All was disorder and anarchy. A despotic power was at the summit of the Church; midway and below, were growing usurpations, scandalous and never-ceasing contests; Christianity had much less reason to complain of being too much governed, than of being badly governed. Illusory in the ranks of the clergy, discipline had actually become a source of demoralization for the laity. To the long and severe penances of ancient times had succeeded the redemption of sins at a money price. If, at least, it had been necessary to pay for each transgression separately, it would yet have been necessary to number one’s vices. The extreme evil was, that they might be redeemed all at once, they might be redeemed beforehand, for all one’s lifetime, for all one’s family, for all one’s posterity, for a whole parish altogether. Thenceforward, there was no more authority. The absolution of the priest was derided, because absolution had already been paid for out of the purse; and the clerical power that Rome maintained on one side, she overthrew on the other.
The traffic of indulgences was carried on by the same means as ordinary barter; it had its contractors on a large scale, its directors and sub-directors, its offices, its tariffs, its travelling factors. Indulgences were vended by auction, at the beat of the drum, in the public places. They were sold by wholesale and by retail, and those agents were employed, who best knew the art of deceiving and plundering mankind.
It was, above all, this sacrilegious industry which gave the fatal blow to the Romish church. Nothing irritates a people so much as to find in religion less morality than in themselves; and this instinct is just. Every religion should ameliorate those who believe in it. When it depraves them, when it makes them descend beneath that condition in which they would be without it, its fall is certain; for it possesses no longer its essential and supreme reason of existence.
How, moreover, could the members of the clergy enforce a respect for moral duties, which they were the first to transgress? We will not here recount the disgraceful and universal licentiousness so numerously attested by authentic declarations, among others by the hundred grievances which were presented to the diet of Nuremberg, in 1523, with the signature of a legate even of Pope Adrian. Many priests paid a public tax for the privilege of living in an unlawful commerce, and in many localities in Germany this disorder had been rendered obligatory, so that still greater offences might be avoided.
Besides indulgences, Rome had invented all kinds of methods for increasing its revenues: appellations, reservations, exemptions, provisions, dispensations, expectatives, annates. The gold of Europe would have been completely absorbed if the governments had not placed some barrier; and even the poorest nations were compelled to impoverish themselves yet more to gorge pontiffs, who, like the grave, never exclaimed—“It is enough.”
The bishops and the heads of monastic orders did the same in the different provinces of Catholicity. Everything helped them to swell the possessions of the Church; peace and war, public triumphs and misfortunes, private successes and reverses, the faith of these, and the heresy of those. What they could not obtain from the liberality of the faithful, they sought in the spoliation of those who disbelieved. And so, as the grievances of Nuremberg state, the regular and secular clergy possessed in Germany one-half the territory; in France it held the third; elsewhere, still more. And the ecclesiastical domains being exempt from all taxation, priests and monks, without bearing the burdens of the state, monopolized all its benefits.
Not only did they enjoy enormous privileges for their property; they had others for their persons. Every clerk was an anointed of the Lord, a sacred thing for the civil judge. No one had a right to place his hand upon him, until he had been tried, condemned, and degraded by the members of his own order. The clergy thus formed a society wholly distinct from the general society. It was a caste placed without and above the common law; its immunities prevailed over the sovereignty of justice, and authors entitled to our credence relate that wretches entered the sacerdotal order or the cloister, solely to commit crimes with impunity.
If the priests did not suffer the magistrates to attach them, they arrogated to themselves the right of interposing without end in the suits of the laity. Testaments and wills, marriages, the civil condition of children, and a host of other matters which were called mixed, were carried before their tribunal; so that a considerable part of justice depended upon the clergy, who themselves depended upon their peers and chief alone; an organization, useful perhaps in the times of ignorance, when none but ecclesiastics possessed any knowledge, but which, by perpetuating itself down to the sixteenth century, after the revival of letters, became the most iniquitous of prerogatives, the most intolerable of usurpations.
There are in the present day writers who draw a magnificent ideal of the state of Catholicism before Luther. But have they ever studied that epoch? And those who declaim with the greatest violence against the Reformation, would they suffer for one day the abuses it has destroyed?
And it must be said, for the honour of mankind, that from period to period, fresh and courageous adversaries have arisen against each error, and each encroachment of the priestly power. In an early age, Vigilantius, and Claude of Turin; then, the Vaudois and the Albigenses; then, the Wickliffites, the Hussites, and the Brethren of Moravia and Bohemia—small and feeble communities—were crushed by the popes leagued with the princes, but who from their scaffolds and their stakes, transmitted to each other the sacred flame of primitive faith, until, reared aloft by the powerful hand of Luther, it spread afar its rays over the Christian world.