NOTICES OF PERU. 



331 



of the popes, for the three first ages, are attested by the monu- 

 ments of history. The knowledge, the talents, the zeal, and 

 laborious vigilance of the fourth and fifth centuries, are incon- 

 testable, for their works exist. The labors, and constant en- 

 deavors of the sixth and seventh, to diminish and repair the 

 ravages of barbarism, to save the reliques of the sciences, arts, 

 laws, and customs, cannot be called in doubt; of these, their 

 cotemporaries bear testimony. What the popes did in the 

 eighth and ninth, to humanize the people of the north, through 

 the means of religion, is so well known, that the Protestants 

 have not been able to conceal it, even with the varnish of odi- 

 um, except by poisoning the motives, the intentions, and the 

 means employed. It was necessary not to forget what the popes 

 did in the ninth century, to restrain the devastations of the 

 Mahometans. It has been requisite to scrape through the lees 

 of past ages, to find personages and deeds that could be black- 

 ened at discretion. And at what period were the bad popes? 

 It was when Italy was torn by petty tyrants, who disposed of 

 the See of Rome at their will; it was, when, casting out its le- 

 gitimate possessors, they placed in it either their children or 

 their creatures.^* 



" But even in the ages of general corruption and darkness, 

 I mean the tenth and the eleventh, how much are the majority 

 of the popes distinguished above the commonalty of men, not 

 only by their knowledge, but by their firm and untiring zeal 

 in opposing the torrent of abuses of the monarchs and people, 

 in extirpating the dominant vices of simony and incontinency, 

 in reducing the clergy everywhere to a common mode of living 

 separate from the age? All the monuments of that epoch, bear 

 testimony to the fact, and amongst them may be reckoned the 

 Roman Councils, celebrated in 1059 and 1063. Of the thirty- 

 three popes who governed the church in the twelfth and thir- 

 teenth centuries, there is not one who did not do honor to the 

 Holy See — not one whose habits were reprehensible. If their 

 pretensions, and the mode of sustaining them, sometimes caused 

 disturbance in the church, the purity of their lives, and their 



* Diccion. Theol. art. Papa. 



