Archbishop Peckham’s third constitution at Reading (1279) orders the General Excommunications to be explained to the people on the Sundays after every Rural Chapter, and the archdeacons to see that it is done.[634]
CHAPTER XXXII.
RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
he subject of the religious condition of the parish priests and their people in the Middle Ages—their belief and life—brings us into a polemical atmosphere. There are some admirers of those times who look upon them as “the Ages of Faith;” there are others who think that in those times of false doctrines and manifold superstitions priests and people were generally degraded and vicious.
The truth lies somewhere between the two. We do not propose to enter into polemical discussion. Our business, as it seems to us, is to try to put ourselves into the midst of the people, to enter into their minds, to study their lives, and to represent as fairly as we can what manner of men priests and people were, what they believed, and how they lived.
We seem to see on the whole that there were two “schools of thought” in the Middle Ages. One consisted of learned men of a speculative turn of mind, who explained and developed ancient doctrines and practices into new and erroneous meanings; followed by a crowd of devout people who adopted their views, and sometimes degraded philosophical speculations and pious opinions, which they hardly understood, into gross misapprehensions and superstitions. On the other hand, there were people of competent learning, who read the Scriptures and the ancient Fathers, and in substance adhered to their teaching; and with them remained a crowd of people whose Christian common sense kept them fairly free of extravagances. We must be careful in judging people who have been brought up in a faulty system. We must not take for granted that everybody believed in every error and in the conclusions logically involved in it, or approved of every superstitious custom. On the contrary, the soul, like the stomach, seems to discriminate what it lives on, and to have a power of assimilating what is good, and rejecting more or less what is noxious. Why should we doubt that God watches over His people, and helps the ignorant, well-intentioned Christian man unconsciously to refuse the evil and choose the good?