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scarcely be upon the side of the Holy See, but of irreligious and avaricious princes. This in fact is the account given with perfect truth by these great Catholic historians, and by others as great-but Protestant. Gosselin says that, the sovereigns against whom the Holy See struggled with in the Middle Ages, "were princes guilty of excesses the most notorious, and most baneful to the interests of religion and of nations, they were adulterous, simoniacal, purjured, abettors of heresy and schism, and oppressors of their subjects. This is the character (he adds) unanimously given by all historians of the emperor Henry IV., deposed by Gregory VII., of the emperor Frederick II., deposed by Innocent IV. And then he goes on to say, (a statement very material for our present argument), consider in particular the character of Henry IV., such as it has been drawn from the pages of contemporary historians by modern writers, least liable to the suspicion of partiality to the Holy See. He was even in his eighteenth year one of the most profligate characters. He had two or three concubines at the same time, and whenever he heard of any beautiful young woman, married or unmarried, if he could not seduce her he had her carried off by violence. These crimes involved him in many murders, to make away with the husbands of the women whom he coveted. He became cruel even to his most trusted associates. He gave bishoprics to those who gave him most money, and who knew best how to further his vices, and after having thus sold a bishopric, if another person offered him more money, or was more lavish in flattering his crimes, he ordered the former bishop to be deposed for simony, and appointed the second in his place, whence it happened that many cities had two bishops at the same time, and both unworthy."t

And again, "if we trace back to their source the troubles of the empire under Henry IV., we shall find that the original cause of these troubles was the unprecedented conduct and sacrilege of that prince, who persisted in the most scandalous disorders, and shamelessly trampled on the rights of the Church, making himself sovereign arbiter of ecclesiastical dignities within his dominions." Dr.

Döllinger gives a similar account, and speaking of Pope Alexander II., says, "the last important step taken by Alexander, the full consequences of which devolved upon his more daring successor, was his excommunication of those counsellors of Henry, who had sold ecclesiastical dignities. And elsewhere he says, "A most baneful influence was exercised by Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, who had won the favour of the young king. This vain, ambitious, and at the same time, avaricious and prodigal prelate, who wished to erect for himself a patriarchate in the north, and who had before disposed of bishoprics according to his caprice,-united himself with another favourite of the king, and carried on with him a shameless commerce in bishoprics and abbeys. The unworthy bishops who had intruded themselves into the different sees, carried their ideas further in the practice of that simony by which they had obtained their Churches. In 1090 Pope Alexander II. employed against them the bitter reproach that they gave ordination for money. Thus a multitude of rude, ignorant, conscienceless men, found their way into the ranks of the German clergy, working on their state as a trade, and the bishops engaged in worldly affairs and projects of aggrandizement, either deficient themselves in moral virtue, or too timid to engage in a laborious contest, suffered the evil to continue." Who appointed those bishops? Not the Holy See, but the Crown. It was on the very question of the influence of the Crown, on their appointment, that Gregory VII. waged his great contest with the emperor. Who was responsible for these abuses! The Holy See? No, but the Crown. The Holy See was continually protesting against them, and reproaching the profligate princes, and their parasites, the unworthy prelates whom they appointed. Yet such is the perversity of prejudice that Gregory is popularly called ambitious, and proud, for seeking to prevent these shameless prostitutions of ecclesiastical dignities, and the Popes are, by the same writers, accused of permitting them! How could the Pontiffs be responsible for abuses they had not the power to prevent? The history of succeeding ages,

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* Hist. Ch. v. iii. p. 152.

† p. 229.

says

Gosselin, "proves that the contest of the Popes with the Emperors, and the evils resulting from them were occasioned in the commencement of the conquest, and often schismatical pretensions of the emperor. And he cites the Count de Maistre, who states as to Frederick II., that Innocent IV. ended most justly by solemnly deposing the emperor, (at the council of Lyons) in 1245, for the crimes of perjury, sacrilege, heresy, and felony, juridically proved and admitted in the council." Gosselin goes on to say, "It was for the contests between Frederick II. and Popes Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. that arose in Italy the two parties, the Guelphs and Ghibellines, who caused so much trouble and disorder in the country during two centuries." This brings us near to the era of the Reformation, and when the historian shows religion had nothing to do with the contests, he falls upon the very truth, which it is our object in this article to establish.

Religion had nothing to do with the Reformation. The Reformation was not the result of religious, but of irreligious feelings. It was a continuance of a revolt against right, against justice, and against religion, which had raged for centuries, and had its origin in the corruptions, not of the Papacy, but of the princes who oppressed it,the corruptions of human nature, on which the Church had to wage war. In that war her weapons, which were spiritual, only had force so long as the faith of the people lasted; when the evil influences of princes had, by corrupting the episcopate and thus depraving the clergy, sapped that faith, the sword of the Church lost its power, and the abuses it could not suppress enslaved her, took an established form in the Reformation, which was, therefore, not a reaction from abuses, or a restoration of religion, but the installation of rebellion, and the final triumph of abuses against which the Holy See had long struggled. The Reformation only established as principles the iniquities of Henry IV.

Ranke expresses the proposition we have been establishing, "a participation in ecclesiastical revenues, and the right of promotion to Church benefices and offices, was that which the civil power now especially desired." The

* Gosselin, v. ii. p. 342.

‡ v. i. p. 31.

† Ib. 342.

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history of Germany, or of any other country, shows this, and shows that the object of heresy was to escape the moral control of the Church, by pandering to this propensity in the civil power. Confining ourselves on this occasion to Germany, we could prove our case from Protestant historians. Thus, glancing at the pages of a modern writer, we find him stating that, in 1273, Ottocar of Bohemia, a rebel against the Holy See, rejected with disdain all the proposals of accommodation made by the judicious and conciliating Pontiff, (Gregory X.) " but prevented the clergy of Bohemia from contributing the tenths of their revenues."* Passing on to a generation later, we find him speaking of the deplorable situation to which Bohemia was reduced by the dreadful oppressions of the Regent Otho of Brandenburgh, (who seems to have thus early afforded an illustration of the predatory propensities of his house). After transporting into his own territories all the treasures of the Church,"......" he placed the administration in the hands of the Bishop of Brandenburgh, who, if possible, surpassed the Regent in exactions, cruelty, and extortion." Under it there arose those dissensions between Bohemia and Austria, which had a great influence on the development of the schism of Huss and Jerome of Prague. Albert, says the Protestant historian, was of a despotic and encroaching spirit, and he does not seem to have observed that this may have had to do with. the contest in which he was engaged with Pope Boniface VIII. in 1300. We find the emperor in that contest early securing the neutrality of the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Elector of Saxony,-two of the German princes, who have always been found, from political reasons, rebellious against the Holy See, and who, with the instinct of rapacity, foresaw, what their successors found, their greatest opportunities of aggrandizement in the war to which the Reformation was certain to give rise.

The brutality of Philip the Fair relieved Albert from Boniface, but, by an exemplary retribution "his encroaching spirit," to use the Protestant historian's phrase, soon caused him the loss of Bohemia. Nor was it long ere the Holy See was fearfully avenged on the House of Austria

* Hist. House of Austria, v. i. p. 24.

† Ib. 51.

by the Swiss. The schism of Huss was successful chiefly by reason of the jealousy of a weak and wicked Bohemian Sovereign, towards the Catholic House of Hapsburg, which, in Albert V., found a worthy representative. In the words of the same Protestant historian we will state the story: "Under the mild dominion of Charles IV., Bohemia enjoyed a long period of peace and tranquillity, had greatly increased in riches, splendour, and territory, and the natives were rapidly advancing in learning and civilization. After the foundation of a university Prague became the abode of learning and science. All this was the result, let it be observed, of the Catholic religion, under the Supremacy of the Holy See. "But during the reign of Wenceslaus, Bohemia rapidly declined, and the nobles broke out into sedition. The inactive and careless monarch, addicted to wine and pleasure, was of a character ill calculated to repress these disorders." "Under these circumstances a dispute, which, under the reign of a more able monarch, would probably have been confined within the walls of a University, gave rise to those religious feuds which occasioned the Hussite war, and rendered Bohemia for many years a scene of rapine and carnage. "In consequence of the long schism in the Papacy," (originated by wicked princes, such as Philip the Fair,)" the arrogant exactions of the Pontiffs,' whose "exactions," as we have shown, were exactions of their rights," and the licentious conduct of the clergy,' entirely owing, as we have also shown, to the corruptions introduced by wicked princes, such as Wenceslaus, several learned men began to embrace and propagate opinions hostile to the principles and pretences of the Roman See."*

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We

"Among these, John Huss, a member of the University of Prague and confessor to Queen Sophia, the wife of Wenceslaus, strenuously asserted the principles of Wickliffe, the English reformer, and levelled his attack against the pretensions of the Pope, particularly against the sale of indulgences, issued by Boniface VIII." pause here to remark upon the great adroitness shewn by these heretics on the choice of their cheval de battaille. Huss herein imitated Wickliffe, and Luther, as we shall see, followed Huss. All, then, took care to commence *Coxe, v. i. p. 149.