370 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
buildings of Cluny.1 This was the end of its prosperity. Another decline followed, from which Cluny never entirely recovered. The last abbots were merely ornamental, and wasted two-thirds of the income at the court of France. The French Revolution of 1789 swept the institution out of existence, and reduced the once famous buildings to ruins; but restorations have since been made.2
A similar reformation of monasticism and of the clergy was attempted and partially carried out in England by St. DUNSTAN (925-May 19, 988), first as abbot of Glastonbury, then as bishop of Winchester and London, and last as archbishop of Canterbury (961) and virtual ruler of the kingdom. A monk of the severest type and a churchman of iron will, he enforced the Benedictine rule, filled the leading sees and richer livings with Benedictines, made a crusade against clerical marriage (then the rule rather than the exception), hoping to correct the immorality of the priests by abstracting them from the world, and asserted the theocratic rule of the church over the civil power under Kings Edwy and Edgar; but his excesses called forth violent contentions between the monks and the seculars in England. He was a forerunner of Hildebrand and Thomas a Becket.3
1 Hurter, I c. p. 45.
2 The material of the church was sold during the Revolution for not much more than 100,000 francs. When Napoleon Bonaparte passed through Macon, he was invited to visit Cluny, but declined with the answer: "You have al lowed your great and beautiful church to be sold and ruined, you are a set of Vandals ; I shall not visit Cluny." Lorain, as quoted by Hurter, p. 47. The last abbot of Cluny was Cardinal Dominicus de la Rochefaucauld, who died in exile A.D. 1800.
3 See Dunstan's life in the Acta Sanct. for May 19; and in Butler's Lives of the Saints, under the same date. Comp. Wharton, Anglia Sacra, II. ; Lingard Hist, of the Anglo Saxon Church; Soames, Anglo-Saxon Church; Lappenberg,' Oesch. von England; Hook, Archbishops of Canterbury; Milman, Latin Chris tianity, Bk. VII., ch. 1; Hardwick; Robertson; also Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHURCH DISCIPLINE.
Comp. vol. II. § 57 (p. 187 sqq.), and vol. IIT. \ 68 (p. 356 sqq.) § 85. The Penitential Books.
I. The Acts of Councils, the Capitularies of Charlemagne and his suc
cessors, and the Penitential Books, especially that of Theodore of Canterbury, and that of Rome. See Migne's Patrol Tom. 99, fol. 901-983.
II. FRIEDR. KTJNSTMANN (R. C.) : Die latcin. Ponitentialbucher der Angel-
sachsen. Mainz 1844. F. W. H. WASSERSCHLEBEN : Bussordnungen der abendldnd. Kirche. Halle 1851. STEITZ: Das r dm. Buss- Sacra ment. Frank f. 1854. FRA^TK (R. C.) : Die Bussdisdplin der Kirche. Mainz 1867. PROBST (R. C.) : Sacramente und Sacramentalien. Tubingen 1872. HADDAN and STUBBS : Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, vol. III. Oxf. 1871. H. Jos. SCHMITZ (R. C.) : Die Bussbiicher und die Bussdisdplin der Kirche. Nach handschriftl. QucUcn. Mainz 1883 (XVI. and 804 p.). Comp. the review of this book by Wasserschleben in the "Theol. Literaturzeitung," 1883, fol. 614 sqq.
BINGHAM, Bk XIV. SMITH and CHEETHAM, II. 608 sqq. (Penitential Books). Herzog,2 III. 20 sqq. (Bussbiicher}. WETZER and WELTE* II. 209-222 (Beichtbiicher} ; II. 1561-1590 (Bussdisdplin}.
Comp. lit. in \ 87.
The discipline of the Catholic church is based on the power of the keys intrusted to the apostles and their successors, and includes the excommunication and restoration of delinquent members. It was originally a purely spiritual jurisdiction, but after the establishment of Christianity as the national religion, it began to affect also the civil and temporal condition of the subjects of punishment. It obtained a powerful hold upon the public mind from the universal belief of the middle ages that the visible church, centering iu the Roman papacy, was by
*