A class, as historians have observed, which no longer justifies its privileges by its services, is in imminent danger; if it reforms in time, it may be saved; if it does not, it is doomed. In England, the friars were doomed. But nothing is ever entirely lost, and while, for centuries, Chaucer’s merriment made people merry at the expense of the begging orders, it is only fair, before parting with them, to recall such an unprejudiced testimony as that of {311} Bacon, in his essay “Of Love”: “There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars.”
59. A GAME OF FOX AND GEESE.
(From the MS. 10 E. IV.)
CHAPTER II THE PARDONERS
“Indulgence” was at first simply a commutation of penance. The punishments inflicted for sins were of long duration; fasting and mortification had to be carried on for months and years. The faithful were permitted to transform these interminable chastisements into shorter expiation. Thus a clerk might exchange a year of penance against three hundred lashes, reciting a psalm at each hundred.[432] Tables of such exchanges were drawn up by competent prelates. The learned and autocratic Theodore, born at Tarsus, Cilicia, an encyclopædic mind and a strong disciplinarian, archbishop of Canterbury from 669 to 690, who left on the British church a permanent mark, had published a tariff allowing people to be excused of a month’s penance on bread and water if they sang instead twelve hundred psalms with bended knees; for a year’s penance the singing was increased, and each course of psalter singing was accompanied with three hundred strokes in the palm of the hand (palmatæ). But it was possible to compensate {313} a year’s penance and escape at the same time the psalms, fasts and strokes by paying a hundred shillings in alms.[433] In another such table, drawn up in the ninth century by Halitgarius, bishop of Cambrai, is found this additional facility, that if the sinner, sentenced to a month’s penance on bread and water, chooses rather the singing of psalms he may be allowed not to kneel while he sings, but then instead of twelve hundred he will have to sing fifteen hundred and eighty psalms. He may in the same manner be excused of more than one month, up to twelve, in which last case, if he chooses not to kneel, he will have to sing no less than twenty thousand one hundred and sixty psalms.[434]
Laymen, who had their choice, frequently preferred a payment in money, the rich having to pay more than the poor, and the sums thus obtained were usually well employed. We have seen them serve for the support of roads and bridges; they were also applied in reconstructing churches, in helping the sick of a hospital, and in covering the expenses of numerous public enterprises. The entirety of punishments was taken off by a plenary indulgence; thus the French pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont, in 1095, granted one to all those who, through pure devotion and not to acquire booty or glory, should go to Jerusalem to fight the infidel; and this was the first crusade.
Little by little the idea of an actual commutation vanished, and was replaced by a different system, known as the theory of the “Treasury.” It had indeed become obvious as the use of indulgences spread, and they were more and more easily gained, that they could no longer be justified as offering to the sinner only his choice between {314} several sorts of even penances. They were something else. A short, well selected prayer, a small gift in money, would now exempt devout people from the greatest penalties and from numberless years of a possible purgatory; the one could scarcely be considered as the equivalent of the other; how was the equilibrium established between the two scales? The answer was that the deficiency was made up by the application to the sinner of merits, not indeed his own, but of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, of which there was an inexhaustible “treasury,” the dispensation of which rested with the Pope and the clergy.
This theory was acted upon long before being put forth in express words; it does not appear to have been more than vaguely alluded to before the fourteenth century, when Pope Clement VI, the “Doctor Doctorum,” gave a perfectly clear definition and exposition of the “treasury” system. In a bull of the year 1350, he explains that the merits of Christ are infinite, and those of the Virgin and the saints, superabundant. This excess of unemployed merit has been constituted into a treasury, “not one that is deposited in a strong room, or concealed in a field, but which is to be usefully distributed to the faithful, through the blessed Peter, keeper of heaven’s gate, and his successors.” However largely employed, there ought to be “no fear of an absorption or a diminution of this treasury, first on account of the infinite merits of Christ, as has been said before, then because the more numerous are the people reclaimed through the use of its contents, the more it is augmented by the addition of their merits.”[435] The treasury had therefore no chance of ever being found empty, since the more was drawn from it the more it grew. Such is in all its simplicity the theory of the “treasury,” which has ever since been maintained, with no change in the theory but much in the practice. {315}