History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0189/01899.txt

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$Title{History Of The Intellectual Development Of Europe
Chapter IV. Part III.}
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$Author{Draper, John William M.D., LL.D.,}
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$Subject{church
europe
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life
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$Date{1876}
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Title:       History Of The Intellectual Development Of Europe
Book:        Volume II
Author:      Draper, John William M.D., LL.D.,
Date:        1876

Chapter IV. Part III.

     First, of the Crusades.  There had been wrenched from Christendom its
fairest and most glorious portions.  Spain, the north of Africa, Egypt, Syria,
Asia Minor, were gone.  The Mohammedans had been repeatedly under the walls of
Constantinople; its fall was only a question of time.  They had been in the
streets of Rome.  They had marched across Italy in every direction. But
perhaps the geographical losses, appalling as they were, did not appear so
painful as the capture of the holy places; the birth-place of our Redeemer;
the scene of His sufferings; the Mount of Olives; the Sea of Galilee; the
Garden of Gethsemane; Calvary; the Sepulchre.  Too often in their day of
strength, while there were Roman legions at their back, had the bishops
taunted Paganism with the weakness of its divinities, who could not defend
themselves, their temples, or their sacred places.  That logic was retaliated
now.  To many a sincere heart must many an ominous reflexion have occurred.
In Western Europe there was a strong common sense which quickly caught the
true position of things - a common sense that could neither be blinded nor
hoodwinked.  The astuteness of the Italian politicians was insufficient to
conceal altogether the great fact, though it might succeed in dissembling its
real significance for a time.  The Europe of that day was very different from
the Europe of ours.  It was in its Age of Faith. Recently converted, as all
recent converts do, it made its belief a living rule of action.  In our times
there is not upon that continent a nation which, in its practical relations
with others, carries out to their consequences its ostensible, its avowed
articles of belief.  Catholics, Protestants, Mohammedans, they of the Greek
communion, indiscriminately consort together under the expediences of the
passing hour.  Statesmanship has long been dissevered from religion - a fact
most portentous for future times.  But it was not so in the Middle Ages.  Men
then believed their form of faith with the same clearness, the same intensity
with which they believed their own existence or the actual presence of things
upon which they cast their eyes.  The doctrines of the Church were to them no
more inconsequential affair, but an absolute, an actual reality, a living and
a fearful thing.  It would have passed their comprehension if they could have
been assured that a day would come when Christian Europe, by a breath, could
remove from the holy places the scandal of an infidel intruder, but, upon the
whole, would consider it not worth her while to do so.  How differently they
acted.  When, by the preaching of Peter the Hermit and his collaborators, who
had received a signal from Rome, a knowledge had come to their ears of the
reproach that had befallen Jerusalem and the sufferings of the pilgrims, their
plain but straight-forward common sense taught them at once what was the right
remedy to apply, and forthwith they did apply it, and Christendom,
precipitated headlong upon the Holy Land, was brought face to face with
Mohammedanism. But what a scene awaited the zealous, the religious barbarians
- for such they truly were - when Constantinople, with its matchless
splendours, came in view!  What a scene when they had passed into Asia Minor,
that garden of the world, presenting city after city, with palaces and
edifices, the pride of twenty centuries!  How unexpected the character of
those Saracens, whom they had been taught, by those who had incited them to
their enterprise, to regard as no better than bloodthirsty fiends, but whom
they found valiant, merciful, just!  When Richard the Lion-hearted, King of
England, lay in his tent consumed by a fever, there came into the camp camels
laden with snow, sent by his enemy, the Sultan Saladin, to assuage his
disease, the homage of one brave soldier to another.  But when Richard was
returning to England, it was by a Christian prince that he was treacherously
seized and secretly confined. This was doubtless only one of many such
incidents which had often before occurred.  Even down to the meanest
camp-follower, every one must have recognized the difference between what they
had anticipated and what they had found.  They had seen undaunted courage,
chivalrous bearing, intellectual culture far higher than their own.  They had
been in lands filled with the prodigies of human skill.  They did not melt
down into the populations to whom they returned without imparting to them a
profound impression destined to make itself felt in the course of time.

     But, secondly, as to the state of things in Rome.  The movement into
which all Europe had been thrown by these wars brought to light the true
condition of things in Italy as respects morality.  Locomotion in a population
is followed by intellectual development.  The old stationary condition of
things in Europe was closed by the Crusades.  National movement gave rise to
better observation, better information, and could not but be followed by
national reflexion.  And though we are obliged to speak of the European
population as being in one sense in a barbarous state, it was a moral
population, earnestly believing the truth of every doctrine it had been
taught, and sincerely expecting that those doctrines would be carried to their
practical application, and that religious profession must, as a matter of
course, be illustrated by religious life.  The Romans themselves were an
exception to this.  They had lived too long behind the scenes.  Indeed, it may
be said that all the Italian peninsula had emancipated itself from that
delusion, as likewise certain classes in France, who had become familiar with
the state of things during the residence of the popes at Avignon.  It has been
the destiny of Southern France to pass, on a small scale, under the same
influence, and to exhibit the same results as were appointed for all Europe at
last.

     And now, what was it that awakening Europe found to be the state of
things in Italy?  I avert my eyes from looking again at the biography of the
popes; it would be only to renew a scene of sin and shame.  Nor can I, without
injustice to truth, speak of the social condition of the inhabitants of that
peninsula without relating facts which would compel my reader to turn over the
page with a blush.  I prefer to look at the maxims of political life which had
been followed for many centuries, and which were first divulged by one of the
greatest men that Italy has produced, in a work - A.D. 1513 - truly
characterized as a literary prodigy.  Certainly nothing can surpass in
atrocity the maxims therein laid down.

     Machiavelli, in that work, tells us that there are three degrees of
capacity among men.  That one understands things by his own natural powers;
another, when they are explained to him; a third, not at all.  In dealing with
these different classes different methods must be used.  The last class, which
is by far the most numerous, is so simple and weak that it is very easy to
dupe those who belong to it.  If they cease to believe of their own accord
they ought to be constrained by force, in the application of which, though
there may be considerable difficulties at first, yet, these once overcome by a
sufficient unscrupulousness - veneration, security, tranquillity, and
happiness will follow.  That, if a prince is constrained to make his choice,
it is better for him to be feared than loved; he should remember that all men
are ungrateful, fickle, timid, dissembling, and self-interested; that love
depends on them, but fear depends on him, and hence it is best to prefer the
latter, which is always in his own hands.  The great aim of statesmanship
should be permanence, which is worth everything else, being far more valuable
than freedom.  That, if a man wants to ruin a republic, his proper course is
to set it on bold undertakings, which it is sure to mismanage; that men, being
naturally wicked, incline to good only when they are compelled; they think a
great deal more of the present than the past, and never seek change so long as
they are made comfortable.

     He recommends a ruler to bear in mind that, while the lower class of men
may desert him, the superior will not only desert, but conspire.  If such
cannot with certainty be made trustworthy friends, it is very clearly
necessary to put it out of their power to be enemies.  Thus it may be observed
that the frequent insurrections in Spain, Gaul, and Greece against the Romans
were entirely due to the petty chiefs inhabiting those countries; but that,
after these had been put to death, everything went on very well. Up to a
certain point, it should be the grand maxim of a wise government to content
the people and to manage the nobles; but that, since hatred is just as easily
incurred by good actions as by bad ones, there will occasionally arise the
necessity of being wicked in order to maintain power, and, in such a case,
there should be no hesitation; for, though it is useful to persevere in the
path of rectitude while there is no inconvenience, we should deviate from it
at once if circumstances so advise.  A prudent prince ought not keep his word
to his own injury; he ought to bear in mind that one who always endeavours to
act as duty dictates necessarily insures his own destruction; that new
obligations never extinguish the memory of former injuries in the minds of the
superior order of men; that liberality, in the end, generally insures more
enemies than friends; that it is the nature of mankind to become as much
attached to one by the benefits they render as by the favours they receive;
that, where the question is as to the taking of life or the confiscation of
property, it is useful to remember that men forget the death of their
relatives, but not the loss of their patrimony; that, if cruelties should
become expedient, they should be committed thoroughly and but once - it is
very impolitic to resort to them a second time; that there are three ways of
deciding any contest - by fraud, by force, or by law, and a wise man will make
the most suitable choice; that there are also three ways of maintaining
control in newly-conquered states that have once been free - by ruining them,
by inhabiting them, or by permitting them to keep their own laws and to pay
tribute.  Of these the first will often be found the best, as we may see from
the history of the Romans, who were experienced judges of such cases.  That,
as respects the family of a rival but conquered sovereign, the greatest pains
should be taken to extinguish it completely; for history proves, what many
fabulous traditions relate, that dangerous political consequences have
originated in the escape of some obscure or insignificant member; that men of
the highest order, who are, therefore, of sound judgment - who seek for actual
social truths for their guidance rather than visionary models which never
existed - will conform to the decisions of reason, and never be influenced by
feelings of sentiment, unless it is apparent that some collateral advantage
will arise from the temporary exhibition thereof; and that they will put a
just estimate on the delusions in which the vulgar indulge, casting aside the
so-called interventions of Divine Providence, which are, in reality, nothing
more than the concatenation of certain circumstances following the ordinary
law of cause and effect, but which, by interfering with the action of each
other, have assumed a direction which the judgment of the wisest could not
have foreseen.

     Europe has visited with its maledictions the great political writer by
whom these atrocious maxims have been recommended, forgetting that his offence
consists not in inventing, but in divulging them.  His works thus offer the
purest example we possess of physical statesmanship.  They are altogether
impassive.  He views the management of a state precisely as he might do the
construction of a machine, recommending that such a wheel or such a lever
should be introduced, his only inquiry being whether it will accomplish his
intention.  As to any happiness or misery it may work, he gives himself no
concern, unless, indeed, they evidently ought to enter into the calculation.
He had suffered the rack himself under a charge of conspiracy, and borne it
without flinching.  But, before Machiavelli wrote, his principles had all been
carried into practice; indeed, it would not be difficult to give abundant
examples in proof of the assertion that they had been for ages regarded in
Italy as rules of conduct.

     Such was the morality which Europe detected as existing in Italy, carried
out with inconceivable wickedness in public and private life; and thus the two
causes we have been considering - contact with the Saracens in Syria and a
knowledge of the real state of things in Rome - conspired together to produce
what may be designated as the moral impulse, which, in its turn, conspired
with the intellectual.  Their association foreboded evil to ecclesiastical
authority, thus taken at great disadvantage.  Though, from its very birthday,
that authority had been in absolute opposition to the intellectual movement,
it might, doubtless, for a much longer time have successfully maintained its
conflict therewith had the conditions remained unchanged.  Up to this time its
chief strength reposed upon its moral relations.  It could point, and did
point the attention of those whose mental culture enabled them to understand
the true position of affairs, to Europe brought out of barbarism, and
beginning a course of glorious civilization. That achievement was claimed by
the Church.  If it were true that she had thus brought it to pass, it had been
altogether wrought by the agency of her moral power, intellectual influence in
no manner aiding therein, but being uniformly, from the time of Constantine
the Great to that of the Reformation, instinctively repulsed.  When, now, the
moral power suffered so great a shock, and was not only ready to go over to,
but had actually allied itself with the intellectual, there was great danger
to ecclesiastical authority. And hence we need not be surprised that an
impression began to prevail among the clear-thinking men of the time that the
real functions of that authority were completed in producing the
partially-civilized condition to which Europe had attained, the course of
events tending evidently to an elimination of that authority as an active
element in the approaching European system.  To such the Church might
emphatically address herself, pointing out the signal and brilliant results to
which she had given rise, and displaying the manifest evils which must
inevitably ensue if her relations, as then existing, should be touched.  For
it must have been plain that the first effect arising from the coalition of
the intellectual with the moral element would be an assertion of the right of
private judgment in the individual - a condition utterly inconsistent with the
dominating influence of authority.  It was actually upon that very principle
that the battle of the Reformation was eventually fought.  She might point out
- for it needed no prophetic inspiration - that, if once this principle was
yielded, there could be no other issue in Christendom than a total
decomposition; that though, for a little while, the separation might be
limited to a few great confessions, these, under the very influence of the
principle that had brought themselves into existence, must, in their turn,
undergo disintegration, and the end of it be a complete anarchy of sects.  In
one sense it may be said that it was in wisdom that the Church took her stand
upon this point, determining to make it her base of resistance; unwisely in
another, for it was evident that she had already lost the initiative of
action, and that her very resistance would constitute the first stage in the
process of decomposition.

     Europe had made a vast step during its Age of Faith.  Spontaneously it
had grown through its youth; and the Italians, who had furnished it with many
of its ideas, had furnished it also with many of its forms of life.  In that
respect justice has still to be done them.  When Rome broke away from her
connexions with Constantinople, a cloud of more than Cimmerian darkness
overshadowed Europe.  It was occupied by wandering savages.  Six hundred years
organized it into families, neighbourhoods, cities.  Those centuries found it
full of bondmen; they left it without a slave.  They found it a scene of
violence, rapine, lust; they left it the abode of God-fearing men. Where there
had been trackless forests, there were innumerable steeples glittering in the
sun; where there had been bloody chieftains, drinking out of their enemies'
skulls, there were grave ecclesiastics, fathoming the depths of free-will,
predestination, election.  Investing the clergy with a mysterious superiority,
the Church asserted the equality of the laity from the king to the beggar
before God.  It disregarded wealth and birth, and opened a career for all.
Its influence over the family and domestic relations was felt through all
classes.  It fixed paternity by a previous ceremony; it enforced the rule that
a wife passes into the family of her husband, and hence it followed that
legitimate children belong to the father, illegitimate to the mother.  It
compelled women to domestic life, shut them out from the priesthood, and tried
to exclude them from government.  In a worldly sense, the mistake that Rome
committed was this: she attempted to maintain an intellectual immobility in
the midst of an advancing social state.  She saw not that society could no
more be stopped in its career through her mere assertion that it could not and
should not move, than that the earth could be checked in its revolution merely
because she protested that it was at rest.  She tried, first by persuasion and
then by force, to arrest the onward movement, but she was overborne,
notwithstanding her frantic resistance, by the impetuous current.  Very
different would it have been had the Italian statesmen boldly put themselves
in the van of progress, and, instead of asserting an immutability and
infallibility, changed their dogmas and maxims as the progress of events
required.  Europe need not have waited for Arabs and Jews.

     In describing these various facts, I have endeavoured to point out
impressively how the Church, so full of vigour at first, contained within
itself the seeds of inevitable decay.  From the period when it came into
collision with the intellectual and moral elements, the origin of which we
have traced, and which conspired together for its overthrow, it exhibited a
gradual decline; first losing its influence upon nations, and ceasing to be in
them a principle of public action; next, witnessing the alienation of the
higher and educated classes, the process descending downward through the
social scale, therein retracing the steps of its advance.  When
ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international
affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more
than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than
the abbot.  There remained a lingering influence over individuals, who had not
yet risen above a belief that it could control their state after death.  This
decline of its ancient influence should be a cause of rejoicing to all
intelligent men, for an ecclesiastical organization allying itself to
political power can never now be a source of any good.  In America we have
seen the bond that held the Church and State together abruptly snapped.  It is
therefore well that, since the close of the Age of Faith, things have been
coming back with an accelerated pace, to the state in which they were in the
early Christian times, before the founder of Constantinople beguiled the
devotional spirit to his personal and family benefit - to the state in which
they were before ambitious men sought political advancement and wealth by
organizing hypocrisy - when maxims of morality, charity, benevolence, were
rules of life for individual man - when the monitions of conscience were
obeyed without the suggestions of an outward, often an interested and artful
prompter - when the individual lived not under the sleepless gaze, the
crushing hand of a great overwhelming hierarchical organization, surrounding
him on all sides, doing his thinking for him, directing him in his acts,
making him a mere automaton, but in simplicity, humility, and truthfulness
guiding himself according to the light given him, and discharging the duties
of this troublesome and transitory life "as ever in his great Taskmaster's
eye."

     For the progressive degradations exhibited by the Roman Church during the
Age of Faith, something may be offered as at once an explanation and an
excuse.  Machiavelli relates, in his "History of Florence" - a work which, if
inferior in philosophical penetration to his "Prince," is of the most singular
merit as a literary composition - that Osporco, a Roman, having become pope,
exchanged his unseemly name for the more classical one Sergius, and that his
successors have ever since observed the practice of assuming a new name.  This
incident profoundly illustrates the psychical progress of that Church.  During
the fifteen centuries that we have had under consideration - counting from a
little before the Christian era - the population of Italy had been constantly
changing.  The old Roman ethnical element had become eliminated partly through
the republican and imperial wars, and partly through the slave system.  The
degenerated half-breeds, of whom the Peninsula was full through repeated
northern immigrations, degenerated, as time went on, still more and more.
After that blood admixture had for the most part ceased, it took a long time
for the base ethnical element which was its product to come into physiological
correspondence with the country, for the adaptation of man to a new climate is
a slow, a secular change.

     But blood-degeneration implies thought-degeneration.  It is nothing more
than might be expected that, in this mongrel race, customs, and language, and
even names should change - that rivers, and towns, and men should receive new
appellations.  As the great statesman to whom I have referred observes, Caesar
and Pompey had disappeared; John, Matthew, and Peter had come in their stead.
Barbarized names are the outward and visible signs of barbarized ideas.  Those
early bishops of Rome whose dignified acts have commanded our respect, were
men of Roman blood, and animated with sentiments that were truly Latin; but
the succeeding pontiffs, whose lives were so infamous and thoughts so base,
were engendered of half-breeds.  Nor was it until the Italian population had
re-established itself in a physiological relation with the country - not until
it had passed through the earlier stages of national life - that manly
thoughts and true conceptions could be regained.

     Ideas and dogmas that would not have been tolerated for an instant in the
old, pure, homogeneous Roman race, found acceptance in this adulterated,
festering mass.  This was the true cause of the increasing debasement of Latin
Christianity.  Whoever will take the trouble of constructing a chart of the
religious conceptions as they successively struggled into light, will see how
close was their connexion with the physiological state of the Italian ethnical
element at the moment.  It is a sad and humiliating succession. Mariolatry;
the invocation of saints; the supreme value of virginity; the working of
miracles by relics; the satisfaction of moral crimes by gifts of money or
goods to the clergy; the worship of images; Purgatory; the sale of benefices;
transubstantiation, or the making of God by the priest; the materialization of
God - that He has eyes, feet, hands, toes; the virtue of pilgrimages;
vicarious religion, the sinner paying the priest to pray for him; the
corporeality of spirits; the forbidding of the Bible to the laity; the descent
to shrine-worship and fetichism; the doctrine that man can do more than his
duty, and hence have a claim upon God; the sale by the priests of indulgences
in sin for money.

     But there is another, a very different aspect under which we must regard
this Church.  Enveloped as it was with the many evils of the times, the truly
Christian principle which was at its basis perpetually vindicated its power,
giving rise to numberless blessings in spite of the degradation and wickedness
of man.  As I have elsewhere (Physiology, Book II., Chap. VIII.) remarked,
"The civil law exerted an exterior power in human relations; Christianity
produced an interior and moral change.  The idea of an ultimate accountability
for personal deeds, of which the old Europeans had an indistinct perception,
became intense and precise.  The sentiment of universal charity was
exemplified not only in individual acts, the remembrance of which soon passes
away, but in the more permanent institution of establishments for the relief
of affliction, the spread of knowledge, the propagation of truth.  Of the
great ecclesiastics, many had risen from the humblest ranks of society, and
these men, true to their democratic instincts, were often found to be the
inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually coming to be the
depositaries of the knowledge that then existed, they opposed intellect to
brute force, in many instances successfully, and by the example of the
organization of the Church, which was essentially republican, they showed how
representative systems may be introduced into the state.  Nor was it over
communities and nations that the Church displayed her chief power.  Never in
the world before was there such a system.  From her central seat at Rome, her
all-seeing eye, like that of Providence itself, could equally take in a
hemisphere at a glance, or examine the private life of any individual.  Her
boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar
at the monastery gate.  In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too
insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities, every
one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his marriage, her
knell tolled at his funeral.  She extorted from him the secrets of his life at
her confessionals, and punished his faults by her penances.  In his hour of
sickness and trouble her servants sought him out, teaching him, by her
exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his reliance on God, or strengthening
him for the trials of life by the example of the holy and just.  Her prayers
had an efficacy to give repose to the souls of his dead.  When, even to his
friends, his lifeless body had become an offence, in the name of God she
received it into her consecrated ground, and under her shadow he rested till
the great reckoning-day.  From little better than a slave she raised his wife
to be his equal, and, forbidding him to have more than one, met her recompense
for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every fireside.  Discountenancing
all impure love, she put round that fireside the children of one mother, and
made that mother little less than sacred in their eyes.  In ages of
lawlessness and rapine, among people but a step above savages, she vindicated
the inviolability of her precincts against the hand of power, and made her
temples a refuge and sanctuary for the despairing and oppressed.  Truly she
was the shadow of a great rock in many a weary land!"

     This being the point which I consider the end of the Italian system as a
living force in European progress, its subsequent operation being directed to
the senses and not to the understanding, it will not be amiss if for a moment
we extend our view to later times and to circumstances beyond the strict
compass of this book, endeavouring thus to ascertain the condition of the
Church, especially as to many devout persons it may doubtless appear that she
has lost none of her power.

     On four occasions there have been revolts against the Italian Church
system: 1st, in the thirteenth century, the Albigensian; 2nd, in the
fourteenth, the Wiclifite; 3rd, in the sixteenth, the Reformation; 4th, in the
eighteenth, at the French Revolution.  On each of these occasions
ecclesiastical authority has exerted whatever offensive or defensive power it
possessed.  Its action is a true indication of its condition at the time.
Astronomers can determine the orbit of a comet or other celestial meteor by
three observations of its position as seen from the earth, and taken at
intervals apart.

     1st. Of the Albigensian revolt.  We have ascertained that the origin of
this is distinctly traceable to the Mohammedan influence of Spain, through the
schools of Cordova and Granada, pervading Languedoc and Provence.  Had these
agencies produced only the gay scenes of chivalry and courtesy as their
material results, and, as their intellectual, war-ballads, satires, and
amorous songs, they had been excused; but, along with such elegant
frivolities, there was something of a more serious kind.  A popular proverb
will often betray national belief, and there was a proverb in Provence, "Viler
than a priest." The offensive sectaries also quoted, for the edification of
the monks, certain texts, to the effect that, "if a man will not work neither
let him eat." The event, in the hands of Simon de Montfort, taught them that
there is such a thing as wresting Scripture to one's own destruction.

     How did the Church deal with this Albigensian heresy?  As those do who
have an absolutely overwhelming power.  She did not crush it - that would have
been too indulgent; she absolutely annihilated it.  Awake to what must
necessarily ensue from the imperceptible spread of such opinions, she
remorselessly consumed its birth-place with fire and sword; and, fearful that
some fugitives might have escaped her vigilant eye, or that heresy might go
wherever a bale of goods might be conveyed, she organized the Inquisition with
its troops of familiars and spies.  Six hundred years have elapsed since these
events, and the south of France has never recovered from the blow.

     That was a persecution worthy of a sovereign - a persecution conducted on
sound Italian principles of policy - to consider clearly the end to be
attained, and adopt the proper means without any kind of concern as to their
nature.  But it was a persecution that implied the possession of unlimited and
irresponsible power.

     2nd. Of the revolt of Wiclif.  We have also considered the state of
affairs which aroused the resistance of Wiclif.  It is manifested by legal
enactments early in the fourteenth century, such as that ecclesiastics shall
not go armed, nor join themselves with thieves, nor frequent taverns, nor
chambers of strumpets, nor visit nuns, nor play at dice, nor keep concubines -
by the Parliamentary bill of 1376, setting forth that the tax paid in England
to the pope for ecclesiastical dignities is fourfold as much as that coming to
the king from the whole realm; that alien clergy, who have never seen nor care
to see their flocks, convey away the treasure of the country - by the homely
preaching of John Ball, that all men are equal in the sight of God.  Wiclif's
opposition was not only directed against corruptions of discipline in the
Church, but equally against doctrinal errors.  His dogma that "God bindeth not
men to believe any thing they cannot understand" is a distinct embodiment of
the rights of reason, and the noble purpose he carried into execution of
translating the Bible from the Vulgate shows in what direction he intended the
application of that doctrine to be made.  Through the influence of the queen
of Richard the Second, who was a native of that country, his doctrines found
an echo in Bohemia - Huss not only earnestly adopting his theological views,
but also joining in his resistance to the despotism of the court of Rome and
his exposures of the corruptions of the clergy.  The political point of this
revolt in England occurs in the refusal of Edward III., at the instigation of
Wiclif, to do homage to the pope; the religious, in the translation of the
Bible.

     Though a bull was sent to London requiring the archheretic to be seized
and put in irons, Wiclif died in his bed, and his bones rested quietly in the
grave for forty-four years.  Ecclesiastical vengeance burned them at last, and
scattered them to the winds.

     There was no remissness in the ecclesiastical authority, but there were
victories won by the blind hero, John Zisca.  After the death of that great
soldier - whose body was left by the road-side to the wolves and crows, and
his skin dried and made into a drum - in vain was all that perfidy could
suggest and all that brutality could execute resorted to - in vain the sword
and fire were passed over Bohemia, and the last effort of impotent vengeance
tried in England - the heretics could not be exterminated nor the detested
translation of the Bible destroyed.

     3rd. Of the revolt of Luther.  As we shall have, in a subsequent chapter,
to consider the causes that led to the Reformation, it is not necessary to
anticipate them in any detail here.  The necessities of the Roman treasury,
which suggested the doctrine of supererogation and the sale of indulgences as
a ready means of relief, merely brought on a crisis which otherwise could not
have been long postponed, the real point at issue being the right of
interpretation of the Scriptures by private judgment.

     The Church did not restrict her resistance to the use of ecclesiastical
weapons - those of a carnal kind she also employed.  Yet we look in vain for
the concentrated energy with which she annihilated the Albigenses, or the
atrocious policy with which the Hussites were met.  The times no longer
permitted those things.  But the struggle was maintained with unflinching
constancy through the disasters and successes of one hundred and thirty years.
Then came the peace of Westphalia, and the result of the contest was
ascertained.  The Church had lost the whole of northern Europe.

     4th. Of the revolt of the philosophers.  Besides the actual loss of the
nations who openly fell away to Protestantism, a serious detriment was soon
found to have befallen those still remaining nominally faithful to the Church.
The fact of secession or adherence depending, in a monarchy, on the personal
caprice or policy of the sovereign, is by no means a true index of the
opinions or relations of the subjects; and thus it happened that in several
countries in which there was an outward appearance of agreement with the
Church because of the attitude of the government, there was, in reality, a
total disruption, so far as the educated and thinking classes were concerned.
This was especially the case in France.

     When the voyage of circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan had for ever
settled all such questions as those of the figure of the earth and the
existence of the antipodes, the principles upon which the contest was composed
between the conflicting parties are obvious from the most superficial perusal
of the history of physics.  Free thought was extorted for science, and, as its
equivalent, an unmolested state for theology.  It was an armed truce.

     It was not through either of the parties to that conflict that new
troubles arose, but through the action of a class fast rising into importance
- literary men.  From the beginning to the middle of the last century these
philosophers became more and more audacious in their attacks.  Unlike the
scientific, whose theological action was by implication rather than in a
direct way, these boldly assaulted the intellectual basis of faith.  The
opportune occurrence of the American Revolution, by bringing forward in a
prominent manner social evils and political methods for their cure, gave a
practical application to the movement in Europe, and the Church was found
unable to offer any kind of resistance.

     From these observations of the state of the Church at four different
epochs of her career we are able to determine her movement.  There is a time
of abounding strength, a time of feebleness, a time of ruinous loss, a time of
utter exhaustion.  What a difference between the eleventh and the eighteenth
centuries!  It is the noontide and evening of a day of empire.