IN every country of Europe, besides the local government represented by the king or emperor, there was a foreign government acknowledging the authority of the Pope, whose power was, for hundreds of years, above that of the king. The pretended object of the papal power was to secure the moral well-being of the people; the real object was to obtain large revenues, and give support to a vast body of officers,—Pope, cardinals, priests, monks, and friars, who lived in idleness on the fruits of the toil of the laborers. It was at one time actually found that the sum annually drawn from England by the court of Rome was three times that which went into the coffers of the king.
In order rightly to appreciate the influence of the Reformation upon the world, let us see what was the state of Europe just previous to that time, after being for one thousand years under the exclusive control of the Catholic church. A modern writer has drawn a vivid and truthful picture of that period.
The surface of the continent was for the most part covered with pathless forests; here and there it was dotted with monasteries and towns. In the lowlands and along the river courses were fens, sometimes hundreds of miles in extent, exhaling their pestiferous miasms, and spreading ague far and wide.
In all directions the roads were almost impassable for a large portion of the year. A common means of transportation was in clumsy carts drawn by oxen, going at the most but three or four miles an hour. Where boat conveyance along rivers could not be had, pack-horses and mules were resorted to for the transportation of merchandise. These restraints upon intercommunication tended powerfully to increase the general benighted condition. Journeys by individuals could not be undertaken without much risk, for there was scarcely a moor or a forest that had not its highwaymen.
The houses of the peasantry were built of stones put together without mortar; the roofs were of turf; a stiffened cowhide served for a door. Their food consisted of the coarsest vegetable products, sometimes even of the bark of trees. In some places they were unacquainted with bread.
In Paris and London the houses were of wood, daubed with clay and thatched with straw or reeds. They had no windows, and, until the invention of the saw-mill, very few had wooden floors. The luxury of a carpet was unknown; some straw, scattered in the room, supplied its place. There were no chimneys; the smoke of the ill-fed, cheerless fire escaped through a hole in the roof. The streets had no sewers; they were without pavements or lamps. No attempt was made at drainage, but the putrefying rubbish and the garbage was simply thrown out of the door.
Personal cleanliness was utterly unknown; even great officers of state swarmed with vermin. The citizen clothed himself with leather, a garment which, with its ever-accumulating filth, might last for many years. Dens of physical and moral pollution, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the cold, the ague-stricken patient with no help except shrine cure, was it strange that in a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled?
In the famine of 1030, human flesh was cooked and sold; and in that of 1258, fifteen thousand persons died of hunger in London alone. In the invasion of the plague, the deaths were so numerous that the living could hardly bury the dead.
The nobles were devoted to gluttony and sensual pleasure. Drinking day and night was the general pursuit. The common people were a prey to the more powerful. The baronial castles were dens of robbers. The deepest ignorance everywhere prevailed; religion was little more than a degrading superstition. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields.
We have now seen what the Roman Catholic power did for the people. Let us glance for a moment at what it did for itself. When we think of the stately monastery, an embodiment of luxury, with its closely mown lawns, its gardens and bowers, its fountains and many murmuring streams, we must connect it, not with the ague-stricken peasant dying without help in the fens, but with the abbot, his ambling palfrey, his hawk and hounds, his well-stocked cellar and larder.
When we survey, as we still may, the magnificent churches and cathedrals of those times, miracles of architectural skill, when in imagination we restore the transcendently imposing services of which they were once the scene, the dim religious light streaming in through the many-colored windows, the sounds of voices seeming scarcely inferior in their melody to those of Heaven, the priests in their sacred vestments, and, above all, the prostrate worshipers listening to litanies and prayers in a foreign and unknown language, we shall justly conclude that all this was not for the sake of the worshipers, but for the glory of the great, the overshadowing authority of Rome.