314 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



and writing a still rarer accomplishment ; every landed proprietor was a mere 

 soldier ; and being- expert and strong by the daily use of arms, was eager for 

 an opportunity of showing his prowess. Nor was such opportunity ever 

 wanting; for, when not employed in expeditions against a public enemy, he 

 was commonly engaged in some petty enterprise at home, prompted by pride 

 avarice, or revenge. Hence feuds, as, indeed, the term itself imports, were 

 the peculiar characteristic of feudal power; vice and idleness were per- 

 petually engendering animosities ; gross ignorance disabled the different par- 

 ties from adjusting them by the address of argument and fair reason; brutal 

 obstinacy rendered them hereditary; and the son who succeeded to his 

 father's estate succeeded also to his quarrels. 



While such was the ready aid which the political system of the times ad- 

 ministered to the gloomy reign of mental darkness and disorder, the gross 

 misconduct of the church was still more instrumental in promoting the same 

 direful effect. Although nothing is more clear than that, through the whole 

 of this desolate period, God never left himself witliout a witness of the truth, 

 the purity, and the power of the genuine doctrines of Christianity; although 

 nothing is more clear than that, even in the deepest midnight of this desolate 

 period, a few honest, zealous, and conscientious ecclesiastics, and even lay- 

 men, are to be met with who sedulously and manfully opposed themselves to 

 the general corruption of their contemporaries, it is equally clear, that the 

 great mass of the priesthood assumed the sacred habit for the mere purpose 

 of indulging more effectually in the worst and most licentious passions and 

 appetites ; and surpassed all the rest of the community in the irregularity 

 and scandal of their lives. Many of them were professed infidels, and ex- 

 claimed openly to each other, " Qua7itas divitias nobis peperit hate Christi 

 fabulaP^ — What wealth does this fiction of Christ obtain for us !" A sen- 

 timent generally ascribed to the free-thmking genius of Leo X., but which, 

 whether ever uttered by him or not, was in frequent use long before his era ; 

 while nearly all concurred in the well-known motto that " ignorance is the 

 mother of devotion." 



In truth, it requires no ordinary stock of temper to wade through the scenes 

 of abominable filth and barefaced hypocrisy which characterize the holy 

 fathers of the church, as they were impiously denominated, at the period im- 

 mediately before us. Crusades, indeed, had long been in use for the extirpa- 

 tion of infidelity, and there were occasional triumphs of the Cross over the 

 Crescent ; but, like most other pretensions to ecclesiastical zeal and devo- 

 tion, even these had for the most part been perverted to the sinister purposes 

 of avarice, temporal authority, or revenge; while plenary indulgences and 

 remissions of sin, for given periods of time, or, in other words, formal 

 licenses to live a life of unrestrained debauchery, and gratify every libidi- 

 nous appetite and inclination for the term specified", had, during the existence 

 of many crusades, been openly granted at the Vatican, as well as distributed 

 for this purpose by its commissaries, all over Europe, to every one who would 

 either consent to join the sacred standard in person or hire a substitute to 

 fight for him. And similar indulgences were continued after their cessa- 

 tion, and were notoriously bought and sold at a settled or market-price. 



This was strikingly exemplified during the papacy of Urban II. in the 

 year 1100; while it is admitted by the warmest advocates of the Vatican 

 that the famous fabric of St. Peter's church at Rome was paid for under Leo 

 X. out of the same resources ; which they venture to urge, indeed, in justifi- 

 cation of the measure ;* as though crimes could change their nature by the 

 end for which they are perpetrated. 



One of the fittest instruments for this traffic of abomination was the noto- 

 rious Dominican inquisitor John Tetzel, who, true to his own trade, led so 

 abandoned a life of debauchery that he was at length condemned to death 

 by the emperor Maximilian for the crime of adultery, accompanied with very 

 atrocious circumstances ; and was saved from undergoing the punishment 



* See DiipiR, book ii. ch. i. ; as also Roscoe's Life of Leo X. vol. iii. p. 150. 



