ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



315 



with great difficulty. He had the effrontery to boast that he had saved more 

 souls from hell by his indulgences, than ever St. Peter had converted to 

 Christianity by his preaching. 



This juggler in iniquity, however, was at times himself out-juggled by 

 others ; and the following instance of his being overreached, as gravely re- 

 lated by Sechendorf, will show that the mummery of his trading was as ridi- 

 culously absurd as it was grossly nefarious. A man of some rank at Leipsic, 

 who was disgusted with his villany, and determined to be even with him, ap- 

 plied to him for information whether he could grant absolution for a sin of a 

 particular kind intended to be perpetrated, but to be kept a secret till the time. 

 Tetzel replied boldly that he could readily do so, provided the payment were 

 made equal to it. The bargain was instantly struck, the money paid down ; 

 and the diploma of absolution signed, sealed, and delivered in due form. 

 The purchaser, thus empowered, waited quietly till Tetzel, having collected 

 from Leipsic and its neighbourltood all the money he was able to lay hold of, 

 set off for his home richly freighted. The man of absolution followed him 

 right speedily ; overtook him on the road ; plundered him of the whole of his 

 fraudulent gain, and, having beaten him soundly at the same time over the 

 shoulders, produced his patent of absolution, avowed that this was the sin he 

 had purchased leave to commit, and sent him back to Leipsic to tell his 

 own story. 



If we turn immediately to the Vatican itself, and observe the personal con- 

 duct of the direct successors to the chair of St. Peter, and of the sacred col- 

 lege by which they were surrounded, what is the picture which is unfolded 

 to us 1 We behold pope fighting against pope, cardinals, in a multiplicity of 

 instances, against cardinals ;* the former occasionally deposed, and the latter 

 still more frequently strangled. We behold Leo X., when only an infant of 

 seven years old, made abbot of the rich benefice of Fonte-dolce ; a few years 

 afterward holding not less than twenty benefices equally rich and valuable 

 at the same time ; and nominated to the grave and venerable college of car- 

 dinals at the age of thirteen. We behold Alexander VI., a near predecessor 

 of Leo X., living incestuously with his own daughter, the loose but beautiful 

 and accomplished Lucretia Borgia, a common prostitute to her father and two 

 brothers ; and we behold one of the brothers assassinating the other, and 

 shortly afterward her legitimate husband, in the precincts of the apostolic 

 palace, and upon the threshold of St. Peter's church, from a jealousy of their 

 superior pretensions to her favour.f While, to close the whole, for it is dis- 

 gusting to wade in such a slough of moral filth, we behold the council of 

 Lateran inveighing with all its authority against the scandalous lives of 

 many of its own ministers, who, not satisfied with living in a state of concu- 

 binage themselves, consented to receive the wages of iniquity, and sell 

 licenses to the laity for the grant of a like indulgence.^ 



But it may, perhaps, be said, that in these instances the soft and enervating 

 power of an Italian climate, and the licentious habits which so peculiarly 

 characterized the decline of the Roman empire, and which to the period 

 before us had never been altogether eradicated, laid a foundation for vices 

 which would not otherwise have been exhibited. Let us then direct our 

 attention to a climate of another kind ; let us turn to the hardy and prover- 

 bially vii luous inliabitants of Scotland, and proverbially virtuous, too, from 

 the very nature of the climate itself: what was the effect of ignorance and 

 papal superstition amid the corruption of the fourteenth and fifteenth centu- 

 ries upon the physical temperance and chastity of the Highlands ] The fol- 

 lowing is Dr. M'Crie's account in his Life of John Knox, and which he sup- 

 ports by sufficient authorities : — 



"The corruptions by which the Christian religion was universally de- 



• Roscoe, vol. ii. p. 104. t lb. vol. i. Subjoined Dissertations, p. 8—11. 



$ Quia verd in quibiisdam regionibus noiinulli jnrisdictionem liabentes, pecuniaiios quffistus 4 concubi- 

 nariis percipere iioti erubescunt, paliciUes eos in tali foeditate sordesccie, sub pceni nialedictionis teternte 

 praicipinius, ne deinceps sub [)acto, cornposilione aut epe alterius quaestfls, talia quovis mode tolerent, aut 

 dlseSmulent.— S. S. Coiicil. torn. xiv. p. 302. 



