"Nothing is more moving, in medieval history, than the omnipresence, almost at times the omnipotence, of religion. It is difficult for those who today live in comfort and plenty to go down in spirit into the chaos and penury that molded medieval faiths.

"But we must think of the superstitions, apocalypses, idolatry, and credulity of medieval Christians, Moslems, and Jews with the same sympathy with which we should think of their hardships, their poverty and their griefs. The flight of thousands of men and women from 'the world, the flesh, and the Devil' into monasteries and nunneries suggests not so much their cowardice as the extreme disorder, insecurity, and violence of medieval life.

"It was within this encompassing vision that most Christian lives moved and found their meaning. The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence taht right would win in the end and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimiated in the unversal triumph of the good.

"The Last Judgment was the pivot of the Christian, as of the Jewish and the Moslem, faith.

"The belief in the Second Advent of Christ and the end of the world, as preludes to the Judgment, had survived the disappointments of the apostles, the passing of the year 1000, and the fears and hopes of forty generations. It had become less vivid and general but it had not died. 'Wise men' said Roger Bacon in 1271 , considered the end of the world to be near.

"Every great epidemic or disaster, every earthquake or comet or other extraordinary event was looked upon as heralding the end of the world.

"There was much tenderness in medieval Christianity, probably more than in any other religion in history, but the Catholic. like the early Protestant theology and preaching, felt called upon to stress the terror of hell. Christ was to this age no 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' but the stern avenger of every mortal sin.

"Nearly all churches showed some representative of Christ the Judge. Many had pictures of the Last Judgment and these portrayed the tortures of the damned more prominently than the bliss of the saved.

"St. Methodius, we are told, converted King Boris of Bulgaria by painting a picture of hell on the wall of the royal palace.

"Many mystics claimed to have had visions of hell and described its geography and terror. The monk Tundale, in the twelfth century reported exquisite details.

"In the center of hell, he said, the Devil was bound to a burning gridiron by redhot chains. His screams of agony never ended. His hands were free and reached out and seized the damned. His teeth crushed them like grapes. HIs fiery breath drew them down his burning throat.

"Assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the bodies of the damned alternately into fire or icy water -- or hung them up by the tongue -- or sliced them with a saw -- or beat them flat on an anvil -- or boiled them or strained them through a cloth. Sulphur was mixed with the fire in order that a vile stench might be added to the discomforts of the damned but the fire gave no light so that horrible darkness surrounded the incalculable diversity of pains.

"The Church herself gave no official location or description of hell but she frowned upon men who, like Origen, doubted the reality of its material fires.

"Most Christian theologians took literally the statement ascribed to Christ:-'He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned' (Matt xvi, 16).

"St. Augustine reluctantly concluded that infants dying before being baptized went to hell.

"St. Anselm thought that the damnation of unbaptized infants (vicariously guilty through the sin of Adam and Eve) was no more unreasonable than the slave status of children born to slaves -- which he considered reasonable.

"The Church softened the doctrine by teaching that unbaptized infants went not to hell but to limbo -- Infernus puerorum -- where their only suffering was the pain of the loss of paradise.

"Most Christians believed that all Moslems -- and most Moslems (Mohammed excepted) believed that all Christians -- would go to hell.

"It was generally accepted that all 'heathen' were damned.

"The Fourth Lateran Council declared that no man could be saved outside the Universal Church.

"Pope Gregory IX condemned as heresy Raymond Lully's hope that 'God hath such love for His people that almost all men will be saved, since, if more were damned than saved, Christ's mercy would be without great love.

"No other prominent churchmen allowed himself to believe -- or say -- that the saved would outnumber the damned.

"Berthold of Regensburg, one of the most famous and popular preachers of the thirteenth century, reckoned the proportion of the damned to the saved as a hundred thousand to one.

"St. Thomas Aquinas thought that 'in this also doth God's mercy chiefly appear, that He raiseth a few to that salvation wherefrom very many fail.'

"Volcanoes were supposed by many to be the mouths of hell. their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned. Gregory the Great argued tahat the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned. The congested bowels of the earth held in their hot embrace the great majority of all the human beings that had ever been born. From that hell there would be no respite nor escape through all eternity.

Said Berthold:- Count the sands of the seashore, or the hairs that have grown on man or beast since Adam. Reckon a year of torment for each grain or hair and that span of time would hardly represent the beginning of the agony of the condemned.

"We hear of many heretics but most of these admitted the basic tenets of the Christian creed.

"At Orleans in 1017 two men 'among the worthiest in lineage and learning' denied creation -- the Trinity, heaven, and hell as 'mere ravings.'

"John Salisbury, in the twelfth century, tells of hearing many persons talk 'otherwse than faith may hold.'

"In that century, says Villani, there were at Florence epicureans who scoffed at God and the saints and lived 'according to the flesh.'

"Giraldus Cambrensis tells of an unnamed priest who, reproved by another for careless celebration of the Mass, asked whether his critic really believed in transubstantiation, the Incarnation, the Virgin birth, and resurrection -- adding tht all this had been invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint and was now carried on by hypocrites.

"The same Gerald of Wales quotes the scholar Simon of Tournai as crying out one day:-'Almighty God! How long will this superstitious sect of Christians, and this upstart invention endure?'

"Of this Simon the story is told that in a lecture he proved by ingenious arguments the doctrine of the Trinity and then, elated by the applause of his audiences, boasted that he could disprove the doctrine with yet stronger arguments. Whereupon, we are told, he was immediately stricken with parlysis and idiocy.

"About 1200 Peter, Prior of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, London, wrote:-'There are some who believe that there is no God and that the world is ruled by chance. There are many who believe neither in good or evil angels, nor in life after death, nor in any other spiritual and invisible thing.'

"But village atheists leave few memorials behind them. The literature that has come down from the Middle Ages was largely composed by churchmen or was largely screened by ecclesiastical selection.

"We shall find 'wandering scholars' composing irreverent poetry, rough burghers swearing the most blasphemous oaths, people sleeping and shoring, even dancing and whoring, in church, and 'more lechery, gluttony, murder, and robbery in the Sunday (said a friar) 'than reigned all the week before.'

"Such items, suggesting a lack of real faith, might be multipled by heaping up instances from a hundred countries and a thousand years on one page. They serve to warn us against exaggerating medieval piety.

"But the Middle Ages still convey to the student a pervasive atmosphere of religious practices and beliefs. Every European state took Christianity under its protection and enforced submission to the Church by law.

"Nearly every king loaded the Church with gifts. Nearly every event in history was interpreted in religious terms.

"Every incident in the Old Testament prefigured something in the New. In vetere testamento, said Augustine, novum later, in novo vetus pater, e.g. said the great Bishop,

"David watching Bathsheba bathing symbolized Christ beholding His Church cleaning herself from the pollution of the world.

"Everything natural was a supernatural sign.

"Every part of a church, said Guillaume Durand, Bishop of Mende, has a religious meaning. The portal is Christ, through whom we enter heaven. The pillars are the bishops and doctors who uphold the Church. The sacristy, where the priest puts on his vestments, is the womb of Mary, where Christ put on human flesh.

"Men preferred it so. They suspected that no one could answer their questions. It was prudent, they felt, to take on faith the replies given with such quieting authoritativeness by the church.

"They would have lost confidence in her had she ever admitted her fallibility. Perhaps they distrusted knowledge as the bitter fruit of a wisely forbidden tree, a mirage that would lure man from the Eden of simplicity and an undoubting life.

"So the medieval mind, for the most part, surrendered itself to faith, trusted in God and the Church, as modern man trusts in science and the state.

"Said Philip Augustus to his sailors in a midnight storm:-'You cannot perish for at this moment thoudands of monks are rising from their beds and will soon be praying for us.'

"Men believed that they were in the hands of a power greater than any human knwoledge cold give. In Christendowm, as in Islam, they surrendered to God and even amid profanity, violence, and lechery, they sought Him and salvation.

"It had two functions -- to remove the stain of original sin and, by this new birth, to formally receive the individual into the Christian fold. At this ceremony the parents were expected to give the child the name of a saint who was to be its patron, model, and protector. This was its 'Christian name.'

"By the ninth century the early Christian method of baptism by total immersion had been gradually replaced by aspersion -- sprinkling -- as less dangerous to health in northern climes.

"Any priest -- or, in emergency, any Christian -- could confer baptism.

"The old custom of deferring baptism to the later years of life had now been replaced by infant baptism.

"It was administered only by a bishop with a 'laying on of hands,' a prayer that the Holy Ghost would enter the candidate, an anointing of the forehead with chrism, and a slight blow on the cheek.

"If the doctrines of the Church inculcated a sense of sin, she offered means of periodically cleansing the soul by confessing one's sins to a priest and performing the assigned penances.

"According to the Gospel (Matt, xvi, 19; xviii, 18), Christ had forgiven sins and had endowed the apostles with a similar power to 'bind and loose.' This power, said the Church, had descended by apostolic succession from the apostles to the early bishops, from Peter to the popes, and in the twelfth century the 'power of the keys' was extended by bishops to the priests.

"The public confession practiced in primitive Christianity had been replaced in the fourth century by private confession to spare embarrassment to dignitaries but public confession survived in some heretical sects and a public penance might be imposed for such monstrous crimes as the massacre of Thessalonica or the murder of Becket.

"The Fourth Council of the Lateran made annual confession and communion a solemn obligation whose neglect was to exclude the offender from church services and Christian burial.

"To encourge and protect the penitent a 'seal' was placed upon every private confession. No priest was allowed to reveal what had been so confessed.

"Absolution in confession removed from sin the guilt that would have condemned the sinner to hell but it did not absolute him from the 'temporal' punishment due to his sin.

"Only a small minority of Christians completely atoned on earth for their sins. The balance of atonement wold be exacted in purgatory.

"The Church claimed the right to remit such punishments by transmitting to any Christian penitent who performed stipulated works of piety or charity a fraction of the rich treasury of grace earned by Christ's sufferings and death and by saints whose merits outweighed their sins.

"Indulgences had been granted as far back as the ninth century. Some were given in the eleventh century to pilgrims visiting sacred shrines. The first plenary indulgence was that which Urban II offered in 1095 to those who would join the First Crusade.

"From these uses the custom arose of giving indulgences for repeating certain prayers, attending special religious services, building bridges, roads, churches, or hospitals, cleaning forests or draining swamps, contributing to a crusade, to an ecclesiastical institution, to a church jubilee, to a Christian war . . .

"The system was put to many good uses but it opened doors to human cupidity. The Church commissioned certain ecclesiastics, usually friars, as quaestiari to raise funds by offerng indulgences in return for gifts, repentance, and prayer. These solicitors -- whom the English called 'pardoners' -- developed a competitive zeal that scandalized many Christians.

"They exhibited real or false relices to stimulate contributions. They kept for themselves a due or undue part of their receipts.

"The Church made several efforts to reduce these abuses. The Fourth Lateran Council ordered bishops to warn the faithful against false relices and forged credentials. It ended the right of abbots and limited that of bishops to issue indulgences. It called upon all ecclesiastics to exercise moderation in their zeal for the new device.

"In 1261 the Council of Mainz denounced many quaestiari as wicked liars who displayed the stray bones of men or beaats as those saints, trained themselves to weep on order and offered purgatorial bargains for a msximum of coin and a minimum of prayer.

"Similar condemnations were issued by church councils at Vienne and Ravenna.

"The church took literally the words ascribed to Christ at the Last Supper -- of the bread, 'this is my body,' and of the wine, 'this is my blood.'

"The main feature of the Mass was the 'transubstantiation' of wafers of bread and a chalice of wine into the body and blood of Christ by the miraculous power of the priest.

"The original purpose of the Mass was to allow the faithful to partake of the 'body and blood, soul and divinity' of the Second Person of the Triune God by eating the consecrated host and drinking the consecrated wine.

"As the drinking of the transubstantiated wine risked spilling of the blood of Christ, the custom arose in the twelfth century of communicating through taking only the Host. When some conservatives (whose views were later adopted by the Hussites of Bohemia) demanded communion in both forms to make sure that they received the blood as well as the body of the Lord, theologians explained that the blood of Christ was 'concomitant' with His body in the bread, and His body was 'concomitant' with with His blood in the wine.

"A thousand marvels were told of the power of the consecrsated Host to cast out devils, cure disease, stop fires, and detect perjury by choking liars.

"In the sacrament of holy orders the bishop conferred upon the new priest some of the spiritual powers inherited from the apostles and presumjably given to these by God Himself in the person of Christ.

"And in the final sacrament -- extreme unction -- the priest heard the confession of the dying Christian, gave him the absolution that saved him from hell and anointed his members so that they might be cleansed of sin and fit for resurrection before his Judge.

"His survivors gave him Christian burial instead of pagan cremation because the Church held that the body too would rise from the dead. They wrapped himn in his shroud, placed a coin in his coffin as if for Charon's ferriage and bore him to his grave with solemn and costly creiemony.

"It instructs, nourishes, and often begets, belief.

"It brings the believer into comforting contact with his god.

"It charms the senses and the soul with drama, poetry, and art.

"It binds individuals into fellowship and a community by persuading them to share in the same rites -- the same songs -- the same prayers -- at last the same thoughts.

"The oldest Christian prayers were the Pater noster and the Credo. Toward the end of the twelfth century the tender and intimate Ave Maria began to ake form. And there were poetic litanies of praise and supplication.

"Some medieval prayers verged on magic incantations to elicit miracles. Some ran to an importunate iteration that desperately overruled Christ's ban on 'vain repetitions.'

"Monks and nuns, and later the laity, from an Oriental custom brought in by Crusaders, gradually developed the rosary. As this was made popular by Dominican monks, so the Franciscans popularized the Via Crucis, or Way or Stations of the Cross, by which the worshiper recited prayers before each of fourteen pictures or tableaux representing stages in the Passion of Christ.

"Priests, monks, nuns, and some laymen sang or recited the 'canonical hours' -- prayers, readings, psalms, and hymns formulated by Benedict and others, and gathered into a breviarium by Alcuin and Gregory VII.

"Every day and night, at interals of some three hours, and from a million chapels and hearths, these conspiring prayers besieged the sky.

"The Almighty was feared. He still carried, in popular conception, much of the severity that had come down from Yahveh.

"How could a simple sinner dare to take his prayer to so awful and distant a throne? Jesus was closer, but He too was God, and one hardly ventured to speak to Him face to face after so thoroughly ignoring His Beatitudes.

"It seemed wiser to lay one's prayer before a saint certified by canonization to be in heaven and to beg his or her intercession with Christ.

"All the poetic and popular polytheism of antiquity rose from the never dead past and filled Christian worship with a heartening communion of spirits, a brotherly nearness of earth to heaven, redeeming the faith of its darker elements.

"Every nation, city, abbey, church, craft, soul, and crisis of life had its patron saint, as in pagan Rome it had had a god.

"England had St. George, France had St. Denis, St. Bartholomew was the protector of the tanners because he had been layed alive.

"St. John was involved by candlemakers because he had been plunged into a calldron of burning oil.

"St. Christopher was the patron of porters because he had carried Christ on his shoulders.

"Mary Magdalen received the petitions of performers because she had poured aromatic oils upon the Savior's feet.

"For every emergency of ill, men had a friend in the skies. St. Sebastian and St. Roch were mighty in time of pestilence .

"St. Apollinia, whose jaw had been broken by the executioner, healed the toothache.

"St. Blaise cured sore throat.

"St. Corneille protectd oxen, St. Gall chickens, St. Anthony pigs.

"But the year did not find room for the 25,000 saints that had been canonized by the tenth century. The calendar of saints was so familiar to the people that the almanac divided the agricultural year by their names.

"In France the feast of St. George was the day for sowing. In England St. Valentine's Day marked the winter's end. On that happy day birds (they said) coupled fervently in the woods and youths put flowers on the window sills of the girls they loved.

"Many saints received canonization through the insistent worship of their memory by the people or the locality, sometimes against ecclesiastical resistance.

"Images of the saints were set up in churches and public squares, on buildings and roads, and received a spontaneous worship that scandalized some philosophers and iconoclasts. Bishop Claudius of Turin complained that many folk 'worship images of saints. They have not abandoned idols but only changed their names.'

"Some monks, seeking privacy for their devotions, resented the miracles wrought by their relics.

"At Grammont the abbot appealed to the remains of St. Stephen to stop his wonder working which was luring noisy croweds. He threatened:-'Othrwise we will throw your bones into the river.'

"It was the people not the Church that took the lead in creating or swelling the legends of relic miracles. The Church in many cases warned the public to discredit the tales. In 386 an imperial decree presumably requested by the Church forbade the 'carrying about or sale of' the remains of 'martyrs.'

"St. Augustine complained of 'hypocrites in the garb of monks' who 'trade in members of martyrs, if martyr they be.' Justinian repeated the edict of 386.

"About 1119 Abbot Guilbert of Nogent wrote a treatise On the Relics of Saints, calling a halt to the relic craze. Many of the relics, he says, are of 'saints celebrated in worthless records,'

"Some 'abbots, enticed by the multitude of gifts brought in, suffered the fabrication of false miracles.' 'Old wives and herds of base wenches chant the lying legends of patron saints at their looms and if a man refuse their words they will attack him with their distaffs.'

"The clergy, he notes, have rarely the heart or courage to protest. He confesses that he too held his peace, when relic mongers offered to eager believers 'some of that very bread which Our Lord pressed with His own teeth' for 'I should rightly be coandemned for a madman if I should dispute with madmen.'

"He observes that several churches have complete heads of St. John the Baptist and marvels at the hydra heads of that undecapitable saint.

"Here too the people took the initiative. In 431 Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, in a famous sermon at Ephesus, applied to Mary many of the terms fondly ascribed by the pagans of Ephesus to the 'great goddess Artemis-Diana.

"The Council of Ephesus in that year over the protests of Nestorius, sanctioned for Mary the title 'Mother of God.' Gradually the tenderest feature of Astarte, Cybele, Artemis, Diana and Isis were gathered together in the worship of Mary.

"In the sixth century the Church established the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven and assigned it to August 13, the date of ancient festivals of Isis and Artemis.

"Mary became the patron saint of Constantinople and the imperial family. Her piacture was carried at the head of every great procession and was (and is) hung in every church and home in Greek Christendom.

"Half of the beauty of Catholic worship, much of the splendor of Catholic art and song, are the creation of this gallant faith in the devotion and gentleness, even the physical loveliness and grace, of woman. The daughers of Eve have entered the temple and have transformed its spirit.

"Partly because of that new Catholicism feudalism was chastened into chivalry and the status of woman was moderately raised in a man-made world. Because of it medieval and Renaissance sculpture and painting gave to art a depth and tenderness rarely known to the Greeks.

"Following ancient customs, and perhaps for reasons of health, she prescribed periodical fasts. All Fridays were to be meatless. Throughout the forty days of Lent no meat, eggs, and chees might be eaten and the fast was not to be broken until the hour of none (3 p.m.). Furthermore there were to be in that period no weddings, no rejoicing, no hunting, no trials in court, no sexual intercourse.

"The Psalms of the Old Testament, the prayers and homilies of the Jerusalem Temple, readings from the New Testament, and the administration of the Eucharist, constituted the earliest elements of the Christian service.

"The division of the Church into Eastern and Wstern resulted in divergent rites. And the inability of the early popes to extend their full authority beyond Central Italy resulted in a diversity of ceremony even in the Latin Church.

"A ritual established at Milan spread to Spain, Gaul, Ireland, and North Britain and was not overcome by the Roman form until 664.

"Pope Hadrian I, probably completing labors begun by Gregory I, reformed the liturgy in a 'Sacramentary' sent to Charlesmagne toward the end of the eighth century.

"From the fourth century onward the vocal participation of the worshipers declined and 'canonical choristers' provided the musical response to the celebrant's chant. The hymns sung in the various services of the Church are among the most moving producers of medieval sentiment and art.

"The known history of the Latin hymn begins with Bishop Hilary of Poitiers. Returning to Gaul from exile in Syria, he brought home some Greco-Oriental hymns, translated them into Latin, and composed some of his own. All of these are lost.

"Ambrose at Milan made a new beginning. Eighteen survive of his sonorous hymns, whose restrained fervor so affected Augustine.

"The noble hymns of faith and tranksgiving, The Deum laudamus, formerly ascribed to Ambrose, was probably written by the Romanian Bishop Nicetas of Remisiana toward the end of the fourth century.

"In later centuries the Latin hymns may have assumed a new delicacy of feeling and form under the influence of Moslem and Provencal love poetry. Some of the hymns (like some Arabian poems) verged on jingling doggerel, tipsy with excess of rhyme.

"In northern countries the Feast of the Nativity took over the pleasant rites wherewith the pagan Teutons had celebrated the victory of the sun, at the winter solstice, over the advancing night.

"Hence the 'Yale" logs that burned in German, North French, English, Scandinavian homes and the Yule trees laden with gifts and the merry feasting that tried strong stomachs until the Twelfth Night therafter.

"There were countless other feasts or holy days -- Epiphany, Circumcision, Palm Sunday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost...Such days -- and only in less degree all Sundays -- were exciting events in the life of medieval man.

"For Easter he confessed such of his sins as he cared to remember, bathed, cut his beard or hair, dressed in his best and most uncomfortable clothes, received God in the Eucharist, and felt more profoundly than ever the momentous Christian drama of which he was made a part.

"In many towns, on the last three days of Holy Week, the events of the Passion were represented in the churches by a religious play, with dialogue and plain chant.

"Several other occasions of the ecclesiastical year were signalized with such 'mysteries.' About 1240 Juliana, prioress of a convent near Liege, reported to her village priest that a supernatural vision had urged upon her the need of honoring with a solemn festival the body of Christ as transsubstantiated in the Eucharist.

"In 1262 Pope Urban IV sanctioned such a celebration and entrusted to St. Thomas Aquinas the composition of an 'office' for it -- approprite hyumns and prayers. The philosopher acquitted himself wonderfully well in this assignment.

"In 1311 the Feast of Corpus Christi was finally established and was celebrated on the first Thursday after Pentecost with the most impressive procession of the Christian year. Such ceremonies drew immense crowds and glorified numerous participants.

"They opened the way to the medieval secular drama. They helped the pageantry of the guilds, the tournaments and knightly initiations, and the coronation of kings, to occupy with pious flurry and sublimating spectacle the occasional leisure of men not natively inclined to order and peace.

"The Church based her technique of moralizaion through faith not on arguments to reason but on appeals to the senses through drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, and poetry. And it must be confessed that such appeals to universal sensibilities are more successful -- for evil as well as for good -- than challenges to the changeful and indiviualistic intellect.

"She taught the dignity of labor and practiced it through the agriculture and industry of her monks. She sanctified the organization of labor in the guilds and organized religious guilds to perform works of charity.

"Every church was a sanctuary with right of asylum in which hunted men might find some breathless refuge until the passions of their pursuers could yield to the processes of law. To drag men from such a sanctuary was a sacrilege entailing excommunication.

"The church or cathedral was the social as well as the religious center of the village or town. Sometimes the sacred precinct or even the church itself was used with genial clerical consent to store grain or hay or wine, to grind corn or brew beer.

"There most of the villagers had been baptized, there most of them would be buried. There the older folks would gather of a Sunday for gossip or discussion and the young men and women to see and be seen. There the beggars assembled and the alms of the Church were dispensed.

"There nearly all the art that the village knew was brought together to beautify the House of God.

"The poverty of a thousand homes was brightened by the glory of that temple which the people had built with their coins and hands and which they considered their own, their collective and spiritual home.

"In the church belfry the bells rang the hours of the day or the call to services and prayers. The music of those bells was sweeter than any other except the hymns tht bound voices and hearts into one or warmed a cooling faith with the canticles of the Mass.

"Canon law -- the 'law of the rule' of the Church -- was a slow accretion of old religious customs, scriptural passages, opinions of the Fathers, laws of Rome or the barbarians, the decrees of Church councils and the decisions and opinions of the popes.

"Some parts of the Justinian Code were adapted to govern the conduct of the clergy. Other parts were recast to accord with the views of the Church on marrige, divorce, and wills.

"Collections of ecclesiastical legislation were made in the sixth and eighth centuries in the West and periodically by Byzantine emperors in the East.

"Certainly his digest shows a wise acquaintance with both Roman law and medieval philosophy. He called his boook Concordia discondantium -- reconciliation of discordant regulations. Later generations call it his Decretium.

"It drew into order and sequence the laws and customs, the conciliar and papal decrees, of the Church down to 1139 on her doctrine, ritual, organization, and administration -- the maintenance of ecclesiastical property -- the procedure and precedents of ecclesiastical courts -- the regulation of monastic life, the contract of marriage -- and the rules of bequest.

"The method of exposition may have stemmed from Abelard's Sic et non, and had in turn some influence on Scholastic method after Gratian. It began with an authoritative proposition, uoted statements or precedents contradicting it, sought to resolve the contradiction, and added a commentary. Though the book was not accepted by the medieval Church as a final authority, it became, for the period it covered, the indispensable and almost sacred text.

"Indeed, the field covered by canon law was larger than that covered by any contemporary civil code.

"It embraced not merely the structure, dogma, and operation of the Church, but rules for dealing with non-Christians in Christian lands -- procedure in the investigation and suppression of heresy -- the organization of crusaders -- the laws of marrige -- legitimacy -- dower -- adultery -- divorce -- wills -- burial -- widows and orphans -- laws of oath -- perjury -- sacrilege -- blasphemy -- simony -- libel -- usury and just price -- regulations for schools and universities -- the Truce of God and other means of limiting war and organizating peace -- the conduct of episcopal and papal courts -- the use of excommunication -- anathema and interdict -- the administration of ecclesiastical penalties -- the relations between civil and ecclesiastical courts -- betwen state and Church

"Minor excommunication excluded a Christian from the sacraments and ritual of the Church. Any priest could pronounce the penalty. To believers it meant everlasting hell if death should reach the offender before absolution came.

"A major excommunication (the only kind now used by the Church) could be pronounced only by councils or by prelates higher than a priest and only upon persons within their jurisdiction.

"It removed the victim from all legal or spiritual association with the Christian community. He could not sue or inherit or do any valid act in law but he could be sued and no Christian ws to eat or talk with him on pain of minor escommunication.

"When King Robert Of France was esxcommunicated for marrying his cousin he was abandoned by all his courtiers and nearly all his servants. Two domestics who remained threw into the fire the victuals left by him at his meals lest they be contaminated by them.

"In extreme cases the Church added to excommunication anathema -- a curse armed and detailed with all the careful pleonasm of legal phraseology.

"As a last resort the pope could lay an interdict upon any part of Christendom -- i.e. suspend all or most religious services. A people feeling the need of the sacraments and fearful of death supervening upon unforgiven sins sooner or later compelled the excommunicated individual to make his peace with the Church.

"Such occasional indifference marked the beginning of a decline in the authority of canon law over the laity of Europe. As the Church had taken so wide an area of human life under her rule when -- in the first Christian millennium, secular powers had broken down -- so in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as secular government grew stronger, one phase after another of human affairs was recaptured by civil from canon law.

"The Church properly won in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments. In most other fields her authority began to decline -- in education, marriage, morals, economy, and war.

"The states that had grown up under the protection -- and by the permission -- of the sociaial order that she had created declared themselves of age, and began that long process of secularization which culminates today.

"But the work of the canonists, like most creative activity, was not lost. It prepared and trained the Church's greatest statement. It shared in transmitting Roman law to the modern world. It raised the legal rights of widows and children and established the principle of dower in the civil law of Wstern Europe, and it helped to shape the form and terms of Scholastic philosophy.

"A monk was 'a religious' -- so was a nun. Some monks were also priests and constituted the 'regular clergy' -- i.e. clergy following a monastic rule (regula).

"All other clergy were called 'secular', as living in the 'world' (saeculum).

"All ranks of clergy were distinguished by the tonsure -- a shaven crown of the head -- and wore a long robe of any single color but red or green, buttoned from head to foot.

"The term clergy included not only those in 'minor orders' -- i.e. church doorkeepers, readers, exorcists, and acolytes -- but all university students, all teachers, and all who, having taken the tonsure as students, later became physicians, lawyers, artists, authors, or served as accountants or literary aides. Hence the later narrowing of the terms clerical and clerk.

"Instances of marriage or concubinage in the Latin priesthood after Gregory VII were recorded but they became more and more exceptional. The parish priest had to content himself with spiritual joys.

"As the parish was normally coterminous with a manor or a village, he was usually appointed by the lord of the manor in collusion with the bishop.

"He was seldom a man of much schooling for a university education was costly and books were rare. It was enough if he could read the breviary and the missal, administer the sacraments, and organize the parish for worship and charity. In many cases he was only a vicarius, a vicar or substitute, hired by a rector to do the religious work of the parish for a fourth of the revenues of the 'benefice.'

"In this way one rector might hold four or five benefices while the parish priest lived in humble poverty eking out his income with 'altar fees' for baptisms, marriages, burials, and Masses for the dead.

"Sometimes, in the class war, he sided with the poor, like John Ball. His morals could not compare with those of the modern priest who has been put on his best behavior by religious competition but by and large he did hs work with patience, conscience, and kindliness. He visited the sick, comforted the bereaved, taught the young, mumbled his breviary, and brought some moral and civilizing leaven to a rough and lusty population.

"The bishop was a priest selected to co-ordinate several parishes and priests into one diocese. Originally and theoretically he was chosen by priests and people.

"Usually, before Gregory VII, he was named by the baron or king. After 1215 he was elected by the cathedral chapter in co-operation with the pope. "To hies care were committed many secular as well as ecclesiastical affairs and his episcopal court tried some civil cases as well as all those involving clergy of any rank. He had the power to appoint and depose priests but his authority over the abbots and monasteries in his diocese diminished in this period as the popes, fearing the power of the bishops, brought the monastic orders under direct papal control.

"His revenues came partly from his parishes, mostly from the estates attached to his see. Sometimes he gave more to a parish than he received from it.

"Candidates for a bishopric usually agreed to pay -- at first to the king, later to the pope -- a fee for their nomination. As secular rulers they sometimes yielded to the amiable weakness of appointing relatives to lucrative posts.

"Pope Alexander III complained that 'when God deprived bishops of sons the Devil gave them nephews.' Many bishops lived in luxury, as became fuedal lords. But many were consumed in devotion to their spiritual and administrative tasks.

"After the reform of the episcopate by Leo IX the bishops of Europe were, in mind and morals, the finest body of men in medieval history."

Comments about bishops?

"In this sense the government of the Church was a theocracy -- a government of the people, through religion, by the earthly vicars of God.

"In another sense the Church was a democracy. Every man in Christendom except the mentally or physically defective, the convicted criminal, the excommunicate and the slave was eligible to the priesthod and the papacy.

"As in every system, the rich had superior opportunities to prepare themselves for the long hierarchical climb. But career was open to all and talent, not ancestry, chiefly determined success. Hundreds of bishops and several popes came from the ranks of the poor.

"It continued for a generation through several pontificates and reached a compromise in the Concordat of Worms (1122) between Pope Calixtus II and the Emperor Henry V.

"Henry surrendered to the Church 'all investiture by ring and staff' and agreed that elections of bishops and abbots 'shall be conducted canonically' -- i.e. by made by the affected clergy or monks -- 'and shall be free from all interference' and simony.

"Calixtus conceded that in Germany the elections of bishops or abbots holding lands from the crown should be held in the presence of the king -- that in disputed elections the king might decide between the contenders after consulting with the bishops of the province -- and that an abbot or bishop holding lands from the king should render to him all feudal obligations due from vassal to suzerain.

"Similar agreements had already been signed for England and France. Each side claimed the victory.

"One chose Innocent II, the other Anacletus II. Anacletus, although of the noble family of the Pierleoni, had had a Jewish grandfather, a convert to Christianity. His opponents called him 'Judaeo-pontifex' and St. Bernard, who on other occasions was friendly to the Jews, wrote to the Emperor Lothaire II that 'to the shame of Christ a man of Jewish origin was come to occupy the chair of St. Peter' -- forgetting Peter's origin.

"The greater part of the clergy and all but one of Europe's kings, upheld Innocent. The populace of Europe amused itself with slanders charging Anacletus with incest and with plundering Christian churches to enrich his Jewish friends but the people of Rome supported him until his death.

"As Lotario dei Conti, son of the count of Segni, he had all the advantages of aristocratic birth and cultured rearing. He studied philosophy and theology at Paris, canon and civil law at Bologna.

"Back in Rome, by his mastery of both diplomacy and doctrine, and his influential connections, he advanced rapidly on the ecclesiastical ladder. At thirty he was a cardinal deacon, and at thirty-seven, although still not a priest, he was unanimously chosen pope (1198). He was ordained on one day and consecrated on the next.

"It was his good fortune that the Emperor Henry VI, who had acquired control of South Italy, had died in 1197, leaving the throne to the three-year-old Frederick II. Innocent seized the opportunity vigorously -- deposed the German prefect in Rome -- ousted the German feudatories from Spoleto and Perugia -- received the submission of Tuscany -- re-established the rule of the papacy in the Papal States -- was recognized by Henry's widow as overlord of the Two Sicilies -- and conseented to be the guardian of her son.

"He brought Serbia and even distant Armenia under the dominion of the Roman See.

"Gradually he secured control over ecclesiastical appointments and made the powerful episcopacy the organ and servant of the papacy.

"Through an astonishing succession of vital conflicts he reduced the potentates of Europe to an unprecedented recognition of his sovereignty.

"His policies were least effective in Italy. He failed in repeated efforts to end the wars of the Italian city states. In Rome his political enemies made life so unsafe for himn that for a time he had to shun his capital.

"King Sverre of Norway successfully resisted him despite excommunication and interdict.

"Philip II of France ignored his command to make peace with England but yielded to the Pope's insistence that he take back his discarded wife.

"Alfonso IX of Leon was persuaded to put away Berengaria whom he had married within the forbidden degrees of kinship.

"Portugal, Aragon, Hungary and Bulgaria acknowledged themselves as feudal fiefs of the papacy and sent it tribute yearly.

"When King John rejected Innocent's appointment of Langton as achbishop of Canerbury, the Pope drove him by interdict and shrewd diplomacy to add England to the list of papal fiefs.

"Innocent extended his power in Germany by supporting Otto IV against Philip of Swabia, then Philip against Otto, then Otto against Frederick II, then Frederick against Otto, in each case exacting concessions to the papacy as the price of his favor and freeing the Papal States from the threat of encirclement.

"He reminded the emperors that it was a pope who had 'translated' the imperium or imperial power from the Greeks to the Franks, that Charlemagne had been made Emperor only by papal anointment and coronation and that what the popes had given they could take away.

"It was not unusual for a cathedral, a monastery, or a nunnery to own several thousand manors, including a dozen towns or even a great city or two.

"The bishop of Langres owned the whole country. The abbey of St. Martin of Tours ruled over 20,000 serfs. The bishop of Bologna held 2000 manors. So did the abbey of Lorsch. The abbey of Las Huelgas, in Spain, held sixty four townships.

"In Castile, about 1200, the Church owned a quarter of the soil. In England, a fifth. In Germany a third. In Livonia one half.

"These, however, are loose and uncertain estimates.

"Such accumulations became the envy and target of the state. Charles Martel confisciated church property to finance his wars. Louis the Pious legislated against bequests that disinherited the children of the testator in favor of the Church. Henry II of Germany stripped many monasteries of their lands, saying that monks were vowed to poverty.

"Several English statutes of mortmain put restrictions on the deeding of property to 'corporations' -- meaning ecclesiastical bodies.

"Edward I levied from the English Church in 1291 a tenth of its property and in 1294 a half of its annual revenue.

"Philip II began, St. Louis continued, Philip IV established the taxation of ecclesiastical property in France.

"As industry and commerce developed, and money multiplied and prices rose, the income of abbeys and bishoprics, derived laggely from feudal dues once fixed at a low price level and now hard to raise, proved inadqequate not only for luxury but even for maintenance.

"Hundreds of clergymen from St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, St. Francis and Cardinal de Vitry down to simple monks, labored to mitigate these natural abuses. It is chiefly from the writings of such ecclesiastical reformers that our knowledge of the abuses is derived.

"A dozen monastic orders devoted themselves to preaching reform by their good example. Pope Alexander III and the Lateran Council of 1179 condemned the exaction of fees for administering baptism or extreme unction, or performing a marriage.

"Gregory X called the Ecumenical Council of Lyons in 1274 specifically to take measures for the reform of the church. The popes themselves, in this age, showed no taste for luxury and earned their keep by arduous devotion to their exhausing tasks.

"There were, in the Age of Faith, recesses of religious mysticism and sentiment that escaped and resented organized sacerdotal Christianity.

"Moving perhaps with returning Crusaders, new waves of Oriental mysticism flowed into the West.

"From Persia, through Asia Minor and the Balkans, came echoes of Manichean dualism and Mazdakian communism.

"From Islam a hostility to images, an obscure fatalism, and distaste for priets.

"And from the failure of the Crusades a secret doubt as to the divine origin and support of the Christian Church.

"The Paulicians, driven westward by Byzantine persecution, carried through the Balkans into Italy and Province, their scorn of images, sacraments, and the clergy. They divided the cosmos into a spiritual world created by God and a material world created by Satan. And they identified Satan with the Yahveh of the Old Testament.

"They were ignored for a time, then condemned, and thirteen of their number were burned at the stake in 1023.

"Similar heresies developed and led to uprisings at Cambrai and Liege, Goslar, Soissons, Cologne, etc.

"Berthold of Regensburg reckoned 150 heretical sects in the thirteenth century. Some were harmless groups who gathered to read the Bible to one another in the vernacular without a priest and to put their own interpretation upon its disputed passages. Several, like the Humililati in Italy, the Beguines and Beghards in the Low Countries, were orthodox in everything except their embarrassing insistence that priests shold live in poverty.

"Said a bishop in 1190:-'The cities are filled with these false prophets.' Milan alone had seventeen new religions.

"The leading heretics there were the Patarines -- named apparently from Pataria, a poor quarter of the town. The movement seems to have begun as a protest against the rich.

"It was turned to anticlericalism, denounced the simony, wealth, marriage, and concubinage of the clergy, and proposed, in the words of one leader that 'the wealth of the clergy be impounded, their property put up at auction. If they resist, let their houses be given up to pillage and let them and their bastards be hounded out of the city.'

"Similar anticlerical parties rose in Viterbo, Orvieto, Verone, Ferrara, Parma, Piacenza, Remini....

"At times they dominated the popular assemblies, captured city governments, and taxed the clergy to pay for divic enterprises.

"Innocent III instructed his legate in Lombardy to exact an oath from all municipal officials that they would not appoint or admit heretics to office.

"Montpellier, Narbonne, and Marseille were the first French centers of the heresy, perhaps through contact with Moslems and Jews and through frequentation by merchants from heretical centers in Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Italy.

"Merchants spread the movement to Toulouse, Orleans, Soissons, Artas, and Reims but Languedoc and Provence remained its strongholds. There French medieval civilization had reached its height. The great religions mingled in urbane amity, women were imperiously beautiful, morals were loose, troubadours spread gay ideas and, as in Frederick's Italy, the Renaissance was ready to begin.

"Southern France was at that time (1200) composed of practically independent principalities, tenuously bound in theoretical allegiance to the king of France. In this region the counts of Toulouse were the greatest lords, possessing territories more extensive than those directly owned by the king.

"The doctrines and practices of the Cathari were in part a return to primitive Christian beliefs and ways, partly a vague memory of the Arian heresy that had prevailed in southern France under the Visigoths, partly a product of Manichean and other Oriental ideas. They had a black robed clergy of priests and bishops called perfecti, who at their ordination vowed to leave parents, mate, and children, to devote themselves 'to God and the gospel, never to touch a woman, never to kill animals, never to eat meat, eggs, or dairy food, nor anything but fish and vegetables.

"We do not know the Pope's reply. But a new crusade was begun and Louis was on the verge of victory when he died at Montpensier.

"Seizing the opportunity to make peace with Blanche of Castile, regent for Louis IX, Raymond offered the hand of his daughter Jeanne to Louis' brother Alphonse with the reversion of Raymond's lands to Jeanne and her husband at Raymond's death. Blanche, harassed by rebellious nobles, accepted and Pope Gregory IX approved on Raymond's pledge to suppress all heresy.

"A treaty of peace was signed at Paris in 1229 and the Albigensian wars came to an end after thirty years of strife and devastation.

"Orthodoxy triumphed, toleration ceased. The Council of Narbonne forbade the possession of any part of the Bible by laymen. Feudalism spread, municipal liberty declined, the gay age of the troubadours passed away in southern France.

"In 1271 Jeanne and Alphonse, who had inherited Raymond's possessions, died without issue and the spacious county of Toulouse fell to Louis IX and the French crown. Central France now had free commercial outlets on the Mediterranean and France had taken a great step toward unity.

"In classic Rome where the gods were allied with the state in close harmony, heresy and blaspehmy were classed with treason and were punishable with death. Where no accuser cold be found to denounce an offender, the Roman judge summoned the suspect and made an inqisitio, or inquiry, into the case.

"From this procedure the medieval Inquisition took its form and name.

"The Eastern emperors, applying Roman law in the Byzantine world, inflicted the death penalty upon Manicheans and other heretics.

"During the Dark Ages in the West when Christinianity was seldom challenged by its own children, tolerance increased and Leo IX held that excommunication should be the only punishment for heresy.

"In the twelfth century, as heresy spread, some ecclesiastics argued that the excommuication of heretics by the Church should be followed with their banishment or imprisonment by the state.

"The revival of Roman law at Bologna in the twelfth century provided terms, methods, and stimulus for a religious inquisition. The canon law of heresy was copied word for word from the fifth law of the title De haereticis in the Justinian Code.

"On this assumption any attack upon the Catholic faith was an offense against God Himself.

"The contumacious heretic could only be viewed as an agent of Satan, sent to undo the words of Christ and any man or government that tolerated heresy was serving Lucifer.

"Feeling herself an inseparable part of the moral and political government of Europe, the Church looked upon heresy precisely as the state looked upon treason. It was an attack upon the foundatons of social order.

"Said Innocent III:-'The civil law punishes traitors with confiscation of their property and death. All the more, then should we excommunicate and confiscate the property of those who are traitors to the faith of Jesus Christ. For it is an infinitely greater sin to offend the divine mnajesty than to attack the majesty of the soveriegn.'

"To ecclesiastical statesmen like Innocent the heretic seemed worse than a Moslem or a Jew. These lived either outside of Christendom or by an orderly and equally severe law within it.

"The alien enemy was a solder in open war. The heretic was a traitor within who undermined the unity of a Christendom engaged in a gigantic conflict with Islam.

"'The mob lynched heretics long before the Church began to persecute.'

"The orthodox population complained that the Church ws too lenient with heretics. Sometimes it 'snatched sectaries from the hands of protesting priests.'

"Wrote a priest of northern France to Innocent III:- 'In this country the piety of the people is so great that they are always ready to send to the stake not only avowed heretics but those merely suspected of heresy.'

"In 1114 the bishop of Soissons imprisoned some heretics. While he was away the populace, 'fearing that the clergy might be too lenient,' broke into the jail, dragged forth the heretics, and burned them at the stake.

"In 1144 at Liege the mob insisted on burning some heretics whom Bishop Adalbero still hoped to convert.

"He favored for this task the members of the new mendicant orders, partly because the simplicity and devotion of their lives would counteract the scandals of ecclesiastical luxury and partly because he could not depend upn the bushops.

"However, no inquisitor was to condemn a heretic to serious punishment without episcopal consent.

"So many Dominicans were employed in this work that they were nicknamed domini canes -- the (hunting) 'dogs of the Lord'. Most of them were men of strict morals but few had the quality of mercy. They thought of themselvs not as judges impatially weighing evidence but as warriors pursuing the enemies of Christ.

"Some were careful and conscientious men like Bernard Gui. Some were sadists like 'Robert the Dominican,' a converted Patarine heretic who in one day in 1239 sent 180 prisoners to the stake, including a bishop who, in his judgment, had given heretics too much freedom.

"Bernard de Caaux, a zealous inquisitor, left behind him a long register of cases tried by him. Not one of these was 'relaxed.'

"In seventeen years as an inquisitor Bernard Gui condemned 930 heretics, forty five of them to death.

"At a sermo generalis in Toulouse in 1310 twenty persons were ordered to go on pilgrimage, sixty five were condemned to life imprisonment, eighteen to death.

"In an auto-da-fe of 1312 fifty one were sent on pilgrimage, eighty six received various terms of imprisonment, five were turned over to the secular arm.

"It stamped out Catharism in France, reduced the Waldenses to a few scattered zealots, restored south Italy to orthodoxy, and postponed by three centuries the dismemberment of Western Christianity.

"France lost to Italy the cultural leadership of Europe. But the French monarchy, strengthened by the acquisition of Languedoc, grew powerful enough to subdue the papacy under Boniface VIII, and to imprison it under Clement V.

"In Spain, the Inquisition played a minor role before 1300.

"Raymond of Penafort, Dominican confessor to James I of Aragon, persuaded him to admit the Inquisition in 1232. Perhaps to check inquisitorial zeal a statute of 1233 made the state the chief beneficiary of confiscations for heresy.

"The orthodox majority were too indifferent to join actively in the hunt. Independent dictators like Ezzelino at Vicenza and Pallavicino at Cremona and Milan clandestinely or openly protected heretics.

"In Florence the monk Ruggieri organized a military order of orthodox nobles to support the Inquisition. The Patarines fought bloody battles with them in the strets and were defeted. Thereafter Florentine heresy hid its head.

"In 1252 the inquisitor Fra Piero da Verona was assassinated by heretics at Milan. His canonizaton as Peter Martyr did more to check heresy in north Italy than all the rigors of the inquisitors.

"The papacy organized crusades against Ezzelino and Pallavicino. The one was overthrown in 1259, the other in 1268.

"Perhaps it can be better understood by our age, which has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon.

"Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith.

"Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty.

"Certainty is murderous.

"Plato sanctioned intolerance in his Laws. The Reformers sanctioned it in the sixteenth century. Some critics of the Inquisition defend its methods when practiced by modern states.

"The methods of the inquisitors, including torture, were adopted into the law codes of many governments.

"Perhaps our contemporary secret torture of suspects finds its model in the Inquisition even more than in Roman law. Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure.

"The monasteries had multiplied during the Dark Ages, reaching a peak in the troubled nadir of the tenth century and then declining in number as secular order and prosperity grew.

"In France, about 1100, thee were 543. About 1250 there were 187. Possibly this loss in the number of abbeys was compensated by a rise in their average membership but very few monasteries had a hundred monks.

"It was still a custom in the thirteenth century for pious or burdened parents to commit children of seven years or older to monasteries as oblates -- 'offered up' to God.

"St. Thomas Aquinas began his monastic career so. The Benedictine order considered the vows taken for an oblate by his parents as irrevocable.

"St. Bernard and the new orders held that the oblate, on reaching maturity, might without reproach return to the world.

"A year of novitiate was prescribed, during which the candidate might freely withdraw. One knight drew back, says the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach 'on the cowardly plea that he feared the vermin of the monastic garment, for our woolen clothing harbors much vermin.'

"Prayer occupied some four hours of the monk's day. Meals were brief, and usually vegetarian. The remainder of the day was given to labor, reading, teaching, hospital work, charity, and rest.

"Caesarius tells how his monastery, in the famine of 1197, gave as many as 1500 'doles' of food in a day and 'kept alive until harvest time all the poor who came to us.'

"In the same crisis a Cistercian abbey in Westphalia slaughtered all its flocks and herds and pawned its books and sacred vessels to feed the poor. Through their own labor and that of their serfs, the monks built abbeys, churches, and cathedrals, farmed great manors, subdued marshes and jungles to tillage, practiced a hundred handicrafts and brewed excellent wines and ales.

"The abbey of St. Riquier was not among the richest, yet it had 117 vassals, owned 1500 houses in the town where it was placed, and received from its tenants yearly 10,000 chickens, 10,000 capons, 75,000 eggs and a money rent individually reasonable, cumulatively great.

"Much richer were the monasteries of Monte Cassino, Cluny, Fulda, St. Gall, St. Denis. Abbots like Suger of St. Denis, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, or even Samson of Bury St. Edmund's were mighty lords controlling immense material wealth and social or political power.

"Suger, after feeding his monks and building a majestic cathedral, had enough resources lefto half-finance a crusade. It was probably of Suger that St. Bernard wrote:-'I lie if I hve not seen an abbot riding with a train of sixty horses and more.'

"But Suger was prime minister and had to clothe himself in pomp to impress the populace. He himself lived with austere simplicity in a humble cell, observing all the rules of his order so far as his public duties would allow.

"In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows.

"While the majority of monks remained reasonably loyal to their rule, a minority took an easier view toward the world and the flesh. In many cases the abbot had been appointed by some lord or king, usually from a rank accustomed to comfort. Such abbots were above monastic rules. They enjoyed hunting, hawking, tournaments, and politics and their example infected the monks.

"Giraldus Cambrensis points a merry picture of the abbot of Evesham:-'None was safe from his lust.' The neighborhood reckoned his offspring at eighteen. Finally he had to be deposed.

"Worldly abbots, fat and rich and powerful, became a target of public humor and literary diatribe. The most merciless and incredible satire in medieval literature is a description of an abbot by Walter Map.P>"Some cloisters were known for their fine food and wines. We should not grudge the monks a little good cheer and we can understand how weary they were of vegetables, how they longed for meat.

"At an unknown date before 1039 St. John Gualberras established the order of Vallombrosa in the 'shady valley' of that name in Italy and inqugurated in it the institution of lay brothers later developed by the mendicant orders.

"The Roman Synod of 1059 exhorted canons -- clergymen sharing the labors and revenues of a cathedral -- to live in community and hold all their property in common, like the apostles. Some were reluctant and remained 'secular canons.' Many responded, adopted a monastic rule that they ascribed to St. Augustine and formed semimonastic communities collectively known as Augustinian or Austin Canons.

"In 1084 St. Bruno of Cologne, having declined the archbishopric of Reims, founded the Carthusian order by establishing a monastery at a desolate spot named Chartreuse, in the Alps near Grenoble.

"Other pious men, sick of worldly strife and clerical lexity, formed similar Carthusian units in secluded places. Each monk worked, ate, and slept in his own separate cell, lived on bread and milk, wore gardments of horsehair, and practiced almost perpetual silence.

"Three times a week they came together for Mass, vespers, and midnight prayers. On Sundays and holydays they indulged themselves in converstion and a common meal.

"Bernard chose a heavily wooded spot, ninety miles from Citeaux, known as Clara vallis, Bright Valley, Clairvaux.

"There was no habitation there and no human life. The initial task of the fraternal band was to build with their own hands their first 'monastery' -- a wooden building containing under one roof a chapel, a refectory, and a dormitory loft reached by a ladder. The beds were bins strewn with leaves. The windows were not larger than a man's head. The floor was the earth.

"Diet was vegetarian except for an occasional fish. No white bread, no spices, little wine. These monks eager for heaven ate like philosophers courting lengevity. The monks prepared their own meals, each serving as cook in turn.

"By the rule that Bernard drew up, the monastery could not buy property. It could own only what was given it. He hoped that it would never have more land than could be worked by the monks' own hands and simple tools.

"In that quiet valley Bernard and his growing fellowship labored in silence and content, free from the 'storm of the world,' clearing the forest, planting and reaping, making their own furniture, and coming together at the canonical hours to sing, without an organ, the psalms and hymns of the day.

"The younger orders kept their arduous rules with reasonable fidelity but not many men could be found in that dynamic period to bear so strict a regimen.

"In time the Cistercians -- even in Bernard's Clairvaux -- became rich through hopeful gifts. Endowments for the 'pittances' enabled the monks to add meat to their diet and plenty of wine. They delegated all manual labor to lay brothers.

"Four years after Bernard's death they bought a supply of Saracen slaves. They developed a large and profitable trade in the products of their socialistic industry and aroused guild animosity through their exemption from transportation toils.

"The decline of faith as the Crusades failed reduced the number of novices and disturbed the morale of all the monastic oders. But the old ideal of living like the apostles in a propertyless communism did not die. The conviction that the true Christian must shun wealth and power and be a man of unflinching peace lingered in thousands of souls.

"There Pietro had fallen in love with a French girl, Pica, and he had brought her back to Assisi as his wife.

"When he returned from another trip to Provence and found that a son had been born to him, he changed the child's name to Francesco, Francis, apparently as a tribute to Pica. The boy grew up in one of the loveliest regions of Italy and never lost his affection for the Umbrian landscape and sky.

"He learned Italian and French from his paents and Latin from the parish priest. He had no further formal schooling but soon entered his father's business.

"He disappointed Ser Pietero by showing more facility in spending money than in making it. He was the richest youth in town and the most generous. Friends flocked about him, ate and drank with him, and sang with him the songs of the troubadours. Francis wore, now and then, a parti-colored minstrel's suit.

"He was a good-looking boy with black eyes and hair and kindly face and a melodious voice. His early biographers protest that he had no relations with the other sex and, indeed, knew only two women by sight but this surely does Francis some injustice.

"When he appeared again in Assisi he was so thin, haggard, and pale and his clothes so tattered, his mind so bewildered, that the urchins in the public square cried out Pazzo! Pazzo! -- 'A madman! A madman!'

"There his father found him, called him a half-wit, dragged him home, and locked him in a closet. Freed by his mother, Francis hurried back to the chapel. The angry father overtook him, upbraided him for making his family a public jest, reproached him for making so little return on the money spent in his rearing, and bade him leave the town.

"Francis had sold his personal belongings to support the chapel. He handed the proceeds to his father who accepted them. But he would not recognize the authority of his father to command one who now belonged to Christ.

"Summoned before the tribunal of the bishop in the Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, he presented himself humbly while a crowd looked on in a scene made memorable by Giotto's brush. The bishop took him at his word and bade him give up all his property.

"Francis retired to a room in the episcopal palace and soon reappeared stark naked. He laid his bundled clothing and a few remaining coins before the bishop and said:-'Until this time I have called Pietro Bernadone my father but now I desire to serve God. That is why I return to him this money as well as my clothing and all that I have had from him. For henceforth I desire to say nothing else than 'Our Father, who art in heaven.'

"Bernadone carried off the clothing while the bishop covered the shivering Francis with his mantle. Francis returned to St. Damian's, made himself a hermit's robe, begged his food from door to door and with his hands began to rebuild the crumbling chapel.

"The great Pope gently counseled them to defer formal organization of a new order until time should test the practicability of the rule. He said:-'My dear children, your life appears to me too severe. I see indeed that your fervor is great but I ought to consider those who will come after you, lest your mode of life be beyond their strength.'

"Francis persisted and the Pope finally yielded -- incarnate strength to incarnate faith.

"The friars took the tonsure, submitt3ed themselves to the hierarchy and received from the Benedictines of Mr. Subasio, near Assisi, the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, so small -- some ten feet long -- that it came to be called Portiuncula -- 'little portion.'

"In 1212 he sailed from an Italian port but a storm cast his ship upon the Dalmatian coast and he was forced to return to Italy. Legend, however, tells how 'St. Francis converted the soldan of Babylon.'

"In the same year, says a story probably also mythical, he went to Spain to convert the Moors. On arrival he fell so ill that his disciples had to bring him back to Assisi.

"Another questionable narrative takes him to Egypt. He passed unharmed, we are told, into the Moslem army that was resisting the Crusades at Damietta. He offered to go through fire if the sultan would promise to lead his troops into the Christian faith in case Francis emerged unscathed. The sultan refused but had the saint escorted safely to the Christian camp.

"Horrified by the fury with which the soldiers of Christ massacred the Moslem population at the capture of Damierra, Francis returned to Italy a sick and saddened man.

"His fame brought recruits who took the vows without due reflection.

"Some came to regret their haste. Many complained that the rule was too severe.

"Francis made reluctant concessions. Doubtless, too, the expansion of the order, which had divided itself into several houses scattered through Umbria, made such demands upon him for administrative skill and tact as his mystic absorption could hardly meet.

"Once, we are told, when one monk spoke evil of another, Francis commanded him to eat a lump of ass's dung so that his tongue would not relish evil any more. The monk obeyed but his fellows were more shocked by the punishment than by the offense.

"In 1220 Francis resigned his leadership, bade his followers elect another minister-general and thereafter counted himself a simple monk. A year later, however, disturbed by futher relaxation of the original rule, he drew up a new rule -- his famous 'Testament' -- aiming to restore full observance of the vow of poverty and forbidding the monks to move from their huts at the Portiuncula to the more salubrious quarters built for them by the townspeople.

"He submitted this rule to Honorius III who turnd it over to a committee of prelates for revision. When it came from their hands it made a dozen obeisances to Francis and as many relaxations of the rule.

"Two other leaders dominated that dynamic age. Innocent III and Frederick II. Innocent raised the Church to its greatest height from which in a century it fell. Frederick raised the Empire to its greatest height from which in a decade it fell.

"Francis exaggerated the virtues of poverty and ignorance but he reinvigorated Christianity by bringing back into it the spirit of Christ. Today only scholars know of the Pope and the Emperor but the simple saint reaches into the hearts of millions of men.

"The order that he had founded numbered at his death some 5000 members and had spread into Hungary, Germany, England, France, and Spain.

"It proved the bulwark of the Church in winning northern Italy from hereesy back to Catholicism.

"Its gospel of poverty and illiteracy could be accepted by only a small minority. Europe insisted on traversing the exciting parabola of wealth, science, philosophy, and doubt. Meanwhile even the modified rule that Francis had so unwillingly accepted was further relaxed. Men could not be expected to stay long and in needed number on the heights of the almost delirious asceticism that had shortned Francis life.

"With a milder rule the Friars Minor grew by 1280 to 200,000 monks in 8000 monasteries. They became great prachers and by their example led the secular clergy to raise up the custom or preaching of Siens and St. Anthony of Padua, scientists like Roger Bacon, philosohers like Duns Scotus, teachers like Alexander of Hales.

"Some became agents of the Inquisition. Some rose to be bishops and archbishops, popes. Many undertook dangerous missionary enterprises in distant and alien lands.

"Gifts poured in from the pious. Some leaders, like Brother Elias, learned to like luxury. And though Francis had forbidden rich churches, Elias raised to his memory the imposing basilica that still crowns the hill of Assisi.

"Brought up by an uncle priest, he was one of thousands who in those days took Christianity to heart. When famine struck Palencia, he is said to have sold all his goods, even his precious books, to feed the poor.

"He became an Augustinian canon regular in the cathedral of Osma and in 1201 accompanied his bishop on a mission to Toulouse, then a center of the Albigensian heresy. Their very host was an Albigensian. It may be a legend that Dominic converted him overnight.

"Inspired by the advice of the bishop and the example of some heretics, Dominic adopted the life of voluntary poverty, went about barefoot, and strove peaceably to bring the people back to the Church.

"At Montpellier he met three papal legates -- Arnold, Raoul, and Peter of Castelnau. He was shocked by their rich dress and luxury and attributed to this their confessed failure to make headway against the heretics. He rebuked them with the boldness of a Hebrew prophet:-'It is not by the display of power and pomp, nor by cavalcades of retainers and richly houseled palfreys, not by gorgeous apparel, that the heretics win proselytes. It is by zealous preaching, by apostolic humility, by austerity by holiness.'

"The only mention of him in connection with physical persecution tells how, at a burning of heretics, he saved one from the flames. Some of his order proudly called him, after his death, Persecutor haereticorum -- not necessarily the persecutor but the pursuer of heretics.

"He gathered about him a group of fellow preachers and their effectivenss was such that Pope Honorious III recognized the Friars Preachers as a new order and approved the rule drawn up for it by Dominic.

"Making his headquarters at Rome, Dominic gathered recruits, taught them, inspired them with his almost fanatical zeal and sent them out through Europe as far east as Kiev and into foreign lands to convert Christendom and heathendom to Christianity.

"At the first general chapter of the Dominicaus at Bologna in 1120, Dominic persuaded his followers to adopt by unanimous vote the rule of absolute poverty.

"In the fourth century some women, emulating monks, left the world and lived the life of religious in solitude or in communities under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

"About 530 St. Benedict's twin sister Scholastica established a nunnery near Monte Casssino under his guidance and rule. From that time Benedictine convents spread through Europe and Benedictine nuns became almost as numerous as Benedictine monks.

"The Cistercian Order opened its first convent in 1125 , its most famous one, Port Royal, in 1204.

"By 1300 there were 700 Christian nunneries in Europe. In these older orders most of the nuns came from the upper classes and nunneries were too often the repository of women for whom their male relations had no room or taste.

"In 458 the Emperor Majorian had to forbid parents to rid themselves of supernumerary daughters by compelling them to enter a convent. Entry into Benedictine nunneries usually required a dowry, although the Church prohibited any but voluntry offerings. Hence a prioress, like Chancer's, could be a woman of proud breeding and large responsibilities, administering a spacious domain as the source of her convent's revenues.

"When Santa Clara came to him in 1212 and expressed her wish to found for women such an order as he had founded for men, he overlooked canonical regulations and, although himself only a deacon, received her vows, accepted her into the Franciscan Order, and commissioned her to organize the Poor Clares.

"Innocent III, with his usual ability to forgive infractions of the letter by the spirit, confirmed the commission. Santa Clara gathered about her some pious women who lived in communal poverty, wove and spun, nursed the sick, and distributed charity.

"If we look back upon the nineteen centuries of Christianity, with all teir heroes, kings, and saints, we shall find it difficult to list many men who came so close to Christian perfection as the nuns. Their lives of quiet devotion and cheerful ministration have made many generations blessed.

"The medieval imagination was so stimulatd by all the forces of word, picture, statue, ceremony, even by the color and quantity of light, that supersensory visions came readily, and the believing soul felt itself breaking through the bounds of nature to the supernatural.

"The human mind itself in all the mystery of its power, seemed a supernatural and unearthly thing surely akin to -- a blurred image and infinitesimal fraction of -- the mind behind and in the matter of the world.

"So the top of the mind might touch the foot of the throne of God. In the ambitious humility of the mystic the hope burned that a soul unburdened of sin and uplifted with prayer might rise on the wings of grace to the Beatific Vision and a divine companionship.

"That vision could never be attained through sensation, reason, science, or philosophy which were bound to time, the many, and the earth and could never reach to the core and power and oneness of the universe.

"The problem of the mystic was to cleanse the soul as an internal organ of spiritual perception -- to wash away from it all stain of selfish individuality and illusory multiplicity -- to widen its reach and love to the uttermost inclusion -- and then to see, with clear and disembodied sight, the cosmic, eternal, and divine -- and thereby to return as from a long exile, to union with the God from Whom birth had meant a penal severance.

"Greek Christianity abounded in them despite the Hellenic legacy of reason.

"St. Augustine was a mystic fountain fo the West. His Confessions constituted a return of the soul from created things to God. Seldom had any mortal so long conversed with the Deity.

"St. Anselm the statesman, St. Bernard the organizer, upheld the mystical approach against the rationalism of Roscelin and Abelard.

"When William of Champeaux was driven from Paris by the logic of Abelard, he founded in a suburb the Augustinian abbey of St. Victor as a school of theology. And his successors there, Hugh and Richard, ignoring the perilous adventure of young philosophy, based a religion not on argument but on the mystical experience of the divine presence.

"Joachim of Flora -- Giovanni dei Gioacchini de Fiori -- a noble of Calabria, developed a longing to see Palestine.

"Impressed on the way by the misery of the people, he dismissed his retinue and continud as a humble pilgrim. Legend tells how he passed an entire Lent in an old well on Mt. Tabor, how on Easter Sunday a great splendor appeared to him and filled him with such divine light that he understood at once all the Scriptures, all the future and the past.

"Returning to Calabria, he became a Cistercian monk and priest, thirsted for austerity, and retired to a hermitage. Disciples gathered and he formed them into a new Order of Flora whose rule of poverty and prayer was approved by Celstine III.

"In 1200 he sent to Innocent III a series of works which he had written, he said, under divine inspiration but which, nevertheless, he submitted for papal censorship.

"She did not tolerate serious doctrinal deviations from the official line or the anarchic individualism of some religious sects but she admitted the claim of the mystics to a direct approach to God and listened with good humor to saintly denunciations of her human faults.

"Many clergymen, even high dignitaries, sympathized with the critics, recognized the shortcomings of the Church, and wished that they too could lay down the contaminating tools and tasks of world politics and enjoy the security and peace of monaasteries fed by the piety of the people and protected by the power of the church.

"Perhaps it was such patient ecclesiastics who kept Christianity steady amid the delirious revelations that periodically threatened the medieval mind.

"He was a Christian as well as a pope - a man of peace and amity, seeking justice rather than victory.

"Hoping to regain Palestine by one united effort, he persuaded Venice, Genoa, and Bologna to end their wars. He secured the election of Rudolf of Hapsburg as Emperor, but soothed with courtesy and kindness the defeated candidates.

"He reconciled Guelf and Ghibelline in factious Florence and Siens, saying to his Guelf supporters:-'Your enemies are Ghibellines but they are also men, citizens, and Christians.'

"He summoned the prelates of the Church to the Council of Lyons; 1570 leading churchmen came, every great state sent a representative. The Greek emperor sent the heads of the Greek Church to reaffirm its submission to the Roman See. Latin and Greek churchmen sang together a Te Deum of joy.

"Bishops were invited to list the abuses that needed reform in the Church. They responded with starling candor. Legislation was passed to mitigate these evils.

"All Europe was magnificnetly united for a mighty effort against the Saracens. But on the way back to Rome, Gregory died.

"It was the misfortune of the Church that at this juncture, nearing the end of a virile and progressive century, the mightiest throne in Christendom should have fallen to a man whose love of the Church, and sincerity of purpose, were equaled by his imperfect morals, his personal pride, and his tactless will to power.

"He was not without charm -- he loved learning and rivaled Innocent III in legal training and wide culture. He founded the University of Rome and restored and extended the Vatican Lirary. He gave commissions to Giotto and Arnolfo di Cambio and helped finance the amazing facade of Orvieto Cathedral. "He had prepared his own elevation by persuading the saintly but incompetent Celestine V to resign after a pontificate of five months -- an unprecedented act that surrounded Boniface with ill will from the start.

"To scotch all plans for a restoration, he ordered the eighty-year-old Celestine to be kept in detention in Rome. Celestine escaped, was captured, escaped again, wandered for weeks through Apulia, reached the Adriatic, attempted a crossing to Dalmatia, was wrecked, was cast ashore in Italy, and was brought before Boniface.

"He tried to dissuade Frederick of Aragon from accepting the throne of Sicily. When Frederick persisted Boniface excommunicated him and laid an interdict upon the island. Neither King nor people paid any heed to these censures and in the end Boniface reocgnized Frederick.

"To prepare for a crusade he ordered Venice and Genoa to sign a truce. They continued their war for three years more and rejected his intervention in making peace.

"Failing to secure a favorable order in Florence, he placed the city under interdict and invited Charles of Valois to enter and pacify Italy. Charles accomplished nothing but won the hatred of the Florentines for himself and the Pope.

"Seeking peace in his own Papal States, Boniface had attempted to settle a quarrel among the members of the powerful Colonna family. Pietro and Jacopo Colonna. both cardinals, repudiated his suggestion. He deposed and excommunicated them.

"Whereupon the rebellious nobles affixed to the doors of Roman churches and laid upon the altar of St. Peter's a manifesto appealing from the Pope to a general council.

"Boniface repeated the excommunication, extended it to five other rebels, ordered their property confiscated, invaded the Colonna domain with papal troops, captured its fortresses, razed Palestrina to the ground and had salt strewn over its ruins.

"Philip IV resolved to unify his realm, had seized the English province of Gascony, Edward I had declared war.

"Now, to finance their struggle both kings decided to tax the property and personnel of the Church. The popes had permitted such taxation for crusades but never for a purely secular war.

"The French clergy had recognized their duty of contributing to the defense of the state that protected their possessions but they feared that if the power of the state to tax were unchecked, it would be a power to destroy. Philip had alrady reduced the role of the clergy in Frnace. He had removed them from the manorial and royal courts and from their old posts in the administration of the government and in the council of the king.

"Disturbed by this trend, the Cistercian Order refused to send Philip the fifth of their revenues which he had asked for the war with England and its head addressed an appeal to the Pope.

"Boniface had to move carefully for France had long been the chief support of the papacy in the struggle with Germany and the Empire. But he felt that the economic basis of the power and freedom of the Church would soon be lost if she could be short of her revenues by state taxation of Church property without papal consent.

"In February, 1296, he issued one of the most famous bulls in ecclesiastical history. Its first words, Clericis laicos, gave it a name. Its first sentence made an unwise admission, and its tone recalled the papal bolts of Gregory VII:-

"The King commissioned William of Nogaret, his chief legist, to go to Rome and notify the Pope of the King's appeal to a general council.

"Boniface, then in the papal palace at Anagni, declared that only the pope could call a general council and prepared a decree excommunicating Philip and laying an interdict upon France. Before he could issue it William of Nogaret, and Sciarra Colonna, heading a band of 2000 mercenaries, burst into the palace, presented Philip's message of notification, and demanded the Pope's resignation.

"Boniface refused. A tradition 'of considerable trustworthiness' says that Sciarra struck the Pontiff in the face and would have killed him had not Nogaret intervened. Boniface was seventy-five years old, physically weak, but still defiant. For three days he was kept a prisoner in his palace while the mercenaries plundered it.

"Then the people of Anangni, reinforced by 400 horsemen from the Orsini clan scatterd the mercenaries and freed the Pope. Apparently his jailers had given him no food in the three days for standing in the market place he begged;-'If there be any good woman who would give me an alms of wine and bread, I would bestow upon her God's blessing and mine.' The Orsini led him to Rome and the Vatican.

"A month later Benedict died at Perugia, apparently poisoned by Italian Ghibellines.

"Philip agreed to support Bertrand de Bot, Archbishop of Bordeaux, for the papacy if he would adopt a conciliatory policy, absolve those who had been excommunicated for the attack upon Boniface, allow an annual income tax of ten per cent to be levied upon the French clergy for five years, restore the Colonnas to their offices and property, and condemn the memory of Boniface.

"We do not know how far Bertrand consented. He was chosen Pope and took the name of Clement V. The cardinals warned him that his life would be unsafe in Rome and after some hesitation and perhaps a pointed suggestion from Philip, Clement removed the papal seat to Avignon on the east bank of the Rhone just outside the southeastern boundary of France.

"So began the sixty eight years of the 'Babylonian Captivity' of the popes.

"Likewise the blow -- physical or political given Boniface VIII at Anagni marks in one sense the beginning of 'modern times.'

"It was the victory of nationalism aagainst super-nationanlism, of the state against the Church, of the power of the sword over the magic of the word. The papacy had been weakened by its struggle against the Hohenstaufens and by the failure of the Crusades.

"France and England had been strengthened by the collapse of the Empire and France had been enriched by acquiring Languedoc with the help of the Church.

"Perhaps the popular support given to Philip IV against Boniface vIII reflected public resentment of the excesses of the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. Some of Nogaret's ancestors, it was said, had been burnd by the inquisitors.

"Boniface had not realized, in undertaking so many conflicts, that the weapons of the papacy had been blunted by overuse. Industry and commerce had generated a class less pious than the peasantry. Life and thought were becoming secularized, the laity was coming into its own.

"Nowhere else in history has an organization wielded so profound an influence over so many men for so long a time. The authority of the Roman republic and Empire over its immense realm endured from Pompey to Alaric, 480 years. That of the Mongol Empire or the British Empire some 200 years.

"But the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant force in Europe from the death of Charlemagne to the death of Boniface - 489 years. Her organization and administration do not appear to have been as competent as that of the Roman Empire, nor was her personnel as capable or cultured as the men who governed the provinces and cities for the Caesars.

"But the Church inherited a barbarous bedlam and had to find a laborious way back to order and education. Even so her clergy were the best instructed men of the age and it was they who provided the only education available in Western Europe during the five centuries of her supremacy. Her courts offered the justest justice of their time. Her papal Curia, sometimes venal, sometimes incorruptible, constituted in some degree a world court for the arbitration of international disputes and the limittion of war.

"We shall find an unexpected freedom of thought among the philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even among professors at universities chartered and supervised by the Church.

"All that she asked was that such discussions should be confined and intelligible only to the educated and should not take the form of revolutionary appeals to the people to abandon their creed or the Church.

"Says her most industrious recent critic: 'The Church as it embraced the whole population, embraced also every type of mind, from the most superstitious to the most agnostic. Many of these unorthodox elements worked far more freely under the cloak of outward conformity, than is generally supposed.'

"All in all, the picture that we form of the medieval Latin Church is that of a complex organizationn doing its best despite the human frailties of its adherents and its leaders to establish moral and social order and to spread an uplifting and consoling faith amid the wreckage of an old civilization and the passions of an adolescent society.

"The sixty century Church found Europe a flotsam of migratory barbarians, a babel of tongues and creeds, a chaos of unwritten and incalcuable laws. She gave it a moral code buttressed with superntural sanctions strong enough to check the unsocial impulses of violent men.

"She offered it monastic retreats for men, women, and classic manuscripts. She governed it with episcopal courts, educated it with schools and universities and tamed the kings of the earth to moral responsibility and the tasks of peace. She brightened the lives of her children with poetry, drama, and song, and inspired them to raise the noblest works of art in history.

"Unable to establish a utopia of equality among unequally able men, she organized charity and hospitality and in some measure protected the weak from the strong.

"Parental love, in beast and man, created the natural social order of the family with its educative discipline and mutual aid.

"Parental authority, half a pain of love and half a joy of tyranny, transmitted a life-saving code of social conduct to the individualistic child.

"The organized force wielded by chieftain, baron, city, or state circumscribed and largely circumvented the unorganized force of individuals.

"Love of approval bent the ego to the will of the group. Custom and imitation guided the adolescent, now and then, into ways sanctioned by the trial-and-error experience of the race. Law frightened instinct with the specter of punishment.

"Those impulses are too strong to be deterred by any human authority that cannot be everywhere at once with awesome police.

"A moral code bitterly uncongenial to the flesh must bear the seal of a supernatural origin. If it is to be obeyed, it must carry a divine sanction and prestige that will be respected by the soul in the absence of any force and in the most secret moments and coverts of life.

"Even parental authority, so vital to moral and social order, breaks down in the contest with primitive instincts unless it is buttressed by religious belief inculcated in the child. To serve and save a society, a religion must oppose to insistent instict no disputable man-made directives, but the undebatable, categorical imperatives of God Himself.

And those divine commandments (so sinful or savage is man) must be supported not only by praise and honor bestowed for obeying them, not only by disgrace and penalties imposed for violating them, but also by the hope of heaven for unrequited virtue and the fear of hell for unpunished sin.

"Like the Hindu conception of karma, this was an attempt to explain apparently unmerited suffering. The good endured evil here becaue of some ancestral sin.

"In Christian theory the whole human race had been tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Said Gratian's Decretum, unofficially accepted by the Church as her teaching:- 'Every human being who is conceived by the coition of a man with a woman is born with original sin, subject to impiety and death, and therefore a child of wrath.' and only divine grace and the atoning death of Christ could save him from wickedness and damnation (only the gentle example of the martyred Christ could redeem man from violence, lust, and greed and save him and his society from destruction).

"The preaching of this doctrine, combined with natural catastrophes that seemed unintelligible except as punishments for sin, gave many medieval Christians a sense of inborn impurity, depravity, and guilt, which colored much of their literature before 1200,

"The first moral incident of the Christian life ws baptism. The child was solemnly inducted into the community and the Church and was vicariously subjected to their laws. Every child received a 'Christian name' -- that is, usually the name of some Christian saint.

"Children were loved as now but were beaten more. They were numerous despite high infantile and adolescent mortality.

"They disciplined one another by their number and became civilized by attrition. They learned a hundred arts of the country or the city from relatives and playmates and grew rapidly in knowledge and wickedness.

"Said Thomas of Calano in the thirteenth century:-'Boys are taught evil as soon as they can babble and as they grow up they become stadily worse until they are Christians only in name' -- but moralists are bad historians.

"Financial maturity -- the ability to support a family -- came later than biological maturity -- the ability to reproduce.

"Sexual education might aggravate the pains of continence in this interval and the Church required premarital continence as an aid to conjugal fidelity, social order, and public health.

"Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen the medieval youth had probably sampled a variety of sexual experiences. Pederasty, which Christianity had effectively attacked in late antiquity, reappeared with the Crusades, the influx of Oriental ideas, and the unisexual isolation of monks and nuns.

"In 1177 Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux, wrote of France that 'ancient Sodom is springing up from her ashes.'

"Philip the Fair charged that homosexual practices were popular among the Templars.

"The Penitnetials -- ecclesiastical manuals prescribing penances for sin -- mention the usual enormities, including bestiality. An astonishing variety of beasts received such attentions.

"Where amours of this sort were discovered they were punishable with the death of both participants. The records of the English parliament contain many cases of dogs, goats, cows, pigs, and geese being burned to death with their human paramours.

"The promiscuous nature of man overflowed the dikes of secular ecclesiastical legislation. Some women felt that abdominal gaiety could be atoned for by hebdomadal piety. Rape was common dispite the severest penalties.

"Knights who served highborn dames or damoiselles for a kiss or a touch of the hand might console themselves with the lady's maids. Some ladies could not sleep with a good conscience until they had arranged this courtesy.

"The Knight of La Tour-Landry mourned the prevalence of fornication among aristocratic youth. If we were to believe him, some men of his class fornicated in church, nay, 'on the altar.' He tells of 'two queens which in Lent, on Holy Thursday took their foul delight and pleasance within the church during divine services.'

"William of Malmesbury described the Norman nobility as 'given over to gluttony and lechery' and exchanging concubines with one another lest fidelity should dull the edge of husbandry.

"Illegitimate children littered Christendom and gave a plot to a thousand tales.

See definition of HEBDOMADAL.

"A child of seven could consent to a betrothal and such engagements were sometimes made to facilitate the transfer or protection of proerty.

"Grace de Salaby, aged four, was married to a great noble who could preserve her rich estate. Presently he died and she was married at six to another lord. At eleven she was married to a third.

"Such unions could be annulled at any time before the normal age of commummation which in the girl was presumed to be twelve, in the boy fourteen. The Church reckoned the consent of parents or guardian unnecedssary for valid marriage if the parties were of age. She forbade the marriage of girls under fifteen but allowed many exceptions.

"In this matter the rights of property overruled the whims of love and marriage was an incident in finance. The bridegroom presented gifts or money to the girl's parents, gave her a 'morning gift' and pledged her a dower right in his estate.

"In England this was a life interest of the widow on one third of the husband's inheritance in land. The bride's family gave presents to the family of the groom and assigned to her a dowry consisting of clothing, linen, utensils and furniture and sometimes of property.

"This was call divortium but not in the sense of annulling the marriage. Such annulment was granted only when the marriage could be shown to have contravened one of the canonical impediments to matrimony.

"It is hardly probable that these were deliberaely multiplied to provide grounds of divorce for those who could afford the substntial fees and costs required for an annulment. The Church used these impediments to meet with flexible judgment exceptional cases where divorce would promise an heir to a childless king or would otherwise serve public policy or peace.

"Germanic law allowed divorce for adultery, sometimes even by mutual agreement. The kings preferred the laws of their ancestors to the stricter law of the Church. Feudal lords and ladies, reverting to the ancient codes, sometimes divorced one another without ecclesiastical leave.