Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/136

 coming to or from Compostella, seeking to win pardon for themselves or others by their wandering devotion.

Sometimes the desire to go on pilgrimage became almost an epidemic. Bands of children thronged the roads, bareheaded and clad in nothing but their shirts; women left their families and men deserted their work. In vain preachers of morals like Geiler von Kaisersberg denounced the practice and said that on pilgrimages more sinners were created than sins pardoned. »-The terror swayed men and they fled to shrines where they believed they could find forgiveness; the pilgrimage songs make a small literature; and pilgrim guide-books, like the Mirabilia Romae and Die Walfart und Strosse zu Sont Jacob, appeared in many languages.

This revival of religion had its special effect on men destined to a religious life. -The secular clergy seem to have been the least affected. Chronicles, whether of towns or of families, bear witness to the degradation of morals among the parish priests and the superior clergy. The Benedictines and their dependent Orders of monks do not appear to have shared largely in the religious movement. It was different however with the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the mendicant Augustinians. These begging friars reformed themselves strenuously, in the medieval sense of reformation. They went back to their old lives of mortifying the flesh, of devoting themselves to works of practical benevolence and of self-denying activity. As a consequence, they, and not the parish clergy, had become the trusted religious leaders of the people. Their chapels were thronged by the common folk, and the better disposed nobles and burghers took them for their confessors and spiritual directors. It was in vain that the Roman Curia proclaimed, by its Legates in Germany, the old doctrine that the benefits of religious acts do not depend upon the personal character of the administrators; that it published regulations binding all parishioners to confess at least once a year to their parish priests. The people, high and low, felt that Bishops who rode to the Diet accompanied by their concubines disguised in men's clothing, and parish priests who were tavern-keepers or the most frequent customers at the village public-house, were not true spiritual guides. They turned for the consolations of religion to the poor-living, hard-working Franciscans and Augustinian Eremites who listened to their confessions and spoke comfortingly to their souls, who taught the children and said masses without taking fees. The last decades of the fifteenth century were the time of a revival in the spiritual power and devotion of the mendicant Orders.

One result of the underlying fear which inspired this religious revival was the way in which the personality of Christ was constantly regarded in the common Christian thought of the time as it is revealed to us in autobiographies, in sermons, and in pictorial representations. The Saviour was concealed behind the Judge, who was to come to punish the wicked. Luther tells us that when he was a boy in the parish