Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/640

 624 CONCLUSION. doners to obedience ; the bishops were ordered to take the matter in hand and punish the evil-doers. They proved as inefficient as might have been expected. The abuse continued until it became the proximate cause of the Reformation, after which the Council of Trent abolished the profession of pardoner, avowedly because it was the occasion of great scandal among the faithful, and that all efforts to reform it had proved useless.* More important was the nonfeasance of the Inquisition with re- spect to simony. This was the corroding cancer of the Church throughout the whole of the Middle Ages — the source whence sprang almost all the evils with which she afflicted Christendom. From the highest to the lowest, from the pope to the humblest parish priest, the curse was universal. Those who had only the sac- raments to sell made a trade of them. Those whose loftier posi- tion gave them command of benefices and preferment, of dispensa- tions and of justice, had no shame in offering their wares in open market, and preferment thus obtained filled the Church with mer- cenary and rapacious men whose sole object was to swell their purses by extortion and to find enjoyment in ignoble vices. Ber- thold of Ratisbon, about the middle of the thirteenth century, preaches that simony is the worst of sins, worse than homicide, adultery, perjury, but it now so crazes men that they think through it to serve God.f Instinctively all eyes turned to the Holy See as the source and fountain of all these evils. A quaint popular satire, current in the thirteenth century, shows how keenly this was felt : " Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver Marks. In those days the pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to the throne of our majesty, first say to him : Friend, why comest thou ? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pas9 that a certain poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope and cried out, saying : Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry, I pray you to help my misery. Then were they wroth and said : Friend, thy poverty perish with thee ; get thee behind me Satan, for thou knowest not the odor of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last farthing. — C. Trident. Sess. xxi. De Reform, c. 9. f Bertholdi a Ratispona Sermones, Monachii, 1882, p. 93.
 * 2 Clement, v. ix.— Concil. Senonens. ann. 1485, Art. n. c. 8 (D'Achery, I. 758).