who no longer observe any religion, will be brought low; Rome and its immediate neighbourhood will alone be left to them, partly in consequence of wars, partly by the common agreement of the States."1

More cutting and more terrible sound the words of the northern prophetess, St. Bridget, who lived in Rome some two centuries later. It has not prejudiced the high reverence felt for her visions, universally regarded as inspired, and defended in an express treatise by Cardinal Torquemada, that they contain the most vivid pictures of the corruption of the Papal See and its Court, and their mischievous influence on the Church. She calls the Pope worse than Lucifer, a murderer of the souls intrusted to him, who condemns the innocent and sells the elect for filthy lucre.2

Bishops and abbots

Every one told the same tale. had to exhaust and denude their churches and establishments to satisfy the greed of the court officials and get their causes settled. They bid against each other in bribery. Every one, from doorkeeper to Pope, had

1 This remarkable prophecy, with many more of St. Hildegard's, is in the collections of Baluze and Mansi, Miscel. ii. 444-447.

Revel. i. c. 41, p. 49, cf. iv. c. 49, p. 211.

3 Bishop Stephen of Tournay, in 1192, said, "Romano plumbo nudantur cclesiæ."-Ep. 16.

to be paid and fee'd, or the case was lost. It may be seen from the accounts of ambassadors, e. g., of the deputies sent in 1292 from the Commune of Bruges, that giving once was not enough, but the fee had to be constantly repeated as long as the process lasted.1 The cardinals' and Popes' nephews were quite inordinately insatiable. The jurist, Peter Dubois, thought it a misfortune for the whole of Christendom that the cardinals found themselves compelled to live by robbery, as their benefices were not productive enough. The upshot was, that poor men could neither hope to gain preferment nor could keep it, and bishops entered on their office already loaded with heavy debts, which were further augmented by the annates introduced in the fourteenth century.

In the eleventh century there was an energetic movement throughout the whole Church with a view to putting an end to the sale of benefices at royal courts, but now the Roman Court had made simony the supreme power everywhere. The little finger of the Curia pressed more heavily on the churches than ever

1 They may be found in Kervyn of Lettenhove, Hist. de Flandre, ii. 589. Again Herculano (Hist. de Portugal) cites from the Codex Vatican. 3457, a bill of the Archbishop of Bruges, showing that he paid through the Roman bankers the sum of 3000 florins to nineteen cardinals in 1226.

the arm of kings. No one knew what remedy to suggest; complaints and reproaches were disregarded, and synods were powerless and condemned to silence in the absence. of the Pope or his legates. Every cleric excused his simonaical conduct by the example of the Roman Church. It was the common saying, that every one was taught from youth upwards to look on the Roman Church as the mistress of doctrine and the bright example for all other Churches; that what she approved and openly practised others must also approve and copy, and that they might on their side make their profits out of spiritual ministries and sacraments who had dearly bought the right to do so at Rome with their benefices, and who, indeed, could in no other way pay off the debts incurred there.

§ XV.-The Judgments of Contemporaries. Bishop Durandus of Mende contemplates the Church of his age from many points of view, especially its condition in 1310 in Italy and the south of France, but he is always brought back to the one crying evil, and source of so many corruptions, the papal Court. "It is that Court," he says, "which has drawn all things to itself, and is in danger of losing all. It is always sending out into the various dioceses immoral clerks, provided with

benefices, whom the bishops are obliged obediently to receive, while they have no persons fit for the work of the Church. It is continually extorting large sums from prelates, to be shared between the Pope and his cardinals, and by this simony is corrupting the Universal Church to the utmost of its power. While the Curia goes on in this way, all remedies for the Church are vain." He then enumerates the most necessary reforms, without which the Church must sink deeper and deeper in corruption, but they cut, in fact, at the roots of the whole papal system as it had existed for 200 years, and therefore his book produced no effect worth mentioning, though the Pope asked for it, and it was laid before the Council of Vienne.

1 Durandus says the Roman Church is reviled in every country. Every one is ashamed of her, and charges her with corrupting the whole clergy, whose immorality has exposed them to universal hatred. It is the fault of the Curia, he says, "ut . . . inde tota Ecclesia vilipendatur et quasi contemptui habeatur."-Tract. de modo Gen. Concil. celeb. (Paris, 1761), p. 300. He, at the same time, differs widely in his devotion to the Pope from his contemporaries Pelayo and Trionfo. He maintains the Pope's absolute dominion over monarchs, and insists on the Donation of Constanstine, and the rights that flow from it. But he desiderates a certain decentralization. He wants the Curia, which has absorbed all Church rights and jurisdiction, to give back some of them, and restore to national Churches and bishops some freedom of action. See Tract. (ut sup.), p. 294, where he says the Roman Court understands "omnia traham ad Me Ipsum" as authorizing its appropriating the rights of all others exclusively to itself. One would like to know whether this book, which holds up to the Pope and cardinals, as in a mirror, so terrible a reflection of their misdeeds and iniquitous acts against the Church, was ever read in Avignon.

One of the French Popes, Urban v., who had some good instincts, acknowledged the misery and corruption of the Church, and thought (in 1368) the cessation of Councils was the main cause of the mischief.1 But he did not perceive, or at least did not say, that this was the fault of his predecessors, whose systematic policy had brought matters to such a pass that it was partly impossible and partly useless to hold Councils. This state of things led theologians, who wished to use Biblical language, to appropriate involuntarily the sayings of Old Testament prophets on the corruptions of their people, and to describe the Church of the day as the venal harlot whose shame God would shortly uncover in sight of all men. Nicolas Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, for instance, does so in an address before Urban v. and the cardinals at Avignon in 1363.2 Great, indeed, must have been the evil, when even bishops applied such expressions and metaphors to the Church and the Papal See; which coincided with those used by the sectaries of the time, and bordered closely on suspicious inferences as to their right of separating from so terribly corrupt an institution.

When we read all these accusations and these descrip2 Brown, Fasc. Rer. Expet. ii. 487.

1 Concil. (ed. Labbé), xi. 1958.

P