Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/88

70 essence of her religion, and from which her rebellious children in the sixteenth century were by no means able entirely to liberate themselves. The service of God was merged in ceremonial on the one hand, in superstition on the other. Even those men who had the wish to uphold the principles which the nobler minds of the ninth cen tury had professed, had not the strength to carry them out consistently. Ratherius, bishop of Verona, a good example of the cultivated churchman of his day and a sturdy enemy of the worldliness and profligacy of his contemporaries, repeats the declamations of saint Agobard against magic. He denounces the credulous spirit of those who assume its efficacy, and yet he himself recommends for some ailment a remedy of an entirely superstitious nature. He has a just contempt for the fashion in which fasts, penances, and pilgrimages were undertaken, and a very slight opinion of their value at all unless controlled by a high spiritual motive: yet his protests against materialistic views of religion are compatible with so hearty an adhesion to the doctrine of transubstantiation that the treatise of Paschasius Radbert, which first formulated it, was often ascribed to him.

Religion was fast subsiding into mere superstition or into its kindred opposite, materialism. The claim to mysterious powers was the means by which the clergy were enabled to maintain their hold upon the people. Insensibly they were enveloped in the same shadow, and we have actually evidence of a body of Christian priests in the diocese of Vicenza who worshipped a God with eyes and ears and hands; they were branded as a distinct order of heretics, anthropomorphites: such was the result of the popular and authorised image-worship. Nor was it only in the ceremonial of the church or in the medley of Christian and heathen manners and thoughts that the collapse of religion made itself felt. Ambitious churchmen found their only opening, now that the ambition of Christian learning was forgotten, in the service of the secular state, where they were the more indispensable,