If we look at the ministers of the Church, the old story of tyranny and vice is told over again during this century. Among its popes is numbered Benedict IX., deposed for his profligacy, restored and again deposed, restored by force of arms, and selling the pontificate, so that three popes at once claimed the tiara, and were all three declared unworthy, and a fourth placed on the throne. Fresh disturbances followed, and new usurpers, until in A.D. 1059 the election of the pope was taken out of the hands of the people and transferred to the college of cardinals, a change which was much struggled against, but which was ultimately adopted. In A.D. 1073 Hildebrand was elected pope under the title of Gregory VII.; this man, perhaps, more than any other, augmented the temporal power of the papacy. It was he who moulded the church into the form of an absolute monarchy, and fought against all local privileges and national freedom of the churches in each land; it was he who claimed rule over all kings and princes, and treated them as vassals of the Roman see; it was he who, in 1074, calling a council at Rome, caused it to decree the celibacy of the clergy, so that priests having no home, and no family ties, might feel their only home in the Church, and their only tie to Rome; it was he who struggled against Germany, and who kept the excommunicated emperor standing barefoot and almost naked in the snow for three days, in the courtyard of his castle. A bold bad man was this Hildebrand, but a man of genius and a master-mind, who conceived the mighty idea of a universal Church, wherein all princes should be vassals, and the head of the Church absolute monarch of the world.

It was at the annual council of Rome, A.D. 1076, that Pope Gregory VII. recited and proclaimed "all the ancient maxims, all the doubtful traditions, all the excessive pretensions, by which he could support his supremacy. It was, in a manner, the abridged code of his domination—the laws of servitude that he proposed to the world at large. Here are the terms of this charter of theocracy: 'The Roman Church is founded by God alone. The Roman pontiff alone can legitimately take the title of universal ... There shall be no intercourse whatever held with persons excommunicated by the Pope, and none may dwell in the same house with them.... He alone may wear the imperial insignia. All the princes of the earth shall kiss the feet of the Pope, but of none other.... He has the right of deposing emperors.... The sentence of the Pope can be revoked by none, and he alone can revoke the sentences passed by others. He can be judged by none. None may dare to pronounce sentence on one who appeals to the See Apostolic. To it shall be referred all major causes by the whole Church. The Church of Rome never has erred, and never can err, as Scripture warrants. A Roman pontiff, canonically ordained, at once becomes, by the merit of Saint Peter, indubitably holy. By his order and with his permission it is lawful for subjects to accuse princes.... The Pope can loose subjects from the oath of fealty.' Such are the fundamental articles promulgated by Gregory VII. in the Council of Rome, which the official historian of the Church reproduced in the commencement of the seventeenth century as being authentic and legitimate, and Rome has never disavowed it. Borrowed in part from the false Decretals, resting, most of them, on the fabulous donation of Constantine, and on the successive impostures and usurpations of the first barbarous ages, they received from the hand of Gregory VII. a new character of force and unity. That pontiff stamped them with the sanction of his own genius. Such authority had never before been created: it made every other power useless and subaltern" ("Life of Gregory VII.," by Villemain, trans. by Brockley, vol. ii., pp. 53-55). Thus the struggle became inevitable between the temporal and the spiritual powers. "In every country there was a dual government:—1. That of a local kind, represented by a temporal sovereign. 2. That of a foreign kind, acknowledging the authority of the Pope. This Roman influence was, in the nature of things, superior to the local; it expressed the sovereign will of one man over all the nations of the continent conjointly, and gathered overwhelming power from its compactness and unity. The local influence was necessarily of a feeble nature, since it was commonly weakened by the rivalries of conterminous states and the dissensions dexterously provoked by its competitor. On not a single occasion could the various European states form a coalition against their common antagonist. Whenever a question arose, they were skilfully taken in detail, and commonly mastered. The ostensible object of papal intrusion was to secure for the different peoples, moral well-being; the real object was to obtain large revenues and give support to large bodies of ecclesiastics. The revenues thus abstracted were not unfrequently many times greater than those passing into the treasury of the local power. Thus, on the occasion of Innocent IV. demanding provision to be made for three hundred additional Italian clergy by the Church of England, and that one of his nephews, a mere boy, should have a stall in Lincoln Cathedral, it was found that the sum already annually abstracted by foreign ecclesiastics from England was thrice that which went into the coffers of the king. While thus the higher clergy secured every political appointment worth having, and abbots vied with counts in the herds of slaves they possessed—some, it is said, owned not fewer than twenty thousand—begging friars pervaded society in all directions, picking up a share of what still remained to the poor. There was a vast body of non-producers, living in idleness and owning a foreign allegiance, who were subsisting on the fruits of the toil of the labourers" ("Conflict between Religion and Science," Draper, pp. 266, 267).

The struggle between the Greek and Latin Churches, hushed for awhile, broke out again fiercely A.D. 1053, and in 1054 Rome excommunicated Constantinople, and Constantinople excommunicated Rome. The disputes as to transubstantiation continued, and shook the Roman Church with their violence. Outside orthodoxy, some of the old heresies lingered on. The Paulicians wandered throughout Europe, and became known in Italy as the Paterini and the Cathari, in France as the Albigenses, Bulgarians, or Publicans. The Council of Orleans condemned them to be burned alive, and many perished.

CENTURY XII.

The wars which spread Christianity were not yet entirely over, but we only hear of them now on the outskirts, so to speak, of Europe, except where some tribes apostatized now and then, and were brought back to the true faith by the sword. The struggles between the popes and the more stiff-necked princes as to their relative rights and privileges continued, and we sometimes see the curious spectacle of a pontiff on the side of the people, or rather of the barons, against the king: whenever this is so, we find that the king is struggling against Roman supremacy, and that the pope uses the power of the nation to subdue the rebellious monarch. We do not find Rome interfering to save the people from oppression when the oppressor is a faithful and obedient son of Holy Church.

Fresh heresies spread during this century, and we everywhere met with one corrective—death. Most of them appear to have grown out of the old Manichaean heresy, and taught much of the old asceticism. The Cathari were hunted down and put to death throughout Italy. Arnold of Brescia, who loudly protested against the possessions of the Church, and maintained that church revenues should be handed over to the State, proved himself so extremely distasteful to the clergy that they arrested him, crucified him and burned his dead body (A.D. 1155). Peter de Bruys, who objected to infant baptism, and may be called the ancestor of the Baptists, was burnt A.D. 1130. Many other reformers shared the same fate, and one large sect must here be noted. Peter Waldus, its founder, was a merchant of Lyons, who (A.D. 1160) employed a priest to translate the Gospels for him, together with other portions of the Bible. Studying these, he resolved to abandon his business and distribute his wealth among the poor, and, in A.D. 1180, he became a public preacher, and formed an association to teach the doctrines of the Gospel, as he conceived them, against the doctrines of the Church. The sect first assumed only the simple name of "the poor men of Lyons," but soon became known as the Waldenses, one of the most powerful and most widely spread sects of the Middle Ages. They were, in fact, the precursors of the Reformation, and are notable as heretics protesting against the authorty of Rome because that authority did not commend itself to their reason; thus they asserted the right of private judgment, and for that assertion they deserve a niche in the great temple of heretic thought.

CENTURY XIII.

In the far west of Europe paganism still struggled against Christianity, and from A.D. 1230 to 1280 a long, fierce war was waged against the Prussians, to confirm them in the Christian faith; the Teutonic knights of St. Mary succeeded finally in their apostolic efforts, and at last "established Christianity and fixed their own dominion in Prussia" (p. 309), whence they made forays into the neighbouring countries, and "pillaged, burned, massacred, and ruined all before them." In Spain, Christianity had a yet sadder triumph, for there the civilized Moors were falling under the brutal Christians, and the "garden of the world" was being invaded by the hordes of the Roman Church. The end, however, had not yet come. In France, we see the erection of THE INQUISITION, the most hateful and fiendish tribunal ever set up by religion. The heretical sects were spreading rapidly in southern provinces of France, and Innocent III., about the commencement of this century, sent legates extraordinary into the southern provinces of France to do what the bishops had left undone, and to extirpate heresy, in all its various forms and modifications, without being at all scrupulous in using such methods as might be necessary to effect this salutary purpose. The persons charged with this ghostly commission were Rainier, a Cistercian monk, Pierre de Castelnau, archdeacon of Maguelonne, who became also afterwards a Cistercian friar. These eminent missionaries were followed by several others, among whom was the famous Spaniard, Dominic, founder of the order of preachers, who, returning from Rome in the year 1206, fell in with these delegates, embarked in their cause, and laboured both by his exhortations and actions in the extirpation of heresy. These spiritual champions, who engaged in this expedition upon the sole authority of the pope, without either asking the advice, or demanding the succours of the bishops, and who inflicted capital punishment upon such of the heretics as they could not convert by reason and argument, were distinguished in common discourse by the title of inquisitors, and from them the formidable and odious tribunal called the Inquisition derived its origin (pp. 343, 344). In A.D. 1229, a council of Toulouse "erected in every city a council of inquisitors consisting of one priest and two laymen" (Ibid). In A.D. 1233, Gregory IX. superseded this tribunal by appointing the Dominican monks as inquisitors, and the pope's legate in France thereupon went from city to city, wherever these monks had a monastery, and there appointed some of their number "inquisitors of heretical pravity." The princes of Europe were then persuaded to lend the aid of the State to the work of blood, and to commit to the flames those who were handed over as heretics to the civil power by the inquisitors. The plan of working was most methodical.

The rules of torture were carefully drawn out: the prisoner was stripped naked, the hair cut off, and the body then laid on the rack and bound down; the right, then the left, foot tightly bound and strained by cords; the right and left arm stretched; the fleshy part of the arm compressed with fine cords; all the cords tightened together by one turn; a second and third turn of the same kind: beyond this, with the rack, women were not to be tortured; with men a fourth turn was employed. These directions were written in a Manual, used by the Grand Inquisitor of Seville as late as A.D. 1820. An analysis is given by Dr. Rule, in his "History of the Inquisition," Appendix to vol. i., pp. 339-359, ed. 1874. Then we hear, elsewhere, of torture by roasting the feet, by pulleys, by red-hot pincers—in short, by every abominable instrument of cruelty which men, inspired by religion, could conceive. Let the student take Llorente and Dr. Rule alone, and he will learn enough of the Inquisition horrors to make him shudder at the sight of a cross—at the name of Christianity.

Llorente gives the most revolting details of the torture of Jean de Salas, at Valladolid, A.D. 1527, and this one case may serve as a specimen of Inquisition work during these bloodstained centuries. Stripped to his shirt, he was placed on the chevalet (a narrow frame, wherein the body was laid, with no support save a pole across the middle), and his feet were raised higher than his head; tightly twisted cords cut through his flesh, and were twisted yet tighter and tighter as the torture proceeded; fine linen, thrust into his mouth and throat, added to the unnatural position, made breathing well nigh impossible, and on the linen water slowly fell, drop by drop, from a suspended vessel over his head, till every struggling breath stained the cloth with blood (see "Histoire critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne," t. II., pp. 20-23, ed. 1818). This Spanish Inquisition, during its existence, punished heretics as follows:—

Burnt alive ....................... 31,912

Burnt in effigy.................... 17,659

Heavily punished................... 291,450 ———- Total 341,021

(Ibid, t. IV. p. 271). Add to this list the ruined families, some of whose members fell victims to the Inquisition, and then—remembering that Spain was but one of the countries which it desolated—let the student judge of the huge total of human agony caused by this awful institution. Nor must it be forgotten that its dungeons did not gape only for those who opposed the pretensions of Rome; men of science, philosophers, thinkers, all these were its foes; Llorente gives a list of no less than 119 learned and eminent scientific men who, in Spain alone, fell under the scourge of the Inquisition (see t. II. pp. 417-483).

One special crime of the Church in this age must not be forgotten: her treatment of Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon was a Franciscan monk, who not only studied Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental languages, but who devoted himself to natural science, and made many discoveries in astronomy, chemistry, optics, and mathematics. He is said to have discovered gunpowder, and he proposed a reform of the calendar similar to that introduced by Gregory XIII., 300 years later. His reward was to be hooted at as a magician, and to be confined in a dungeon for many years.

The heretics spread and increased in this century, spite of the terrible weapon brought to bear against them. The "Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit," known also as Beghards, Beguttes, Bicorni, Beghins, and Turlupins, were the chief additional body. They believed that all things had emanated from God, and that to Him they would return; and to this Eastern philosophy they added practical fanaticism, rushing wildly about, shouting, yelling, begging. The Waldenses and Albigenses multiplied, and diversity of opinion spread in every direction.

CENTURY XIV.

This fourteenth century is one of the epochs that sorely test the ingenuity of believers in papal infallibility; for the cardinals, having elected one pope in A.D. 1378, rapidly took a dislike to him, and elected a second. The first choice, Urban VI., remained at Rome; the second, Clement VII., betook himself to Avignon. They duly excommunicated each other, and the Latin Church was rent in twain. "The distress and calamity of these times is beyond all power of description; for not to insist upon the perpetual contentions and wars between the factions of the several popes, by which multitudes lost their fortunes and lives, all sense of religion was extinguished in most places, and profligacy arose to a most scandalous excess. The clergy, while they vehemently contended which of the reigning popes was the true successor of Christ, were so excessively corrupt as to be no longer studious to keep up even an appearance of religion or decency" ("Europe During the Middle Ages," Hallam, p. 359).

Meanwhile, the struggle between Rome and the heretics went on with ever-increasing fury. In England, Dr. John Wickcliff, rector of Lutterworth, became famous by his attack on the mendicant orders in A.D. 1360, and from that time he raised his voice louder and louder, till he spoke against the pope himself. He translated the Bible into English, attacked many of the prevailing superstitions, and although condemned as holding heretical opinions, he yet died in peace, A.D. 1387. Rome revenged itself by digging up his bones and burning them, about thirteen years later. Rebellion spread even among the monks of the Church, and a vast number of some nonconformist Franciscan monks, termed Spirituals, were burned for their refusal to obey the pope on matters of discipline. The intense hatred between the Franciscan and Dominican orders made the latter the willing instrument of the papacy; and, in their character as inquisitors, they hunted down their unfortunate rivals as heretics. The Flagellants, a sect who wandered about flogging themselves to the glory of God, fell also under the merciless hands of the inquisitors, as did also the Knights Templars in France. A new body, known as the Dancers, started up in A.D. 1373, and spread through Flanders; but the priests prayed them away by exorcising the dancing devils that, they said, inhabited the members of this curious sect. Among the sufferers of this century one name must not be forgotten: it is that of Ceccus Asculanus. This man was an Aristotelian philosopher, an astrologer, a mathematician, and a physician. "This unhappy man, having performed some experiments in mechanics that seemed miraculous to the vulgar, and having also offended many, and among the rest his master [the Duke of Calabria], by giving out some predictions which were said to have been fulfilled, was universally supposed to deal with infernal spirits, and burned for it by the inquisitors, at Florence, in the year 1337" (p. 355). There seems no green spot on which to rest the eye in this weary stretch of blood and fire.

CENTURY XV.

In this fifteenth century the knell of the Church rang out; it is memorable evermore in history for the discovery of the New World, and the consequent practical demonstration of the falsehood of the whole theory of the patristic and ecclesiastical theology. In the flood only "Noah and his three sons, with their wives, were saved in an ark. Of these sons, Sham remained in Asia and repeopled it. Ham peopled Africa; Japhet, Europe. As the fathers were not acquainted with the existence of America, they did not provide an ancestor for its people" ("Conflict between Religion and Science," Dr. Draper, p. 63). Lactantius, indeed, inveighed against the folly of those who believed in the existence of the antipodes, and Augustine maintained that it was impossible there should be people living on the other side of the earth. Besides, "in the day of judgment, men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air" (Ibid, p. 64). Clearly there was no other side, theologically; only Columbus sailed there. Another fatal blow was struck at the Church by the invention of the printing press, about A.D. 1440, an invention which made knowledge possible for the many, and by diffusion of knowledge made heresy likewise certain. It is not for me, however, to trace here the progress of heretic thought; that brighter task is for another pen; mine only to turn over the bloodstained and black pages of the Church. One name stands out in the list of the pontiffs of this century, which is almost unparalleled in its infamy; it is that of Roderic Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. Foully vicious, cruel, and bloodthirsty, he is startlingly bad, even for a pope. Among his children are found the names of Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, names whose very mention recalls a list of horrible crimes. Alexander died A.D. 1503, from swallowing, by mistake, a poison which he and his son Caesar had prepared for others. Turning to the heretics, we see great lives cut short by the terrible blows of the inquisition:—Savanarola, the brave Italian preacher, the reformer monk, tortured and burned A.D. 1498; John Huss, the enemy of the papacy, burned A.D. 1415, in direct violation of the safe conduct granted him; Jerome, of Prague, the friend and companion of Huss, burned A.D. 1416. Myriads of their unhappy followers shared their fate in every European land. But to Spain belongs the terrible pre-eminence of cruelty in this last century before the Reformation. In the year 1478 a bull of Pope Sixtus IV. established the Inquisition in Spain. "In the first year of the operation of the Inquisition, 1481, two thousand victims were burnt in Andalusia; besides these, many thousands were dug up from their graves and burnt; seventeen thousand were fined or imprisoned for life. Whoever of the persecuted race could flee, escaped for his life. Torquemada, now appointed Inquisitor-General for Castile and Leon, illustrated his office by his ferocity. Anonymous accusations were received, the accused was not confronted by witnesses, torture was relied upon for conviction; it was inflicted in vaults where no one could hear the cries of the tormented. As, in pretended mercy, it was forbidden to inflict torture a second time, with horrible duplicity it was affirmed that the torment had not been completed at first, but had only been suspended out of charity until the following day! The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin.... This frantic priest destroyed Hebrew Bibles wherever he could find them, and burnt six thousand volumes of Oriental literature at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism" (Draper's "Conflict of Science and Religion," p. 146). Torquemada was, indeed, a worthy successor of Moses. During his eighteen years of power, his list of victims is as follows:—

Burnt at the stake alive................... 10,220 Burnt in effigy, the persons having died in prison or fled the country............ 6,860 Punished with infamy, confiscation, perpetual imprisonment, or loss of civil rights .................................. 97,321 ———- Total .....................................114,401

—("History of the Inquisition," by Dr. W.H. Rule, vol. i., p. 150. Full details of numbers are given in the "Histoire critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne," Llorente, t. I., pp. 272-281).

Cardinal Ximenes was not quite so successful as Torquemada, but still his roll is long:

Burnt at the stake alive ................... 3,564 Burnt in effigy ............................ 1,232 Punished heavily .......................... 48,059 ——— —(Ibid, p. 186). Total ................... 52,855

In A.D. 1481, in the bishoprics of Seville and Cadiz, "two thousand Judaizers were burnt in person, and very many in effigy, of whom the number is not known, besides seventeen thousand subject to cruel penance" (Ibid, p. 133). In A.D. 1485, no less than 950 persons were burned at Villa Real, now Ciudad Real.

Spite of all this awful suffering, heretics and Jews remained antagonistic to the church, and in March, A.D. 1492, the edict of the expulsion of the Jews was signed. "All unbaptized Jews, of whatever age, sex, or condition, were ordered to leave the realm by the end of the following July. If they revisited it, they should suffer death. They might sell their effects, and take the proceeds in merchandise or bills of exchange, but not in gold or silver. Exiled thus, suddenly from the land of their birth, the land of their ancestors for hundreds of years, they could not in the glutted market that arose sell what they possessed. Nobody would purchase what could be got for nothing after July. The Spanish clergy occupied themselves by preaching in the public squares sermons filled with denunciations against their victims, who, when the time for expatriation came, swarmed in the roads, and filled the air with their cries of despair. Even the Spanish onlookers wept at the scene of agony. Torquemada, however, enforced the ordinance that no one should afford them any help.... Thousands, especially mothers with nursing children, infants, and old people, died by the way—many of them in the agonies of thirst" (Ibid, p. 147). Thus was a peaceable, industrious, thoughtful population, driven out of Spain by the Church. Nor did her hand stay even here. Ferdinand, alas! had completed the conquest of the Moors; true, Granada had only yielded under pledge of liberty of worship, but of what value is the pledge of the Christian to the heretic? The Inquisition harried the land, until, in February 1502, word went out that all unbaptized Moors must leave Spain by the end of April. "They might sell their property, but not take away any gold or silver; they were forbidden to emigrate to the Mahommedan dominions; the penalty of disobedience was death. Their condition was thus worse than that of the Jews, who had been permitted to go where they chose" (Ibid, p. 148). And so the Moors were driven out, and Spain was left to Christianity, to sink down to what she is to-day. 3,000,000 persons are said to have been expelled as Jews, Moors and Moriscoes. The Moors departed,—they who had made the name of Spain glorious, and had spread science and thought through Europe from that focus of light,—they who had welcomed to their cities all who thought, no matter what their creed, and had covered with an equal protection Mahommedan, Christian, and Jew.

Nor let the Protestant Christian imagine that these deeds of blood are Roman, not Christian. The same crimes attach to every Church, and Rome's black list is only longer because her power is greater. Let us glance at Protestant communions. In Hungary, Giska, the Hussite, massacred and bruised the Beghards. In Germany, Luther cried, "Why, if men hang the thief upon the gallows, or if they put the rogue to death, why should not we, with all our strength, attack these popes and cardinals, these dregs of the Roman Sodom? Why not wash our hands in their blood?" ("The Spanish Inquisition," Le Maistre, p. 67, ed. 1838). Sandys, Bishop of London, wrote in defence of persecution. Archbishop Usher, in an address signed by eleven other bishops, said: "Any toleration to the papists is a grievous sin." Knox said, "The people are bound in conscience to put to death the queen, along with all her priests." The English Parliament said, "Persecution was necessary to advance the glory of God." The Scotch Parliament decreed death against Catholics as idolaters, saying "it was a religious obligation to execute them" (Ibid, pp. 67, 68). Cranmer, A.D. 1550, condemned six anabaptists to death, one of whom, a woman, was burned alive, and in the following year another was committed to the flames; this primate held a commission with "some others, to examine and search after all anabaptists, heretics, or contemners of the book of Common Prayer" ("Students' History of England," D. Hume, p. 291, ed. 1868).

In Switzerland, Calvin burned Servetus. In America, the Puritans carried on the same hateful tradition, and whipped the harmless Quakers from town to town. Wherever the cross has gone, whether held by Roman Catholic, by Lutheran, by Calvinist, by Episcopalian, by Presbyterian, by Protestant dissenter, it has been dipped in human blood, and has broken human hearts. Its effect on Europe was destructive, barbarising, deadly, until the dawning light of science scattered the thick black clouds which issued from the cross. One indisputable fact, pregnant with instruction, is the extremely low rate of increase of the population of Europe during the centuries when Christianity was supreme. "What, then, does this stationary condition of the population mean? It means, food obtained with hardship, insufficient clothing, personal uncleanness, cabins that could not keep out the weather, the destructive effects of cold and heat, miasm, want of sanitary provisions, absence of physicians, uselessness of shrine cure, the deceptiveness of miracles, in which society was putting its trust; or, to sum up a long catalogue of sorrows, wants and sufferings in one term—it means a high death-rate. But, more, it means deficient births. And what does that point out? Marriage postponed, licentious life, private wickedness, demoralized society" (Draper's "Conflict of Religion and Science," p. 263). "The surface of the Continent was for the most part covered with pathless forests; here and there it was dotted with monasteries and towns. In the lowlands and along the river courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and spreading agues far and wide." In towns there was "no attempt made at drainage, but the putrefying garbage and rubbish were simply thrown out of the door. Men, women, and children slept in the same apartment; not unfrequently domestic animals were their companions; in such a confusion of the family it was impossible that modesty and morality could be maintained. The bed was usually a bag of straw; a wooden log served as a pillow. Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; great officers of state, even dignitaries so high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin; such, it is related, was the condition of Thomas a Becket, the antagonist of an English king. To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and profusely used. The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years. He was considered to be in circumstances of ease, if he could procure fresh meat once a week for his dinner. The streets had no sewers; they were without pavement or lamps. After night-fall, the chamber-shutters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied down, to the discomforture of the wayfarer tracking his path through the narrow streets, with his dismal lantern in his hand" (Ibid, p. 265). Little wonder indeed, that plagues swept through the cities, destroying their inhabitants wholesale. The Church could only pray against them, or offer shrines where votive offerings might win deliverance; "not without a bitter resistance on the part of the clergy, men began to think that pestilences are not punishments inflicted by God on society for its religious shortcomings, but the physical consequences of filth and wretchedness; that the proper mode of avoiding them is not by praying to the saints, but by ensuring personal and municipal cleanliness. In the twelfth century it was found necessary to pave the streets of Paris, the stench in them was so dreadful. At once dysenteries and spotted fever diminished; a sanitary condition, approaching that of the Moorish cities of Spain, which had been paved for centuries, was attained" (Ibid, p. 314). The death-rate was still further diminished by the importation of the physician's skill from the Arabs and the Moors; the Christians had depended on the shrine of the saint, and the bone of the martyr, and the priest was the doctor of body as well as of soul. "On all the roads pilgrims were wending their way to the shrines of saints, renowned for the cures they had wrought. It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines.... For patients too sick to move or be moved, there were no remedies except those of a ghostly kind—the Paternoster and the Ave" (Ibid, p. 269). Thus Christianity set itself against all popular advancement, against all civil and social progress, against all improvement in the condition of the masses. It viewed every change with distrust, it met every innovation with opposition. While it reigned supreme, Europe lay in chains, and even into the new world it carried the fetters of the old. Only as Christianity has grown feebler has civilization strengthened, and progress has been made more and more rapidly as a failing creed has lost the power to oppose. And now, day by day, that progress becomes swifter; now, day by day, the opposition becomes fainter, and soon, passing over the ruins of a shattered religion, Free Thought shall plant the white banner of Liberty in the midst of the temple of Humanity; that temple which, long desecrated by priests and overshadowed by gods, shall then be consecrated for evermore to the service of its rightful owner, and shall be filled with the glory of man, the only god, and shall have its air melodious with the voice of the prayer which is work.

* * * * *

INDEX TO SECTION IV. OF PART II.

* * * * *

INDEX OF BOOKS USED.

Draper, Conflict of Religion and Science...425, 433, 437, 449, 455, 456, 464, 465, 471, 472, 475, 476 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History...424 Gibbon, Decline and Fall...425, 429, 432, 433, 435 Hallam, Europe during the Middle Ages...454, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 470, 471 Hume, Student's History of England...474 Le Maistre, Spanish Inquisition...474 Llorente, Histoire critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne...468, 469, 472, 473 Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History...Used throughout Rule, History of the Inquisition...468, 472 Villemain, Life of Gregory VII...464 * * * * *

INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

Advent of Christ expected...456, 457 Alexandrine Library, destruction of...432 Arius...433, 434 Boniface, Apostle of Germany...442 Century 2nd and 3rd...423, 429 Century 4th...429, 435 Century 5th...435, 439 Century 6th...439, 441 Century 7th...441, 442 Century 8th...442, 447 Century 9th...447, 451 Century 10th...451, 457 Century 11th...457, 465 Century 12th...466, 467 Century 13th...467, 469 Century 14th...469, 470 Century 15th...471, 474 Charlemagne...442, 444 Christianity, general effect of...474, 476 Church, wealth of...425, 440, 441, 444, 457, 460 Church, doctrine of...426, 450 Church, refuge for evil doers...442 Clergy, frauds of...431, 444, 448, 449 Clergy, vice of...426, 431, 435, 437, 441, 447, 448, 451, 453, 454, 469 Constantine...424, 425 Conversions...429, 430, 435, 439, 443, 451, 457, 467 Crusades...452, 458 Eastern and Western Churches, separation of...449, 450 Endowment of Church, first...429 Filioque...446, 449 Heresies...426-428, 433-435, 438, 440, 442, 446, 450, 456, 465, 466, 470, 471, 472, 473 Heretic, first burnt alive...431 " number burned in Spain...469, 472 Hildebrand...463, 464 Hypatia, murder of...437 Iconoclastic controversy...445, 446 Ignorance of bishops...441 Inquisition...467-469, 472-474 Isidorian decretals...448 Jews, expulsion of, from Spain...473, 474 Learning, lack of...437, 439, 451, 452, 453, 461, 462, 463 " revival of...460, 461 Moors, learning of...447, 453, 456 " expulsion of, from Spain...473, 474 Patristic geography...471 People, misery of...455, 475, 476 Protestant persecution...474, 475 Rome, supremacy of...436, 445, 448, 464, 465 " badness of Popes of...454, 463, 464, 469, 471 Stylites...437 Torquemada...472, 473

THE END