II. because the incomes of these were so large, as to CHAP. give wealth or enjoyment to the unprovided; and their power so great, as to make it politic to have them occupied by their relatives or friends.55 Hence the hierarchy became filled with men who entered it merely for its pecuniary resources and worldly consequence, and who never meant nor wished to perform its religious obligations. They were not clergymen in education, taste or purpose; they were the busy, voluptuous and fashionable men of their ruder day, seated in cathedral stalls and bearing ecclesiastical titles; but seeking only, and not hypocritically, to receive the appended revenues, and to spend them on their pleasures. They made no disguise of their characters. It was the custom to do what they did; and it was immoral only in the eyes of those who envied because they did not share, or of others who were sincerely pious, or who suffered from their exactions, or who wished to have from their pastor religious instruction and consolation. The SIMONY against which the popes so stoutly battled in the eleventh and succeeding centuries, was against these worldly preferments of the affluent laity and their pecuniary purchase. In this counteraction the pontiffs acted as the guardians of the Christian commonwealth. It is only to be regretted, that when their exertions had prevailed to repress 55 Several writers have remarked this desecration of religious dignities; but as the rich and great have in all ages the right and power of preferment, it must always depend upon their own rectitude how they will confer it; and upon the education of the preferred, how they will use what they obtain. In 1541, we see by Contareni's Letters, that the bishop of Fresingensis was the brother of the elector palatine, and that the archbishop of Salzburg was in the same relation to the duke of Bavaria. 3. Ep. Poli. Quir. p. 227. Such prelates were princes, not clergymen, as our duke of York was bishop of Osnaburg. BOOK the mischief, they should have been induced to transfer to themselves the right and habit of practising it.56 The censures of Bernard and Grostete are reiterated, with the additions of other corruptions, by many ecclesiastical critics, from their times to the days of Luther. The popular Franciscan prophet, John de Rupecissa, whom Froissard thought a learned and gifted man, but whose lucubrations mark him to have been a visionary more honest than wise," was imprisoned by Clement VI. for 56 Grostete is another impressive instance, that every bishop was not of the immoral kind which he denounced. His feelings on religion, as he expressed them in his address to his clergy, were of the most elevated and spiritual description :— Our duty is first by the loftiness of our contemplations, and by the fervor of our affections, to penetrate into heavenly things, and to listen to what the Divine voice within us may suggest to us. Then, what we may thus receive in our secret meditation, it is for us to expand externally to others, for their edification-considering diligently that sin is the parent of death; the corruption of nature; the privation of good; the captivity of the mind. It transforms the superior loveliness of the soul, which ought ever to wear the re-formed image of the highest and ineffable beauty, into the deformity of debasing turpitude. It sinks to the similitude of the brute that interior man which ought always to exhibit the renewed image of the united Godhead.' p. 271. In a letter to a religious lady, he thus expresses his feelings: You have in yourself, as I hope, the treasures of true religion; but true religion endeavors to attain the height of perfection, that it may produce no evil to others, and may endure with magnanimity what they may inflict. The soul should be neither relaxed by its joy, when temporal goods occur, nor regret them if they should be withdrawn. It seeks not to draw to itself the shadowy things of the body, but perhaps would rather, with the hand of discretion, turn them away; for sincere religion renounces the world. Pious minds brave not temporal things when they are absent, and bear them as burthens when they occur, because they are afraid of being drawn out of themselves by the cares of the external world. For, unless the mind secludes itself from these, it does not penetrate the interior things. It is not induced to contemplate those which are above us and within us, unless it be studiously withdrawn from whatever would involve it in worldly concerns.' ib. p. 310. 57 We see the impression which the victories of Edward III. and his son made on the mind of Europe, in the predictions which this once II. his presumptuous rebukes 58 His contemporary, CHAP. Oresmius," an archdeacon of Bayeux, with more emphatic detail, declaimed without reserve against the corrupt state of the Catholic church, as the fourteenth century was closing, which others at the same time as strongly reprimanded. 60 much celebrated man issued from his prison at Avignon. In 1356, he chose to declare that the weight of the English scourge would be incrcased, till every part of the French kingdom was struck by it, and that an Englishman would reform the clergy, and bring on a millennium. Before six years are completed from the present year 1356, all the pride of the clergy will be trampled in the mud, and all the depravity of the world will be destroyed. The city of delight will be turned into mourning but mercy will come to the desolate nation, because AN ENGLISHMAN, a Vicar of Christ, who will know all his wishes, and reduce all ecclesiastics to the apostolic manner of life, will extirpate almost all crimes, sow all the evangelical virtues in the world, convert most of the Jews; destroy the Saracens; convert the Tartars, and extinguish the Turks. All the earth will then be at peace, and the peace will last a thousand years.' Prophetiæ I. de Rup. ap. Browne's Fascic. App. 494. 6 He dates his prophetic career from 1349, the first year of my coming to the court, ad denunciandum et dicendum.' He declaimed against the absence of beneficed men from their churches; against their pomp, sensuality and avarice; the ostentatious splendor, and private luxury of their leaders; 'prelates going to preach the poverty of Christ, followed by a cavalcade of 250 or 300 horse, as some do at this day; or to recommend us to imitate his humility, surrounded with knights and shield bearers.' He also censures the papal exactions from the ecclesiastical community, which he says were exciting maledictions against the exactor. See his Vaticinations, in Browne's Fasciculus, v. 2. p. 495–8. 59 This ecclesiastic, in his sermon before Urban V., the successor of Clement VI., asserted that the Fastus' of the clergy moved few to reverence, but many to indignation; and allured others to think that they should offer an acceptable sacrifice to the Deity, if they could plunder some fat priests, crassos presbyteros.' Ib. 490. Go It was in 1398, that Nicholaus de Clamengius composed his work on the Church. His general charge is, that the income, and not the duties of the benefice, was the universal inquiry. Spoliation was the general practice. Every sensual enjoyment was indulged, and all the appendages of human greatness and pride anxiously sought for. The popes led the march of rapacity and arrogance, by their mercenary encroachments, and stately examples. Persons were appointed by favor, from the plough, or mechanical occupations, to livings, who were as ignorant of Latin as of Arabic, and of morals as of letters, till a priest and a bad man had become synonimous, and nothing was sunk lower or more despicable than that ecclesiastical order which had once been so revered. See his Treatise in Browne's Fascicul. vol. 2. p. 556-8. We BOOK II. But while the moralizing writers were satisfied with opposing their verbal criminations, the Franciscan mendicants took the field against the established church, because its indolence and corruptions roused their ambition, or their conscience, to take upon themselves the duties, which the settled hierarchy was so generally neglecting. This new order so gratified the public feeling, that they outran their own expectations, and startled the possessioned church by the reputation, wealth, preference and power which they were every where acquiring. The peril and disgrace to the existing hierarchy, whom they threatened and were laboring to supersede, became so obvious to its leaders, that, in 1357, the archbishop of Armagh made a deliberate accusation of the ambitious mendicants before the Pope and cardinals, in the consistory at Avignon, and impeached their conduct, as elaborately as they were assaulting the church.61 He charged them with seducing and abstracting youth from private families into their orders,62 which had so alarmed parents as add at fuller length his charge against the Pope. Even the summi Pontifices plerumque se, super alios, libidine domandi extulerunt.' They take to themselves the jura et collationes' of all vacant churches, wherever Christianity has spread; and of all prelacies and other dignities which used to be made by election, decreeing all such elections to be null; and thus they fill their purses from every Christian province, and by sedula negotiatione congregare infinitam molem auri et argenti ad opus suæ cameræ,' ib. 557. They have taken from all diocesans and patrons the faculty of presentation.' ib. The pontiffs strive to exalt their state, regifico luxu, super omnes mortalium magnificentias.' 61 His Defensorium Curatorum' is printed by Browne in his Fasciculus, vol. 2. p. 466. It was pronounced by the prelate, at Avignon, on 8 Nov. 1357. 62 He states, that these friars having obtained from the popedom the privilege of hearing confessions, almost all the young men chose to confess to them. That they allowed these to join their order, and if they did so, they were not suffered to go till they had professed it, and were then not allowed to speak even to their father or mother, nisi sub 63 II. to induce them to withdraw their children from the CHAP. universities, to the great detriment of these seminaries; with obtaining for themselves so much of the pecuniary profits of confessions and burials, as to have multiplied the numbers of their order to the diminution of others; and to be appropriating all saleable books to furnish their own exclusive libraries, which made other seminaries undervalued; with artfully worming or boldly intruding themselves into wealthy houses, feasting there uninvited, and carrying away what provisions they could extort; and with getting privileges from Rome, of preaching, of burying, and hearing confessions, to fratrum custodia et timore.' ib. 473. An English nobleman had complained to the archbishop, that his son, tho but 13, had been thus drawn away, and could hold no conversation with his father, nisi sub fratrum custodia.' ib. 63 Because they would rather make them tillers of the field than thus to lose them." He adds this curious fact, 'Hence it is, that altho in my time there have been at Oxford for study 30,000 students, there are not in these days above 6,000 found there. And the greatest cause of this diminution is thought to be this circumvention of the lads.' ib. 473. The former amount of the number of the students is more remarkable than its diminution, which the prelate's alleged reason seems scarcely sufficient to account for. 64 Ib. 474. 65 There is not found in the common studies of the faculty of the arts of sacred theology and canon law, or of medicine, or of civil law, ' nisi rare,' any very useful liber venalis,' but all are bought up by the friars, that in every convent there may be one grand and noble library.' ib. 474. 6 66 I sent of my subjectis rectoribus' three or four for study; but I was told, that because they could not find there a Bibliam' useful to them, or any other books of theology for sale that were suitable to them, they had returned back to their country. The aim was, that no clericus should remain in the church, but these friars only.' ib. 474. No great or middling person, of clergy or people, could take their meals, but some of these mendicants, not called, will be there; and not like paupers, asking humbly for alms, as St. Francis ordered, but, penetrating into the mansions, they make themselves guests without being invited, and eat and drink what they find there, and carry away what they chuse.' ib. 474. |