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The Ecclesiastical and political History of the Popes of Rome, during the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Leopold Ranke, Professor in the
University of Berlin: Translated from the German, by Sarah Austin. 3 vols. 8vo.
London: 1840.
It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book excellently
translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is known and esteemed wherever
German literature is studied, and has been found interesting even in a most
inaccurate and dishonest French version. It is, indeed, the work of a mind
fitted both for minute researches and for large speculations. It is written also
in an admirable spirit, equally remote from levity and bigotry, serious and
earnest, yet tolerant and impartial. It is, therefore, with the greatest
pleasure that we now see this book take its place among the English classics. Of
the translation we need only say that it is such as might be expected from the
skill, the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of the accomplished lady who, as
an interpreter between the mind of Germany and the mind of Britain, has already
deserved so well of both countries.
The subject of this book has always appeared to us singularly interesting. How
it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more, how it was that the
Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe, not only ceased to lose, but
actually regained nearly half of what she had lost, is certainly a most curious
and important question; and on this question Professor Ranke has thrown far more
light than any other person who has written on it.
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well
deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that
Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other
institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the
smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers
bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of
yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we
trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond
the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of
fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice
was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone,
and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique,
but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth
to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in
Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit
with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in
any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for
what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendancy extends over the vast
countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries
which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that
which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer
than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all
other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we
see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching.
She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical
establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is
not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the
Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when
Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped
in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some
traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand
on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more and more
enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favorable to Protestantism, and
unfavorable to Catholicism. We wish that we could think so. But we see great
reason to doubt whether this be a well-founded expectation. We see that during
the last two hundred and fifty years the human mind has been in the highest
degree active, that it has made great advances in every branch of natural
philosophy, that it has produced innumerable inventions tending to promote the
convenience of life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been
very greatly improved, that government, police, and law have been improved,
though not to so great an extent as the physical sciences. Yet we see that,
during these two hundred and fifty years, Protestantism has made no conquests
worth speaking of. Nay, we believe that, as far as there has been a change, that
change has, on the whole, been in favor of the Church of Rome. We cannot,
therefore, feel confident that the progress of knowledge will necessarily be
fatal to a system which has, to say the least, stood its ground in spite of the
immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of Queen
Elizabeth.
Indeed the argument which we are considering, seems to us to be founded on an
entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to which the law of
the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once a proposition has been
demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested. Every fresh story is as solid a
basis for a new superstructure as the original foundation was. Here, therefore,
there is a constant addition to the stock of truth. In the inductive sciences
again, the law is progress. Every day furnishes new facts, and thus brings
theory nearer and nearer to perfection. There is no chance that, either in the
purely demonstrative, or in the purely experimental sciences, the world will
ever go back or even remain stationary. Nobody ever heard of a reaction against
Taylor's theorem, or of a reaction against Harvey's doctrine of the circulation
of the blood.
But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural
religion,--revelation being for the present altogether left out of the
question,--it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is more
favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just the same
evidences of design in the structure of the universe which the early Greeks had.
We say just the same; for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists
have really added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflecting mind
finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower and shell. The reasoning
by which Socrates, in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist
Aristodemus, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates
makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of
Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question, the
question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated
European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than
a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in which we surpass
the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light on the state of the soul after
the animal life is extinct. In truth all the philosophers, ancient and modern,
who have attempted, without the help of revelation to prove the immortality of
man, from Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably.
Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian are the
same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from barbarism is
quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius of Locke or Clarke is
quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to imagine that subtle speculations
touching the Divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human
actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of
intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar
manner the delight of intelligent children and of half civilized men. The number
of boys is not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to
be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig. "Il en savait ce
qu'on en a su dans tous les ages; c'est-a-dire, fort peu de chose." The book of
Job shows that, long before letters and arts were known to Ionia, these vexing
questions were debated with no common skill and eloquence, under the tents of
the Idumean Emirs; nor has human reason, in the course of three thousand years,
discovered any satisfactory solution of the riddles which perplexed Eliphaz and
Zophar.
Natural theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of our
origin and of our destiny which we derive from revelation is indeed of very
different clearness, and of very different importance. But neither is revealed
religion of the nature of a progressive science. All Divine truth is, according
to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches, recorded in certain books. It is
equally open to all who, in any age, can read those books; nor can all the
discoveries of all the philosophers in the world add a single verse to any of
those books. It is plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot be a progress
analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology, and
navigation. A Christian of the fifth Century with a Bible is neither better nor
worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible, candor
and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed equal. It matters not at all
that the compass, printing, gunpowder, steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand
other discoveries and inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are
familiar to the nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the
smallest bearing on the question whether man is justified by faith alone, or
whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice. It seems to us,
therefore, that we have no security for the future against the prevalence of any
theological error that ever has prevailed in time past among Christian men. We
are confident that the world will never go back to the solar system of Ptolemy;
nor is our confidence in the least shaken by the circumstance, that even so
great a man as Bacon rejected the theory of Galileo with scorn; for Bacon had
not all the means of arriving at a sound conclusion which are within our reach,
and which secure people who would not have been worthy to mend his pens from
falling into his mistakes. But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was ready to
die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel some doubt
whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph over all opposition.
More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the information on the subject
that we have, or that, while the world lasts, any human being will have. The
text, "This is my body," was in his New Testament as it is in ours. The
absurdity of the literal interpretation was as great and as obvious in the
sixteenth century as it is now. No progress that science has made, or will make,
can add to what seems to us the overwhelming force of the argument against the
real presence. We are, therefore, unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More
believed respecting transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by
men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas More is
one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine of
transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which stands that test
will stand any test. The prophecies of Brothers and the miracles of Prince
Hohenlohe sink to trifles in the comparison.
One reservation, indeed, must be made. The books and traditions of a sect may
contain, mingled with propositions strictly theological, other propositions,
purporting to rest on the same authority, which relate to physics. If new
discoveries should throw discredit on the physical propositions, the theological
propositions, unless they can be separated from the physical propositions, will
share in that discredit. In this way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may
indirectly serve the cause of religious truth. The Hindu mythology, for
example, is bound up with a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin,
therefore, who learns geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindu
mythology. If Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the Papal
decision that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent
Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the Church
exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute of that
supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate functions, the
promise of her Founder authorized her to expect.
This reservation affects not at all the truth of our proposition, that divinity,
properly so called, is not a progressive science. A very common knowledge of
history, a very little observation of life, will suffice to prove that no
learning, no sagacity, affords a security against the greatest errors on
subjects relating to the invisible world. Bayle and Chillingworth, two of the
most skeptical of mankind, turned Catholics from sincere conviction. Johnson,
incredulous on all other points, was a ready believer in miracles and
apparitions. He would not believe in Ossian; but he was willing to believe in
the second sight. He would not believe in the earthquake of Lisbon; but he was
willing to believe in the Cock Lane ghost.
For these reasons we have ceased to wonder at any vagaries of superstition. We
have seen men, not of mean intellect or neglected education, but qualified by
their talents and acquirements to attain eminence either in active or
speculative pursuits, well-read scholars, expert logicians, keen observers of
life and manners, prophesying, interpreting, talking unknown tongues, working
miraculous cures, coming down with messages from God to the House of Commons. We
have seen an old woman, with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune-teller,
and with the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess, and surrounded
by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and
knowledge, immeasurably her superiors; and all this in the nineteenth century;
and all this in London. Yet why not? For of the dealings of God with man no more
has been revealed to the nineteenth century than to the first, or to London than
to the wildest parish in the Hebrides. It is true that, in those things which
concern this life and this world, man constantly becomes wiser and wiser. But it
is no less true that, as respects a higher power and a future state, man, in the
language of Goethe's scoffing friend,
"bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag, Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag."
The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations. During the
last seven centuries the public mind of Europe has made constant progress in
every department of secular knowledge. But in religion we can trace no constant
progress. The ecclesiastical history of that long period is a history of
movement to and fro. Four times, since the authority of the Church of Rome was
established in Western Christendom, has the human intellect risen up against her
yoke. Twice that Church remained completely victorious. Twice she came forth
from the conflict bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the principle of
life still strong within her. When we reflect on the tremendous assaults which
she has survived, we find it difficult to conceive in what way she is to perish.
The first of these insurrections broke out in the region where the beautiful
language of Oc was spoken. That country, singularly favored by nature, was, in
the twelfth century, the most flourishing and civilized portion of Western
Europe. It was in no wise a part of France. It had a distinct political
existence, a distinct national character, distinct usages, and a distinct
speech. The soil was fruitful and well cultivated; and amidst the cornfields and
vineyards arose many rich cities each of which was a little republic, and many
stately castles: each of which contained a miniature of an imperial court. It
was there that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a
humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of art and
literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects which, since the
fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces of the Roman empire, were
still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan, the rich and energetic English, were
abandoned to artisans and shepherds. No clerk had ever condescended to use such
barbarous jargon for the teaching of science, for the recording of great events,
or for the painting of life and manners. But the language of Provence was
already the language of the learned and polite, and was employed by numerous
writers, studious of all the arts of composition and versification. A literature
rich in ballads, in war-songs, in satire, and, above all, in amatory poetry
amused the leisure of the knights and ladies whose fortified mansions adorned
the banks of the Rhone and Garonne. With civilization had come freedom of
thought. Use had taken away the horror with which misbelievers were elsewhere
regarded. No Norman or Breton ever saw a Mussulman, except to give and receive
blows on some Syrian field of battle. But the people of the rich countries which
lay under the Pyrenees lived in habits of courteous and profitable intercourse
with the Moorish kingdoms of Spain, and gave a hospitable welcome to skilful
leeches and mathematicians who, in the schools of Cordova and Granada, had
become versed in all the learning of the Arabians. The Greek, still preserving,
in the midst of political degradation, the ready wit and the inquiring spirit of
his fathers, still able to read the most perfect of human compositions, still
speaking the most powerful and flexible of human languages, brought to the marts
of Narbonne and Toulouse, together with the drugs and silks of remote climates,
bold and subtle theories long unknown to the ignorant and credulous West. The
Paulician theology, a theology in which, as it should seem, many of the
doctrines of the modern Calvinists were mingled with some doctrines derived from
the ancient Manichees, spread rapidly through Provence and Languedoc. The clergy
of the Catholic Church were regarded with loathing and contempt. "Viler than a
priest," "I would as soon be a priest," became proverbial expressions. The
Papacy had lost all authority with all classes, from the great feudal princes
down to the cultivators of the soil.
The danger to the hierarchy was indeed formidable. Only one transalpine nation
had emerged from barbarism; and that nation had thrown off all respect for Rome.
Only one of the vernacular languages of Europe had yet been extensively employed
for literary purposes; and that language was a machine in the hands of heretics.
The geographical position of the sectaries made the danger peculiarly
formidable. They occupied a central region communicating directly with France,
with Italy, and with Spain. The provinces which were still untainted were
separated from each other by this infected district. Under these circumstances,
it seemed probable that a single generation would suffice to spread the reformed
doctrine to Lisbon, to London, and to Naples. But this was not to be. Rome cried
for help to the warriors of northern France. She appealed at once to their
superstition and to their cupidity. To the devout believer she promised pardons
as ample as those with which she had rewarded the deliverers of the Holy
Sepulcher. To the rapacious and profligate she offered the plunder of fertile
plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the ingenious and polished inhabitants of
the Languedocian provinces were far better qualified to enrich and embellish
their country than to defend it. Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in the
"gay science," elevated above many vulgar superstitions, they wanted that iron
courage, and that skill in martial exercises, which distinguished the chivalry
of the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to face enemies who, in
every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been victorious against tenfold
odds. A war, distinguished even among wars of religion by merciless atrocity,
destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and with that heresy the prosperity the
civilization, the literature, the national existence, of what was once the most
opulent and enlightened part of the great European family. Rome, in the
meantime, warned by that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of
her crusaders had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her
whole system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis, the
Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual police was
everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote mountain, was
unvisited by the begging friar. The simple Catholic, who was content to be no
wiser than his fathers, found, wherever he turned, a friendly voice to encourage
him. The path of the heretic was beset by innumerable spies; and the Church,
lately in danger of utter subversion, now appeared to be impregnably fortified
by the love, the reverence, and the terror of mankind.
A century and a half passed away; and then came the second great rising up of
the human intellect against the spiritual domination of Rome. During the two
generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the power of the Papacy had
been at the height. Frederic the Second, the ablest and most accomplished of the
long line of German Caesars, had in vain exhausted all the resources of military
and political skill in the attempt to defend the rights of the civil power
against the encroachments of the Church. The vengeance of the priesthood had
pursued his house to the third generation. Manfred had perished on the field of
battle, Conradin on the scaffold. Then a turn took place. The secular authority,
long unduly depressed, regained the ascendant with startling rapidity. The
change is doubtless to be ascribed chiefly to the general disgust excited by the
way in which the Church had abused its power and its success. But something must
be attributed to the character and situation of individuals. The man who bore
the chief part in effecting this revolution was Philip the Fourth of France,
surnamed the Beautiful, a despot by position, a despot by temperament, stern,
implacable, and unscrupulous, equally prepared for violence and for chicanery,
and surrounded by a devoted band of men of the sword and of men of law. The
fiercest and most high minded of the Roman Pontiffs, while bestowing kingdoms
and citing great princes to his judgment-seat, was seized in his palace by armed
men, and so foully outraged that he died mad with rage and terror. "Thus," sang
the great Florentine poet, "was Christ, in the person of his vicar, a second
time seized by ruffians, a second time mocked, a second time drenched with the
vinegar and the gall." The seat of the Papal court was carried beyond the Alps,
and the Bishops of Rome became dependants of France. Then came the great schism
of the West. Two Popes, each with a doubtful title, made all Europe ring with
their mutual invectives and anathemas. Rome cried out against the corruptions of
Avignon; and Avignon, with equal justice, recriminated on Rome. The plain
Christian people, brought up in the belief that it was a sacred duty to be in
communion with the head of the Church, were unable to discover, amidst
conflicting testimonies and conflicting arguments, to which of the two worthless
priests who were cursing and reviling each other, the headship of the Church
rightfully belonged. It was nearly at this juncture that the voice of John
Wickliffe began to make itself heard. The public mind of England was soon
stirred to its inmost depths: and the influence of the new doctrines was soon
felt, even in the distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long
been a predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often seen
in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the seat of the
Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely assailed at once in
England and in the German Empire, was in a situation scarcely less perilous than
at the crisis which preceded the Albigensian crusade.
But this danger also passed by. The civil power gave its strenuous support to
the Church; and the Church made some show of reforming itself. The Council of
Constance put an end to the schism. The whole Catholic world was again united
under a single chief; and rules were laid down which seemed to make it
improbable that the power of that chief would be grossly abused. The most
distinguished teachers of the new doctrine were slaughtered. The English
Government put down the Lollards with merciless rigor; and in the next
generation, scarcely one trace of the second great revolt against the Papacy
could be found, except among the rude population of the mountains of Bohemia.
Another century went by; and then began the third and the most memorable
struggle for spiritual freedom. The times were changed. The great remains of
Athenian and Roman genius were studied by thousands. The Church had no longer a
monopoly of learning. The powers of the modern languages had at length been
developed. The invention of printing had given new facilities to the intercourse
of mind with mind. With such auspices commenced the great Reformation.
We will attempt to lay before our readers, in a short compass, what appears to
us to be the real history of the contest which began with the preaching of
Luther against the Indulgences, and which may, in one sense, be said, to have
been terminated, a hundred and thirty years later, by the treaty of Westphalia.
In the northern parts of Europe the victory of Protestantism was rapid and
decisive. The dominion of the Papacy was felt by the nations of Teutonic blood
as the dominion of Italians, of foreigners, of men who were aliens in language,
manners, and intellectual constitution. The large jurisdiction exercised by the
spiritual tribunals of Rome seemed to be a degrading badge of servitude. The
sums which, under a thousand pretexts, were exacted by a distant court, were
regarded both as a humiliating and as a ruinous tribute. The character of that
court excited the scorn and disgust of a grave, earnest, sincere, and devout
people. The new theology spread with a rapidity never known before. All ranks,
all varieties of character, joined the ranks of the innovators. Sovereigns
impatient to appropriate to themselves the prerogatives of the Pope, nobles
desirous to share the plunder of abbeys, suitors exasperated by the extortions
of the Roman Camera, patriots impatient of a foreign rule, good men scandalized
by the corruptions of the Church, bad men desirous of the license inseparable
from great moral revolutions, wise men eager in the pursuit of truth, weak men
allured by the glitter of novelty, all were found on one side. Alone among the
northern nations the Irish adhered to the ancient faith: and the cause of this
seems to have been that the national feeling which, in happier countries, was
directed against Rome, was in Ireland directed against England. Within fifty
years from the day on which Luther publicly renounced communion with the Papacy,
and burned the bull of Leo before the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism
attained its highest ascendancy, an ascendancy which it soon lost, and which it
has never regained. Hundreds, who could well remember Brother Martin a devout
Catholic, lived to see the revolution of which he was the chief author,
victorious in half the states of Europe. In England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden,
Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the Palatinate, in several cantons
of Switzerland, in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformation had completely
triumphed; and in all the other countries on this side of the Alps and the
Pyrenees, it seemed on the point of triumphing.
But while this mighty work was proceeding in the north of Europe, a revolution
of a very different kind had taken place in the south. The temper of Italy and
Spain was widely different from that of Germany and England. As the national
feeling of the Teutonic nations impelled them to throw off the Italian
supremacy, so the national feeling of the Italians impelled them to resist any
change which might deprive their country of the honors and advantages which she
enjoyed as the seat of the government of the Universal Church. It was in Italy
that the tributes were spent of which foreign nations so bitterly complained. It
was to adorn Italy that the traffic in Indulgences had been carried to that
scandalous excess which had roused the indignation of Luther. There was among
the Italians both much piety and much impiety; but, with very few exceptions,
neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn of Protestantism. The religious
Italians desired a reform of morals and discipline, but not a reform of
doctrine, and least of all a schism. The irreligious Italians simply disbelieved
Christianity, without hating it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen;
and, so looking at it, they liked it better in the established form than in any
other. It was to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and Pliny.
Neither the spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit of Machiavelli had anything in
common with the spirit of the religious or political Protestants of the North.
Spain again was, with respect to the Catholic Church, in a situation very
different from that of the Teutonic nations. Italy was, in truth, a part of the
empire of Charles the Fifth; and the Court of Rome was, on many important
occasions, his tool. He had not, therefore, like the distant princes of the
North, a strong selfish motive for attacking the Papacy. In fact, the very
measures which provoked the Sovereign of England to renounce all connection with
Rome were dictated by the Sovereign of Spain. The feeling of the Spanish people
concurred with the interest of the Spanish Government. The attachment of the
Castilian to the faith of his ancestors was peculiarly strong and ardent. With
that faith were inseparably bound up the institutions, the independence, and the
glory of his country. Between the day when the last Gothic king was vanquished
on the banks of the Xeres, and the day when Ferdinand and Isabella entered
Granada in triumph, near eight hundred years had elapsed; and during those years
the Spanish nation had been engaged in a desperate struggle against
misbelievers. The Crusades had been merely an episode in the history of other
nations. The existence of Spain had been one long Crusade. After fighting
Mussulmans in the Old World, she began to fight heathens in the New. It was
under the authority of a Papal bull that her children steered into unknown seas.
It was under the standard of the cross that they marched fearlessly into the
heart of great kingdoms. It was with the cry of "St. James for Spain," that they
charged armies which outnumbered them a hundredfold. And men said that the Saint
had heard the call, and had himself, in arms, on a grey war-horse, led the onset
before which the worshippers of false gods had given way. After the battle,
every excess of rapacity or cruelty was sufficiently vindicated by the plea that
the sufferers were unbaptized. Avarice stimulated zeal. Zeal consecrated
avarice. Proselytes and gold mines were sought with equal ardor. In the very
year in which the Saxons, maddened by the exactions of Rome, broke loose from
her yoke, the Spaniards, under the authority of Rome, made themselves masters of
the empire and of the treasures of Montezuma. Thus Catholicism which, in the
public mind of Northern Europe, was associated with spoliation and oppression,
was in the public mind of Spain associated with liberty, victory, dominion,
wealth, and glory.
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