most eloquent or popular preacher, would never have compensated for the loss of Mass to the poorest congregation of mediaval England. It is just this view of the matter that Father Bridgett's account of the interdict supplies. Together with the increasing restlessness of the religious orders under its gloomy restrictions, we feel the secret disaffection that was spreading amongst the people, when, contrary to all the expectations of the Pope, John-envying Mahommedan nations who knew no restrictions of morality, and had no Pope to vindicate God's rights and the rights of God's people-so far from yielding, hardened himself more and more against God and man; gave himself up to every kind of brutual indulgence; is said to have even sought help from the Emperor of Morrocco with an offer of renouncing Christianity; pillaged churches and confiscated the goods of the churchmen who resisted him; and carried his impious defiance of interdict and excommunication alike to such lengths that when he chanced to see a very fat stag brought in, he cried out with a laugh, He had a good life, and yet he never heard Mass.' No wonder that the terrible verdict of the King's contemporaries-Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John'--has passed into the sober judgment of history.*

Dr. Lingard, with certainly less than his usual perspicacity, esteems the interdict 'a singular form of punishment by which the person of the King was spared, and his subjects, the unoffending parties, were made to suffer.' Father Bridgett shows a wider grasp of the subject. He has appreciated and exhibits the fact that, though far less guilty than the King, England as a nation was at the time far from innocent:

'A mediæval monarch, however despotic, could not be considered apart from his people, as if they bore none of the responsibility of his acts. When it suited their own interests the barons could be bold enough both to counsel and to resist their sovereigns. The feudal system put no standing army in the pay and obedience of the King. It left him dependent on the fidelity of his great vassals. If kings were bold to do evil, it was because they were pushed on by evil counsellors among the clergy and the laity, were surrounded by docile agents, and counted on the co-operation or connivance of their people. What were the great excommunications and interdicts of the Middle Ages but lessons in constitutional government given to kings and people alike, teaching them that they were responsible to and for each other? If the innocent suffered with the guilty, that is the very condition of human society.'

* J. R. Green," History of the English People."

And then more pointedly justifying the Pope for an act that has been variously misrepresented and misinterpreted as part of a crafty or ambitious policy, difficult of vindication on the grounds of either equity or justice, he sums up this section of his subject:

The crimes of the country attained their climax in John, one of the vilest of our kings; and there was no injustice in requiring the whole nation to unite in expiating his guilt.

'Besides this, if we would form a right conception of the great interdict of 1208, we must remember that an interdict is not an ordinary punishment of ordinary crimes. It is a solemn protest against outrages to the liberty and majesty of the Church. She is established by God as the Queen of the nations as well as their mother. She has a right to hide her countenance when she is insulted. She had a right to demand reparation. Pope Innocent exercised no tyranny. He withdrew from the English nation nothing to which it had a right. He confiscated none of its riches, he abridged none of its liberties. It was as a supernatural society, as a baptized people, as a part of the Church of which he under Christ was supreme ruler, that he humbled the nation, or called upon it to humble itself, by the withdrawal of God's presence. He judged it better that the Churches should be closed even for years than that they should be opened for the pompous but sacrilegious ministrations of the enslaved and corrupted priesthood which John would have created. It was better, as he wrote to the Cistercian Abbots, that the Holy Spirit should, with ineffable groans, plead in the hearts of desolate men, than that Masses should be offered in the presence of impenitent sinners.

The obstinancy of the King, and perhaps the sins of the nation, made the interdict far longer than the Pope had anticipated. He had hoped that a short vigil would be followed by a glad festival. It was not his fault if the vigil was of unexampled length. It was a war, and partook of a war's chances. Innocent chose it, it would seem, as a milder measure than excommunication.

'Having once entered upon it he had no choice but to fight it out to victory, even though the victory could not be gained without a far more terrible and prolonged contest than he had expected, and though he was obliged to add at least those other spiritual penalties from which he had shrunk at first.

"The interdict lasted six years and three months; for though the King had been absolved from his excommunication, and High Mass and Te Deum were sung in the Cathedral of Winchester on the 20th July, 1213, yet reparation was not made by him, nor the interdict removed from the country, until July 2nd, 1214,

"Et factum est gaudium magnum in universa Ecclesia Anglicana.""*

√.

Clearly the interdict derived its unconquerable operative power from the faith of the people, not from the faith of the Sovereign, and it was a faith that, as we observed just now, had never been breathed upon much less shaken by the wind of heresy. William of Newborough, writing at the end of the twelfth century, rejoiced that England had ever remained free from every heretical pestilence though many other parts of the world were afflicted by various forms of its disturbing presence. "The Britons indeed,"

he wrote, "produced Pelagius, and were corrupted by his doctrine. But since Britain has been called England no contagion of heresy has ever infected it." And for nearly two centuries after William of Newborough wrote, England remained free. And even when the metaphysical subtleties of Wycliffe and the frenzy of the Lollards against the Holy Eucharist first made its dreadful disintegrating power felt, heresy had no wide-spread influence, it did not exert a national influence. Great as the mischief it did was, it could not alienate the masses from their old faith.

'Ten years after the death of Wycliffe the fanaticism of the Lollards emboldened them to present a petition to Parliament, which, though then rejected, is remarkable as being the first mention in that assembly of a heresy which was, in the course of centuries, to be adopted by it as a test of the allegiance to the Crown and Protestant Church. "The false Sacrament of Bread," says this petition, "leads all men, with a few exceptions, into idolatry; for they think that the Body of Christ, which is never out of heaven, is, by virtue of the priest's words, essentially enclosed in a little bread which they show to the people."t

"There was much corruption of morals, much scepticism in England, at that time among the higher classes, much misery and ignorance in the lower orders, yet the nation was not yet prepared to reject the faith of centuries and cut itself off from Christendom. There was a sturdy common-sense view which prevailed over the metaphysical subtleties of Wycliffe and which is thus exposed by Netter: "Are then all infidels who are not Wycliffites? All-Greeks, Illyrians, Spaniards, French, Indians, Hungarians, Danes, Germans, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, English, Irish, Scotch-all the innumerable priests and bishops throughout the world all blind, all infidels? And has the whole Church throughout the world now at length to learn from this

* Thomas Wykes, p. 58, Rolls Series. † Wilkins, iii. 221.

John Wicked-life* what Christ meant in the Gospel when he gave His Body in the Eucharist? And did Christ thus leave His spouse, the Church of the whole world, deprived of the possession of the true faith, in order to cleave to this Wycliffian harlot? Surely the portentous ambition of this new sect is alone deserving of eternal punishment. You wretched, deluded men, does it really seem to you a trifle to believe in Christ as you profess to do, and to disbelieve in His Church? To believe. in Christ the Head and to sever from Him His mystic body? To begin the creed with, I believe in God, and to terminate your counter-creed with, I deny the Catholic Church?" "†

Granted that the Lollard negations prepared the way for the wider and ever-widening negatives called by the general name of Protestantism,' that they did not take real hold of the masses is abundantly proved in many a chapter of the History of the Holy Eucharist, embracing the generations that came and went before the Reformation was forced on an unwilling people.' And to show that they did not affect the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue, we have only to recall the names of men and women like Robert Grosseteste, the upholder of our national liberties; William of Wykeham, the illustrious Bishop of Winchester; Elphinstone of Aberdeen, churchman, lawyer, and statesman; Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of Henry VII. and founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; John Fisher, the great patron of learning, Bishop and Cardinal; Thomas More, Chancellor of England and martyr.

6

John's character and acts proved that what is called the Reformation that is to say, the perpetual and self-imposed interdict of the Catholic religion in England-might have come some centuries earlier than it did had it only depended on the will of kings. Such men as Rufus and John were quite as willing as Henry VIII. to sacrifice the souls of their people to the gratification of their own avarice, lust, and hate. Remedies such as that made use of by Innocent were possible in the thirteenth century, but would have been found useless in the sixteenth. They depend for their efficacy on the strength of faith, not merely in one country, but throughout Christendom. When a great number have come to be of the opinion of John, that temporal prosperity is more important than religion, and boast how well a country can get on without Mass-like John's fat buck-then it would be an idle threat to deprive them of what they already disregard.'

"A Joanne, cognomento impiæ vitæ." If my translation is correct, this pun on Wycliffe's name must have been well known in England, since the Latin would convey no meaning to any but an Englishman. Thomas Netter (Waldensis), " Doctrinale Fidei," iii. 35.

How in the sixteenth century so great a number came to be of the opinion of John as to bring about the tremendous revolution that made the national faith of centuries a penal offence Father Bridgett does not tell us. Passages such as the one last cited foreshadow and anticipate the momentous epoch in the History of the Holy Eucharist when the doctrine of the Real Presence was reviled as a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit, when the offering of Mass by a Catholic priest was punished with a cruel death, and the repudiation of it was required as the price of social preferment or of civil liberty; but that is all. The volumes we have been rapidly glancing through bring us down to the Reformation, and there they stop. Happily the reason is not far to seek, nor disconcerting when found. In a notice prefixed to the first volume the author tells us that he had collected materials to complete his History to the present day; but when he found that a third volume would be required to treat adequately the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, he thought it better to make the early and mediæval periods complete in themselves, and he has done so. And moreover he promises the third volume. It cannot well be more important than the two volumes before us. But if we have not shown that it will be of very great importance as the completion of a work that has hitherto been wanting to the popular apprehension of our national history, we have gravely failed in our duty.

ART. VIII.-ON SOME REASONS FOR NOT DESPAIRING OF A NATIONAL RETURN TO THE FAITH.

[This Paper was read by the writer before the Academia of the Catholic Religion.]

A

MOST able and thoughtful Paper on the conversion of England, which was read by an Academician at the last session in June last, elicited from several members, including the present writer, the expression of an opinion more favourable to our wishes than that to which he inclined. The accomplished author of that Paper appeared to believe that, whereas there were many signs of a growing tendency on the part of individuals, alarmed at the swift and wide-spread movement of this age and country towards disbelief in all and every form of supernatural religion, to fall back on the Catholic Church as the alone adequately tutelary system of historic and doctrinal Christianity, yet anything like