People used to go on pilgrimage, and especially such as had fallen into any great sin, would go through everything to pray at the Holy Sepulchre for forgiveness. The Saracens, who had not been unkind to the pilgrims, were subdued by a much fiercer set of Mahometans, the Turcomans, who did everything to profane the holy places, and robbed and misused the Christians who came to worship there. The news of this profanation stirred up all Europe to deliver the Sanctuary from the unbeliever. Monks went about preaching the holy war, and multitudes took the cross, that is, fastened on their shoulder one cut out in cloth, and vowed to win back Jerusalem. The Pope took upon himself to say that whoever was killed in such a cause, would have all his sins forgiven, and be in no danger of purgatory; and this be called an indulgence. These wars were called Crusades. In the first, in 1098, Jerusalem was conquered, and a very good and pious man, named Godfrey, set up to be king, though he would not be crowned, saying he would never wear a crown of gold where his Master had worn a crown of thorns. But as the Greek Christians who already lived there, would not own the Pope, but held to their own Patriarch, a Latin Patriarch was thrust in and was in subjection to the Pope; and thus the unhappy schism grew wider. After Godfrey's death, the Christians in Palestine did not behave well, nor show themselves worthy to have the keeping of Jerusalem; and though St. Bernard preached a second Crusade, and the Emperor of Germany and King of France came to help them, their affairs only grew worse and worse.
In 1186, after they had possessed the Holy City only eighty-eight years, they were deprived of it; it was taken again by the Saracens, and they retained only a few towns on the coast. All devout people mourned that the unbeliever should again be defiling the sanctuary; but the Pope had a great quarrel with the Emperor of Germany, and told the poor credulous people that fighting his battles was as good as a Crusade; and they began to forsake the Holy Land, and leave it to its fate. Our own Richard the Lion Heart did his best, and so did the excellent French king, St. Louis, who died in Africa on his way to the Crusade, but all in vain; and finally the Christians were driven out of Acre, their last town, and Palestine became Mahometan again with only a few oppressed Christians here and there. Then came a much more rude, dull, and violent race of Mahometans, the Turks, who burst out of the East, conquered the Saracens, gained all Asia Minor, and at last, in the year 1453, they took the city of Constantinople, killed the last emperor, Constantine, in the assault, and won all the country we now call Turkey, where they sadly oppressed the Greeks, though they could not make them turn from their true Catholic faith. It was then that the light of truth faded entirely away from Ephesus and the Churches of Asia; a blight fell wherever the Turks went, and cities, once prosperous, were deserted and ruined. Tyre was one of these; and she has now become a mere rock, where fishermen spread their nets to dry upon the sea-shore, as Ezekiel had foretold. However, it was only forty years afterwards, that the last remains of the Mahometan conquerors were chased out of Spain, so that it became again an entirely Christian country.
LESSON XXXII.
THE REFORMATION.
"The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a treasure hid in a field."—Matt. xiii. 44.
When the Services of the Church were first drawn up, almost everyone in the East spoke Greek, and most people in the West understood Latin; and when the Teutons learnt Christianity, they also, with it, learnt a little Latin. Thus the Prayers and the Scriptures remained in that tongue, but the people themselves spoke each their own language. German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian are mixtures in different degrees of Latin and Teuton, and only learned persons who understood the old language, could follow the Prayers, or read the Bible. So the people missed more and more of the real truth and meaning of sacred things; and some of the clergy who had grown corrupt, took advantage of their ignorance and deceived them. Whereas the Pope had once declared that those who went on a Crusade were sure of dying in a state of salvation, he now declared, that to give alms for building the great Church of St. Peter at Rome, would answer the same purpose; and indulgences, namely, promises of so many years less of purgatory, used to be absolutely sold; and it was very difficult to set these errors right, for anyone who was thought to speak against the doctrine of the Church, was liable to be punished by being burnt to death. This was quite contrary to the ways of the early Church, which, however bad a heretic might have been, never attempted to harm his person, but only separated him from her Communion.
As the Holy Spirit within the Church is ever cleansing and sanctifying it, witnesses against these errors began to be raised up. The way to print books, instead of writing them out, had been discovered in the fifteenth century; and as this art made them much more cheap and common, many more people began to read and to think. In the year 1517, a German monk, named Martin Luther, began to declare how far the selling of indulgences was from the doctrine of the Apostles; and he spoke such plain truth, that he convinced a great number of Germans, and there was a great longing for the cleansing of the Church, especially after Luther had translated the Bible into his own tongue, and everyone could see how unlike the teaching there was to what had been so long believed.
In England, King Henry VIII. separated from the Roman Church because the Pope would not please him by breaking a marriage, which certainly never ought to have been sanctioned; but which having been permitted by the Pope, and having continued twenty years, it was very wrong to dissolve. He called himself Head of the Church in England; and though he believed all the later errors, he allowed the Lessons to be read from a new English translation of the Bible. He pretended to reform the convents, some of which were in a very bad state, and had forgotten their rules; but instead of setting them to rights, he seized their wealth, and turned all the monks and nuns adrift.
The new notions were favoured by his break with the Pope. The whole Western Church was in a ferment; the reformers were constantly writing and preaching against the many errors of the Roman Church, and were rejoicing over the real treasure of true faith they had found hidden within her. Many other sincere and good men were shocked at such disobedience to what they had once respected; and unhappily, almost all the Italian clergy and cardinals were so food of the riches and power in which they were maintained by misleading the people, that they dreaded nothing so much as having them set right.
The Emperor, Charles V., strove hard to bring about a General Council of the Church, as the only hope of making matters right, but he was much hindered by his wars with the King of France, and by the double dealing of the Pope; and in the meantime Luther and his friends drew up a protest against the false doctrines of Rome, and were, for that reason, called Protestants. In Switzerland and France, another reformer, named John Calvin, was preaching against the doctrine of the Pope; and though he neglected what the Church of old pure times had decided, and thus threw away much that was good, as well as much that was untrue, great numbers followed him; but unfortunately, none of the higher clergy on the Continent would listen to these views, and there seemed no choice but to accept falsehood, or to break into a schism. After many trials, Charles V. got together some Italian, Spanish, and German clergy at Trent, in the Tyrol, and called them a council; but this was far from being a true General Council, as there was nobody from the Eastern Church, nor from many branches of the Western. The Protestants knew they should not be fairly treated, and that if these Italians should decide that they were heretics, they might very probably be burnt; so, instead of coming to it, they acted as the early Christians never did, they took up arms and fought, and this attempt at a council broke up in confusion.