observes rightly enough that he believes the Pope's power is so immeasurably great, that no Pope can ever know the full extent of it.1

Petrarch, who for years had closely observed the Curia, saw and felt, somewhat later (1350), like St. Bonaventure, Dante, and Pelayo. In his eyes, too, it is the Apocalyptic woman drunken with blood, the seducer of Christians, and plague of the human race. His descriptions are so frightful, that one would suppose them the exaggerations of hatred, were they not confirmed by all his contemporaries.2 The letter of the Augustinian monk of Florence, Luigi Marsigli, Petrarch's friend and pupil, is quite as outspoken about the Papal Court, which no longer ruled through hypocrisy-so openly did it flaunt its vices—but only through the dread inspired by its interdicts and excommunications.3

For four centuries, from all nations and in all tongues,

1 "Nec credo quod Papa possit scire totum quod potest facere per potentiam suam." Such things were written in 1320 at the Pope's command, and in 1584, when this work, which exhibits the Church as a dwarf with a giant's head, was republished by the Papal sacristan Fivizani, Gregory XIII. accepted the dedication.

2 Epist. sine Titulo. Opp. ii. 719.

3 Lettera del Ven. Maestro L. M. 'contro i vizi della Corte del Papa, Genova, 1859. He calls the cardinals "avari, dissoluti, importuni, e sfacciati Limogini," most of them being of the province of Limousin, and the Curia at this time entirely in their hands.

were thousandfold accusations raised against the ambition, tyranny, and greed of the Popes, their profanation of holy things, and their making all the nations of Christendom the prey of their rapacity; and, what is still more surprising, in all this long period no one attempted to refute these charges, or to represent them as calumnies or even exaggerations. The Roman Court, indeed, always found champions of its rights, knowing, as it did so well, how to reward them for their services. The later scholasticism moulded on St. Thomas, the copious literature of canon law, and the host of decretalists on the side of the Curia,-Italians first, and then from 1305 to 1375 from the south of France,-who fought and wrote for the Papacy as their special and eminently profitable subject, never yielded an inch of the enormous jurisdiction it had already acquired, but were always spinning out fresh corollaries of its previously acknowledged rights. During the long period from 1230 to 1520 the parasites of the Roman Court ruled and cultivated the domain of canon law as interpreters of the new codes; or, in the scriptural language of the cardinals who composed the Opinion of 1538, the Popes heaped up for themselves teachers after their lusts, having itching ears, to invent cunning devices for building up a

system which made it lawful for the Pope to do exactly

what he pleased.1

Nevertheless, not one of all this multitude undertook the defence of the Popes and their government against the flood of reproaches and accusations which rolled up from all sides upon them, nor one of the theologians and practical Church writers; all confined themselves to the question of legitimate right. They insist continually that the first See can be judged by no man, that none may dare say to the most reprobate and mischievous of Popes, "Why dost thou do so?" One must endure anything silently and patiently, bending humbly beneath the rod. That is all they have to say; only now and then the indignation of the secular and married jurists, who could not hold benefices, broke out against the clergy, who reserved all the good things of this world to themselves. Or they intimated the ground of their silence and connivance, like Bartolo, who said, “As we live in the territory of the (Roman) Church, we affirm the Donation of Constantine to be valid."

1 Consil. Delect. Card. p. 106, in Durandus, Tract. de Modo Concil. Paris, 1671; " ut eorum studio et calliditate inveniretur ratio, quâ liceret id quod liberet." The Opinion was drawn up by Cardinal Caraffa, with the assistance of the most respected men in Italy, but when he became Pope Paul IV. he had the Consilium put on the Index. There have not been wanting persons who regarded it as an act of heroism for a Pope to put himself on the Index.

But the strength of a power like the papal must rest ultimately on public opinion; only while contemporaries are convinced of its legitimacy, and believe that its use really rests on a higher will, can it maintain itself. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, no one in Europe knew or even suspected the true state of the case; no one was able to distinguish between the original germ of the primacy in the apostolic age and that colossal monarchy which presented itself before the deluded eyes of men as a work that came ready-made from the hand of God. The notion that manifold forgeries and inventions had co-operated with favourable circumstances to foster its growth, would have been generally rejected as blasphemy. They grumbled at the use the Popes made of their power, but did not question their right to it, and the obedience paid was more willing than enforced. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, and after the commencement of the Great Schism, a few men, like Gerson, D'Ailly, and Zabarella, began to open their eyes gradually to the truth, as they compared the existing state of the law with the ancient canons. They saw there must have been a portentous revolution somewhere, but how or when it happened they were still ignorant.

§ XVI.-The Inquisition.

A wholly new institution and mighty organization had been introduced to make the papal system irresistible, to impede any disclosure of its rotten foundations, and to bring the infallibility theory into full possession: it was the Inquisition.

Through the influence of Gratian, who chiefly followed Ivo of Chartres, and through the legislation and unwearied activity of the Popes and their legates since 1183, the view of the ancient Church on the treatment of the heterodox had been for a long period completely superseded, and the principle made dominant that every departure from the teaching of the Church, and every important opposition to any ecclesiastical ordinances, must be punished with death, and the most cruel of deaths, by fire.

The earlier laws of the Roman Emperors had distinguished between heresies, and only imposed severe penalties on some on account of their moral enormity, but this distinction was given up after the time of Lucius III., in 1184. Complete apostasy from the Christian faith, or a difference on some minor point, was all the same. Either was heresy, and to be punished with death.