1349, the first year of my coming to the court, ad denunciandum et dicendum.' He declaimed against the absence of beneficed men from their churches; against their pomp, sensuality and avarice; the ostentatious splendor, and private luxury of their leaders; 'prelates going to preach the poverty of Christ, followed by a cavalcade of 250 or 300 horse, as some do at this day; or to recommend us to imitate his humility, surrounded with knights and shield bearers.' He also censures the papal exactions from the ecclesiastical community, which he says were exciting maledictions against the exactor. See his Vaticinations, in Browne's Fasciculus, v. 2. p. 495–8. This ecclesiastic, in his sermon before Urban V., the successor of Clement VI., asserted that the Fastus' of the clergy moved few to reverence, but many to indignation; and allured others to think that they should offer an acceptable sacrifice to the Deity, if they could plunder some fat priests, crassos presbyteros.' Ib. 490. 60 It was in 1398, that Nicholaus de Clamengius composed his work on the Church. His general charge is, that the income, and not the duties of the benefice, was the universal inquiry. Spoliation was the general practice. Every sensual enjoyment was indulged, and all the appendages of human greatness and pride anxiously sought for. The popes led the march of rapacity and arrogance, by their mercenary encroachments, and stately examples. Persons were appointed by favor, from the plough, or mechanical occupations, to livings, who were as ignorant of Latin as of Arabic, and of morals as of letters, till a priest and a bad man had become synonimous, and nothing was sunk lower or more despicable than that ecclesiastical order which had once been so revered. See his Treatise in Browne's Fascicul. vol. 2. p. 556-8. We CHAP. II. |