was to be taken that no heretic had access to sick or

dying persons. All wills were to be made in the presence of a priest. No office of trust was to be held by one in evil fame as a heretic. Those were in evil fame, who were so by common report, or so declared by good and grave witnesses before the bishop.*

Melun.

m

But statutes of persecution always require new statutes Council of rising above each other in regular gradations of rigour and cruelty. The Legate found the canons of Toulouse to be eluded or inefficient. He summoned a council at Melun, attended by the Archbishop of Narbonne and other prelates. The unhappy Count of Toulouse was compelled to frame the edicts of this council into laws for his dominions. The first provision showed that persecution had wrought despair. It was directed against those who had murdered, or should murder, or conceal the murderers of persecutors of heretics. A reward of one mark was set on the head of every heretic, to be paid by the town, or village, or district to the captor. It was evident that the heretics had now begun to seek concealment in cabins, in caves, and rocks, and forests; not merely was every house in which one should be seized to be razed to the ground, but all suspected caves or hiding places were to be blocked up; with a penalty of twenty-five livres of Toulouse to the lord on whose estate such houses or places of concealment of evil report should be found. Those who did not assist in the capture of heretics were liable to punishment. If any one was detected after death to have been a heretic his property was confiscated. Those who had made over their estates in trust, before they became heretics, nevertheless

The statutes of Toulouse in Mansi, sub ann. Compare Limborch, Historia Inquisitionis. Among the other decrees of the Council was one which declared the absolute immunity of all clerks from taxation, unless they were merchants or married (mercatores vel uxorati). If one succeeded to the inheritance of a lay fief, he was answerable for its burthens. They were likewise free from tolls (péages). Every person was bound to attend church on Sundays and holi

days. The statutes against private wars were in a more Christian spirit, only beyond the age. Every male above 14 was sworn to keep the peace; and heavy penalties denounced against all who should violate it. This was perhaps a law of foreign conquerors in a subjugated land.

m Conventus Meldunensis: Statuta Raimondi, A.D. 1233. Labbe Concil. sub ann.

CHAP. VIII.

HERESY SURVIVES.

forfeited such estates.

law by moving about

241

A.D. 1233.

Those who attempted to elude the under pretence of trade or pilgrimage, were ordered to render an account of their absence. A Council at Beziers enforced upon the clergy, under pain of suspension, or of deprivation, the denunciation of all who should not attend divine service. in their churches, on the appointed days, especially those suspected of heresy.

Yet heresy, even the Manichean heresy, was not yet extinguished. Many years, as will appear," must intervene of the administration of the most atrocious code of procedure which has ever assumed the forms of justice; more than one formidable insurrection; the forcible expulsion of the terrible Inquisition; the assassination, the martyrdom as it was profanely called, of more than one inquisitor, before the South of France collapsed into final spiritual subjection.

Yet, Latin Christianity might boast at length to have crushed out the life, at least in outward appearance, of this insurrection within her own borders. No language of Latin descent was permanently to speak in its religious services to the people, to form a Christian literature of its own, to have full command of the Scriptures in its vernacular dialect. The Crusade revenged itself on the poetry of the Troubadour, once the bold assailant of the clergy, by compelling it, if not to total silence, to but a feeble and uncertain sound.

"See on for the proceedings of the Inquisition.

VOL. IV.

Ꭱ

CHAPTER IX.

Preaching

rare.

NEW ORDERS. ST. DOMINIC.

THE progress of the new opinions in all quarters, their obstinate resistance in Languedoc, opinions, if not yet rooted out, lopped by the sword and seared by the fire, had revealed the secret of the fatal weakness of Latin Christianity. Sacerdotal Christianity, by ascending a throne higher than all thrones of earthly sovereigns, by the power, the wealth, the magnificence of the higher ecclesiastics, had withdrawn the influence of the clergy from its natural and peculiar office. Even with the lower orders of the priesthood, that which separated them from the people in a certain degree, set them apart from the sympathies of the people. The Church might still seem to preach to all, but it preached in a tone of lofty condescension; it dictated rather than persuaded ; but in general actual preaching had fallen into disuse; it was in theory the special privilege of the bishops, and the bishops were but few who had either the gift, the inclination, the leisure from their secular, judicial, or warlike occupations to preach even in their cathedral cities; in the rest of their dioceses their presence was but occasional ; a progress or visitation of pomp and form, rather than of popular instruction. The only general teaching of the people was the Ritual.

The Ritual.

But the splendid Ritual, admirably as it was constituted to impress by its words or symbolic forms the leading truths of Christianity upon the more intelligent, or in a vaguer way upon the more rude and uneducated, could be administered, and was administered by a priesthood almost entirely ignorant, but which had just learned mechanically, not without decency, perhaps not without devotion, to go through the stated observances. Everywhere the bell summoned to

CHAP. IX.

CLERGY AND PEOPLE.

243

the frequent service, the service was performed, and the obedient flock gathered to the chapel or the church, knelt, and either performed their orisons, or heard the customary chant and prayer. This, the only instruction which the mass of the priesthood could convey, might for a time be sufficient to maintain in the minds of the people a quiescent and submissive faith, nevertheless, in itself could not but awaken in some a desire of knowledge, which it could not satisfy. Auricular confession, now by Innocent III. raised to a necessary duty, and to be heard not only by the lofty bishop, but by the parochial priest, might have more effect in repressing the uneasy or daring doubts of those who began to reason; doubts which would startle and alarm the uneducated priest, and which he would endeavour to silence at once by all the terrors of his authority. Though the lower priesthood were from the people, they were not of the people; nor did they fully interpenetrate the whole mass of the people. The parochial divisions, where they existed, were arbitrary, accidental, often not clearly defined; they followed in general the bounds of royal or aristocratical domains. A church was founded by a pious king, noble, or knight, with a certain district. around it; but in few countries was there any approach to a systematic organisation of the clergy in relation to the spiritual wants and care of the whole Christian community.

The fatal question of the celibacy of the clergy worked in both ways to the prejudice of their authority. Celibacy of The married clergy, on the whole no doubt the clergy." more moral, were acting in violation of the rules of the Church, and were subject to the opprobrious accusation of living in concubinage. The validity of their ministrations was denied by the more austere; the doctrines of men charged with such grievous error lost their proper weight. The unmarried obeyed the outward rule, but by every account, not the bitter satire of enemies alone but the reluctant and melancholy admission of the most gentle and devout, in general so flagrantly violated the severer principles of the Church, that their teaching, if they attempted actual teaching, must have fallen dead on the minds of the people.

The earlier monastic orders were still more deficient as instructors in Christianity. Their chief, if not Monasticism. their sole exclusive and avowed object, was the salvation, or, at the highest, the religious perfection of themselves and of their own votaries. Solitude, seclusion, the lonely cell, their own unapproached, or hardly approached chapel, was their sphere; their communication with others was sternly cut off. The dominant, the absorbing thought of each hermit, of each cœnobite, was his own isolation or that of his brethren from the dangerous world. But to teach the world they must enter the world. Their influence, therefore, beyond their convent walls was but subordinate and accessory. The halo of their sanctity might awe, attract others; the zeal of love might, as to their more immediate neighbours, struggle with the coercive and emprisoning discipline. But the admiration of their sanctity would act chiefly in alluring emulous votaries within rather than in extending faith and holiness beyond their walls. Even their charities were to relieve their own souls, to lay up for themselves treasures of good works, rather than from any real sympathy for the people. The loftier notion of combining their own humiliation with the good of mankind first dawned upon the founders of the Mendicant orders. In the older monasteries beneficence was but a subsidiary and ancillary virtue. The cultivation of the soil was not to increase its fertility for the general advantage; it was to employ their own dangerous energies, to subdue their own bodies by the hard discipline of labour. At all events, the limit of their influence was that of their retainers, tenants, peasants, or serfs, bounded by their own near neighbouhood. No sooner indeed had any one of the older Orders, or any single monastery attained to numbers, rank or influence, than it became more and more estranged from the humbler classes; the vows of poverty had been eluded, the severer rule gradually relaxed; the individual might remain poor, but the order or the convent became rich; narrow cells grew into stately cloisters, deserts into parks, hermits into princely abbots. It became a great religious aristocracy; it became worldly, without impregnating the