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.

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 downfall 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.1 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. "The worst and most abused man to be found, when his badness had been thoroughly exposed in the Council at Constance."

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