must seek among facts of a different character.

Though their extent is certainly a matter of dispute, there is no doubt about the fact of serious clerical abuses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There is no need here to trench upon contentious ground; and it should be said that when a catalogue of offences is produced as a picture of the mediæval church without giving the other side of the picture, only a most erroneous impression can be created. There was extraordinary greatness in a church that could produce a St. Bernard, a St. Francis, an Anselm, a Grosseteste. Yet even if we leave out of account the invectives of professed enemies altogether and only rely upon the unimpeachable authority of the Church’s leaders themselves, we are left with rather a dark picture. We must remember that would-be reformers are prone to indulge in highly coloured language with reference to the evils they seek to eradicate. Yet, simony must have been a crying abuse, or it would not have received so much attention from zealous pontiffs. We know too of many bishops who neglected their spiritual duties and were nothing more than feudal barons, sometimes fattening upon riches amassed by extortion. It cannot be denied that there were numerous instances of absenteeism and pluralities; while for the sexual immorality to be found among both regular and secular clergy we have the excellent authority of great men who were scandalized by it and sought to produce amendment, such as Honorius III, St. Bernard and Bishop Grosseteste. Monastic reforms had been tried, the Cluniac being followed by the Cistercian and others of a like severity. A fine attempt had been made to assist the endeavour of the parish priest to strive after personal holiness by the institution of the orders of the Praemonstratensians and the Austin Friars. And much good was unquestionably accomplished; yet order after order eventually fell away from its pristine purity and the seed of corruption remained uneradicated. At the very least, we can say that most men must have had from personal experience knowledge of some glaring contrast between clerical profession and accomplishment. That some such contrast should at all times in greater or less degree exist is only the inevitable result of the weaknesses of human nature. It has invariably been the case, however, that when the ministers of a religion have failed to proclaim their gospel in their lives as well as in their preaching, they have sowed doubt and distrust and lost adherents.

Bishop Grosseteste told Pope Innocent IV that the corruption of the priesthood was the source of the heresies which troubled the Church.3 We may feel sure that it was one source at all events when we note in the twelfth century a most marked revival of the Donatist doctrine that the sacrament is polluted in sinful hands. By similar reasoning the score of a great composer might be regarded as tainted for our hearing because the members of the orchestra performing it were not all high-minded men. That would be similar reasoning: but it would not be the same. Skill in his art is what we expect from the musician; without it he cannot mediate between the composer and his audience, he cannot interpret the music, he can only jar and lacerate the feelings of his hearers. There is the skill also of the priest. He has to interpret spiritual things and needs therefore to be spiritually-minded. God may not be dependent upon the worthiness of His interpreters; none the less their unworthiness may jar upon and lacerate the feelings of worshippers, conscious of the scandal of such unworthiness. When, for example, priests are found abusing the confessional by actually soliciting their female penitents to sin, a moral revulsion against such a practice is inevitable. Such a revulsion may in some cases generate an attack upon the whole system of confession—and that is heresy.4

An intense dissatisfaction with the moral condition of the world, more especially as revealed in the Church, is one of the dominant features of the neo-Manichæan heresy, known as Catharism or Paulicinianism, of Waldensianism, of Joachitism. The last actually postulated that Christianity had failed and that mankind stood in need of a new revelation and a new Saviour. Corruption in the Church was, then, one of the contributory causes of mediæval heresy, and anti-sacerdotalism was one of its features.

It must not be assumed, however, that because heretical sects protested against scandals in the Church, they necessarily exhibited a higher standard of morality themselves. The reverse is in some cases the truth. Among the heresiarchs and their followers are found men who were mere half-crazed fanatics, others whose passion was more of lust than for righteousness. We have to bear in mind that our knowledge of the heretics is almost entirely derived from their adversaries; unbiased contemporary testimony there is none. Yet, even remembering this, we can appreciate the repugnance which many heretical sects inspired in their own day. In the second place, the Church was itself alive to the need of reform. The best minds always were; and to all the outbreak of heresies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though it was so ruthlessly and thoroughly suppressed, was a significant warning. Unhappily the abuses actually tended to increase in the fourteenth century, and the papacy in particular lost heavily in moral and spiritual authority when it allowed itself to become the mere catspaw of the French monarchy at Avignon, when it became rent asunder by the even greater disaster of the Schism.

But the task of the Church in reforming itself was one of very great difficulty. It was essential in purifying conduct to take the utmost precautions against adulterating the purity of the faith, in reforming the papacy to maintain the fundamental continuity of the Church, of its orders, its sacraments, its traditions. Individual would-be reformers were carried away by their perfervid zeal, led into proposing the most unheard-of innovations. Wycliffe actually demanded the sweeping away of the higher orders of the priesthood and the monastic orders as a condition of the suppression of corruption. Such theories were clearly heretical, and it was no solvent of the spiritual troubles of the Church to weaken it still further by making concessions to revolutionaries, by invalidating sound doctrine. Such was the point of view of moderate reformers like Gerson, D’Ailly, Niem—men perhaps just as earnest as Wycliffe and Hus in their desire for purity, but anxious, as these were not, for the preservation of the Catholic faith untouched. And it is easy to understand the position they adopted. The general conditions of their time, political and social as well as religious, made a strong appeal to the conservative instinct. England and France were both suffering from the havoc of the Hundred Years War. There was schism in the empire as well as in the papacy. The terrible scourge of the Black Death laid all countries low. Social unrest was widespread and alarming. Vagrant, masterless men devoured with avidity any doctrines of a communist saviour, and to such the Wycliffite thesis of dominion founded on grace had an obvious and dangerous attractiveness. Just as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so now in the case of Wycliffitism and Husitism, heresy was regarded not as a purely religious matter, but also as a social danger. Another phenomenon which conservatives naturally viewed with misgiving was early translations of the