HABITS OF THE MENDICANTS.

41

weapons, offensive and defensive, were used,
besides ridicule. Thus the greater monasteries
would occasionally rouse themselves, and found
a small college or hall at the universities for
their own novices, that they might not resign to
their antagonists, without a struggle, the entire
possession of those ancient seats of learning.
So, again, when their members proceeded to de-
grees, they would often do it with studious cost
and popular display, turning the occasion into a
holiday spectacle, which might be set in balance
against the miracles, mysteries, and other thea-
trical attractions of the mendicants. These
latter, however, might have long laughed at
such artifices, had they continued true to one
another; but the arrow which pierced them to
the heart was feathered from their own wing.
Their principles, like those of modern dissenters,
propagated schism; they split amongst them-
selves; and the four orders tore the coat, which
should be without seam, into as many parts.
Mutual abuse, instead of cordial co-operation,
was their maxim. The poor ploughman who
sought instruction in his creed at the hands of
the Friars Minors, was only told, as he valued
his soul, to beware of the Carmelites; the Car-
melites promoted his edification by denouncing
the Dominicans; the Dominicans, in their turn,
by condemning the Augustins. "Be true to us,"
was the language of each; "give us your money,
and you shall be saved without a creed."2 In-

1 Warton's Hist. of English Poetry, i, 290.
2 Ibid. 296.

deed, the frailty of human nature soon found out the weak places of the mendicant system. Soon had the primitive zeal of its founders burnt itself out; and then its censer was no longer lighted with fire from the altar: a living was to be made. The vows of voluntary poverty only led to jesuitical expedients for evading it; a straining at gnats and swallowing of camels. The populace were to be alarmed, or caressed, or cajoled out of a subsistence. A death-bed was a friar's harvest; then were suggested the foundation of chantries, and the provision of masses and wax-lights. The confessional was his exchequer; there hints were dropped that the convent needed a new window, or that it owed" fortie pound for stones." Was the good man of the house refractory? The friar had the art of leading the women captive, and reaching the family purse by means of the wife.1 Was the piety of the public to be stimulated? Rival relics were set up, and impostures of all kinds multiplied without shame, to the impoverishment of the people, the disgrace of the church, and the scandal of Christianity.

It is revolting to bear record of these villanies, -to see sordid advantage taken of the most sacred feelings of mankind, and religion itself subjected to suspicion through the hypocrisy of its professors. But, however humiliating may be the confession, experience has sanctioned it as a truth, that an indigent church makes a corrupt clergy; that in order to secure a priesthood

1 Erasm. Colloq. Franciscani. Chaucer.

ADVANTAGE OF ENDOWMENTS.

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43

which shall wear well, a permanent provision must be set aside for their maintenance, such a provision as shall induce men duly qualified, to enter the church: for it is visionary to suppose that temporal motives will not have their weight in this temporal state of things; and it is unreasonable to expect that persons who are excluded by the rules of society from the usual inlets to wealth, the courts, the camp, or the exchange, and who cannot but know or feel, when they are honestly doing their duty, that they are as good commonwealth's men, to put it upon no higher ground, as any others, and therefore have as good a right to its liberal regards as any others, should be content to waive this right; such a provision as shall be enough to ensure recruits for the priesthood from all ranks, the highest as well as those below, and so to ensure their easy intercourse with all ranks; for the leaven should leaven the whole lump ;- such a provision as should encourage them to speak with all boldness, crouching to no man for their morsel of bread, nor tempted to lick the hand that feeds them ; such a provision as should prevent the meanness of their condition from prejudicing the force of their reasons, or give occasion to a high-minded hearer to accuse their plain speech of unmannerly presumption. Surely, until we can find such a church upon earth, in all her members, and in all the successive generations of her members, as can be true to the image of our Lord, it is a vision indeed to reject all adventitious support, such as her condition may require, and to say

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with the great puritan poet, that she should be content, as he was, " to ride upon an ass."1

It is needless to add, that the friars at length became as rottenness to the bones of the Roman catholic church; that, by the time of Erasmus and Luther, they were the butt at which every dissolute idler, on every tavern bench, discharged his shaft, hitting the establishment, and religion itself, through their sides; that they were exhibited in pot-house pictures as foxes preaching, with the neck of a stolen goose peeping out of the hood behind; as wolves giving absolution, with a sheep muffled up in their cloaks; as apes sitting by a sick man's bed, with a crucifix in one hand, and with the other in the sufferer's fob.2 Still the disaffection which this ridicule both indicated and promoted, was in some degree neutralised. There was something, after all, in the constitution of such an order as the friars, which gratified the feelings of the people, and which led to their continued toleration, if not to their aggrandisement. They were, for the most part, men of themselves; they were the democratic portion of the church. It no doubt flattered the

1 Milton, i. 80. Prose Works, Burnett's ed. Bishop Jewel argues the question more practically than Milton; and, allowing that there are many who would teach Christ for Christ's sake, looks onward to posterity, and asks of fathers, whether their own zeal will cause them to "keep their children at school until four and twenty years old, at their own charges, that in the end they may live in glorious poverty? that they may live poorly and naked, like the prophets and apostles?" and he foretells that the event would be a lapse into ignorance.-Serm. on Ps. lxix. 9.

2 Erasm. Colloq. Franciscani.

DEGENERACY OF THE FRIARS.

45

vanity of the peasant or mechanic, to see his own flesh and blood bearding the first-born of Egypt with whom he was brought into contact, or rather collision, in the members of the old and orthodox abbeys; nor would it be less grateful, perhaps, to an unlettered man to hear the clerk of his own name, and of his own breeding, starting and maintaining with vast pertinacity theological subtleties, which had little other merit, to be sure, than that of being in opposition to received opinions, and an assertion of the right of every man to think for himself, however ill he might be qualified for doing so to advantage.

Then, again, the pope was a tower of strength to the mendicant orders. They were the men of his right hand; and it may be observed, that when the Reformation came on, which was, amidst other and nobler interests concerned, a struggle in the first instance between the king and the pope for the mastery, the smaller monasteries (which were those of the friars) were the first confiscated by Henry; for he considered them the barracks from which his most inveterate enemies issued to the contest, prepared to maintain the cause of their sovereign lord the pope against any and every antagonist. Lastly, it is not to be forgotten, that the cloak of the friar was the refuge for a class of men who would now be supported by parish relief; and though in both cases the idle might often be enabled hereby to enter into the labours of others, yet often again assistance would be thus administered to the blameless sufferer, and the load of life on the whole be lightened to the poor.