BOOK I. the teachers of the nations intended they should execute their mission. But it was in consequence of their being made a teaching ministry that these men became thus strong, whether for evil or for good. It is true, in the polity of the Church there was little originality. It was conformed in its great outline to the secular polity of the Roman Empire. Many of its doctrines, too, may be traced to the superstitions prevalent among the people whom the clergy aspired to govern. But in dealing with these matters there was room enough left for the action of that profound policy, and especially for the display of that combination of tenacity and flexibility, which was to be so conspicuous through the whole history of the Papal church.

Restoration of State

its effect.

One effect from this progress of clerical ascendency religion and is seen in the formation of that sort of union between the power of the priesthood and the civil power which had existed everywhere before the promulgation of Christianity, but which had been wholly unknown to the Church during the first three centuries of her history. It is not until Christianity has vanquished the forces of the Roman empire, that her ministers begin to account the secular appliances of that empire as their great strength. The Church is to be potent in the future by becoming a servant to the power it has subdued! The terms of this compact between the spiritual and the secular varied in different countries and at different times; and the contentions between the parties on this ground were often bitter. the clergy never failed to secure one great advantage from this policy. The State, while taking precedence of the Church, became so far her servant as to be ever ready to punish alleged ecclesiastical offences with

But

civil penalties. Apart from such assistance the clerical CHAP. II, thunder would have spent itself to little purpose. All the horrors in the history of religious persecution which have done so much to make the history of religion itself appear at times more like a piece of history from the infernal regions than like anything human, must be traced to this renewed confederacy between the priest and the magistrate. Without that, not a fact in the long story of those evil deeds would have cast its disgrace upon our faith. Our fathers suffered less from this cause than some other nations. But when the labours of Wycliffe gave movement to public thought, the heresies of the Lollards were met by the statute which doomed all heretics to the stake.

concerning

patronage and power.

The clergy of every national church in the middle Disputes age were in the condition of men who had to serve two masters. They owed allegiance to the king, and they were often reminded that they were under the same obligation to the papacy. To-day we find them in high debate on some question at issue between them and the crown; to-morrow their controversy has respect to some pretension of the papal court which is said to be undue and uncanonical. The pontiffs, moreover, are intent upon enriching their dependents by bestowing on them vacant bishoprics or livings, now in one nation, now in another. But the sovereigns of those nations are commonly not less intent on protecting their domains from spoliation in that form. The wrangling about this distribution of pelf and power runs through the whole history of the hierarchy during those centuries. Through long intervals, this is the material which comes to the surface, to the exclusion of almost everything beside.

C

sacerdotal

theories.

BOOK I. But amidst all these contentions the clergy are Growth of careful that the foundations of their spiritual power shall be laid broad and deep. In process of time, the sacramental scheme was made to be so definite and comprehensive, as to place the soul of the worshipper completely in the hands of the priest. The seven sacraments, beginning with baptism, and ending with extreme unction, left every spiritual privilege, from the beginning of life to its close, at the disposal of that functionary. Through his services, and through those services alone, could spiritual safety be realized. In the case of persons who gave credence to this theory, the sense of subjection must have been absolute.

Track of

light through

the dark

ness.

But it should be confessed, that with all their proneness towards error in so many directions, the clergy who flourished towards the decline of the Roman empire, and those even of the middle age, never wholly lost sight of the great lines of revealed truth in relation. either to man or to his Maker. The influence of such writers as Augustine, Ambrose, and Bernard, was great, and it was an influence, in the main, on the side of just views concerning man, as guilty and as incapable of removing his guilt; as depraved and as incapable of vanquishing his depravity. Nor was it less just in relation to God, as taking away human guilt by the sacrifice of Christ, and as subduing human depravity by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Light to this effect shines out more or less from age to age amidst the darkness, so that the Reformers of the sixteenth century often. insisted, in their confessions and in their discussions, that the theology which they were concerned to inculcate was the theology which the most famous among the Christian Fathers had never failed to teach. It

would be easy, they were wont to say, to

underprop' CHAP. II. all their utterances with authorities from that source. From the tendency so generally manifest to substitute the worship of the Virgin, and of Saints, in the place of the worship of God, and even of Christ, we might be led to suppose that anything deserving the name of Christian devotion must have almost ceased to exist. But the writings of such men as are above mentioned, and the fact that those writings were considerably read, seem to warrant a more favourable conclusion.

life in the

The origin of the religious orders, whatever their Spiritual subsequent declensions may have been, is everywhere a religious sign, more or less, of a religious feeling. Those orders orders. may be regarded in the early stages of their history as embodying the Puritan element of the middle age. The object avowed by all of them, in their beginning, was a stricter and purer religious life than was recognised in the Church system of those days. In the language of the times, the parochial clergy were the secular clergy. They stood in a special relation to the secular power, and owed their wealth and influence largely to secular law. They were an order, but they were not included in what were called the religious orders. Monasteries were voluntary establishments, resting on voluntary contributions and endowments; and monks, according to the monastic theory, were men separated to the purest forms of spiritual service. And many of them, like the venerable Bede, were faithful to the institute to which they had bound themselves by the most sacred vows, praying much for the living and the dead, labouring much as the teachers of youth, as transcribers of books, and even as preachers of the word.

voluntary

ism.

BOOK I. But in the scheme of the Mendicant Orders-the Mediaeval Preaching Friars, as they are sometimes called-who make their appearance early in the thirteenth century, we find a still stronger impeachment of the existing hierarchy. In the estimation of those orders, monasticism had become a failure, because, while it professed to be a voluntary system, it accepted endowments, the consequence of which was, that beginning in poverty, it had ended in riches, which, according to the Mendicants, was necessarily to begin in purity and to end in corruption. The friars, accordingly, carried their voluntaryism so far that they altogether eschewed endowments. They would depend on the voluntary offerings of the people, and on those offerings as coming to them from day to day, and as to be expended from day to day. Among these orders, the Franciscans, in their earlier times, were the great preachers-the great city missionaries. Their object was not to supersede the hierarchy, nor even to reform it, but to supplement it with new agencies. Everything about the Franciscan-his dress, his diet, his home, all were to bespeak him a poor man, and to proclaim him as the poor man's minister. To know where plague or leprosy raged was to know where to find the Franciscans, who, from their skill in medicine, were ministers alike to the body and the soul.

In their preaching, the friars discarded the learned and logical style then so common. In their view, the clergy had become disqualified for their work by their learning, hardly less than by their wealth. They were themselves not only poor men preaching to the poor, but laymen preaching to the laity. Their language was studiously simple. Their illustrations were studiously popular. They found material for discourse in the well-known