ATTACKS AGAINST THE CLERGY.

SATIRES against the clergy, mixed with the well-grounded reproaches to which the priesthood had rendered themselves liable, kept pace, at all times, as I have elsewhere remarked, with heresies against the church; on this point, also, Luther fell short of his predecessors. The shepherds had become as depraved as their flocks. Whosoever desires to probe the interior workings of society in those days, should read the councils and the charters of abolition (letters. of grace conceded by the sovereigns); in these are laid bare the wounds of society: the councils incessantly renew their complaints against the looseness of morals; the charters of abolition record the details of sentences and the crimes that gave rise to the royal letters. The capitularies of Charlemagne and of his successors are filled with enactments for the reform of the clergy.

The frightful story of the priest Anastasius being entombed alive with a corpse, through the

revengeful spirit of the Bishop Caulin is well known (Gregory of Tours). We read in the canons added to the first council of Tours, under the episcopacy of St. Perpert: "We have been told, horrible to relate, (quod nefas) that publichouses were established in churches, and that the spot which should be exclusively devoted to prayer and to the praise of God, echoes with the sound of noisy feasts, obscene language, disputes and wranglings."

Baronius, so favourably disposed towards the court of Rome, calls the tenth century the age of iron, such was then the depravity prevailing in the church. The distinguished and learned Gherbert, before he became pope by the name of Sylvester II., and when only archbishop of Rheims, said: " Deplorable Rome, thou once affordedst to our ancestors the most dazzling lights; but now we only derive from thee the most frightful darkness .. We have beheld John Octavian conspiring, in the midst of a thousand prostitutes, against the very Otho whom he had proclaimed emperor. He is overthrown, and Leo the Neophyte succeeds him. Otho withdraws from Rome, and Octavian enters it ; he drives away Leo, cuts off the fingers, hands, and nose, of John the deacon, and, after putting to death many distinguished personages,

soon perishes himself. Can it still be possible to assert that so great a number of priests of the Almighty, worthy by their lives and their merits of enlightening the world, should submit to such monsters, destitute of all knowledge of divine and human sciences?"

St. Bernard evinces as little indulgence for the vices of his age; St. Louis was compelled to overlook the dissoluteness and disorders prevailing in his army. During the reign of Philip the Fair, a council was convoked for the express purpose of applying a remedy to the depravation of morals. In 1351, the prelates and mendicant orders laid their mutual grievances before Clement VII., at Avignon. This pope, who was favourable to the monks, rebuked the prelates "Will ye speak of

in the following language: humility, ye who are so vain and pompous in your horses and equipages? will ye speak of poverty, ye who are so rapacious that all the benefices in the world would not satisfy your cravings? what shall I say of your chastity? . . . Ye hate mendicants, ye close your doors against them, whilst your houses are thrown open to sycophants and persons of scandalous lives (leonibus et truffatoribus)."

Simony was general; priests every where violated the rule of celibacy; they lived with

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abandoned women, concubines, and servantmaids; an abbot of Noreïs had eighteen children. In Biscay, no priests were admitted unless they had their gossips, in other words, wives, supposed to be legitimate.

Petrarch writes to a friend: " Avignon has become a hell, the sink of every abomination. The houses, the palaces, the churches, the thrones of the pontiff and the cardinals, the air, the earth, everything is impregnated with falsehood; a future world, the last judgment, the punishments of hell, the joys of paradise, are held in the light of absurd and childish fables." In support of these assertions, Petrarch quotes certain scandalous anecdotes respecting the debauchery of the cardinals.

In a sermon preached before the pope, in 1364, Doctor Nicholas Orem proved, by six arguments, deduced from the disregard of the Christian doctrine, the pride of the prelates, the tyranny of the heads of the church, and their aversion for truth, that Antichrist would not be long before he made his appearance.

These reproaches, handed down from age to age, were revived by Erasmus and Rabelais. All the world was struck with those vices, which a power long uncontrolled, and the rudeness of the middle ages, had introduced into the church.