Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/663

 APPROACH OF THE REFORMATION. (J47 ing the common-folk that love and truth were the sole essentials of Christianity — "Loue is leche of lyf and nexte owre lorde solve, And also the graith gate that goth in-to heuene; For-thi I sey as I seide ere by the textis, Whan alle tresores ben ytryed treuthe is the beste. Now haue I tolde the what treuthe is, that no tresore is bettere, I may no lenger lenge the with, now loke the owre lorde I" (Vision, I. 202-7.) All such warnings, however, were disregarded, and in the hour of its unquestionable supremacy the sacerdotal system, which seemed impregnable to all assaults and to have no assailants, was on the eve of its overthrow. The Inquisition had been too successful. So complete had been the triumph of the Church that the old machinery was allowed to become out of gear and to rust for want of daily use. The Inquisition itself had ceased to inspire its old-time terror. For a century it had little to do save an occa- sional foray upon the peasants of the Alpine valleys, or an ex- tortion on the Jews of Palermo, or the fomenting of a witch- craft craze. It no longer had the stimulus of active work or the opportunity of impressing the minds of the people with the cer- tainty of its vengeance and the terrors of its holocausts. At the same time the Great Schism had inflicted a serious blow upon the veneration entertained for the Holy See by both clergy and laity, which found expression in the great councils of Con- stance and Basle. Dexterous management, it is true, averted the immediate dangers threatened by these parliaments of Christen- dom, and the Church remained in theory an autocracy instead of being converted into a constitutional monarchy, but nevertheless the old unquestioning confidence in the vicegerent of God was gone, while the aspirations of Christendom grew stronger under repression. The invention of printing came to stimulate the spread of enlightenment, and a reading public gradually formed itself, reached and influenced by other modes than the pulpit and the lecture-room, which had been the monopoly of the Church. No longer was culture virtually the sole appanage of ecclesiastics. The New Learning spread among a daily increasing class the thirst for knowledge and the critical spirit of inquiry, which in-