Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/39

24 tax was levied; unbeneficed priests were rated as laymen. Benefices were bought and sold; still money enough was not collected. Then the King took down the great silver grating, costing six thousand seven hundred marks, which Louis XI. had placed at the tomb of St. Martin. Once this would have been loudly clamoured against as sacrilege, but now men were too miserable to clamour.

Or, if they murmured, if they said strange things and dreamed strange dreams; if starved, afraid, abandoned, they made for their refuge a faith, uncredited and unknown: their dim voices were not heard in the noisy clangour and splendour of sixteenth-century warfare.

For in the towns of Picardy and Normandy, the quiet artisans looked and noticed, then pondered many things in their hearts. The useless glory of the rich, the squalor of the poor, the corruption, simony, and vile immorality of the Church; death near; desertion present; the world bitter, vague, unreal. Over their looms the weavers bent and dreamed; the smiths and armourers hammered strange thoughts into their iron; the very clergy read new meanings in their missals. A great idea had stirred in the silent womb of the quiet, industrial, abandoned North of France; a thought continually born, dead, born again into the world: God is all, the rest is nothing.

"In the year 1520," says the Bourgeois of Paris, "there arose in the duchy of Saxony, in Germany, a heretic doctor of theology, named Martin Luther, who said many things against the power of the Pope and wrote several book, which were printed and published through all the cities of Germany and throughout the kingdom of France  and in 1521