CHAPTER II.
DIVISIONS AMONGST ECCLESIASTICS.—THE REGULAR AND SECULAR CLERGY.—THE POPE FAVOURS THE FORMER.—EXEMPTIONS FROM EPISCOPAL JURISDICTION.—HABITS OF THE FRIARS.
DIVISIONS AMONGST ECCLESIASTICS.—THE REGULAR AND SECULAR CLERGY.—THE POPE FAVOURS THE FORMER.—EXEMPTIONS FROM EPISCOPAL JURISDICTION.—HABITS OF THE FRIARS.
In tracing the progress of corruption in the English church and the causes of it, we have hitherto had a trustworthy guide in the venerable Bede; henceforward, to the time of the Normans, there is much in our history that is dark, intricate, and uncertain.[64]Many early church records have perished in the fires which on different occasions have consumed our cathedrals;—such was the fate of the documents in the cathedral of Canterbury (of all others the most to be desired), which were burnt together with that primitive structure soon after the Norman conquest.[65]A similar loss, and probably one much greater in extent, was sustained through the great fire of London, when St. Paul’s, with its chapter house and the writings contained in it, fell a prey to the flames;[66]not to speak of the wholesale destruction or dispersion of books and papers which accompanied the suppression of the religious houses, and which left to the fell swoop of the puritans but little to do in order to extinguish much of the ancient ecclesiastical annals of England.
However, it was undoubtedly during the interval in question, that a schism arose in the church, which eventuallyhastened the crisis of the Reformation beyond any one thing else, by dividing the house against itself. The famous Dunstan, who was born in the year 925, was the man to sow the Dragon’s tooth. As yet the different orders of ecclesiastics had lived in harmony. There were secular clergy, and there were regulars; but the latter had not hitherto taken kindly root in England. The great number of churches existing in this kingdom in the middle ages[67](of which many traces yet remain in a name, where both the building itself and all tradition of it have passed away,) bespeaks the popularity of the secular clergy, for it is not probable that these churches were then served from the monasteries; and, moreover, the lodgement which the seculars effected in the religious houses, as the latter were from time to time evacuated of their inmates by the exterminating sword of the Danes, was the effect as well as the cause of their increasing influence. Accordingly Dunstan found many, if not all, of the monasteries, as well as the cathedrals, in the hands of the canons secular, who resided with their families, performing the daily service, and standing upon much the same footing as such persons now do in our collegiate churches.[68]The saint, however, was not satisfied with the state of disorganization and decay to which the monastic order was reduced—he determined upon its reformation. The Benedictine rule, now become popular throughout Europe, was chosen for his experiment, and themonks were set up against the canons and the clergy. Dunstan was not very scrupulous about the justice of the means he used to accomplish his end; if he could not find a way he could make one. He would enjoin the king (Edgar) for instance, as a penance, to suppress the seculars and introduce the monks into the churches in their stead. It is in vain that synods are held wherein the grievances of the ecclesiastics thus violently ejected are propounded; it is in vain that their sufferings excite the sympathy of the nobles and the monarch who plead for their restoration. “That be far from you,—that be far from you,” were the inexorable words which issued from a crucifix in the council-chamber, for Dunstan had called in the supernatural to his help. A second effort is made in behalf of these deprived ministers. Again the saint commits the decision of his cause to heaven, though less innocently than before. The building where they met is shaken; the floor, at least that part of it which was occupied by the adversaries of Dunstan, sinks from under their feet; and whilst Dunstan and his friends continue to sit in safety, the rest are destroyed or disabled in the ruin. There is much in both these adventures to fasten suspicion upon the saint; for Dunstan, like Cromwell and many more, began his career, in all probability, as a bold and honest zealot, till height begot high thoughts, and he ended with being an ambitious and unflinching adventurer. He was, however, one of the master-spirits of the age. He was, strictly speaking, the founder of the monastic orders in England. They regarded him, whilst living, as their fearless champion, and when dead, as their most powerful intercessor: he gave a triumph to their party which they never forfeited; and having once by his means taken the lead of the secular clergy, they kept it to the Reformation. From amongst the monks of Abingdon, Winchester, and Glastonbury, the three greatest monasteries in England, and from the last more especially,which was Dunstan’s own abbey, were for a long while chosen almost all the abbots, principal ecclesiastical officers, and bishops of England;[69]such was the influence which this extraordinary man had established in his generation; and the natural consequence of so great and so successful an innovation was, a deep-rooted jealousy on the part of the ancient clergy towards the regulars, who had supplanted them, and heart-burnings between both parties, which were injurious alike to religion itself and to the establishment which should have been its support. Traces of this schism, for such it really was, may be discovered both in great matters and small. It spread through the whole church system like a leprosy. The architecture and ornaments of the churches bespoke it. Many of those grotesque figures which are seen to this day decorating the spouts of the roof, or the labels of the windows, were probably meant as a fling at the monks; and satirical caricatures to the same effect may still occasionally be met with on the painted glass of our cathedrals. It gives a complexion to our early literature; and the old chroniclers, being chiefly monks, betray on their side the same besetting sin, often without intending it, and sometimes to their own confusion. Thus we are told by one, that as long as the canons were in possession of the church of Winchester no notice was taken of the remains of St. Swithin, nor had a single miracle been wrought at his grave; but that no sooner were the monks in possession, than they carefully deposited his honoured bones within the cathedral in a case of silver and gold, and miracles ensued abundantly;—premises from which the worthy Thomas Rudborne, himself a monk of Winchester, did not mean that we should infer (what, however, we naturally must) that the canons were the more honest men of thetwo. Thus, again, the biographer of Ulstan, a bishop of Worcester in the eleventh century, tells us that as the bishop was on a journey to court, to be present at the Christmas festival, he halted for the night at Merlave, where he was hospitably entertained; that he informed his attendants he should on the morrow go to a distant church which he named; that the morning came, and with it a heavy storm of snow and rain; that his clergy made objections to such a journey in such weather; that go, however, the bishop would, even though he should be alone; that they were vexed, indeed, but held their peace; that one Frewen, a man of more audacity and address than the others, volunteered to be the good bishop’s guide; that he acquitted him of his office but scurvily, somewhat as Ariel might have done, taking him by the hand and leading him by a road which proved knee-deep in mud and mire, and wherein the bishop lost a shoe; for it was a plan of the clergy, says William of Malmesbury, who tells this precious story, to make the bishop repent of his resolution and be ruled by his chaplains. Ulstan, it is to be remembered, was a monk, and so was his biographer, and hence this impotent attempt to exalt the order at the expense of the poor seculars.[70]Such adventures are old wives’ tales, it is true; but they are not on that account the less fitted for showing the quarter from which the wind was setting in. On the other hand, the secular clergy, though on many accounts acting at a disadvantage, and certainly as a body less literary than the monks, could occasionally retaliate. We have seen that one of their weapons of warfare was to decorate their churches with monkish figures in burlesque; but their means of molestation were not confined to these inartificial expedients. Langland, for instance, was a secular priest and a satirical poet, and inhis vision of Pierce Plowman he lashes the regulars (though chiefly a class of them of whom we have not yet had occasion to speak) without moderation or mercy. Their artifices to procure endowments for their houses, their love of pleasure, their luxury, their horses, hawks, and hounds, are all touched in a spirit sufficiently caustic.[71]It is probable that the nobles in general took a malicious pleasure in encouraging this exposure of a class of men who were their rivals in wealth, and their superiors in intelligence, and thus widened the breach. Chaucer, who was a courtier as well as a poet, no doubt reflects the feelings of the upper ranks of his day, and he cleaves to the seculars. Meanwhile, neither of these ecclesiastical parties seems to have been aware that by their mutual criminations they were preparing the nation to demand a reformation in the manners of them all; and that each was throwing stones at the other, when the houses of both were made of glass.
But their strife was not merely a strife of tongues; it was their pleasure to thwart one another in deed as well as in word. Whenever the monks got footing in the cathedrals (which in many instances they very soon did,) they proved a perpetual thorn in the side of the bishop, more especially if he happened to have been promoted from the secular clergy himself. Then they carried themselves towards him in a spirit of “untamed reluctance.” They would not have this man to reign over them. The bishops were vexed at thus having to encounter foes in their own households, and sometimes we find them expressing an angry but impotent wish, that England was clear of them; and sometimes we find them by a stretch of power expelling the whole fraternity at once, and filling up their places with canons who were ever wont to be faithful and obedient to theirdiocesan.[72]On one occasion, indeed, this policy is not only put in practice by a bishop of Winchester, but an attempt is made by him to induce all the prelates of England to adopt the same. William the Conqueror (for it was under him that the thing occurred) was nothing loth to listen to the overture of Walkelin (for that was the bishop’s name), and to second this violent measure,[73]probably meaning to lay claim to a lion’s share of the spoil;[74]for the Norman princes, like some more modern reformers, had the appetite of the dragon of Wantly—“houses and churches were to them geese and turkeys;” but archbishop Lanfranc, the first metropolitan under the Norman dynasty, a good man and a wise, stood in the gap, and saved his church from the tender mercies of a reform, which, being interpreted, would have been a robbery. He, again, had been himself a monk, and probably would on that account view the transgressions of the monks with more charity, and, perhaps, be personally less exposed to their malice. And, indeed, if there must needs be this division of seculars and regulars, it was a happy circumstance for the church, and we will add for the country (for with all its gross defects it was the fountain of life and light to the nation in those times), that the dignitaries were taken from both classes, though chiefly, no doubt, from the regulars; and that thus they mutually acted as checks upon those classes, in any momentary ebullitions of party spirit; not to say that those who were removed from the monastery to the mitre would find their past prejudices corrected by a new position and new interests, and by the discovery that men of their own order were not always the most dutiful of their sons. Thus in the working of the system, there were some of those selfcorrectingprinciples and balances brought into play which in part protected it from itself, and the like to which (though so often overlooked or undervalued) constitute the real worth of many a system which wears an unpromising aspect, and which, in spite of those querulous empirics who assure us that it ought to go intolerably wrong, persists in going tolerably right notwithstanding. This observation is thrown out merely to account for the long continuance of a system, containing within itself such active elements of ruin, as, abstractedly considered, might have been expected to put an end to it much sooner.
But this is not all. In ourpost-mortemexamination of the Roman catholic church of England, undertaken with a view to ascertain the complicated disorders which made a way for its final dissolution, another feature presents itself akin to the last. William the Conqueror, who cared as little for the discipline of the church as for the laws of the land, thought proper to exempt a monastery which he had founded (that of St. Martin de Bello) from episcopal jurisdiction altogether. From this moment a mad ambition drove the monks of the principal religious houses to seek for themselves a similar privilege. Baldwin, abbot of St. Edmunds (Bury), at that time one of the finest foundations in England, obtained such exemption from pope Alexander, although, in the deed which conferred it, and which was executed before the year 1073, the pope, as if lending himself to a transaction hitherto unattempted and unheard of, expresses himself with some reserve—“as far as the thing could be done,salvâ primatis obedientiâ,” consistently with obedience to the primate. Lanfranc, however, then archbishop, who watched over the interests of the church (as we have already seen) with a cautious and prophetic eye, took away this dangerous privilege from the abbot, on his return to England, and reduced him to submission.But less resolute men, such as Radulph, William, and Theobald, succeeding him in the primacy, and the liberties of the church of England having been, in the mean while, crippled by the machinations of Rome, the monks took courage, and, feeling their own strength, claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of archbishops as well as bishops, as a matter of right; and, producing certain charters of ancient date (so they pretended), granted to them by popes or princes, carried their suit into the courts of Rome, and got it confirmed. This dispensation, bad in theory, was not better in practice. The monks of Malmesbury, for instance, had lately (aboutA. D.1180) elected an abbot. The bishop of Salisbury interdicts the abbot elect from receiving the benediction at any other hands than his own; whereupon the latter goes into Wales, and procures it from the bishop of Landaff (for the Welsh church was still independent of England); on this the archbishop suspends the abbot until he can justify his disobedience by producing his letters of exemption. The abbot presents to the archbishop his charter, which turns out to be faulty in the style, the thread, and the seal, and which savours little of the court of Rome. The bishop asserts it to be spurious, and exhibits many professions of submission on the part of the abbots of Malmesbury, made to him or his predecessors. The abbot is contumacious, declares that he holds himself bound to answer to no superior, whether bishop or archbishop, but to the pope only; and adds, “poor and miserable is the abbot who does not utterly annihilate the jurisdiction of a bishop, when, for a single ounce of gold a year, he may buy full liberty for himself from Rome.” The archbishop, therefore, entreats the pope not to aid and abet this turbulent person; and, at the same time, bitterly laments the injury done, not to the bishops only, but to the whole church, by these papal exemptions—exemptions which had provedruinous to the peace, discipline, and good order of the monasteries themselves which enjoyed them.[75]
Here, therefore, was a rift in the church, which time only widened, and which unfitted it for sustaining a storm whenever it should come. But the mischief did not end here. Long before the monks had escaped from the eye of their bishop, they had relaxed from the Sabine simplicity of their primitive institutions; now that they were left at liberty to do what seemed good in their own sight, matters went worse. Giraldus Cambrensis, a writer of the twelfth century, tells us, that on his return from abroad (he had been prosecuting his theological studies at Paris) he dined with the monks of Canterbury. Having eaten of their bread, he lifts up his heel against them, and maliciously exposes their bill of fare. It is curious as a picture of the times:—sixteen lordly dishes and upwards, besides a course of herbs, which latter, however, were not in much request; fish of divers kinds—roast and boiled, stewed and fried; omelets, seasoned meats, and sundry provocatives of the palate, prepared by cunning cooks; wines in ample profusion; sicera, piment, claret, must, mede, and moretum (mulberry),—any thing and every thing but ale, the boast of England, and more especially of Kent. “What would Paul the Hermit have said to all this?” thinks the splenetic Giraldus to himself, “or St. Anthony? or St. Benedict, the founder of the order?”[76]Such evidence, however, is to be received with considerable suspicion. There was for ages before their suppression, a run at the monks. A strong party spirit discovers itself in almost all that relates to the church in these middle ages, much as we are told of the harmony that prevailed in it before the reformation. The writer just quoted was a Welsh archdeacon, very far froma good-natured Sir Hugh, who would “persuade a man not to make a star-chamber matter of it;” on the contrary, he finds nothing as it should be: he is one of those dissatisfied spirits that delight in the study of morbid anatomy; neither monks nor bishops please him; he vexes himself because he cannot make a hundred watches go by his own, never suspecting that, after all, his own may be wrong; and, in his memoir of the Rights and Conditions of the Church of South Wales, he sums up the merits of the Cambrian Clergy with a testy anathema, something after the manner of Bruce’s benediction of the monks of Gondar, against the whole body, as traitors to him (though it does not appear that they had ever trusted him,) and to the liberties of the church to which they belonged.[77]But, when every allowance is made for the prejudice of the witnesses of the day, it is clear that by the thirteenth century, monks were no longer men of St. Benedict, and that another Dunstan, or a better man, was wanted to revive the monastic spirit, and to recover for the regulars the credit they had lost. Accordingly, in this century, the mendicant orders recently brought into being—the maggots not so much of corrupted texts as of corrupted times—found their way into England. The Franciscans, or Friars Minors, the Dominicans, or Black Friars; the Carmelites, or White Friars; and the Augustins, or Grey Friars; were the four divisions. Of these the two former were the most considerable; the Franciscans were the chief of all. The first settlement of these last was at Canterbury, in 1234; that of the Dominicans, thirteen years earlier, at Oxford; at which place, as well as at Cambridge, all the four orders soon found themselves in possession of flourishing houses.[78]There was much to captivate in their prospectus. All worldly views they renounced; they depended upon the alms of the people;and the people, admiring their disinterestedness, and reverencing their piety (which was, or which seemed to be, much beyond that of the monks,) were cheerful givers. They cultivated learning with great success; filled the professors’ chairs in the universities; searched out manuscripts, and multiplied the copies; collected libraries at any cost (for their popularity furnished them with the means); not a treatise on the arts, theology or the civil law appeared, but the friars bought it up. They improved the architecture of their country; for though their vow, like that of the Rhecabites, scarcely allowed them to sow seed or plant vineyards, or have any, it did not deny to them the building of houses; and, accordingly, on these were lavished the ample sums which the munificence of their benefactors poured into their treasury. It was the ambition of the great and noble that their bones should rest within these hallowed walls; and sumptuous shrines bespoke the mighty dead that slept in the chapel of St. Francis. All this might be well; but your friar was a sturdy beggar, and prosperity made him forget himself. He learned to drop the literary and religious character, and assume the politician. He engaged in diplomacy; mixed in the intrigues of courts; discussed treaties, formed alliances, and resolutely maintained the authority of the pope (whose creature he was) against all the princes and prelates of Christendom. He was furnished by his master with powers for effecting all this; and these he used to the confusion both of seculars and monks. He could preach where he would, if he could not lawfully take possession of the church of the minister, he could erect his ambulatory pulpit at any cross, in any parish, and rail (as he generally did) at the supineness and ignorance of the resident pastor. If he chanced to be received under the parsonage roof (as he seldom was,) he was felt to be a snake in the grass ready to betray his host in return for his hospitality; and,if he saw a fowl or a flask on his table, to denounce him, in his next day’s harangue, as a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.[79]He could confess whosoever might come to him. It was to no purpose that a parish priest refused absolution to any black sheep of his flock; away he went to a Franciscan, and absolution was given him at once; the more readily, indeed, as an opportunity was thus afforded the friar of expressing his contempt of every ecclesiastical body but his own. Nor did he enter into the labours of the parochial minister only; he had nobler game in another class of seculars—the cathedral clergy. These he reduced to poverty, and the venerable edifices to which they belonged to decay. The cathedrals were erected and maintained by the proceeds of lands—endowments for the most part received from kings, as the parish churches were generally endowed bylords of manors; and dioceses, even in this day, would be found, we suspect, on a careful examination, to have a more than imaginary reference in their dimensions to the limits of the several Saxon kingdoms into which the island was divided, as parishes certainly have a reference to the estates of individuals. They were further supported bypentecostals, which was an annual composition paid by every household at Pentecost; as an acknowledgement of attachment to the mother church; and, lastly, bybenefactions,oblations, andobits, the free-will offerings of the multitude. For a long time these two latter sources of revenue were very considerable. The people had a pride and pleasure in contributing to the erection, the repairs, and the maintenance of these beautiful structures, which were at once the goodly ornaments of the districts in which they stood; the temples of God, to whose service the pious felt themselves thus giving back a part of what he had freely conferred on them; andthe tombs of their fathers; for it was the desire of those simple days to be buried near the grave of some man of God, whose memory was fragrant among them, and to lay their bones beside his bones. But the friars poisoned the minds of the people, and shook this allegiance. St. Francis was above all the saints, not to say above the Saviour himself. To die in the weeds of a Franciscan, was to die the death of the righteous: and to repose after death in a Franciscan monastery, was to have angels for the guardians of your sepulchre. Accordingly, about the fourteenth century, the pentecostals began to be evaded; recovery was to be made of them by force of law; and free-will offerings to the cathedrals ceased altogether. The number of residentiaries was consequently reduced (a measure of necessity, which involved much subsequent inconvenience and legal dispute,) and the buildings themselves were with difficulty preserved from the injuries of time.[80]Neither did the schism end here. Before, however, we go further, it may due to ourselves to remark, that it is not because an historian of the reformation, protestant though he be, finds pleasure in thus uncovering the nakedness of the Roman catholic church, that he dwells so exclusively on its peccant parts, nor yet because he is not aware that better things may be said of it; but simply because his subject leads him to develope those defects, both in its doctrine and discipline which paved the way for its eventual overthrow, not to recount the virtues which, in spite of such defects, preserved it so long. At the same time, he naturally feels some satisfaction in vindicating his own church from a comparison by which it is thought to suffer, and which represents it as full of discord and division, whilst the church which it supplantedwas at unity with itself. Such was not, we see, the case. Time has, indeed, hushed all report of the bickerings of men who lived three or four centuries ago, and it may be invidious to awake the echo; but tenderness to the dead must not betray us into injustice to the living, and however error may be concealed, it must not be consecrated by the grave. But to return: hitherto we have represented the friars as the enemies of the secular clergy only, whether cathedral or parochial. They had their stone, however, to cast at the monks. It was their pleasure to contrast their own affected poverty (which lasted just so long as they could not help it) with the gallant bearing, profuse expenditure, and ample retinues of these latter, who, in their turn, expressed their contempt for them, not the less cordially, perhaps from a consciousness that the contrast was striking. In a manuscript which once belonged to a learned Benedictine, and is now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a drawing of four devils hugging four mendicant friars, one of each order, with great familiarity and affection.[81]But other weapons, offensive and defensive, were used besides ridicule. Thus the greater monasteries would occasionally rouse themselves, and found a small college or hall at the universities for their own novices, that they might not resign to their antagonists, without a struggle, the entire possession of those ancient seats of learning. So, again, when their members proceeded to degrees, they would often do it with studious costs and popular display, turning the occasion into a holiday spectacle, which might be set in balance against the miracles, mysteries, and other theatrical attractions of the mendicants.[82]These latter, however, might have long laughed at such artifices, had they continued true to one another;but the arrow which pierced them to the heart was feathered from their own wing. Their principles, like those of modern dissenters, propagated schism; they split amongst themselves; and the four orders tore the coat, which should be without seam, into as many parts. Mutual abuse, instead of cordial co-operation, was their maxim. The poor ploughman who sought instruction in his creed at the hands of the Friars Minors, was only told, as he valued his soul, to beware of the Carmelites; the Carmelites promoted his edification by denouncing the Dominican; the Dominicans in their turn by condemning the Augustins. “Be true to us,” was the language of each; “give us your money, and you shall be saved without a creed.”[83]Indeed, the frailty of human nature soon found out the weak places of the mendicant system. Soon had the primitive zeal of its founders burnt itself out; and then its censer was no longer lighted with fire from the altar:—a living was to be made. The vows of voluntary poverty only led to jesuitical expedients for evading it; a straining at gnats and swallowing of camels. The populace were to be alarmed, or caressed, or cajoled out of a subsistence. A death bed was a friar’s harvest; then were suggested the foundation of chantries, and the provision of masses and wax-lights. The confessional was his exchequer; there hints were dropped that the convent needed a new window, or that it owed “fortie pound for stones.” Was the good man of the house refractory? The friar had the art of leading the women captive, and reaching the family purse by means of the wife.[84]Was the piety of the public to be stimulated? Rival relics were set up, and impostures of all kinds multiplied without shame, to the impoverishment of the people, the disgrace of the church, and the scandal of Christianity.
It is revolting to bear record of these villanies—to see sordid advantage taken of the most sacred feelings of mankind, and religion itself subjected to suspicion through the hypocrisy of its professors. But, however humiliating may be the confession, experience has sanctioned it as a truth, that an indigent church makes a corrupt clergy; that in order to secure a priesthood which shall wear well, a permanent provision must be set aside for their maintenance—such a provision as shall induce men duly qualified, to enter the church, for it is visionary to suppose that temporal motives will not have their weight in this temporal state of things; and it is unreasonable to expect that persons who are excluded by the rules of society from the usual inlets to wealth, the courts, the camp, or the exchange, and who cannot but know or feel, when they are honestly doing their duty, that they are as good commonwealth’s men, to put it upon no higher ground, as any others, and therefore have as good a right to its liberal regards as any others, should be content to waive this right;—such a provision as shall be enough to ensure recruits for the priesthood from all ranks, the highest as well as those below, and so to ensure their easy intercourse with all ranks; for the leaven should leaven thewholelump;—such a provision as should encourage them to speak with all boldness, crouching to no man for their morsel of bread, nor tempted to lick the hand that feeds them;—such a provision as should prevent the meanness of their condition from prejudicing the force of their reasons, or give occasion to a high-minded hearer to accuse their plain speech of unmannerly presumption. Surely, until we can find such a church upon earth, in all her members, and in all the successive generations of her members, as can be true to the image of our Lord, it is a vision indeed to reject all adventitious support, such as her condition may require, and to say with the great puritan poet,that she should be content, as he was, to ride upon an ass.”[85]
It is needless to add, that the friars at length became as rottenness to the bones of the Roman catholic church; that, by the time of Erasmus and Luther, they were the butt at which every dissolute idler, on every tavern bench, discharged his shaft, hitting the establishment, and religion itself, through their sides; that they were exhibited in pot-house pictures as foxes preaching, with the neck of a stolen goose peeping out of the hood behind; as wolves giving absolutions, with a sheep muffled up in their cloaks; as apes sitting by a sick man’s bed, with a crucifix in one hand, and with the other in the sufferer’s fob.[86]Still the disaffection which this ridicule both indicated and promoted, was in some degree neutralised. There was, something, after all, in the constitution of such an order as the friars, which gratified the feelings of the people, and which led to their continued toleration, if not to their aggrandisement. They were, for the most part, men of themselves; they were the democratic portion of the church. It no doubt flattered the vanity of the peasant or mechanic, to see his own flesh and blood bearding the first-born of Egypt with whom he was brought into contact, or rather collision, in the members of the old and orthodox abbeys; nor would it be less grateful perhaps, to an unlettered man to hear theclerkof his ownname, and of his own breeding, starting and maintaining with vast pertinacity theological subtleties, which had little other merit, to be sure, than that of being in opposition to received opinions, and an assertion of the right of every man to think for himself, however ill he might be qualified for doing so to advantage.
Then, again the pope was a tower of strength to the mendicant orders. They were the men of his right hand; and it may be observed, that when the Reformation came on, which was, amidst other and nobler interests concerned, a struggle in the first instance between the king and the pope for the mastery, the smaller monasteries (which were those of the friars) were the first confiscated by Henry; for he considered them the barracks from which his most inveterate enemies issued to the contest, prepared to maintain the cause of their sovereign lord the pope against any and every antagonist. Lastly, it is not to be forgotten, that the cloak of the friar was the refuge for a class of men who would now be supported by parish relief, and though in both cases the idle might often be enabled hereby to enter into the labours of others, yet often again assistance would be thus administered to the blameless sufferer, and the load of life on the whole be lightened to the poor.
Such were some of the circumstances that still upheld the mendicants even in the days of their degeneracy, when the spirit was gone that had urged them indeed to enthusiastic extravagances and puerile superstitions, but which was respected because it was thought to be sincere; and when little remained behind but acaput mortuumof unmeaning forms of devotion, and crafty contrivances for gain.