splendors of a princely capital. Like Leo X., he might notoriously disclaim all pretensions of Christian faith, and be known at best as a patron of socalled religious art, at worst as a patron of the secret vices of a papal court.*

All this was publicly known, to the grief, scandal, and shame, we cannot doubt, of multitudes who, like Erasmus, lacked the courage, or like Savonarola the power, to stay the tide that must seem irresistible. For the Church was implicated, in a thousand ways, with the political system of Europe. The nature of its authority made every sovereign, in some sense, a retainer, an ally, or else an open enemy; and its will was as merciless as its hand was strong. In the premature war of revolt that broke out in Bohemia, after the Church had sealed its act of unity by the martyr death of Huss, forty thousand were slain in battle; and a resolute, hardy population were completely crushed. Europe might well wait a century after that, before the bloody experiment could be dared again; and with all the trained skill of an ecclesiastical police that took in the birth-festival, the marriage-sacrament, the death-bed scene, the states

*"An elegant heathen Pope, who carried on Tusculan disputations; Cardinals, who adorned their walls with scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, and devoted themselves to Ciceronian Latin; and a whole scene of luxurious intellectuality in Rome, contrasted bitterly with the palpable superstitions and abuses of the out-of-doors world; and the centre of Christendom, putting itself quietly and unconcernedly ab extra to a whole system for which it was responsible, while it taught men to despise that system, provoked at the same time disgust and rebellion against its own hypocrisy.". MOZLEY, Essays, etc., vol. i. p. 355.

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man's cabinet, the council of war, and the daily espial of the confessional for part of its field we may be sure that the Church would watch and guard very warily, would strike secretly, swiftly, and sharply, against any symptom of a thought more free and a conscience more bold than seemed consistent with its peace.

In the second place, that peace of the Church, as we ought not to forget, was very dear to great multitudes of its disciples and subjects. Whatever the Roman Church has lacked in its instructions, it has never lacked the piety of sentiment, the devotion, the adoration, the fanatical and abject loyalty, at need, of the vast majority of its adherents. Its iniquities and oppressions were to most men a far-away and uncertain rumor; its comforting words, its chanted prayers, its sacred processions, the magic of its solemn bells, the myriad links by which it fastened itself to everything that was holy, sweet, and dear in the daily life of millions, all these were very near. By a thousand years of sleepless, incessant activity, it had woven a spell about the very conscience and thought of men; while in its invisible presence it haunted every step of their common walk. It had possessed their minds with its own scheme of creation and redemption, of heaven and hell.

In a community like ours, of twenty sects equal before the law, of popular science, and intellectual liberty, think how timidly, even here, a serious-minded man or a pious woman listens to a word which seems to invade the secret charm that resides in church authority, thin ghost that it is of what was

once overshadowing and irresistible; and the wonder will then be, not that the Church bore the attack with so little loss of power, but that the attack was dared at all. The very logic, philosophy, and morals by which the attack had to be made were the creation, invention, instruction, of schools founded by the Church and consecrated to its defence. That particular spell was broken, in part, by the new Greek and Roman learning. But in the realm of religion proper the Church still held its own, almost undisputed; and, for authority, "the least papist," said Luther, "is more capable of government than ten of our court nobles."

Even the most daring of the Reformers did hardly more than to draw a doctrine slightly different from the same Scripture, and to deny the Church's claim to be its only interpreter. Their intellectual limitation shows us more clearly than almost anything else can do the degree to which that Church had prepossessed men's minds. The sort of spiritual authority they affected, which is held by their successors in Protestant countries even to this day, proves how natural such authority seemed then, and at what a disadvantage any must stand who tried to break it down where its prestige was so incomparably strong.

And if we think how helpless we should be, even at this day, against such spiritual dominion as still exists, without the help of the steadily increasing light that streams from modern science, it can be no wonder to us, the power of superstition then. For the astronomical spaces of our sky, they had the trim fields or palace-splendors of Paradise; for the geo

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logical depths of our earth, the dreadful and intensely real gulfs of hell, whose fires roared in the underground thunder and blazed in the flaming eruption of Vesuvius or Etna. And so with everything. There is a whole chapter, for example, of ghastly terror in the sorcery and witchcraft of the Middle Age, relics, perhaps, of old Paganism lingering among the people, which the Church had vainly put forth all her merciless power to suppress.

Nothing illustrates more vividly the great horror with which she had the skill to possess men's imagination than this. The Church had built up, about them and within them, a spiritual structure, which they clung to with passionate love and reverence, or else feared to question with a fear as passionate and intense, where the very thought of doubt was a crime, to be burned out by the fires of the stake, or purged away by the flames of purgatory.

It is not likely that at any time in its history the Roman Church felt surer of its strength than the moment before the blow was struck. Its capital was never so splendid, its treasury never so rich, its priesthood never more numerous, well-trained, and confident. The very blunder by which it invited the most formidable attack was the blunder of absolute self-confidence, at the point where it was in closest contact with irreverent and hostile feeling, most exposed whether to bitter satire or to grave rebuke, most weak in making its appeal to the worse rather than the better side in human nature. In fact, its vulnerable point was in its absolute, stupid disbelief that there was such a better side in human

nature; its assumption that it could trade openly in vice, and sell indulgences to sin, in short, that every man was bad enough to wish to do all the evil he could at the cheapest rate, if he could only be satisfied that the license he bought would hold good in the other world.

Of course, it is not the Catholic theory of Indulgences that men can be ransomed by money from the pains of hell: that is, no Catholic in his senses would ever admit that it is so. The real theory of Indulgences is simply the remission of ecclesiastical penalties, the counterpart and the relief of penance. Besides this, not directly, but by intercession of purchased prayers, the Church may promise relief from the pains of purgatory. But, by its own claims, it holds the keys of heaven and hell. It is not likely that the ignorant laity would draw any fine distinctions, any more than that a rude, unscrupulous monk like Tetzel would hesitate at any assurance to drive a trade. This he did "at a horrible rate," says Luther. St. Peter's Church was to be built and glorified in Rome; and at all risks gold must be had from Germany. The salesman was blatant and impudent. Commit what sin you will, said he, were it the violation of the Holy Virgin herself, "as soon as the gold chinks in the Pope's coffer, it is all wiped out." Luther, then "a young doctor, fresh from the forge, glowing and cheerful in the Holy Ghost" (as he describes himself), was amazed with horror. He demanded that Tetzel should be silenced; tried vainly to force on the ecclesiastics of the day the distinction between outward penance and inward penitence;