Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/368

 o-^o GERMANY. earn a livelihood by beggary was in itself an approach to sanc- tity, as we have seen in the case of Conrad of Marburg and St. Elizabeth. About 1230 a certain Willem Cornehs, of Antwerp, Ive up a prebend and devoted himself to teaching the pre-em- fnent virtue of poverty. He carried the received doctnne on the subject, however, to lengths too extravagant, for he held tha po^ erty consumed all sin, as fire ate up rust, and that a ha^lo, if poor, was better than a just and continent rich man ; and though he ^as honorably buried in the church of the Virgm Mary, yet when, four years later, these opinions came to be known. Bishop Nicholas of Cambrai caused his bones to be exhumed and ""Txtremes such as this show us the prevailing tendencies of the age, and it is necessary to appreciate these tendencies >" ordej- to understand how Europe came to tolerate the hordes of holy beg- gars, either wandering or living in communities, who covered the face of the land, and drained the people of their substance. Of the two classes the wanderers were the most ^angerous, but m both there was the germ of future trouble, although the se tl d Beguines approached very nearly the Tertiaries of the Mend- cants. Indeed, they frequently placed th^-elves under the^^^^^^ rection of Dominicans or Franciscans, and eventually t^ose ^vho survived the vicissitudes of persecution mostly merged into the Tertiaries of either one Order or the other. The rapid growth of these communities m the thirteenth cen- tury is easily explicable. Not only did they respond to the spir- S demamls of the age, but they enjoyed the most e.a^ed pa^ tronage. In Flanders the counts seem never wearied ot assistmg them Gregory IX. and his successors took their institution under the special protection of the Holy See. St. Louis pro^-ided iem with houses fn Paris and other cities, and left them abundan legacies in his will, in which he was imitated by his sons. Under such encouragement their numbers increased enormously In Faiis there were multitudes. About 1240 they were estimated at tno thousand in Cologne and its vicinity, and there were as "^any m tl e single Beguinage of NiveUe, in Brabant. Phdippe de Montmiiail, Mirai 0pp. Diplom. II. 948 (Ed. Foppens).-D'Argeutr6, CoU. Judic. I. i. 138.