against which the nobles, equally ignorant and disunited, could adopt no efficacious measures, even if they had discovered them; the discovery, however, was not made: the feudal lords did not suspect that their power was menaced, until the government was actually wrested from their hands.

This indeed is always the attribute of an ascendency when society is in a state of transition; and it is some consolation to the defeated party, that, like the Turks in Constantinople, they may retain the belief in their own superiority long after the fact is evident to all but themselves that their supremacy has been destroyed for ever.

CHAPTER X.

PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

FEUDALISM was forced upon Europe as the only system which could avert the impending danger of anarchy; but many of the systems which assumed a feudal form, still retained their distinguishing principles, and even when the feudal pressure was greatest, were secretly maturing the means for a struggle against its power. The most powerful of these opponents of the dissociating tendencies of feudalism, was the Christian church: it preserved within it the ideas of order, law, morality; the equality of all men before God; and the immutable principles of justice. It may be said, without we hope giving offence to any body, that the church had in these ages greatly fallen from its original purity, both in doctrine and in discipline, and that there were few among the clerical body in the eleventh century whom the Apostles would have recognised as brothers. But we trust that it may be equally said without offence, that to the church as then constituted, and to the clergy as then organized, humanity owes a deep debt of gratitude, for fighting and winning the battle of freedom and civilization. There is probably no part of the Romish creed, and not one of the Romish institutions, that was not

of vast importance in the great struggle which the church had to maintain; and of the doctrines and practices on which the nineteenth century passes just sentence of condemnation, there is scarcely one which could have been spared, seven hundred years ago, without imminent peril to the great cause of human civilization and social happiness. In the great majority of instances, the errors were forced upon the ecclesiastical body; and in all the rest, the error arose from attempting to render universal some formulary that had been devised for a special purpose.

The feudal nobility was isolated, not merely as a body, but individually; the church linked itself with every class of society. The bishops were the companions of princes, the priests claimed reverence in the baronial hall, the preaching friars and monks brought consolation to the cottage of the suffering peasant-thus everywhere offering a strong contrast between sacerdotal universality and feudal exclusiveness. When distinctions as rigid and more onerous, because more obviously artificial than caste, were established in every form of social life, the church scarcely knew any aristocracy but that of talent: once received into holy orders, the serf lost all traces of his bondage; he was not merely raised to an equality with his former lord, but he might aspire to dignities which cast those of temporal princes into the shade. Under such circumstances, the church was inexpressibly dear to the suffering people, and an object of jealousy, not unmingled with hatred, to the feudal tyrants. The ecclesiastical power was daily increasing, as its benefits were more sensibly experienced; the right of sanctuary-in late ages one of its worst abuses, but in the days of unlicensed passions one of its most beneficent institutions—soon placed the church

in an attitude of hostility to the nobility, and gave the signal for a struggle, in which the latter body, for the first time, learned to estimate the importance of the people.

In every age, and in every land, a church exposes its purity to imminent peril by taking the lead in any political struggle: defeat is its ruin, and victory its corruption. It suffers equally in its collective capacity and in its individual members; for the union of the priest and the demagogue forms a character dangerous to the peace of society. But history presents us no instance of such a condition becoming general, save when there is a popular opinion that substantial wrongs exist, against which the members of the sacerdotal order are the only persons able or willing to find a remedy. Such an opinion was formed throughout Europe by those who groaned under feudal domination, and the people could not reasonably be blamed for seeking protection from the priests, when their lords, or rather the lords of their soil, left them no other refuge. It was clearly a matter of necessity, that the church should be kept independent of the temporal power, at a time when the temporal power crushed into ruin every thing that came within its grasp.

The power of the papacy, as an institution, was directly proportioned to the strength of the opinion on which it was founded, and the strength of that opinion must be measured by the circumstances by which it was engendered. It is necessary to keep this philosophic truth steadily in view, because one of the most common arguments urged against the civilizing influences of Christianity, is the alleged delinquencies of the church in the Middle Ages. But if we take into consideration the nature of the times in which these delinquencies are said to have occurred, we may perhaps discover that what we have censured merits

our eulogy, and what we have scorned deserves our gratitude. It is not enough to show that Christianity as first taught, was a blessing: we must further show that throughout the whole course of its history, it has been a benefactor to humanity.*

The dispute about investitures was an attempt on the part of the German feudality to bring the church under its subjection; we may concede, that in the abstract, the emperors were right and the clergy wrong, and we may at the same time contend, that the success of the emperors, at that precise period, would have been productive of the worst consequences. The temporal power of princes required to be checked, not strengthened-it was vacillating between anarchy and oriental despotism, and any increase of its force would have fixed it in one or other of these positions. Public opinion, so far as it existed, was therefore inclined to support the ecclesiastical rather than the civil power, and that opinion was energetically represented by Hildebrand, or Gregory VII. as he was called, after his accession to the papacy.

This celebrated pontiff has been described on one side as an eminent saint, and on the other as a species of moral

* In the controversial works of some Protestants, the importance of this truth has been often forgotten, and infidelity has gained in consequence. It would be well if, in the heat of argument, persons would remember that the errors of Romanism are not absolute falsehoods, but corrupted truths; and that in the rage for sweeping condemnation, they may pass sentence on the truth, when they merely mean to stigmatize the falsehood. In the particular instance to which reference is made in the text, some have written as if the world would have been better without any church in the Middle Ages; it seems, therefore, not unnecessary to point out the services which the church, however corrupt, was still able to render to the great cause of human advancement.