1

the average human intellect." To the student this will be enough to show the true quality of these volumes whose bulk is worthy of a different learning. Even the general reader, who can pretend to no special knowledge of the case, will question the flippant tone with which Mr. Lea decides questions that have occupied men of learning for so many centuries. Where has he taken his degree in theology? Even has he read through the child's catechism? He professes to state different doctrines on indulgences, as taught in the Middle Ages and in our own day, not missing a sneer at the "modern commercial spirit" which he discerns in the latter. But he has understood neither the one nor the other; indeed, they are essentially the same. He is writing of a tribunal whose prime function was the judicial absolution of the innocent or the condemnation of the guilty; yet he has never learned the distinction, known to every Catholic, between absolution from sin, which concerns the conscience alone, and absolution from some charge brought before an exterior court. Of course he knows nothing of absolution from irregularities or censures. His mistakes, in consequence, are not less ridiculous than though he maintained that the United States Senate, in refusing to impeach the late President Andrew Johnson, thereby imparted to him absolution and forgiveness of sins. He knows no ecclesiastical immunity that is not impunity for clerical offenders, and he shamefully misunderstands the exemptions of the religious orders. He is no longer ridiculous, but blasphemous, when he discovers in the commonest Christian relations between man and his Maker what he calls "the current orthodox practices of purchasing, by prayer or money, or other good works, whatever blessings they desired, and expecting nothing without such payment."

5

3

By this time our readers have undoubtedly had enough of Mr. Lea's theology, whatever they may expect from his history. But we must try their patience a little longer. It is presumed Mr. Lea is fully aware that there are still many Roman Catholics in the world. Although his knowledge of their past controversies is quite unlike that of all other writers, yet he must also be aware that in their ranks have never been wanting men whose intelligence and sincerity common modesty should teach him to consider equal to his own. This is the least we can demand. He may object to our belief in an infallible Church, but by what right

1i., 209, 210, 211.

i., 41, 43. Alexander of Hales (A.D. 1200) has no other definition than our own. 3 See especially i., 343, 398, 437, iii., 275; but the whole work is built on like ignor

ance.

i.,

304; a lascivious instance, as usual, and a brutal piece of ignorance.

5 i., 105.

does he foist on us as infallible his own ignorant, flippant, contemptuous imputations of every evil of mind and will? The instances of the "sacerdotalism" which, according to him, "formed the distinguishing feature of mediæval religion," are exemplified every day round about him. What was true then must be true now. We venture to hope that there are few, even among the most violent enemies of the Church, who would say with Mr. Lea, "the believer did not deal directly with his Creator-scarce even with the Virgin or hosts of intercessory saints. The supernatural powers claimed for the priest interposed him as the mediator between God and man; his bestowal or withholding of the sacraments decided the fate of immortal souls; his performance of the mass diminished or shortened the pains of purgatory; his decision in the confessional determined the very nature of sin itself. The implements which he wielded-the Eucharist, the relics, the holy water, the chrism, the exorcism, the prayer-became in some sort fetiches which had a power of their own entirely irrespective of the moral or spiritual condition of him who employed them or of him for whom they were employed."'

We have now trespassed enough on the patience of our readers by these ridiculous and absurdly false blasphemies. We will only say once again that their falsehood might have been read in the pages of mediæval writers, cited by Mr. Lea when it suits his own purpose.' He is fond of repeating that the devotion of that age required no interior or "subjective act" on the part of the Christian. Innocent the Third-the great Pope for whom Mr. Lea professes respect while he does all that he can to blacken his reputation-comes back again and again in sermons, many of which were preached to the common people, on the idea of sorrow as necessary to the forgiveness of sins; so much so that the old-fashioned Protestant dogmatists, without Mr. Lea's extreme mastery over citations, might attempt to prove from them that the Pope of that age did not consider confession and priestly absolution necessary at all. We doubt not many have done so.

On more than one occasion Mr. Lea cites the sermons of Egbert of Schönau against the Pifres and other Catharan heretics of Germany in the twelfth century. This strenuous combatant of the faith was at first a cleric of the church of Bonn, and finally became a good and holy Benedictine monk in the monastery from which he takes his name. He is far more famous from certain writings which deal with "subjective" holiness than from his sermons.

1 i., 47; on page 100 "orthodox asceticism trenches closely on Manichæism," with St. Francis, Tauler, and the Sulpitian Olier as examples!

Once for all, Mr. Lea is totally unacquainted, to all appearances, with the commonest Catholic practices of the present day, and when he runs across them ages ago he accurately realizes Cardinal Newman's delicious Scripture-reader at "Benediction."

They are the contemplations and visions of his beloved sister Elizabeth, who was a nun in a neighboring convent, and whose influence seems to have drawn him to the monastic calling. Mr. Lea knows in the religious literature of the Middle Ages only that which suits his own theological purposes. Yet he can hardly have failed to come across her name, since he cites that of her friend and correspondent St. Hildegarde.

A short passage from a multitude of others which this simple sister-inerudita, says her brother-dictated through obedience, will show whether interior and "subjective" acts of religion were unknown in that age, and whether Christian souls had no acquaintance with God, but only with the priests. These contemplations often take the character of revelations belonging to the extraordinary office of seer or prophet, which St. Paul says is not to unbelievers, but to believers,' and has always been claimed at irregular intervals in the Church of God. They regularly follow the order of the feasts of the Church's year and show close knowledge and much pious meditation of the least particulars of the Gospel history. Of herself she speaks as follows: "I prayed our Lord with my whole heart saying: O Lord my God, behold I commend my soul and my body to Thy powerful hand, to Thee, holy and undivided Trinity; to Thee, O Lord, I commit all my troubles, for my spirit is greatly tried in those things which Thou hast wrought with me, because I know that I am altogether unworthy of so great grace. Thou knowest, my Lord, that never have I presumed to ask such things from Thee; but now, since of Thy free goodness Thou hast so magnified Thy mercy with me, I beseech Thee also to keep me so that by no sin I may fall from Thy grace." This, however deluded we might consider the praying soul to be, is surely not the prayer of one who knows no God except the priest, nor any "subjective" act of religion. And that these high sentiments were not limited to convent walls is plain from the fact that her brother and many others came to draw from her teachings what they might say to the people. It is recorded that great good came from their preaching. This was one of her chief lessons: "Love not the world and those things which are in the world, but do penance for evil deeds because the time is near." And again: “I warn you that you should love each other. You ought to think how God first loved you, not sparing His only begotten Son, but delivering Him up for you in sacrifice." Perhaps her still more practical reprobation of the vices of her day would have found entrance to Mr. Lea's pages, had she not declared that God assured her the "life of the Catharans was abominable before Him."

1 I. Cor., xiv., 22.

1 Acta SS. (Bolland.), 18 Jun.; also the recent critical study of Roth (Würzburg, 2d ed., 1886).

II.

In the preceding examination of Mr. Lea's impartiality as an historian, we have also applied our first three tests to his competency for dealing with the period in question. In matters of Church history we have shown-satisfactorily, we think-his lack of necessary training in theology and his strange ignorance of the piety of the age; and, not only is there not an entire absence of prejudice in him, but rather he is beset with the most narrow partisan ideas. He is a decided victim to what may properly be called the Chinese habit of mind-if we may trust the tales of travellers concerning Chinese public opinion of all that is foreign to their own immediate surroundings. Mr. Lea signs his preface from Philadelphia. With that curious rivalry which marks neighboring American cities, New Yorkers forever maintain that great city to be only “a large collection of small villages." Surely Mr. Lea's conception of the Roman Catholic Church in general, and of the Middle Ages in particular, dates as far back as the Quaker village of Penn.

Yet all that has gone before is not a tithe of what still remains. It would require a controversy covering the entire scope of universal theology to disentangle the propositions which Mr. Lea so rashly throws out at the beginning and end of his chapters. But all Church history should be written down for him if he would correct his historical positions. His method of dealing with history is as peculiar as his theology. Properly, he does not write history at all. Under the heads of the brief which he holds against the Church, he accumulates any number of examples as striking as may be, and often taken from widely different times and places. This is especially the case in his introductory chapter on the Church, though it is true that his plan nowhere admits of a strictly chronological order. The Inquisition was a judicial organization-a means for the carrying out of certain laws. Naturally, its practical work greatly varied in different times and places, and it is necessary to write separately of its workings in each region where it existed. But it is doubtful whether the Inquisition, thus limited, is a subject of history at all. The mere enforcement of one among many laws gives no adequate presentment of any people or any time.

To understand what the workings of the Inquisition really meant to the populations among whom it was established, would require a knowledge of their general state at the time it began, and of their whole social, economical, political and religious condition during the period it was flourishing among them. A history of the Inquisition otherwise conceived must result in much the same as would a history of the death penalty in the United

States, conceived in the following manner: First, give the statistics of murders, horse-stealings and other capital crimes of a pioneer community, without any reference to what the law-abiding citizens are doing in the meantime. When the imagination is sufficiently aroused by these details, unrelieved by all that accompanied and overshadowed them in the reality, narrate carefully, region by region, all the deaths inflicted in any way on account of crime, or suspicion, or pretence, even, of crime; not only the executions ordered in the regular course of justice, but the doings of the rude, improvised tribunals of lynch law at the South, of the early Californian vigilantes, of vengeful reprisals along the Rio Grande, of the Kentucky vendettas, adding in by way of condiment whatever riots or duels of illustrious detail may have happened during the century. Evidently the result would be sufficiently lurid, if brought out by some bonze or mandarin, to perpetuate what we have called the Chinese habit of mind concerning foreigners for many generations. It would not be unlike the book with which Mr. Lea has regaled the American world.

In fact, Mr. Lea's mind and method are both beset with two capital sins for the historian. The first we have already seen. It is that prolific cause of error called by the scholastic philosophers the hunger and thirst after assertions-appetitus enuntiabilis-with or without knowledge of the subject concerning which the assertions are made. The second is a preposterous love of anecdote, especially of the unutterable sort. This, as one of Mr. Lea's often quoted authorities might have told him, is destructive of all truth of history. With these two vices, it is evident that not " fifteen years,' nor fifteen centuries even, will collect the material necessary for historic truth. All the material collected will be misapprehended, ill-digested, unconsciously falsified by the first vice; and whatever is of real value as a guide through the facts of history will be lost sight of while the second appetite is cramming its maw with the mass of ill-verified, one-sided and fallacious anecdotes with which the contemporary materials of history are sure to abound.

We may take another example from our own day without, we think, any injustice to Mr. Lea's peculiar methods. The history of the death penalty, of which we have spoken, would certainly give a strange idea of American civilization and law. But how would this impression be deepened and rooted in the imagination, were it to be supported by a multitude of details gathered up in police gazettes, in stories of the bandits of the Mississippi or in popular tales of Western adventure, seasoned with the most striking incidents of the Mormon massacres and the doings of the guerillas of the late war! It is true that Mr. Lea, along with the garbage he thus

1 Potthast, on Matthew of Paris,