Chapter V: Miscellaneous Activities

_Political Heresy._

The charge of heresy, being easy to make and hard to disprove, furnished a useful and efficacious means of attacking political enemies, especially as there was no other offence for which the penalty was so severe. Crusades against heretics were common. Prior to the great Albigensian war there were several crusades against the Stedingers of north-western Germany, a harmless sect of Waldensian tendencies, who were finally suppressed in the twelfth century. During the three following centuries the Papacy started or sanctioned crusades against Viterbo, Aix la Chapelle, Aragon, Ezzelin da Romano, Manfred of Sicily, Ferrara, Venice, the Visconti of Milan, the Hussites, the Maffredi, and others. During this period Italy was a scene of almost chronic disorder, turbulence, and war of the most ruthless character. At the capture at Cesena in 1376 the Papal Legate ordered that all the inhabitants should be put to the sword, “without distinction of age or sex, after they had admitted him and his bandits into the city under his solemn oath that no injury would be inflicted on them. The number of the slain was estimated at 5,000.”[36] In the early part of the fourteenth century many noble Italian families had sentences of heresy pronounced against them by the Inquisition.

The earnest efforts of Savonarola to purify the Church and the freedom of his preaching induced the Papacy to proceed against him, though, as usual, political considerations also were influential. He was tried under a Papal commission and in accordance with the formulas of the Inquisition, though it does not appear that the proceedings were officially held by that body. At any rate, he was burnt in 1498, and after his death it was discovered that his writings contained no definitely heretical opinions.

_The Templars._

A very important case in the fourteenth century was the trial of the Templars, which dragged on for over six years. Some of the accusations were of a trivial and ridiculous character, others implied traces of the Catharist heresy and dark practices at the initiation of neophytes, none of which could be proved, and the whole proceedings were a mockery of justice. The real motive was the desire of the King of France to seize the immense wealth of the Order, and grossly exaggerated charges were made with a view of giving a suitable colour to the course of “justice.” The Inquisition set to work, and secured many confessions, of course by the liberal use of torture; and that it was of a rigorous kind is shown by the fact that in Paris alone thirty-six Templars perished under their torments, at Sens twenty-five, and many more elsewhere. So untrustworthy and contradictory is the recorded evidence that there is little reason to doubt the innocence of the accused. Special Inquisitors were appointed all over Europe; the slow process of ecclesiastical law, which then sanctioned abuses from which the secular power shrank, was expedited by the Pope, the bishops were compliant, the State was greedy. The king and the Pope entered into an agreement defining the disposition of the victims’ property. In the clutches of the Inquisition the Order of the Temple was doomed. After a prolonged series of trials it was condemned, and its property confiscated. On May 12, 1310, fifty-four Templars were burnt in Paris, four more a few days later, and about twenty at other places. In Lorraine many of the Order suffered at the stake, while in Germany the victims were comparatively few, some in the diocese of Maintz being fortunate enough to secure an acquittal--a verdict highly displeasing to the Pope. In England the prosecution was greatly hampered by that peculiarity of English law which made torture illegal. The difficulty was got over by the express instructions of the Pope; but, in spite of a certain temporary success in that method of extracting evidence, no Templars were put to death, and the Inquisition failed to establish itself in this country. Results hardly more satisfactory attended its operations in Italy. The Templars were few; they strenuously avouched their innocence, and produced evidence highly favourable to their plea. They were, nevertheless, imprisoned, their property was confiscated, and the Pope in 1311 gave urgent instructions to have them tortured, but with what result is not known. In Castile and Aragon the Templars, notwithstanding another Papal command for their torture and the presence of special Inquisitors sent for the purpose, were declared innocent of the crimes attributed to them; but their Order was dissolved, and its property in Aragon handed over to the Hospitallers, who were burdened with their support. All over Europe repeated and urgent orders were received from Rome that the Templars were to be tortured, and the historian justly remarks that these Papal Bulls were “perhaps the most disgraceful that ever proceeded from a vicegerent of God.”[37]

The magnitude of the proceedings against the Templars may be estimated from the fact that when the Papal archives were by order of Napoleon transferred to Paris in 1810 the boxes of documents relating to the trial numbered 3,239; and many further records were, it is said, sold by Papal agents to grocers as waste paper. At the Council of Vienne convened in 1312, mainly to consider the case of the Templars, the Pope did his utmost to get them condemned without a hearing; and, though unsuccessful in this, the Order was formally abolished at his instigation, and the bulk of its property, as in Aragon, transferred to the Hospitallers, who did not relish the duty of supporting their unfortunate rivals. The rest of the booty was divided among the royal and other thieves who had long lusted for it. Many of the principal Templars were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, in the course of which they rotted to death. The two chiefs, De Molay and De Charny, were slowly burned to death in Paris in March, 1314, as relapsed heretics, on the day after their declaration that they had confessed merely to save their lives. It would have been impossible thus to destroy the wealthiest and most powerful Order in Europe without the agency of the Holy Office.

_Joan of Arc._

When Joan of Arc was captured by John of Luxemburg in May, 1430, she was sold by him for 10,000 livres to the English, who desired to have her tried before the Inquisition. She was bitterly hated by them, and the University of Paris heartily joined in their ferocious pursuit of the heroic maid. Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, another of her opponents, presided at the trial, which opened in February, 1431; and, as it was assumed that the proceedings would be invalid without the presence of an Inquisitor, though Cauchon himself was nominally one, Jean le Maitre, Vicar for Rouen, acted (reluctantly, be it said to his credit) as representative of the Inquisitor for France. The trial was a monstrously unjust one; evidence in Joan’s favour was suppressed, and a number of skilled lawyers and theologians worked hard to entrap her into confession. It is one of the marvels of history that this untaught peasant girl time after time baffled her persecutors by her simple and truthful answers to their cunningly framed questions. Worn out at last by their tireless persistence, she abjured, and received the customary sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The English were furious, and made desperate efforts to secure her death. It was not easy to find a pretext, but one was discovered in her change of clothing. Joan was tempted by having her usual man’s dress placed within her reach. She donned it; advantage was taken of her imprudence to treat it as a formal relapse into heresy, and two days later the noble and innocent deliverer of her country was burnt alive in the market place of Rouen, to the everlasting shame of France and England.

_Sorcery and Magic._

It is impossible to understand the life of the Middle Ages unless it is borne in mind that men and women everywhere held an implicit belief in the reality of the supernatural and of evil spirits, who were for ever tempting them to wrong. The idea of natural law being unknown, it was not perceived that this belief conflicted with the notion of an intelligible cosmos, or that it violated the idea of human responsibility by assuming that man’s actions are attributable, not to himself, but to either good spirits or demons. It was man, however, who received the punishment. The air was believed to be thick with spirits; they might be seen as dust, as motes in the sunbeam, or in the falling rain. The sounds of the wind, of any clashing objects, of running streams and roaring cataracts, were the voices of spirits. From Scriptural texts, such as Genesis vi, 5, Luke iv, 7, and others, the logical deduction was drawn that intercourse between angelic and human beings was not merely possible, but continually took place.

At first the Inquisition neither had nor claimed jurisdiction over dealings with evil spirits. The Church, indeed, was sometimes more rational than the people, for in 1279 an Alsatian nun would have been burnt by the peasantry for sorcery had she not been rescued by some friars. The question of repressing this crime had been raised in 1257, and before many years elapsed it was generally recognized that the Inquisition had some sort of jurisdiction over it. Astrology soon attracted its attention, and was ranked as heresy. Peter of Abano seems to have been the first to be prosecuted, and he would have been burnt as a relapsed heretic had he not taken the precaution to die in the ordinary way first. In 1324 the astrologer, Cecco d’Ascoli, was forced to abjure, but, being imprudent enough to relapse, was burnt three years later. Several people were excommunicated for sorcery early in the fourteenth century, and the growing belief in the reality and gravity of the offence was greatly stimulated by Pope John XXII.

In Ireland a zealous Franciscan worked up a case against Lady Alice Kyteler, alleged to be one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world; and, though the lady escaped to England, her maid was mercilessly scourged until she confessed a tissue of absurdities, after which she was burnt. Persecution diminished when, in 1330, the Pope withdrew sorcery from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but the popular belief continued and extended, and the secular courts were sufficiently rigorous in their treatment of offenders. In 1390 two women, after being severely tortured two or three times without result, finally confessed to a charge of making a love-philtre, and were burnt. The early trials for sorcery in England were held in the civil courts, the leniency of which was disapproved by the Church; in 1407, therefore, Henry IV placed the offence under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which naturally made the most of it, and prepared a congenial soil for the witchcraft delusion.

One of the most extraordinary cases in history is that of Gilles de Retz (or Rais), who in 1440 was accused of sacrilege, child murder, intercourse with demons, and other offences savouring of heresy. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, was a rich and powerful baron of Brittany, whose extravagance involved him in many difficulties. He was pious, as far as the observances of religion went, a man of unusual culture, with a passion for expensive books, paintings, music, the drama, and other forms of art. A dabbler in the occult, he sought perseveringly for the Philosopher’s Stone, by which he believed unlimited wealth would be gained, enabling him to keep up his lavish display and prodigality. But there was a very much darker side to his character. He was accustomed to employ agents, women as well as men, to entice children from their parents, by whom they were never seen again. These disappearances became so numerous that suspicion was aroused, and de Rais was at last arrested and tried before the Bishop of Nantes and the Vice-Inquisitor of the diocese. He was found guilty, but no sentence was pronounced. Immediately afterwards he was tried in a secular court, and sentenced to be hanged and burnt, with two servants who had been accomplices in his ghastly crimes. Making allowance for popular exaggeration, which attributed countless victims to him, there is reason to believe that 140 children were outraged and murdered, their bodies being thrown into pits. It is said that “so depraved became his appetite that he found his chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his victims, over whose sufferings he gloated as he skilfully mangled them and protracted their torture. When dead he would criticize their beauties with his confidential servitors, would compare one with another, and would kiss with rapture the heads which pleased him most.”[38] Yet this monster died with words of godly exhortation on his lips and confident of salvation. Under the threat of torture he freely confessed to crimes enough to put 10,000 men to death. He was taken into church and granted absolution, and the execution was carried out on the following day. The extraordinary wickedness of this man made a deep impression on the superstitious people of Brittany, where he became, in later ages, identified with the Bluebeard of Perrault’s nursery story, of which some writers maintain that he furnished the original, possibly because he is said to have had seven wives, though he possessed only one. It is something to the credit of the Holy Office that it had a share in bringing this fiend to justice.

The growing belief in witchcraft and demonology in the fifteenth century gave additional strength to the long arm of the Inquisition, for witches were of necessity heretics. They were at first treated with comparative mildness, the secular courts being apparently the first to inflict the penalty of burning in such cases. But the Inquisition soon equalled this severity, and gave the accused fewer chances of escape. Venice, however, was less energetic in this matter than most States, for in 1486 and 1521 it incurred the wrath of the Papacy by refusing to burn some witches condemned by the Inquisition. In 1474 several women were burnt in Piedmont for witchcraft, but two others, who were able to employ counsel of their own, had their case transferred to Turin, and presumably secured acquittals--a fact which seems to show the prudence of the Inquisitors in choosing the advocate for the defence, and excommunicating him if he was successful.

Of the Vaudois, or witches of Arras, several persons after being cruelly tortured, were burnt in 1460, a hermit being the first to suffer at Langres; and seven persons were put to death in one _auto de fé_ in July of that year. Many of the leading and wealthiest men of Arras were arrested; confessions, some of them afterwards withdrawn, were wrung from them by torture, and twelve persons in all were burnt out of the thirty-four apprehended. The epidemic of credulity died away after a time, and the Inquisition stopped further prosecutions; but the prosperous city of Arras suffered enormous loss by the confiscations imposed and the panic which dislocated its trade. The return to sanity was chiefly due to the son of one of the victims succeeding in an appeal to the Parliament of Paris (previous appeals had been suppressed), which, after a brief inquiry lasting thirty years, issued a decree rehabilitating some of the accused, and caused the promoters of the prosecutions to be heavily fined. It was decreed that torture should be for the future prohibited. This is “probably the only case on record in which an Inquisitor was brought before a law court to answer for his official actions.”[39] Thus a healthy scepticism was beginning to enter the public mind. Several persons were charged before the Bishop of Amiens, who acquitted them; another was acquitted by the Archbishop of Besançon; while a third was tried by a tribunal consisting of the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, and some theological experts. He was not only acquitted, but authorized to prosecute his accusers for reparation and damages. A poor man who went mad on the subject of witchcraft was burnt in August, 1460.

In its early stages the belief in witchcraft was artificially stimulated by the Church, and flourished in an atmosphere of ignorance and dread of the unseen. “Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superstition in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom.”[40] Every Inquisitor was an agent for the spread of the belief, and the Church industriously taught it. An Italian Inquisitor in 1485 burnt forty-one people for witchcraft in one district in the Grisons--an exploit which gratified the historian Sprenger; and Innocent’s Bull of 1484 gave a perceptible impulse to the superstition, forty-eight persons being burnt in one small German town in five years by order of Sprenger and a fellow Inquisitor. To doubt the reality of the crime was to dispute the authority of the Church; to aid an accused person was to impede the Inquisition. A woman charged with witchcraft had little chance of escape, for if her defence made a favourable impression on the judges they also were considered to have been bewitched, and few of them cared to run that risk. Confessions made under severe torture were, of course, numerous, and were afterwards used as proving the reality of the crime. The small amount of incredulity which existed vanished before Sprenger’s _Malleus Malficarum_, which Lea terms “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.” With perfect good faith and absolute belief in the truth of demoniacal possession, Sprenger brought forward an overwhelming mass of evidence, which no one in those times was able to rebut or dared to dispute. This terrible book, which remained the recognized authority on the subject for more than a century, immensely stimulated a belief which, as Lea remarks, is “ a process of purely natural evolution from the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.”[41] For 200 years the Church had done all it could to promote this belief. Pope Calixtus, in 1457, ordered the repression of witchcraft, and towards the end of the century Alexander VI urged the Inquisitor of Lombardy to show greater zeal in his work. Early in the sixteenth century Julius II defined the powers of the Inquisitors, and issued to their helpers indulgences similar to those given to Crusaders. Thus persecution produced its natural effect in a great revival of superstition in Northern Italy. The Inquisitors burnt 140 persons at Brescia in 1510, and 300 at Como four years later.

The Witch Sabbaths were a well-known institution in the Middle Ages, and it is reported that more than 25,000 persons were sometimes present at these weird gatherings. In view of the danger incurred, such popularity seems unaccountable enough to suggest that the narratives spring from sheer delusion. In the district of Valcamonica an Inquisitor burnt seventy witches and sent as many more to prison, while those suspected or accused numbered 5,000, about one-fourth of the population of the valleys. The Venetian Senate thought this was going too far, but its protest only brought strong remonstrances from the Pope, Leo X, and fresh orders for persecution. The Senate replied by a dignified and rational document, laying it down that the accused were to have a fair trial with legal safeguards, that torture must be discontinued, that the Inquisition’s expenses were to be kept within moderate bounds, that greed for money was not to be the reason for prosecution, and that the excesses alleged against Inquisitors would have to be investigated. This document, “a monument of considerate wisdom and common-sense,” was ignored, and Christendom abandoned itself to a senseless, delirious orgy of superstition and cruelty. Between the madness of the Catholic and the madness of the Protestant there was little to choose. On one point at least they were in accord, and it is significant that Calvin used the arguments of the Inquisitors to justify persecution. In Geneva 500 persons are said to have been burnt within three months, at Toulouse 400 on a single occasion (some say 1,500), at Bamberg 600, at Wurzburg 900 in one year--all in the sixteenth century. The Senate of Savoy condemned 800 at one time. That a cold spring in 1586 was caused by witchcraft was proved by the confessions of the guilty parties, and for this crime 118 women and two men were burnt by the Archbishop of Treves. This city seems to have exceeded all others in its atrocities. According to Lecky, 7,000 persons were burnt there for sorcery, but he does not state over what period these figures extend. The Inquisitor Paramo, who wrote in the sixteenth century, boasts that since 1404 the Holy Office burnt as many as 30,000 persons, who, if let alone, would have “brought the whole world to destruction.”[42] This Paramo defended the secrecy of the Inquisition on the ground that God was the first Inquisitor, and that in secret Adam and Eve had been tried.

_Intellect and Faith._

A religion which imagined that it was the repository of a full and final revelation, that it possessed the keys of the invisible world, and which regarded every doubt as a heresy born of the devil, naturally became in practice a vast machine for persecution. When mental activity was thus a crime, and any attempt to increase knowledge an act of rebellion against God, it was clear that human progress was brought to a standstill. No one can tell what progress would have been made had the Inquisition not existed; that it kept Europe for hundreds of years in mental torpor, and did what it could to make the reign of stupidity eternal, does not admit of question. What the magnificent brain of Roger Bacon could have achieved is matter for speculation. It has been disputed, but seems to be true, that he was imprisoned for his advanced opinions, and died a captive; but, however that may be, it is certain that the Church succeeded in preventing mankind from benefiting by his researches. Anything like modern Freethought was out of the question, but distinct approaches to it were made in the twelfth century by Averrhoes, whose particular tenets were that matter is uncreated and eternal, that the soul dies with the body, only collective humanity being immortal, and that all religions are of human origin and, though useful incentives to virtue, contain only relative truth. These doctrines, which were looked upon as deadly heresies, surprisingly anticipate some of the speculations of our own times. It is remarkable that under the rigorous conditions which prevailed Averrhoism should have spread so rapidly as it did, but it could have been only among the scholarly few; and in the thirteenth century, which was in certain respects more advanced than the fifteenth, these opinions made some slight impression on the popular mind. Had the impression been deeper, the results might have been in some respects more disastrous. The general ignorance was so great that a premature abandonment of the orthodox faith might have been made the occasion of even more flagrant moral licence than actually existed, and so have strengthened the hands of the persecutors. A system which held all religions to be untrue, especially the religion of the Christians, who daily ate their God, would naturally enough be thought to emanate from the bottomless pit, and it is an astonishing circumstance that for a long time the Inquisition left Averrhoism alone. Herman of Ryswick, the most famous successor of Peter of Abano, after being sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, continued to propagate his errors, and in 1512 was burnt at the Hague by order of the Inquisition. It is evident that at times considerable freedom of speech existed, or Laurentius Valla would scarcely have been able, in the middle of the fifteenth century, to assail the “Donation of Constantine,” or to declare that the Papacy should be deprived of its temporal power. Valla got off cheaply by a simple declaration that he believed as Mother Church believed, though Mother Church, he added, knew nothing about it. Ultimately this restless disputant obtained a clerical sinecure in Rome, and died in peace. Several other unbelievers escaped the customary doom of mental independence. It is one of the anomalies of ecclesiastical history prior to the Reformation that, while the most trifling variations from orthodoxy were relentlessly crushed, a philosophical humanism hardly distinguishable from downright Atheism was fashionable among the intellectual classes, even those in clerical orders, and frequently went unpunished. The writings of the famous Raymond Lully--perhaps the most voluminous author on record, for he is credited with 321 volumes--brought him into conflict with the Inquisition; and long after his death in 1315 Eymeric, the Inquisitor of Aragon, sought to have his memory condemned. This was partially done in 1620, though the main object of Lully had been to suppress the heresy of Averrhoism, and many miracles wrought by his remains had evidenced his saintliness. Not many figures of the Middle Ages have had the doubtful honour of being both heretic and saint.

In 1331 Pope John XXII had imprisoned an English priest who maintained that the saints after death are at once admitted to the presence of God. This doctrine, known as the “Beatific Vision,” had aroused the Pope’s anger, but he was subsequently compelled by the strength of the general opinion in its favour to accept it, after a controversy which nearly cost him his tiara. Years of bitter dispute ensued on a subject about which no human being knew anything whatever, and it even became a question of grave political consequence, for the monarchs of the time ventured to differ from the Papal opinion. The Inquisition espoused the popular view, and made questions on the subject an important part of the interrogatories addressed to the unlucky persons brought before its tribunals.

About the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a purely dogmatic development, a further mass of superstition spread, and gave rise to bitter controversies, the Franciscans and Dominicans quarrelling so fiercely that in 1482 popular tumults broke out in Italy on this mysterious topic, of which everybody was supposed to know something. The theory that the Virgin Mary never from the moment of her conception shared the sinful tendencies of ordinary mortals was something of a novelty, and the Dominicans who rejected it had tradition in their favour, but they were overborne by the increasing power of the new superstition. An Italian priest who in 1504 maintained that Christ was conceived in the Virgin’s heart was seized by the Inquisition, and had a narrow escape from death by fire. A special appearance of the Virgin herself, who expressed her annoyance at the doctrine, caused an immense sensation until it was discovered that the manifestation was a trick got up by the Dominicans, and four of the culprits were burnt. Not until 1854, after five centuries of struggle, was the doctrine officially proclaimed as a formal act of faith, when the Dominicans obediently began to find reasons in its favour. It would seem to be a logical sequence that the reputed father of the Virgin was no more concerned in her birth than Joseph was supposed to be in that of Jesus, but for maintaining this thesis a man was condemned so recently as 1876.

_Censorship of Books._

Notwithstanding the extent to which heresy was propagated by printed books, it was a long time before the Inquisition was recognized as the most convenient instrument for their supervision and suppression. The first Papal deliverance on the subject was a Bull by Gregory XI in 1376, instructing the Inquisition to examine and condemn suspected writings, but what were the results is not known. An Archbishop who burnt some writings of John Wycliffe at Prague was found to have exceeded his powers, and it was not till the beginning of the sixteenth century that a regular censorship was organized, and then in Germany only. However, the Inquisition was willing to undertake additional responsibilities, and at length made a rule that any one possessing books of doubtful orthodoxy must within eight days deliver them to the Bishop or Inquisitor of his district, on pain of being under vehement suspicion of heresy. That the Church was more anxious to preserve its privileges than to promote religion may be inferred from the fact that translations into the vernacular of any parts of the Bible were prohibited. As it was found before long that books containing heretical doctrines were being circulated, it was deemed expedient to forbid anything being printed without previous examination by the Holy Office and the Papal and episcopal authorities. The religious world, however, became so disorganized by the Reformation that these precautions were of little avail, and it was not until the Church had regained much of its power in the counter Reformation that a really strict censorship could be established.

_The Greek Church._

Although one Pope, Boniface VIII, issued a Bull decreeing that every human being, including the members of the Greek Church, was bound to obey the Roman Pontiff, a prudent and tolerant attitude was usually maintained towards that unsound but powerful rival. Stray members of the Greek communion who happened to be found in Western Europe were at times persecuted as heretics, and in 1351 all Greeks were ordered once a year to confess and take the sacrament according to the Latin usage. Any person who after this decree violated it was a relapsed heretic, and entitled to no mercy. But to coerce effectively a great religious organization, every member of which was in the eyes of Rome a heretic, proved too arduous a task for orthodoxy, and the Inquisition failed to utilize the glorious opportunities for persecution afforded by Eastern Europe, with its variety of races and religious ideas. The Church was therefore prudent enough to follow a line of policy as mild and tolerant as it was novel.

_Indulgences and Simony._

The scandal to the cause of true religion which accompanied the sale of Indulgences was so notorious all over Europe that it is surprising to find that this abuse--deeply prejudicial to the Church and to public morals--was not considered to deserve vigorous repression. It is true that the practice was sometimes officially denounced, as when Pope Alexander IV gave the Inquisitors power to deal with the evil. But Lea asserts that, so far as he can discover, only one man was tried by the Inquisition for this prevalent offence. He admitted that he had been in the habit of telling monstrous falsehoods and filling the superstitious people with absurdities, but it is doubtful whether he was punished--if at all, it was by nothing more than a light penance. The remarkable lenity of the Church towards this traffic was, of course, due to the fact that it furnished a very substantial source of profit; but if the Popes had expended on the internal reform of the Church a hundredth part of the energy which they devoted to the suppression of minor differences of opinion the Reformation might conceivably have been averted. It was the Reformation that made imperative that moral renewal which prolonged the influence of the Church and still constitutes one of the chief elements of its strength.

It is a striking proof of human selfishness and of the extent to which it blinds mankind to its own failings that the Inquisition was never instructed to put down simony (which, as heresy, came within its jurisdiction), and that it never volunteered to do so--a fact which shows very clearly that, in the view of the Christian Church, morals were of trifling importance compared with belief. One or two of the Popes worked with genuine zeal and immense energy to extirpate the evil, but without avail. The practice being highly profitable financially to the Church, its disastrous moral effects were ignored, the laudable desires of some Pontiffs being thwarted by others less scrupulous. Every clerical office, from the highest to the lowest, was virtually sold by auction. Pope John XXII even drew up a scale on which absolutions for simony could be granted at the lowest market rates. The prevalence of this offence was perhaps the chief of all the causes which contributed to the degradation of the Christian Church. In this connection it may be interesting to reproduce here a clever and daring satire which was popular in the thirteenth century:--

Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver marks. In those
days the Pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to
the throne of our majesty, first say to him: Friend, why comest
thou? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall
cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pass that a certain
poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope, and cried out
saying: Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand
of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry; I pray you to
help my misery. Then were they wroth and said: Friend, thy poverty
perish with thee; get thee behind me, Satan, for thou knowest not
the odour of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt
not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last
farthing.

Then the poor man went away, and sold his cloak and his coat and
all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals and gate-keepers and
chamberlains. But they said: What is this among so many? And they
cast him beyond the gates, and he wept bitterly and could find
naught to comfort him. Then came to the court a rich clerk, fat and
broad and heavy, who in his wrath had slain a man. First he gave
to the gate-keeper, then to the chamberlain, then to the cardinals;
and they thought they were about to receive more. But the lord
pope, hearing that the cardinals and servants had many gifts from
the clerk, fell sick unto death. Then unto him the rich man sent an
electuary of gold and silver, and straightway he was cured. Then
the lord pope called unto him the cardinals and servants, and said
unto them: Brethren, take heed that no one seduce you with empty
words. I set you an example; even as I take so shall ye take.[43]

Avaricious men were enabled by an incredibly bad system to make religion a public danger. Priests who led women astray on the plea that intercourse with holy men was not sinful, a depraved laity, religion severed from morals--these made up a state of society in which apprehensions existed that the wickedness of the clergy would provoke the people to rise against them, or perhaps even bring on the world the final visitation of Divine wrath. Good men asked why God did not intervene to save his Church from ruin. No intervention came.