§ 137. THE AGE PASSING JUDGMENT UPON ITSELF. 893
making his body lean and his soul fat. He had a right to do as he pleased. But it was the same prelate who expressed the hierarchical pride of the age when he exclaimed to an English king that priests are the fathers and masters of kings. The laity, according to Caesar of Heisterbach, as already quoted, were compared to the night, the clergy to the day. The preacher Werner of St. Blasius called the peasants the feet whose toil was appointed to maintain the more worthy parts of the body, — bishops, priests, and monks.1 The thinkers of this period had no vision of the Reformation.
The Middle Ages have been praised as a period of reli gious contentment and freedom from sectarian strife. The very contrary was the case. The strife between the friars and the secular clergy and, in cases, within the monastic orders themselves equals in bitterness any strife that has been maintained between branches of the Protestant Church. It was a question not whether there was religious unrest but, from the days of Arnold of Brescia on, how the established Church might crush out heretical revolt. There was also religious doubt among the monks, and there were women who denied that Eve had been tempted by an apple, as Csesar of Heisterbach assures us.
The superstitions which prevailed were largely inherited from preceding ages. The worship of Mary clouded the merits of Christ. What can be said when Thomas of Chantimpre, d. about 1263, relates in all seriousness that a robber, whose head had been cut off, kept calling upon the Virgin, as the body rolled down a hill, until the parts were put to gether by a priest. The criminal then told how, as a boy, he had devoted Saturdays and Wednesdays to Mary and she had promised he should not die till opportunity was given him to make confession. So he made confession and died again, and, as the reader is left to believe, went into the other world rejoicing.
The gruesome tales of demoniacal presence and influence indicate a condition of mind from which we do well to be
i Migne, 157. 1047.
894 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
thankful we are delivered. John of St. Giles, the admirable English Dominican, used to say, as he retired to his cell in the evening, " Now I await my martyrdom," meaning the bufferings of the devil. The awful story of how Ludwig the Iron, 1100-1172, was welcomed to hell and shown all its compartments and then pitched mercilessly into quenchless flames is no worse than the visions of Dante, but too revolt ing in the apparent callousness of it to the suffering of others not to call forth a shudder to-day.1
Such representations, however, do not warrant the conclu sion that human charity was dead. St. Francis and Hugh of Lincoln kissed the hands of lepers. The Knights of St. Lazarus were intrusted by Louis IX. with the care of this class of sufferers. Houses for lepers were established in England by Lanfranc, Mathilda, queen of Henry, King Stephen at Burton, and others. Mathilda washed their feet, believing that, in so doing, she was washing the feet of Christ.2 The oldest of the military orders and the Teutonic knights, as well as other orders, were organized to care for the sick and distressed.
On the other hand the period sets, in some respects, an example of great devotion, and has handed down to us the universities and the cathedrals, some of the most tender hymns and imposing theological s}Tstems which, if they can not be accepted in important particulars, are yet remarkable constructions of thought and piety. And, above all, it has handed down to us a group of notable men who may well serve as a stimulus to all generations which are interested in the extension of Christ's kingdom.
But in the judgment of these very men, the period was not an ideal one either in morals or faith. If we go to preachers, like Berth old of Regensburg, we find evidence of the prevalence of vice and irreligion among all classes. If we go to popes and Schoolmen, we hear bitter complaints of the evils of the age and of human lot which would fit in
1 Heisterbach, Dial., XII. 2, Strange's ed., II. 316.
2 See Creighton in Traill, I. 368 sq., and Geo. Fernet, Leprosy, in Quart, Rev., 1903, pp. 384 sqq.