artists of medievalism exhausted their efforts in depicting the writhings of the dead in the flames that encircled them. Innumerable visions detailed with a ghastly minuteness the various kinds of torture they underwent,' and the monk, who described what he professed to have seen, usually ended by the characteristic moral, that could men only realise those sufferings, they would shrink from no sacrifice to rescue their friends from such a state. A special place, it was said, was reserved in purgatory for those who had been slow in paying their tithes.2 St. Gregory tells a curious story of a man who was, in other respects, of admirable virtue; but who, de l'Avent, "d'estre au travers de vos chenets, sur vostre petit feu pour une centaine d'ans: ce n'est rien au respect d'un moment de purgatoire. Mais si vous vistes jamais tirer quelqu'un à quatre chevaux, quelqu'un brusler à petit feu, enrager de faim ou de soif, une heure de purgatoire est pire que tout cela."') - Meray, Les Libres Prêcheurs (Paris, 1860), pp. 130-131 (an extremely curious and suggestive book). I now take up the first contemporary book of popular Catholic devotion on this subject which is at hand, and read: Compared with the pains of purgatory, then, all those wounds and dark prisons, all those wild beasts, hooks of iron, red-hot plates, &c., which the holy martyrs suffered, are nothing.' They (souls in purgatory) are in a real, though miraculous manner, tortured by fire, which is of the same kind (says Bellarmine) as our element fire.' The Angelic Doctor affirms "that the fire which torments the damned is like the fire which purges the elect." What agony will not those holy souls suffer when tied and bound with the most tormenting chains of a living fire like to that of hell! and we, while able to make them free and happy, shall we stand like uninterested spectators?' St. Austin is of opinion that the pains of a soul in purgatory during the time required to open and shut one's eye is more severe than what St. Lawrence suffered on the gridiron;' and much more to the same effect. (Purgatory opened to the_Piety of the Faithful. Richardson, London.) 1 See Delepierre, Wright, and Alger. 2 This appears from the vision of Thureill. (Wright's Purgatory of St. Patrick, p. 42.) Brompton (Chronicon) tells of an English landlord who had refused to pay tithes. St. Augustine, having vainly reasoned with him, at last convinced him by a miracle. Before celebrating mass he ordered all excommunicated persons to leave the church, whereupon a corpse got out of a grave and walked away. The corpse, on being questioned, said it was the body of an ancient Briton who refused to pay tithes, and had in consequence been excommunicated and damned. in a contested election for the popedom, supported the wrong candidate, and without, as it would appear, in any degree refusing to obey the successful candidate when elected, continued secretly of opinion that the choice was an unwise one. He was accordingly placed for some time after death in boiling water.1 Whatever may be thought of its other aspects, it is impossible to avoid recognising in this teaching a masterly 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 an almost 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 Greg. Dial. iv. 40. 2 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 contempo rains, 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. 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 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.1 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 Gibbon says of the period during which the Merovingian dy. nasty 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 describing the extreme sensuality of the clergy of his time, 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 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," and another clerk to murder Brunehaut ;3 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. 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.7 The bishoprics were filled by men of notorious debauchery, or by grasping misers.8 The priests sometimes celebrated the sacred mysteries 'gorged with food and dull with wine.'9 They had already begun to carry arms, and Gregory tells of two bishops of the sixth 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; 4 of another queen endeavouring to strangle her daughter with her own hands;5 of an abbot, compelling a poor man to abandon 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; of a bishop's wife, who, besides other crimes, was accustomed to mutilate men and to torture women, by applying red-hot irons to the most sensitive parts of their bodies; of great numbers who were deprived of their ears 7 '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. Ibid. iv. 20. + Ibid. iii. 26. 5 Ibid. ix. 34. Ibid. 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 |