CENTURY XIV.
This fourteenth century is one of the epochs that sorely test the ingenuity of believers in papal infallibility; for the cardinals, having elected one pope in A.D. 1378, rapidly took a dislike to him, and elected a second. The first choice, Urban VI., remained at Rome; the second, Clement VII., betook himself to Avignon. They duly excommunicated each other, and the Latin Church was rent in twain. "The distress and calamity of these times is beyond all power of description; for not to insist upon the perpetual contentions and wars between the factions of the several popes, by which multitudes lost their fortunes and lives, all sense of religion was extinguished in most places, and profligacy arose to a most scandalous excess. The clergy, while they vehemently contended which of the reigning popes was the true successor of Christ, were so excessively corrupt as to be no longer studious to keep up even an appearance of religion or decency" ("Europe During the Middle Ages," Hallam, p. 359).
Meanwhile, the struggle between Rome and the heretics went on with ever-increasing fury. In England, Dr. John Wickcliff, rector of Lutterworth, became famous by his attack on the mendicant orders in A.D. 1360, and from that time he raised his voice louder and louder, till he spoke against the pope himself. He translated the Bible into English, attacked many of the prevailing superstitions, and although condemned as holding heretical opinions, he yet died in peace, A.D. 1387. Rome revenged itself by digging up his bones and burning them, about thirteen years later. Rebellion spread even among the monks of the Church, and a vast number of some nonconformist Franciscan monks, termed Spirituals, were burned for their refusal to obey the pope on matters of discipline. The intense hatred between the Franciscan and Dominican orders made the latter the willing instrument of the papacy; and, in their character as inquisitors, they hunted down their unfortunate rivals as heretics. The Flagellants, a sect who wandered about flogging themselves to the glory of God, fell also under the merciless hands of the inquisitors, as did also the Knights Templars in France. A new body, known as the Dancers, started up in A.D. 1373, and spread through Flanders; but the priests prayed them away by exorcising the dancing devils that, they said, inhabited the members of this curious sect. Among the sufferers of this century one name must not be forgotten: it is that of Ceccus Asculanus. This man was an Aristotelian philosopher, an astrologer, a mathematician, and a physician. "This unhappy man, having performed some experiments in mechanics that seemed miraculous to the vulgar, and having also offended many, and among the rest his master [the Duke of Calabria], by giving out some predictions which were said to have been fulfilled, was universally supposed to deal with infernal spirits, and burned for it by the inquisitors, at Florence, in the year 1337" (p. 355). There seems no green spot on which to rest the eye in this weary stretch of blood and fire.