Such was the condition of Western Christendom.

A

happier view prevailed in France, England, Germany, and Spain, than in Italy and at the Papal Court, about the conditions of valid ordination and administration of sacraments.

Those who had any knowledge of the constitution of the ancient Church perceived now that the confusion for which no remedy had been discovered for thirty years, could only be traced ultimately to the development of the Gregorian system. A strong and earnest desire was aroused for the restoration of the episcopal system, so far as it could then be distinguished through the accumulated rubbish of fabrications it was overlaid with, and the distortions and obscuring of Church history. It was felt that the old system would have made such a degradation and devastation as the Church had now experienced impossible. The conviction grew stronger and stronger that a General Council was the only effectual means for the restoration of harmony in the Church, as also for limiting Papal despotism. Germans, like Henry of Langenstein and Nicholas Cusa; Frenchmen like D'Ailly, Gerson, and Clemange; Italians like Zabarella; Spaniards like Escobar and John of Segovia, came, in the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, to substantially similar conclu

sions, that the Church must recover herself, break the chains the Curialistic system had fastened upon her, and reform herself in her head and her members. And indeed for some time, all who were eminent in the Church for intelligence and knowledge had declared themselves in favour of her rights, and the rights of free Councils, against the Papacy. Even the voices of those who thought so terribly degenerate and misused an institution as the Roman See had now become was nevertheless indispensable, were loudly raised, but without producing any result. Public opinion still recognised the necessity of its existence, but also the urgent need for its limitation and purification.

The first attempt to bring about the assembling of a real, free, and independent Council succeeded. Instead of the mock Synods which had been customary for the last 300 years, when the bishops only came to hear the Pope's decrees read and go home again, a Synod from all Europe was assembled at Pisa in 1409, at which men could dare to speak openly and vote freely. It seemed a great point to contemporaries that two Popes, Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII., were deposed, and a third, Alexander III., was elected. But these proceedings exhausted the strength of the Synod; the mere presence of a Pope, with the Cardinals now again adhering to him, though

he was the creation of the Synod, prevented even the attempt or beginning of a reformation of the Church. The reforms conceded by Alexander were insignificant. As the other two Popes did not submit to the decision of the Synod, there were now three heads of the Church, as before in 1048, but the Pope elected by the Council received far the most general recognition.

§ XXIII.-The Council of Constance.

To bring about the actual downfal of the system, it was necessary that it should be represented in the person of a Pope who was the most worthless and infamous man to be found anywhere, according to the testimony of a contemporary. This Pope, recognised up to the day of his deposition by the great majority of Western Christendom, was Balthasar Cossa, John XXIII. Now was the first real victory won, not only over persons, but over the Papacy, and for this was required such an assembly as was the Council of Constance (1414-1418), the most numerous ever seen in the West, at which, besides 300 bishops, there were present the deputies of fifteen universities, and 300 doctors, men who were not

1 Justinger, Berner-Chronic. p. 276. to be found, when his badness had been at Constance."

"The worst and most abused man thoroughly exposed in the Council

in the ambiguous position of having to reform abuses to which they owed their own dignities and emoluments. And this assembly had to introduce the new plan of voting by nations in place of the old one of voting by individuals, or all would have been wrecked through the great number of Italian bishops, the majority of whom considered it their natural duty to uphold the Papal system, the Curia, and the means of revenue thence accruing to the Italians. The corruption of the Church, and the demoralization which was its result, had penetrated deeper in Italy than elsewhere, and then, as afterwards, it was remarked, that the Italian bishops were the most steady opponents of every remedy and reformation.

With the Council of Constance arose a star of hope for the German Church. Well were it if she had possessed men capable of taking permanent advantage of so favourable a situation. The new Emperor, Sigismund, full of earnest zeal to help the Church in her sore distress, managed so skilfully to persuade and press Pope John, who was threatened in Italy, that he chose. the German city of Constance for the Council, and came there himself, though not by his own goodwill. For three centuries the Germans had been thrust out by

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the Italians and French from all active part in the general affairs of the Church. They were the nation least responsible, next to the English, for the evils of the schism, for the Curia had always been purely French and Italian, and had contained no single element of German representation. The German clergy were more sinned against than sinning. It is true that even in Germany the corruption of the Church had become intolerable, and cried to Heaven, but it was no native product of the German people; it had been imported from the south, like a foreign pestilence, and become permanent through the destruction of the organic life of the national Church.

In the famous decrees of the fourth and fifth sessions, the Council of Constance declared that "every lawfully convoked Ecumenical Council representing the Church derives its authority_immediately from Christ, and every one, the Pope included, is subject to it in matters of faith, in the healing of schism, and the reformation of the Church." The decree was passed without a single dissentient voice,—a decision more eventful and pregnant in future consequences than had been arrived at by any previous Council, and accordant in principle with primitive antiquity,-for so the Church held before