attributed to the intervention of spirits. Such phenomena were by the clergy frequently identified with acts of rebellion against themselves. In the tenth century, the opinion everywhere prevailed that the end of the world was approaching. Many charters begin with these words: 'As the world is now drawing to its close.' An army was so terrified by a solar eclipse, which it conceived to announce this consummation, as to disperse hastily on all sides. More than once the apparition of a comet filled Europe with terror. In the shadows of the universal ignorance, nothing was too absurd for belief and practice. In France, animals were accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, tried, and acquitted or convicted, with all the solemnity of law. The wild were referred to ecclesiastical tribunals; the domestic to the civil. In 1120, a French bishop pronounced an injunction against the caterpillars and field-mice for the ravages they made on the crops. If after three days' notice the condemned did not 'wither off the face of the earth,' they were solemnly anathematized. If, instead, they became perversely more numerous and destructive, the lawyers ascribed it, not to any injustice of the sentence nor to the inefficiency of the court, but to the machinations of Satan. From the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, there are not a few records of proceedings in criminal courts against hogs for devouring children.

About the twelfth century, the brood of superstitions, which had once consisted for the most part in wild legends of fairies, mermaids, giants, dragons, conflicts in which the Devil took a prominent part but was always defeated, or illustrations of the boundless efficacy of some charm or relic,- began to assume a darker hue, and the ages of religious terrorism commenced. Never was the sense of Satanic power and presence more profound and universal. In Christian art, the aspect of Christ became less engaging; that of Satan more formidable: the Good Shepherd disappeared, the miracles of mercy declined, and were replaced by the details of the Passion and the horrors of the Last Judgment. Now it was that the modern conception of a witch-namely, a woman in compact with Satan, who could exercise the miraculous gift at pleasure, and who at night was transported through the air to the Sabbath, where she paid her homage to the Evil One-first appeared. Owing in part to its

insular position, in part to the intense political life which from the earliest period animated its people, there was formed in England a self-reliant type of character which was essentially distinct from that common in Europe, averse to the more depressing aspect of religion, and less subject to its morbid fears. In consequence, the darker superstitions which prevailed on the Continent, and which were to act so tragically on the imaginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had not here arisen. Nevertheless, as will presently appear in our sketch of historical method, there existed a condition of thought so far removed from that of the present day as to be scarcely conceivable. It will show itself in literature as a controlling love of the marvellous; in religion, as the intellectual basis of witchcraft.

Religion.—When the island was yet without political unity, a Greek monk, sent from Rome, organized an episcopate, divided the land into parishes representing the different provinces of its disunited state, linked them all to Canterbury as ecclesiastical centre, and thus founded the Church of England. In veneration of the source of light, Anglo-Saxons began pilgrimages to the Eternal City,' in the hope that, dying there, a more ready acceptance would be accorded them by the saints in Heaven. In gratitude they established a tax, called St. Peter's penny, for the relief of pilgrims and the education of the clergy. The claims of the Roman See, based as here upon filial regard, were to become a tremendous peril alike to monarch and to subject.

As Rome was the queen of cities, so, as the chief seat of Christianity, her Church was naturally held to be the first of Churches, and her bishop first of bishops-the Pope.' When the capital was transferred to Constantinople, and the Vandals had dissolved the framework of Roman society, he gradually became the chief man in Italy, indeed in the whole West. But wealth is dangerous to simplicity, and power to moderation. From being a father and a counsellor merely, forgetting humility, he became a schemer and a ruler. Love of souls was gradually supplanted by love of empire. The evil was possible to the system. Each country in Christendom was mapped out into an allembracing territorial organization, in which the priest was under

1 Meaning father, papa, Greek nánas.

the bishop, he under the archbishop, and the archbishop in turn responsible to the pope, who thus held in his hand the converging reins of ecclesiastical control. While the prelates, each within his respective sphere, were encroaching little by little upon the laity, the Church of Rome was forming and maturing her plans to enthrall both the national churches and the temporal governments. A prime condition of conquest is a replete exchequer. Covetousness was characteristic. Gifts by the rich on assuming the cowl, by some before entering upon military expeditions, bequests by many in the terrors of dissolution; the commutation for money of penance imposed upon repentant offenders, were a few of the various sources of her revenue. No atonement, she taught, could be so acceptable to Heaven as liberal donations to its earthly delegates. The rich widow was surrounded by a swarm of clerical sycophants who addressed her in terms of endearment and, under the guise of piety, lay in wait for a legacy. A special place, it was said, was reserved in purgatory for those who had been slow in paying their tithes. A man who in a contested election for the popedom had supported the wrong candidate, was placed after death in boiling water. The bereft widow, in the first dark hour of anguish, was told that he who was dearer to her than all the world besides, was now writhing in the flames that encircled him, and could be relieved only by a pecuniary present. Masterly adaptation of means to ends. The end of the twelfth century saw the Church at the zenith of territorial possession. She enjoyed nearly one-half of England, and a still greater portion in some countries of the Continent. To her John solemnly resigned his crown, and humbly received it as a fief. But landed acquisitions scarcely contributed so much to her greatness as ecclesiastical jurisdiction and immunity. Her spiritual court, claiming a loftier origin than the civil, acquired absolute exemption from secular authority, and ended by usurping almost the whole administration of justice. Kings were expected to obtain its sanction as a security to their thrones, and to hold those thrones by compliance with its demands. It could try citizens, but ecclesiastics were amenable to it only. The mainspring of her machinery was excommunication and interdict. The former was equivalent to outlawry. The victim was shunned, as one infected with the leprosy, by his servants, his friends, his

family. Two attendants only remained with an excommunicated king of France, and these threw all the meats that passed his table into the fire. By the latter inflicted perhaps to revenge a wounded pride-a county or a kingdom was under suspension of religious offices; churches were closed, bells silent, and the dead unburied. She also derived material support from the multitudinous monks, who, in return for extensive favors, vied with each other in magnifying the papal supremacy. The thirteenth century was the noonday of her predominance. Rome was once more the Niobe of nations; and kings, as of old, paid her homage. Vast sums from England flowed into her treasury, carried by pilgrims; by suitors with appeals in all manner of disputes; by prelates going thither for consecration and for the confirmation of their elections; by applicants for church preferment, which was almost exclusively at the Pope's disposal, and must be bought; by Italian priests who, pasturing on the richest benefices, drew an annual sum far exceeding the royal revenue. In 1300, Boniface VIII, straining to a higher pitch the despotic pretensions of former pontiffs, is said to have appeared at a festival dressed in imperial habits, with two swords borne before him, emblems of his temporal as well as spiritual sovereignty over the earth.

As the Church rose in splendor, she sank in vice. All her institutions had been noble in their first years, but success had ruined them. The monastic movement, inspired by a strong religious motive, tended to soften every sentiment of pride, to repress all worldly desires, to make preeminent the practice of charity, to give humility a foremost place in the hierarchy of virtues. Every monastery was a focus which radiated benevolence. By the monk, savage nobles were overawed, the poor protected, wayfarers comforted. Legend tells how St. Christopher planted himself, with his little boat, by a bridgeless stream, to ferry over travellers. Not without reward, for once, embarking on a very stormy and dangerous night, at the voice of distress, he received Christ. When hideous leprosy extended its ravages over Europe, while the minds of men were filled with terror by its contagion and supposed supernatural character, monks flocked in multitudes. to serve in the hospitals. Sometimes, the legends say, the leper was in a moment transfigured, and he who came in mercy to the

most loathsome of mortals, found himself in the presence of his Lord. As organized later by St. Benedict, the monastery was the asylum of peaceful industry, the refuge of the flying peasant, the retreat of the timid, the abode of the princely, the portal to knowledge and dignity for the inquisitive and ambitious, a field of civilizing activity to the ardent and philanthropic, the symbol of moral power in an age of turbulence and war, the fountain whence issued far and wide a constant stream of missionaries,― often the nucleus of a city, where had been gigantic forests and inhospitable marshes. In the tenth century, when the English Church, inundated by the Danes, had fallen into worldliness and ignorance, Dunstan the reformer saw in vision a tree of wondrous height stretching its branches over Britain, its boughs laden with countless cowls. In the revival of a stricter monasticism, he fancied, lay the remedy for Church abuses. The clergy were displaced by monks, bound by vows to a life of celibacy and religious exercise. Freed ere long by the popes from the control of the bishops, they speedily became ascendant in the Church, and so continued till the Reformation. Parish endowments were transferred to monasteries, of which Dunstan himself established fortyeight, setting an example widely followed in every quarter of the land. Pious, learned, and energetic as were the prelates of William's appointment, they were not English. In language, manner, and sympathy, they were thus severed from the lower priesthood and the people; and the whole influence of the Church was for the moment paralyzed. In the twelfth century a new spirit of devotion woke the slumber of the religious houses, and changed the aspect of town and country. Everywhere men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a reformed offshoot of the Benedictine order. Their rule was one of the most severe mortification and self-denial. Their lives were spent in labor and prayer, and their one frugal daily meal was eaten in silence. They humbly asked for grants of land in the most solitary places, where they could meditate in retirement, amidst desolate moors and the wild gorges of inaccessible mountains. A hundred years later, when the administration of forms had become the sole occupation of the clergy, came the Friars,-Dominicans and Franciscans, to win back the public esteem and reanimate a waning religion.