low ebb of the civilization of that time. But we are prone to judge events of the Middle Ages by the standard of today, and indiscriminately to condemn the acts of these people, when we should consider rather their motives and effects. When sitting in judgment upon the acts of the Medieval Church, we should bear in mind how essentially its surroundings differed from our own. Society today is stratified by commerce. Our castes are commercial, and we are guided by a commercial morality. But the key to a correct understanding of the social stratification of the Middle Ages is found in the fact that then the business of the world was fighting. The morality of the Middle Ages was a morality of force. Thus it is neither surprising nor altogether culpable in the Church of that day that it fell immeasurably short of what we now deem essential in a moral teacher, and partook of the fierce and passionate nature of the community in which it existed. Making due allowance for this fact, however, we cannot but be shocked at the picture of society which must rise in the background when we look upon the Medieval Church. The history of the papacy for a long period is the history of the struggle of rival Italian factions seeking for temporal power; and the Holy See was contended for as an instrument by which the ecclesiastical power might be turned to the advantage of one faction or the other. Throughout Europe, the bishops, freed from any effective supervision by the Pope, both on account of the engrossing nature of his own quarrels, and on account of their distance from Rome, found the temptation for the abuse of their positions irresistible. They claimed an exemption from trial in the civil courts, for the king could have no jurisdiction over the spiritual advisers; and when the ecclesiastical courts made their conduct the subject of investigation, they found no difficulty in directing the decision in their favor. Freed thus from all restraint, the bishops abandoned themselves to the most lawless excesses. The Church lands they held in their own names, and for their own benefit, and thus the feudal system imposed upon them the usual military duties. Hence arose the class of fighting bishops who were more formidable in the field than they were effective in the Church. They kept a body of armed retainers about them continually, and used their power for purposes of plunder, until they became in time the most unbearable scourges in the country. This position of the clergy necessarily attracted a number of adventurers into the service of the Church, and the increasing demand for clerical offices, which were desired solely as positions of pecuniary profit, brought with it a train of attendant abuses. Simony became general, and vacant bishoprics were bought and sold with an openness which absolutely precluded not merely any appropriateness in the selection of incumbents, but also any respect for the office among clergy or laity. Pluralities - the holding of two or more bishoprics by one person followed as a matter of course, and cases are recorded of complaints that bishops did not even visit the sees from which they were drawing their income. Of course, as this material aspect of the office gained prominence, there was a corresponding obscuration of the spiritual aspect. There was no semblance of preaching, and the people were left in spiritual darkness. The flock was an object of interest to the bishop only when he thought that it might be sheared. Every office of the Church was prostituted to the desire for gain. The tithes were enacted with unsparing severity, the confessional was made an instrument of extortion; marriage and funeral ceremonies, final sacraments and masses for the repose of the soul were made sources of profit, and even the bodies of the dead were made the subject of unseemly contest in order to gain the attendant oblations. Cardinal Newman thus describes the Church at this period: When Gregory VII. became Pope, he found offices of devotion neglected, sheep and cattle defiling the house of prayer, and monks attended by women. Offices of the Church were sold almost as at an auc tion. The Archbishop of France, forty-five bishops, and twenty-seven other dignitaries of the Church Only sexual impurity is needed to complete this picture of absolute degradation and faithlessness to their trust, and this was by no means lacking. The celibacy of the earlier ages of the Church had been abandoned. Marriage was almost universal among the clergy, and in Normandy many churches had become heritable property to the sons and daughters of priests. Lawless intercourse was even more common than marriage among the clergy, and thus the Church had not only ceased to exercise its functions as a moral guide, but presented an example of immorality and a contrast with the teachings of Christianity, which could not fail to exert an evil influ ence. The separation of the Church from the mass of the people was increased and intensified by the fact that the clerical offices were recruited from the ranks of the nobility. The division of the communities into two classes was sharp and distinct. In the country the peasants were retainers of the nobles, and their portion was little better than that of slaves. In the cities the lower classes had succeeded by a series of revolts against the nobility in freeing themselves in a measure from the oppressive burdens of the feudal system. Commerce was undeveloped, and the merchants, however prosperous, were looked upon with unbounded contempt by the nobility as well as by the ecclesiasts. The artisans and peasants were equally the objects of this contempt, and there was absolutely no bond of sympathy between the upper and lower classes. The peasants were necessarily profoundly ignorant, and the friction of city life did not suffice to raise the artisans and traders to a much higher intellectual level. It would be supposed that under these circumstances the lower classes would be morally lost. Kept in the densest ignorance, deprived of all spiritual instruction, and forced to view the Church as a gigantic organ of lawless oppression, there was no external force to preserve them from hopeless degradation. It is one of the grandest proofs, therefore, of the innate and unconquerable moral sense of the human race, that the protest against the spiritual demoralization of the Church and the awakening of moral thought originated with these peasants and artisans. The anti-sacerdotal heresies which shook the structure of the Church to its very foundation, were established and spread throughout Europe by the force of the dissatisfaction of these lower classes. These heresies, though embracing many sects, were included in two general classes,the Cathari and the Waldenses. The Cathari, the heretics par excellence, who combined with Christianity a mass of doctrine borrowed from the Eastern religions, held to a faith which had been handed down through the obscure lower classes from the first century. Their dualistic faith, however, would hardly have gained converts or shown such signs of vitality had it not been joined with antisacerdotalism. The Waldenses were closer to the Church, and in fact claimed to be members of it, despite their attacks upon its organization. They were Christians, who protested against the corruption and immorality which had taken possession of the ecclesiastical organization, and they were forced out of the Church by the refusal of the Pope, when appealed to, to recognize them as ministers of the gospel. The recognition which they sought was, in fact, impossible; for their tenet that the sacrament was polluted in polluted hands struck at the very organization of the Church itself, involving as it did the proposition that all who lived pure lives might administer the sacrament. The Church replied that the priest was only an instrument through which the sacraments were administered, and though he might be living in mortal sin, yet they were something higher which might not be reached by the imperfections. of the ministrant. This distinction, however, was too subtle for the understanding of the Waldensian heretics, who spread throughout Europe with alarming rapidity. They increased in strength until, in the latter half of the twelfth century, they perfected their church organization, dividing Europe into sees and appointing bishops. Everything indicated that they expected to supplant the Roman Church. It was against this danger that the Mediæval Inquisition which is to be distinguished from the Modern Inquisition directed against the Protestants- was established. And it is a curious fact that the mendicant friars, to whom the establishment of this institution and the carrying out of its details were ultimately entrusted, the Dominicans and Franciscans, - owed the existence of their orders to the same dissatisfaction with the moral condition of the Church officers, which gave rise to the heresies they were to crush out. These friars entered with spirit into the work of discovering and punishing heretics. The machinery which they established reached an astonishing degree of perfection for those times. Through the confessions of heretics, through the information given by the faithful or the terror-stricken, through a complete system of communication which led to the examination of any sus picious stranger who might arrive in a town, the escape of a heretic was rendered almost impossible. The Inquisition constituted a chain of tribunals throughout Europe, and by a constant interchange of documents and mutual co-operation they covered the country with a network, which, combined with the most careful preservation and indexing of records, produced a system of police singularly complete for a period when international communication was so imperfect. The records of every heretical family could be traced from the papers of one tribunal or another. Vainly might a heretic seek to hide himself by a change of abode; the Inquisition was ever on his track. The mode of procedure in a trial before the Inquisition was borrowed from the "inquisitio" of the Roman Law; but despite this fact, the two procedures differed widely in practice. Theoretically, the inquisitors combined in themselves the characters of judge, of accuser, and of spiritual father, in which latter capacity their chief concern was the salvation of the souls of the accused. In addition to this, they were the defenders of the organization of the Church, the kingdom of God upon earth, against the attacks of those who would overthrow it. It is scarcely to be wondered at that they fell far short of fulfilling these variant and opposing functions. They felt the difficulty of their position, but they failed to appreciate the radical defect of their mental attitude in approaching their task. We have the testimony of one of their number, that the inquisitor "was torn by doubts, for on the one side his conscience pained him if he punished one who neither confessed nor was convicted; but he suffered still more, knowing the cunning and falsity of these men, if he allowed one to escape to the damage of the faith. For every heretic who was at large was a menace to the souls of the faithful." It was the Church which was naturally their first concern, but they allowed their anxiety for the defense of the faith to obscure the justice due to the accused, and it was inevitable that the legal presumption of the innocence of the accused until his guilt was proved should be reversed. The inquisitor sought to wring from him a confession of the heresy of which he felt certain the accused was guilty, and all the machinery of the Holy Office was directed to this end. For not. only did the confession open the way to the salvation of his soul, but it involved the discovery of other heretics who had been his companions. Thus widely did the theory and practice of the Inquisition differ. An institution established for the defense of Christianity, whose highest precepts were morality and justice, was perverted through the misdi rected zeal of the inquisitors into an engine. of oppression and abuse. The still greater perversion of the institution from its true purpose, whereby it was made a means of furthering political aims and gratifying personal malice and enmity, need not be dwelt upon, for these are the inevitable defects of any institution which places unlimited power in the hands of men. Such defects are inherent in humanity rather than in any individual institution, and do not directly enter into an estimate of the influence of the Inquisition as a factor in the develop ment of civilization. Far more valuable for the present purpose is a consideration of the course which events would have followed, had the Church not set up against the growing independence of religious thought an instrument of such irresistible force. Certainly no weaker machinery would have been sufficient to oppose the sweep of free thought, and without the Inquisition we should have seen the heresies crushing out the Church and taking its place. The result which would have followed the supremacy of the Cathari is forcibly pointed out by Mr. Lea. Had Catharism become dominant, or had it even been allowed to exist on equal terms, its asceticism with regard to the commerce of the sexes could only have led to the extinction of the race, or what was more likely, lawless concubinage, and the destruction of the institution of the family. Its condemnation of the visible universe as the work of Satan rendered sinful all striving after material advancement, and a conscientious belief in such a creed could only lead man back in time to his original condition of savagism. It was not a revolt against the Church, but a renunciation of man's dominion over nature. As such it was doomed from the start, and our only wonder must be that it maintained itself so long and so stubbornly. The danger from the Waldensian heresy was by no means so great. Their religious tenets corresponded closely with those of the Church. Their contest was with the ecclesiastical organization, and though they attempt ed an organization of their own, the authority of their bishops was weak and uncertain. The Roman Church at that time furnished the only efficient governmental organization in Christendom. The service of the Church in preceding and directing the development of national governments cannot be overestimated. The strong centralization of the Church presented a model which the separate nations followed; while a more active influence was exerted, often unintentionally, when the Church threw its power on the side of the concentration of political force. And though this centralization would have been evanescent without a coincident growth of national feeling in the individual countries, this feeling was strengthened and fostered by the development of the kingly power. all great natural movements, the development of nationality was the result of the interaction of opposing forces, and the Church organization was one of the most potent and direct of these forces. Had the ecclesiastical organization been swept away, the force which restrained the disintegrating tendencies would have been lost, and the nationalization of Europe would have been retarded. Retarded only, for the ultimate nationalization was inevitable; but the avoidance of this delay was an effect of the Inquisition through its preservation of the Church organization, and is one of the facts to be placed to its credit. The triumph of heresy would have been an evil, yet here again we find a compensation. The medieval heresies were essentially moral in their inception and in their aims; and all moral effort, however blind and uncertain, must exert a beneficent influence. It was a protest against clerical corruption and abuse of power, and in the Church it worked a purification of fire. But the influence of heresy was more lasting and beneficial than this, for it laid the foundation of that free criticism of the Church and that independence of religious thought, which culminated three centuries later in the Protestant Reformation. The medieval heretics were not mentally prepared to develop and direct an intellectual movement of such magnitude and far-reaching significance. Civilization itself was too young for such intellectual independence. The growth of thought is necessarily slow, and liberty becomes license where the community is not sufficiently mature intellectually to exercise it wisely. The restraint of this freedom of religious thought until civilization was prepared to receive it and to assimilate it, was the true work of the Inquisition. Its significance as a factor in the moral and intellectual development of the race is found in this fact, and in no other way can it be reconciled with the true conception of natural methods. It was the conservative force, harsh and cruel it is true, which restrained the movement for intellectual emancipation from the Church, and gave time for the development of that ethical understanding which was essential for a guidance of the revolt in a truer direction and to a higher plane than would have been possible where the leaders were men drawn from the uneducated ranks of society, and therefore incompetent, however earnest in purpose, to lead it in the right path. F. I. Vassault. A LESSON FOR CALIFORNIA. Of books written with a purpose there are many; literature abounds with works written for an ethical purpose, for personal reasons, for a moral purpose, and—at present for a distinctly immoral one. These latter flood the market now, and it becomes a pleasure to turn from such literary iniquity to a book written to correct a great evil and a great wrong, such as "Uncle Tom's Tenement," 1 just issued in Boston. The author, Mrs. Rollins, is already well known for good work in many fields of literature; but her greatest admirer will hardly be prepared for the work that appears in this latest of her writings. She has become interested, as few women ever have become interested, in the problems of labor and capital, of wealth and poverty, as they appear here in New York, the town of widest social range. The characters and incidents of her story run from social A to Z. She deals with the millionaire in his palace, with the laborer in his tenement, and with both without exaggeration. There is pathos in this book, and of that strongest kind, the pathos of situation. There is wit, that of clever, well-bred people, and a wit even keener and more sparkling of boot-blacks, and newsboys, and street Arabs. There are discussions of questions here upon which it seems impossible a woman could have writ ten so well, so far away are they from the ordinary sphere of the thought of even intellectual women, and of the literary woman of the present; and for real dramatic strength, it would be hard in current literature to 1 Uncle Tom's Tenement. By Alice Wellington Rolins. Boston: The Wm. E. Smythe Company. match the last chapter of all of her work. In a very modest preface to her novel, Mrs. Rollins states her reason for giving a title to her work that at once suggests comparison with that other remarkable book, the "Uncle Tom's Cabin," of Mrs. Stowe. She has drawn a parallel between the evil of Southern slavery, now dead and past, and the evil of Northern industrial slavery, present with us, and growing worse every day. The book deals, as we have said, with the wealth and poverty question, what is called locally here in New York "The TenementHouse Problem"; how to make rich people more fully realize the wants of their brotherpoor; how in some way which shall not reduce them to mere charity-takers, to raise the poor nearer to the standard of the rich. It is at once realistic and idealistic ; realistic enough for the most devoted follower of Tolstoï, in that it shows things as they are, idealistic in that it suggests things as they ought to be. And although the scene of the novel is local, and has to do with evils that appear most palpably in New York City, it is of interest alike to the Californian rich man and the Californian poor man in showing them what to do and what to avoid. For the newer community which has not yet reached the heights or the depths of the older, can judge from the picture here painted how best to avoid the misery and the degradation of the poor and the indifference of the rich, or what is only a degree better, the foolish, wellmeant, useless charity of the rich, so strongly shown in these pages. You in San Francisco, in California, have |