Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 4

Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to ma.s.s. If he committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till the purse-strings were untied again.

There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent, where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its good-will.

When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was afterwards torn in pieces by the people.

Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.

If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.

To be a ma.s.s priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words, and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The ma.s.ses were paid for at so much a dozen, and for every ma.s.s that was said, so many years were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.

If they got the ma.s.ses, and the priests got the money, all parties concerned were satisfied.

I am speaking of the form which these things a.s.sumed in an age of degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by man might be abused in the same way.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically, and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously idolatrous.

You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.

With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will remain. For bad health, subst.i.tute penance in this world and purgatory in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.

Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.

This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred and fifty thousand years of purgatory.

What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he is admitted into purgatory at all!

Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger, ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.

You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily, any poor wretch is left to suffer there.

Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale, what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.

'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'

said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again: it is a bad shilling.'

Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on delicate ground. The accounts of those inst.i.tutions, as they existed in England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this hypothesis, was utterly depraved.

But no such theory can explain away the acc.u.mulated testimony which comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers from the Pope. He inst.i.tuted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot, in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the Archbishop's library at Lambeth.

A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches, satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of these reverend personages.

On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they were occupied.

A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve him? His case seems utterly desperate.

Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?

A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how one member could have many bodies, pa.s.sed comprehension. In such a monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself into the body of ten universities.

The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at length gave up the problem in despair.

Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar could not have written the book which pa.s.ses under the name of 'Caesar's Commentaries,'

because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has notoriously no time to learn Latin.

Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.

'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge, which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice, "Bar, bar, bar!"'

I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.

I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and n.o.body will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.

When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for themselves in a hundred years.'

Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'

'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread, to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look like fiery angels.'

And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness, and the loathing of the service of G.o.d.'

Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time, which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the pothouse, and the brothel.

I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a certain point becomes unendurable to the coa.r.s.est nostril. The const.i.tution of human things cannot away with it.

Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible courses.

Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the heads of the Church themselves.

Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The ecclesiastical const.i.tution, like a sick human body, might recover its tone if a better diet were prepared for it.

Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence, much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.

The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and believed that their seat was established for them for ever.

The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.

When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant, the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a new emperor.

There were two compet.i.tors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson, afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.

Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony, Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came out of the business with clean hands.

But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard bargain for his actual vote.

The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.

The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following Lectures.

LECTURE II.

In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October, Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-cla.s.s people, were well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant, whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning the lovely or delightful one.

Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.