Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/158

132 every impartial student of history. To drink like a Templar had become a by-word throughout Europe. Nor were their vices confined to intemperance only; they had become cankered and corrupted through the vitiating influences of inactivity and sloth. The objects for which they had been originally called together in the bands of brotherhood, and which had been their invigorating influence during two centuries, had been abandoned by them voluntarily and for ever. The Templar in his saddle traversing the sandy plains of Palestine was an institution of the country, and, as such, grew and flourished, the European preceptories being only so many offshoots and nurseries from which the parent stem was nourished. Now that stately tree had been felled; Syria had been abandoned, and naught was left but its clinging roots, ramifying within the soil of every country in Europe, devoid of strength sufficient to enable it to spring up afresh, and yet drawing from the impoverished land, in the midst of which it had been planted, that sustenance which could ill be spared. It was the universal feeling that the day of the Order was over.

Philip and Clement were therefore only carrying out the popular verdict when they swept it away from the earth for ever. Even at the present time there are not wanting those who, without accepting the outrageous and absurd accusations enumerated above, still consider that there existed in the fraternity some unholy compact which held them together by its secret spell. There was in their mode of reception, and in many of the other formulæ of the Order, so much that was hidden from the vulgar gaze, and such strict secrecy practised, that it is not impossible, nay, it is not even unlikely, that this belief may have much truth in it. It is a curious fact that the Hospitallers, against whom no similar accusations were levelled, abjured all secrecy in their forms and ceremonies, and it is not easy to imagine the object of so much mystery if there were nothing which required concealment. Sir Walter Scott has, in his romance of “Ivanhoe,” placed in the mouth of Brian de Bois Guilbert, a knight of the Temple, during his interview with Rebecca the Jewess, a confession that within the secret conclave of his Order difference of creed was held in derision as a nursery tale, and that their wealth was dedicated to ends of