trusted as being enlightened from on high, and acting under Divine inspiration.

Paradoxical as it may sound, it is an historical fact that the more suspicious and scandalous the conduct of the Popes-with their exemptions, privileges, indulgences, and the like, and the consequent confusion in the Church-appeared to pious men, the more inclined they felt to take refuge from their own doubts and suspicions in the bosom of Papal infallibility. Tested by simple Christian feeling, they would have been obliged to condemn this, and much else, as an abuse and heinous sin against the Church. But that feeling had to contend with the notion, instilled into them from youth, that the Pope is the lord and master of the Church, whom none may contradict or call to account. This may be illustrated by the language of Peter Cantor, as early as the end of the twelfth century. He says there would indeed be just reason to apprehend that the Papal corruptions might produce a general separation from the spiritual empire of Rome, for there is no scriptural justification for them; but then it would be sacrilegious to find fault with what the Pope does. God suffers not the Roman Church to fall into any error, and we must assume that the Pope does these things under inspira

tion of the Holy Ghost, by virtue of which he is in the last instance the sole ruler of the Church, to the exclusion of all others.1

§ XXII.-The Schism of the Antipopes.

In the fourteenth century, the Church was brought into a condition which forced doubts upon the minds of even the most zealous votaries of the Papal system.

The long schism which for above forty years presented to the world the novel spectacle of rival Popes mutually anathematizing one another, and two Curias, -a French one at Avignon, and an Italian,-shook an authority still commonly regarded as invincible under the last Popes before 1376. For the discomfiture suffered by the Papacy at the beginning of the century, in the person of Boniface VIII., was soon blotted out of men's remembrance by the complete victory it gained soon afterwards over Germany and the Emperor Louis; and the practical effects of that first humiliation were inconsiderable,—it left its mark rather on the Schola and the writings of the French jurists. The wounds inflicted by the persistent policy of the Popes for centuries on the Empire and the national unity of Germany long continued to bleed. The German Church had lost the 1 Verbum Abbrev. (ed. Galopin), p. 114.

very idea of regarding itself as an organic whole; that there had ever been such a thing as German National Synods was utterly forgotten. The experiment of "divide et impera" had been first tried upon the German Church, and had proved a complete success.

The Schism arose from the struggle between two nations for the possession of the Papacy: the Italians wanted to regain and the French to keep it. And thus it came to pass that from 1378 to 1409 Western Christendom was divided into two, from 1409 to 1415, into three, Obediences. A Neapolitan, Urban VI., had been elected, and his first slight attempt at a reform gave immediate occasion to the outbreak of the schism. Soon after entering on his pontificate, he excommunicated the Cardinals who were guilty of simony. But simony had long been the daily bread of the Roman Curia and the breath of its life; without simony the machine must come to a stand-still and instantly fall to pieces. The Cardinals had, from their own point of view, ample ground for insisting on the impossibility of subsisting without it. They accordingly revolted from Urban and elected Clement VII., a man after their own heart.1

Nobody knew at the time whose election was

the most regular, Urban's or Clement's.

Things had

1 Thom. de Acern. De Creat. Urbani. See Muratori, iii. 2, 721.

in fact occurred in both elections which made them legally invalid. The attorneys on both sides urged irrefutable arguments to show that the Pope of the opposite party had no claim to their recognition. There were persons on both sides, since accounted as Saints throughout the whole Church, but who then anathematized one another: on the French side, Peter of Luxemburg and Vincent Ferrer, on the Italian, Catherine of Sienna and Catherine the Swede. Meanwhile there were two Papal Courts and two Colleges of Cardinals, each Court with diminished revenues, and determined to put on the screw of extortion to the utmost,each inexhaustible in the discovery of new methods of making gain of spiritual things, and the increased application of those already in use.

The situation was a painful one for all adherents of Papal infallibility, who found themselves in an inextricable labyrinth. Their belief necessarily implied that the particular individual who is in sole possession of all truth, and bestows on the whole Church the certainty of its faith, must be always and undoubtingly acknowledged as such. There can as little be any uncertainty allowed about the person of the right Pope as about the books of Scripture. Yet every one at that

period must at bottom have been aware that the mere accident of what country he lived in determined which Pope he adhered to, and that all he knew of his Pope's legitimacy was that half Christendom rejected it. Spaniards and Frenchmen believed in Clement VII. or Benedict XIII., Englishmen and Italians in Urban VI. or Boniface IX. What was still worse, the old notion, which for centuries had been fostered by the Popes, and often confirmed by them, of the invalidity of ordinations and sacraments administered outside the Papal communion, still widely prevailed, especially in Italy. The Papal secretary Coluccio Salutato paints in strong colours the universal uncertainty and anguish of conscience produced by the schism, and his own conclusion as a Papalist is, that as all ecclesiastical jurisdiction is derived from the Pope, and as a Pope invalidly elected cannot give what he does not himself possess, no bishops or priests ordained since the death of Gregory XI. could guarantee the validity of the sacraments they administered.1 It followed, according to him, that any one who adored the Eucharist consecrated by a priest ordained in schism worshipped an idol.

1 See his letter to the Count Jost of Moravia, in Martene, Thes. Anecd. ii. 1159, "Quis nescit ex vitiosâ parte veros episcopos esse non posse?" And the point is then further worked out.