Penance and purgatory.

Nature of penance.

The Mass.

absolving an offender who was not truly sorry for what he had done. Confession and penitence were, therefore, necessary preliminaries to absolution.1

Absolution did not free the contrite sinner from all the results of his sin. It cleared the soul of the deadly guilt which would otherwise have been punished by everlasting suffering, but did not exempt the penitent from temporal penalties. These might be imposed by the priest in this world or suffered after death in the fires of purgatory, which cleansed the soul and prepared it for heaven.

The punishment prescribed by the priest was called penance. This took a great variety of forms. It might consist in fasting, repeating prayers, visiting holy places, or abstaining from one's ordinary amusements. A journey to the Holy Land was regarded as taking the place of all penance. Instead, however, of requiring the penitent actually to perform the fasts, pilgrimages, or other sacrifices imposed as penance by the priest, the Church early permitted him to change his penance into a contribution, to be applied to some pious enterprise, like building a church or bridge, or caring for the poor and sick.

The priest not only forgave sin; he was also empowered to perform the stupendous miracle of the Mass. The early Christians had celebrated the Lord's Supper or Holy Eucharist in various ways and entertained various conceptions of its nature and significance. Gradually the idea came to be universally accepted that by the consecration of the bread and the wine the whole substance of the bread was converted into the substance of the body of Christ, and the whole substance Transubstan- of the wine into his blood. This change was termed transubstantiation. The Church believed, further, that in this sacrament Christ was offered up anew, as he had been on the cross,

tiation.

1 Confession was a very early practice in the Church. Innocent III and the fourth Lateran Council made it obligatory by requiring the faithful to confess at least once a year, at Easter time. For sacraments, see Readings, Chapter XVI.

as a sacrifice to God. This sacrifice might be performed for the sins of the absent as well as of the present, and for the dead as well as for the living. Moreover, Christ was to be worshiped under the form of the bread, or host (Latin, hostia, sacrifice), with the highest form of adoration. The host was to be borne about in solemn procession when God was to be especially propitiated, as in the case of a famine or plague.

Consequences

of conceiving the Mass as a

sacrifice.

This conception of the Mass as a sacrifice had some important practical consequences. It became the most exalted of the functions of the priest and the very center of the Church's services. Besides the public masses for the people, private ones were constantly celebrated for the benefit of individuals, especially of the dead. Foundations were created, the income of which went to support priests for the single purpose of saying daily masses for the repose of the soul of the donor or those of the members of his family. It was also a common practice to bestow gifts upon churches and monasteries on condition that annual or more frequent masses should be said for the giver. 83. The sublime prerogatives of the Church, together with its unrivaled organization and vast wealth, combined to make its officers, the clergy, the most powerful social class of the Middle Ages. They held the keys of heaven and without their aid no one could hope to enter in. By excommunication they could not only cast an offender out of the Church, but Excommunialso forbid his fellow-men to associate with him, since he was accursed and consigned to Satan. By means of the interdict they could suspend the consolations of religion in a whole city or country by closing the church doors and prohibiting all public services.1

The influence of the clergy was greatly enhanced by the fact that they alone were educated. For six or seven centuries after the overthrow of the Roman government in the West,

1 See above, p. 183, and Translations and Reprints, Vol. IV, No. 4, for examples of the interdict and excommunication.

The dominant the clergy sources of

position of

and the

their power.

cation and

interdict.

Their moadvantages

nopoly of the

of education.

Offices in the
Church open

very few outside of the clergy ever dreamed of studying or even of learning to read and write. Even in the thirteenth century an offender who wished to prove that he belonged to the clergy, in order that he might be tried by a church court, had only to show that he could read a single line; for it was assumed by the judges that no one unconnected with the Church could read at all.1

It was therefore inevitable that almost all the books should be written by priests and monks and that the clergy should become the ruling power in all intellectual, artistic, and literary matters, the chief guardians and promoters of civilization. Moreover, the civil government was forced to rely upon churchmen to write out the public documents and proclamations. The priests and monks held the pen for the king. Representatives of the clergy sat in the king's councils and acted as his ministers; in fact, the conduct of the government largely devolved upon them.2

The offices in the Church were open to all ranks of men, to all classes. and many of the popes themselves sprang from the humblest classes. The Church thus constantly recruited its ranks with fresh blood. No one held an office simply because his father had held it before him, as was the case in the civil government.

Lea's description of

Church.

The man who entered the service of the Church "was released the medieval from the distraction of family cares and the seduction of family ties. The Church was his country and his home and its interests were his own. The moral, intellectual, and physical forces, which throughout the laity were divided between the claims of patriotism, the selfish struggle for advancement, the provision for wife and children, were in the Church consecrated to a common end, in the success of which all might hope to share,

1 The privilege of being tried by churchmen, which all connected with the Church claimed, was called benefit of clergy. See Readings, Chapter XVI.

2 The bishops still constitute an important element in the upper houses of parliament in several European countries.

while all were assured of the necessities of existence, and were relieved of anxiety as to the future." The Church was thus an army encamped on the soil of Christendom, with its outposts everywhere, subject to the most efficient discipline, animated with a common purpose, every soldier panoplied with inviolability and armed with the tremendous weapons which slew the soul" (Lea).

General Reading.—CUTTS, Parish Priests and their People (F & J. B. Young, $3.00). PRÉVOST, L'Église et les Campagnes au Moyen Âge (Paris, $1.50).

The question of the character of the mediæval clergy.

The debt of western Europe to the Church.

CHAPTER XVII

HERESY AND THE FRIARS

84. It is natural to ask whether the commanders of the great army which made up the Church proved valiant leaders in the eternal warfare against evil. Did they, on the whole, resist the temptations which their almost limitless power and wealth constantly placed in their way? Did they use their vast resources to advance the cause of the Great Leader whose humble followers and servants they claimed to be? Or were they, on the contrary, selfish and corrupt, turning the teachings of the Church to their own advantage, and discrediting its doctrines in the eyes of the people by flagrant maladministration and personal wickedness?

No simple answer to this question is possible. One who realizes how completely the Church dominated every human interest and influenced every department of life in the Middle Ages must hesitate to attempt to balance the good and evil to be placed to its account. That the Church conferred incalculable benefits upon western Europe, few will question. To say nothing of its chief mission, the moral uplifting of mankind through the Christian religion, we have seen how, under its auspices, the barbarians were civilized and brought into the family of nations, how violence was checked by the "Truce of God," and how an educated class was maintained during the centuries when few laymen could either read or write. These are only the more obvious of its achievements; the solace and protection which it afforded to the weak, the wretched, and the heart-sore, no one can assume to estimate.