ashamed of the worthless pontiffs whom they had raised to the chair of St. Peter. Both colleges united in one at Leghorn, denounced the popes, and summoned the council of Pisa. The council deposed both popes as schismatics, perjurers, and heretics, and Alexander V., having been elected by the cardinals, pledged himself to call another council to reform the Church. To Alexander V. succeeded the atrocious John XXIII., who fled from the council of Constance for fear of the accusations preparing against him by the Emperor Sigismund. Of the three popes, John XXIII. was imprisoned in Heidelberg castle, from whence he was afterwards released, and restored to his cardinalate; Gregory XII. the Roman pontiff abdicated, and died of vexation; and Benedict XIII., of Avignon, died at Paniscola, a fortress on the mouth of the Ebro, which he called Noah's Ark, as containing in it the true Church and vicar of Christ, while the rest of the world lay beneath a deluge of schism and apostacy. The council of Constance marks an important era in European history, in a striking and apparently minute circumstance. It was the first ecclesiastical council in which the votes were given, not by individuals, but by nations. This is a symptom of a very altered state of feeling from what prevailed in the preceding centuries. The feeling of the unity of the Church was then so strong, that all national distinctions and barriers of geography or language were lost sight of, overworn and merged in the magnificent

idea of the papacy which then prevailed, and was not inadequately realized in Europe. However at variance countries might be, yet, in ecclesiastical feelings, the Church

"Helped to render indistinct the lines."

But, in the fifteenth century, the feeling of political individuality was beginning to arise, and betraying a consciousness of its existence in an altered way of dealing with the Church, the lines, which the Church had smoothed down and kept out of sight, rose clearer and more hard every day, forming barriers against her quite as much as against the contiguous states. The papacy from this moment ceased to be the standing-point of European progression, or the mould of European civilization. The alteration of the manner of voting in the council of Constance is undoubtedly symbolical of this.

Neither was this question of the nations by any means regarded as unimportant at the time. The French maintained Western Christendom to be comprised of four ecclesiastical nations, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain, and that all the other states fell under some one of these denominations. The English asserted and obtained the dignity of a fifth and co-ordinate nation. With the cardinals were associated six deputies from each of

• Gibbon's note, chap. lxx.

these nations. Otho Colonna was their choice, and, under the name of Martin V., he reunited the Church, and retranslated the Holy See to the banks of the Tiber. Thus terminated the second epoch of the papal greatness of Avignon.

The consequences of this great schism were deplorable, and are still at work untired. These consequences were two-fold, one the effect of the other, and both the effects of the schism. The Church was cast into such a state of helpless disease and scandalous infirmity, that the temporal powers were, so to speak, constrained to come forward and act a prominent part in her restoration; and this too at the very moment when the feeling of political individuality was waxing so strong in the European nations. What would come of this was easily to be seen. Henceforward the attitude which the Catholic kingdoms assumed towards Rome, the language they held, the lengths of obedience to which they were willing to go, were materially altered. They did not deny the blessings which the Church, and the papacy in particular, had conferred upon them, "by the short calms of the truces (well named) of God; by the glimpses of a brighter heaven beyond, in the lives of Christian Saints; by the softening and ennobling influence of Christian art; by the voice of Christian reformers lifted up against ordeals, duels, and slavery; by the gradual erection of a new Christian literature out of the corrupt dregs of Byzantium and Rome, and the jarring chaos of

barbarian invaders "," which literature was in its fresh prime and strong beginnings when Martin V. brought back unity, and the chair of St. Peter to the Vatican. But now Europe weaned herself of the papacy, and took her own course, daily assuming more and more the shape and consistency which she is now once again slowly and precariously relinquishing; substituting a centralization round opinion, and a faith in the necessity of parties, for the old monarchical centralization out of which she was pushed by the events of 1789 and the subsequent twenty-six years.

The second consequence of the great schism was equally unfortunate for the Roman Church; and it was a child of the former. Spiritual influence no longer bore the high value it had hitherto done; the current set towards temporal influence. The popes, fretting at their altered position, imitated with an infelicitous worldly wisdom what they saw around them. The sagacity of the papacy has rarely failed in any object which it has pursued with honest or dishonest constancy. It succeeded now. It made itself a more important temporal state; and by changing its own political standing, it won back some part of its estimation. It had its reward, such as it was. The three pontificates of Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., and Julius II., wore into the very essence and constitution of the papacy a base and secular spirit, from which it has never yet worked 9 Stanley's Prize Essay, p. 45.

itself clear, and which we may see applied in our own times to the spiritual policy of Rome. They who sat in the seat of Hildebrand strove to imitate his work, yet not like him with clean hands and a high mind; and the papacy came out from those pontificates, like a man preternaturally aged, as he emerges from the shadows of sorrow or the clouds of mental conflict.

It has been a very general supposition, that the ambitious and quarrelsome pontificate of Boniface VIII., was the cause of the transfer of the papal chair to Avignon. But this, like most of the charges against Boniface, is not justified by the real state of the case'; neither would I concur with other

1

It would be improper in a work like this to enter into a long detail of facts and examination of passages: but I have studied the pontificate of Boniface VIII. as a crisis in the Church; and the authorities adduced by Gibbon and Sismondi, the latter especially, for Gibbon is very brief, lead me to a different view of that stern pontiff's character, both as a man and a ruler. Hallam, though following the above writers, in his opinion, in many points, does not entirely agree with them, as, indeed, Gibbon and Sismondi do not agree with each other. For the sketch in the text, see the three writers already named, and Crowe's France, i. 85 ; Dunham's Middle Ages, ii. 76; and Cary's Dante. There was an article in the Dublin Review, No. xxii., on Boniface VIII., but it merely concerned the literary question, more particularly examining the authorities of Sismondi; neither does it touch upon the pope's quarrel with Philippe le Bel. It was able, but some of the links in its chain of evidence required additional fortifying. Considerable use has been made in the text of the Processus of Boniface, laid up in the Vatican, and quoted by the reviewer.