skill in the adaptation of means to ends, which almost rises to artistic beauty. A system which deputed its minister to go to the unhappy widow in the first dark hour of her anguish and her desolation, to tell her that he who was dearer to her than all the world besides was now burning in a fire, and that he could only be relieved by a gift of money to the priests, was assuredly of its own kind not without an extraordinary merit.

If we attempt to realise the moral condition of the society of Western Europe in the period that elapsed between the downfall of the Roman empire and Charlemagne, during which the religious transformations I have noticed chiefly arose, we shall be met by some formidable difficulties. In the first place, our materials are very scanty. From the year A.D. 642, when the meagre chronicle of Fredigarius closes, to the biography of Charlemagne by Eginhard, a century later, there is almost a complete blank in trustworthy history, and we are reduced to a few scanty and very doubtful notices in the chronicles of monasteries, the lives of saints, and the decrees of Councils. All secular literature had almost disappeared, and the thought of posterity seems to have vanished from the world. Of the first half of the seventh century, however, and of the two centuries that preceded it, we have much information from Gregory of Tours, and Fredigarius, whose tedious and repulsive pages illustrate with considerable clearness the conflict of races and the dislocation of governments that for centuries existed. In Italy, the traditions and habits of the old empire had in some degree reasserted their sway, but in Gaul the

1 As Sismondi says, 'Pendant quatre-vingts ans, tout au moins, il n'y eut pas un Franc qui songeât à transmettre à la postérité la mémoire des événements contemporains, et pendant le même espace de temps il n'y eut pas un personnage puissant qui ne bâtit des temples pour la postérité la plus reculée.'-Hist. des Français, tome ii. p. 46.

Church subsisted in the midst of barbarians, whose native vigour had never been emasculated by civilisation and refined by knowledge. The picture which Gregory of Tours gives us is that of a society which was almost absolutely anarchical. The mind is fatigued by the monotonous account of acts of violence and of fraud springing from no fixed policy, tending to no end, leaving no lasting impress upon the world. The two queens Frédégonde and Brunehaut rise conspicuous above other figures for their fierce and undaunted ambition, for the fascination they exercised over the minds of multitudes, and for the number and atrocity of their crimes. All classes seem to have been almost equally tainted with vice. We read of a bishop named Cautinus, who had to be carried, when intoxicated, by four men from the table; 2 who, upon the refusal of one of his priests to surrender some private property, deliberately ordered that priest to be buried alive, and who, when the victim, escaping by a happy chance from the sepulchre in which

1 Gibbon says of the period during which the Merovingian dynasty reigned, that it would be difficult to find anywhere more vice or less virtue.' Hallam reproduces this observation, and adds, 'The facts of these times are of little other importance than as they impress on the mind a thorough notion of the extreme wickedness of almost every person concerned in them, and consequently of the state to which society was reduced.'-Hist. of the Middle Ages, ch. i. Dean Milman is equally unfavourable and emphatic in his judgment. It is difficult to conceive a more dark and odious state of society than that of France under her Merovingian kings, the descendants of Clovis, as described by Gregory of Tours. In the conflict of barbarism with Roman Christianity, barbarism has introduced into Christianity all its ferocity with none of its generosity and magnanimity; its energy shows itself in atrocity of cruelty, and even of sensuality. Christianity has given to barbarism hardly more than its superstition and its hatred of heretics and unbelievers. Throughout, assassinations, parricides, and fratricides intermingle with adulteries and rapes.'—History of Latin Christianity, vol. i. p. 365.

2

Greg. Tur. iv. 12. Gregory mentions (v. 41) another bishop who used to become so intoxicated as to be unable to stand, and St. Boniface, after

he had been immured, revealed the crime, received no greater punishment than a censure. The worst sovereigns found flatterers or agents in ecclesiastics. Frédégonde deputed two clerks to murder Childebert,2 and another clerk to murder Brunehaut; she caused a bishop of Rouen to be assassinated at the altar-a bishop and an archdeacon being her accomplices; and she found in another bishop, named Ægidius, one of her most devoted instruments and friends. The pope, St. Gregory the Great, was an ardent flatterer of Brunehaut.6 Gundebald having murdered his three brothers, was consoled by St. Avitus, the Bishop of Vienne, who, without intimating the slightest disapprobation of the act, assured him that by removing his rivals he had been a providential agent in preserving the happiness of his people. The bishoprics were filled by men of nctorious debauchery, or by grasping misers.8 The priests sometimes celebrated the sacred mysteries 'gorged with food and dull with wine.' They had already begun to carry arms, and

9

describing the extreme sensuality of the clergy of his time, adds, that there are some bishops qui licet dicant se fornicarios vel adulteros non esse, sed sunt ebriosi et injuriosi,' &c.—Ep. xlix.

1 Greg. Tur. iv. 12.

2 Id. viii. 29. She gave them knives with hollow grooves, filled with poison, in the blades.

3 Greg. Tur. vii. 20.

5 Id. v. 19.

4 Id. viii. 31-41.

See his very curious correspondence with her.-Ep. vi. 5, 50, 59 ; ix. 11, 117; xi. 62-63.

7 Avitus, Ep. v. He adds, 'Minuebat regni felicitas numerum regalium personarum.'

See the emphatic testimony of St. Boniface in the eighth century. 'Modo autem maxima ex parte per civitates episcopales sedes traditæ sunt laicis cupidis ad possidendum, vel adulteratis clericis, scortatoribus et publicanis sæculariter ad perfruendum.'-Epist. xlix. 'ad Zachariam.' The whole epistle contains an appalling picture of the clerical vices of the times.

• More than one Council made decrees about this. See the Vie de St. Léger, by Dom Pitra, pp. 172–177.

Gregory tells of two bishops of the fifth century who had killed many enemies with their own hands.1 There was scarcely a reign that was not marked by some atrocious domestic tragedy. There were few sovereigns who were not guilty of at least one deliberate murder. Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonising forms of death, more common. We read, among other atrocities, of a bishop being driven to a distant place of exile upon a bed of thorns;2 of a king burning together his rebellious son, his daughter-in-law, and their daughters ;3 of a queen condemning a daughter she had had by a former marriage to be drowned, lest her beauty should excite the passions of her husband ;1 of another queen endeavouring to strangle her daughter with her own hands; of an abbot, with the assistance of one of his clerks, driving a poor man by force out of his house, that he might commit adultery with his wife, and being murdered, together with his partner, in the act;6 of a prince who made it an habitual amusement to torture his slaves with fire, and who buried two of them alive, because they had married without his permission;7 of a bishop's wife, who besides other crimes, was accustomed to mutilate men and to torture women, by applying redhot irons to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; of

1 Greg. Tur. iv. 43. St. Boniface, at a much later period (A.D. 742), talks of bishops 'Qui pugnant in exercitu armati et effundunt propria manu sanguinem hominum.'-Ep. xlix.

2 Greg. Tur. iv. 26.

4 Id. iii. 26.

3 Id. iv. 20.

5 Id. ix. 34.

6 Greg. Tur. viii. 19. Gregory says this story should warn clergymen not to meddle with the wives of other people, but 'content themselves with those that they may possess without crime.' The abbot had previously tried to seduce the husband within the precincts of the monastery, that he might murder him.

7 Greg. Tur. v. 3.

8 Id. viii. 39. She was guilty of many other crimes, which the historian says 'it is better to pass in silence.' The bishop himself had been

great numbers who were deprived of their ears and noses, tortured through several days, and at last burnt alive or broken slowly on the wheel. Brunehaut, at the close of her long and in some respects great, though guilty career, fell into the hands of Clotaire, and the old queen, having been subjected for three days to various kinds of torture, was led out on a camel for the derision of the army, and at last bound to the tail of a furious horse, and dashed to pieces in its course.1

And yet this age was, in a certain sense, eminently religious. All literature had become sacred. Heresy of every kind was rapidly expiring. The priests and monks had acquired enormous power, and their wealth was inordinately increasing. Several sovereigns voluntarily abandoned their thrones for the monastic life. The seventh century, which, together with the eighth, forms the darkest period of the dark ages, is famous in the hagiology, as having produced more saints than any other century, except that of the martyrs."

guilty of outrageous and violent tyranny. The marriage of ecclesiastics appears at this time to have been common in Gaul, though the best men commonly deserted their wives when they were ordained. Another bishop's wife (iv. 36) was notorious for her tyrannies.

1 Fredigarius, xlii. The historian describes Clotaire as a perfect paragon of Christian graces.

2 'Au sixième siècle on compte 214 établissements religieux des Pyrénées à la Loire et des bouches du Rhône aux Vosges.'-Ozanam, Études germaniques, tome ii. p. 93. In the two following centuries the ecclesiastical wealth was enormously increased.

3 Mathew of Westminster (A.D. 757) speaks of no less than eight Saxon kings having done this.

...

↑ Le septième siècle est celui peut-être qui a donné le plus de saints au calendrier.'-Sismondi, Hist. de France, tome ii. p. 50. Le plus beau titre du septième siècle à une réhabilitation c'est le nombre considérable de saints qu'il a produits. . . . Aucun siècle n'a été ainsi glorifié sauf l'âge des martyrs dont Dieu s'est réservé de compter le nombre. Chaque année fournit sa moisson, chaque jour a sa gerbe. . . . Si donc il plaît à Dieu et au Christ de répandre à pleines mains sur un siècle les splendeurs des saints, qu importe que l'histoire et la gloire humaine en tiennent peu compte ?'