much less importance, excited the most violent commotions. One great article of dissension in those times was the worship of images, which had been gradually gaining ground for some centuries. It arose first from the custom of having crucifixes in private houses, and portraits of our Saviour and his apostles, which sometimes being of considerable value, were, among other religious donations, bequeathed by dying persons to the church, where they were displayed on solemn festivals. The clergy at first took pains to repress that superstition. In the year 393 we find St. Epiphanius pulled down an image in a Church of Syria, before which he found an ignorant person saying prayers. Others, however, of his brethren were not so circumspect or scrupulous, and in time the priests even found their interest in encouraging the practice for particular images in particular churches, acquiring a higher degree of celebrity than others, and getting the reputation of performing miraculous cures, the grateful donations that were made to the church were a very considerable emolument to the ecclesiastics.

In the year 727, the emperor Leo, the Isaurian, was desirous of extirpating this idolatry, which he very justly considered as disgraceful to Christianity; but his measures were too violent; he burnt and destroyed all the paintings in the churches, and broke to pieces the statues. The people were highly exasperated; and he attempted to enforce his reformation by punishment and persecution, which had no beneficial effect. His son, Constantine Copronymus, took a wiser method by procuring a general sentence of the clergy, condemning the practice as impious and idolatrous. This prince had a genius for reformation. He wished to abolish the monks, who had greatly increased, and at this time engrossed prodigious wealth; but this evil had taken too deep a root. The origin of these associations merits more particular inquiry.

In treating of the earliest age of the Christian church, it has already been remarked that one great source of the corruption of its doctrines, was an attempt to reconcile them to, or intermingle them with, the notions of the heathen philosophers. This intermixture is the true source from whence the impolitic and destructive system of monachism took its rise. It was a doctrine, both of the Stoic and Platonic philosophy, that in order to raise the soul to its highest enjoyment, and to a communion with superior intelligences, it was necessary to separate it from the body, by mortifying and entirely disregarding that earthly vehicle, which checked its flight, and chained it to the mean and sordid enjoyments of the senses. These prevailing notions of the heathen philosophy, joined to a mistaken interpretation put upon some of the precepts of the gospel, contributed to inspire some enthusiastic Christians with the same ideas. The first of these who thought of separating themselves from society were a few, who, after Constantine had restored peace to the church, being now

free from persecution, began to conceive that since they were no longer exposed to the persecutions of temporal power, they ought to procure for themselves voluntary grievances and afflictions. In that view they betook themselves to wilds and solitudes, where they spent their time in caves and hermitages in alternate exercises of devotion, and in rigorous acts of penance and mortification. Some of them loaded their limbs with heavy irons; others walked naked till their bodies acquired a covering of hair like the wild beasts; and others chose still more nearly to ally themselves to the brute creation, by actually grazing with them in the fields. One father, called a saint, has actually left a panegyric on these Booxo, or grazing saints. A certain class, however, of a more rational spirit of devotion, employed themselves occasionally in manual labor, the price of which afforded them a frugal subsistence, and enabled them to bestow alms on the poor who visited their cells.

Egypt is allowed to have shown the first example of the monastic life. A young fanatic, of the name of Antony, retired about the year 302 to the desert bordering the Red Sea, where his austerities first attracted admiration and respect, and afterwards procured him numberless imitators. He lived to the age of 105, and had the satisfaction of seeing before his death the whole country swarming with madmen like himself.

The reputation which these persons acquired for superior sanctity, and the extraordinary blessings which were believed to attend their pious vows and prayers, naturally procured them many remuneratory donations from those who believed they had profited by their intercessions. Some of the holy men began to lead a very comfortable life; and still pretending to bestow all their superfluities in alms and charitable donations, they retained as much as to enable them to pass their time with much ease and satisfaction. Towards the end of the fourth century, these monks or hermits had multiplied in such a manner, that there was not a province in the East that was not full of them. They spread themselves likewise over a great part of Africa; and in the West, they penetrated within the limits of the bishopric of Rome, and soon became very numerous over all Italy.

It would seem that these holy fathers did not always confine themselves to their cells; but profiting by the great veneration which they had acquired for superior sanctity, they frequently found their way to cities, and took an active part in secular affairs. Under Theodosius the Great, some of these meddling priests had occasioned such disturbances in the empire, that that prince, on a complaint from the judges and magistrates of the provinces, issued an edict prohibiting them to quit their solitudes, or appear in the cities; but they had art or influence enough with this same prince to prevail on him, very soon after, to revoke this edict.

About this time many of these devotees began to form them

selves into societies, and prescribed to themselves certain observances and common rules, to which they bound themselves by oath these were obedience to their superior, strict chastity, and poverty. These societies were called Canobia; and the persons who composed them Coenobitæ, from their living together in common. But they took different denominations, from the names of those holy persons who associated them together, or were the first superiors of their order. Thus St. Benedict, who introduced monachism into Italy, was the founder of that particular order called Benedictine, which has distinguished itself in most of the countries of Europe, by the ambition of many of the brotherhood, as well as by the enormous wealth which they found means to accumulate; and, we ought to add, by the laborious learning which some of them displayed.

Benedict was an Italian by birth; he had studied at Rome, and soon distinguished himself by his talents as well as superior sanctity. An affectation of singularity, probably, made him retire, when a very young man, to a cave at Subiaco, where he remained for some years. Some neighboring hermits chose him for their head, or superior; and the donations which they received from the devout and charitable very soon enabled them to build a large monastery. The reputation of Benedict increased daily, and he began to perform miracles, which attracted the notice of Totila, the Gothic king of Italy. The number of his fraternity was daily augmented, and it became customary for the rich to make large donations. We may judge of the reputation which Benedict's institution had acquired, even in his own lifetime, from this factthat the celebrated Cassiodorus, who had long and ably discharged the office of first minister to the Gothic kings of Italy, in the decline of his life, took the vows of the Benedictine order, and founded a monastery on his own estate; where, in the exercises of devotion, in the enjoyment of the tranquillity of the country, and in the composition of those excellent works which he has left to posterity, he passed the remainder of his days.

Benedict, finding his fraternity grow extremely numerous, sent colonies into Sicily and into France, where they throve amazingly. Hence they transported themselves into England; and, in a very little time, there was not a kingdom of Europe where the Benedictines had not obtained a footing.

In the East, the first who associated the monachi solitarii into a cœnobium, was Basil, the bishop of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia, in the middle of the fourth century. From thence they spread themselves into Greece, and overran the Eastern empire, as the Benedictines had done in the West. Monasteries for women were in the same age founded in Egypt by St. Pacomo, whose sister became the abbess of the first female convent. These females, after a certain time of probation, received the veil, and took the vows of perpetual virginity, obedience, and poverty.

From the Cœnobia, founded by Basil, Benedict, and Pacomo, there sprung in the following age an infinite number of other orders, under different rules. St. Augustin, in Africa established the Canons Regular, whose order, we are told, was framed in imitation of the apostolic life; whence, we may suppose, they fol lowed in their cells different occupations as artisans. Afterwards the Mendicants arose, who, to the three vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, added that of living by begging charity.

It was not for some centuries after the period of which we now treat, that the military religious orders took their rise, such as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the Teutonic Knights, and the Templars.

What contributed very much, however, to increase the reputation of the monastic fraternities, in those unenlightened periods, was that portion of scholastic learning which was almost peculiar to them; and moderate as that degree of knowledge was, it certainly prevented the entire extinction of ancient literature, and preserved some feeble sparks, which the care of a happier age afterwards cherished and raised up to warm and enlighten the world.

As the affectation of superior sanctity, and the pride of being singular, gave rise to many of the austerities of the monastic life, the same motive led some men to seclude themselves from social life in a still more extraordinary manner than that practised by any of the religious orders. These men were termed Stylites, or Pillar Saints. They mounted themselves on the tops of stone pillars, and stood there immovable for many years. One Simeon, a native of Syria, gave the first example of this most amazing folly, and passed thirty-seven years of his life upon pillars of various heights, beginning with one of nine feet, and, increasing from year to year, till he died on a pillar of forty cubits. Another saint, of the same name, lived sixty-eight years in the same manner. The veneration which these holy men acquired excited a number of imitators, and their degrees of sanctity were always estimated according to the height of their pillars, and the number of years they had passed upon them. For above six centuries this superstitious frenzy prevailed in the East, nor was the practice altogether abolished till the twelfth century.

In the age of Charlemagne, according to the received opinion of Protestants, auricular confession began first to be used. The bishops commenced the practice, by requiring that the canons should confess to them. The abbots obliged their monks to the same submission; and these again required it of the laity. Public confession was now in use in the West; for when the Goths embraced Christianity, their instructers from the East had seen it abolished there under the patriarch Nectarius, at the end of the fourth century.

The canonization of saints was practised by every bishop for

twelve centuries: at length, the number growing out of all bounds, the popes thought it necessary to assume the exclusive right of canonization. Pope Alexander III., one of the most profligate of men, was the first who issued a solemn decree reserving to himself the sole right of making saints

Christianity was carried northward by the conquests of Charlemagne; but all beyond the limits of his conquests was in a state of idolatry. All Scandinavia was idolatrous. Poland was in the same state; and the whole inhabitants of that immense tract of country which is now the empire of Russia were pagans, like their neighbors of Tartary. The British and Irish, according to the most probable accounts, had, long before this period, received the first rays of Christianity; but in Britain it was almost totally extinguished, till it was revived under the Saxon heptarchy by the wife of one of the princes; as the Franks, in like manner owed to the wife of Clovis their conversion from idolatry.

CHAPTER IV.

Successors of Charlemagne-Their Weakness and Dissensions-Rise of the Feu dal Aristocracy-First Incursions of the Normans-Their Settlement in Normandy-State of the Eastern Empire-Of Italy and the Church-Rise of the Secular Power of the Popedom-Schisin of the Greek and Latin ChurchesThe Saracens conquer Spain-Extinction of the Empire of Charlemagne— Empire of Germany-Otho the Great.

LEWIS, surnamed the Débonnaire, was the only one of the lawful sons of Charlemagne who survived him. He had been before his father's death associated with him in the empire, and was now hailed emperor and king of France by the nobles assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle. He was afterwards inaugurated by Pope Stephen IV. It has already been noticed that Charlemagne, on the death of his son Pepin, bestowed on his grandson Bernard the kingdom of Italy. Lewis commenced his reign by making a partition of his dominions. He associated his eldest son Lotharius as his colleague in the principal part of his kingdom. He gave Aquitaine, or that part of the southern provinces of France which forms about a third part of the whole kingdom, to his second son Pepin, and assigned Bavaria to Lewis the youngest. The three princes were solemnly crowned, and the two youngest immediately put in possession of their kingdoms. This procedure alarmed the jealousy and indignation of Bernard, king of Italy,