I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by man might be abused in the same way.
The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically, and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously idolatrous.
You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull—a small pardon, or indulgence, or plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind. With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.
Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.
This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but no—if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred and fifty thousand years of purgatory.
What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he is admitted into purgatory at all!
Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger, ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan animas,'—'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time. You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily, any poor wretch is left to suffer there.
Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale, what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.
'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,' said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again: it is a bad shilling.'
Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this hypothesis, was utterly depraved.