The Coming of the Friars | Page 3

rotted and died; and, what was still more dreadful, the
whole machinery of the Church polity had been formed and was
adapted to deal with entirely different conditions of society from those
which had now arisen.
The idea of the parish priest taking the oversight of his flock, and
ministering to each member as the shepherd of the people, is a grand

one, but it is an idea which can be realized, and then only
approximately, in the village community. In the towns of the Middle
Ages the parochial system, except as a civil institution, had broken
down.
The other idea, of men and women weary of the hard struggle with sin,
and fleeing from the wrath to come, joining together to give themselves
up to the higher life, out of the reach of temptation and safe from the
witcheries of Mammon,--that too was a grand idea, and not
unfrequently it had been carried out grandly. But the monk was nothing
and did nothing for the townsman; he fled away to his solitude; the
rapture of silent adoration was his joy and exceeding great reward; his
nights and days might be spent in praise and prayer, sometimes in study
and research, sometimes in battling with the powers of darkness and
ignorance, sometimes in throwing himself heart and soul into art which
it was easy to persuade himself he was doing only for the glory of God;
but all this must go on far away from the busy haunts of men, certainly
not within earshot of the multitude. Moreover the monk was, by birth,
education, and sympathy, one with the upper classes. What were the
rabble to him? [Footnote: The 20th Article of the Assize of Clarendon
is very significant: "Prohibet dominus rex ne monachi... recipiant
_aliquem de minuto populo in monachum,_ vel canonicum vel
fratrem," &c.--Stubbs, "Benedict Abbas," pref. p. cliv.] In return the
townsmen hated him cordially, as a supercilious aristocrat and Pharisee,
with the guile and greed of the Scribe and lawyer superadded.
Upon the townsmen--whatever it may have been among the
countrymen-- the ministers of religion exercised the smallest possible
_restraint._ Nay! it was only too evident that the bonds of ecclesiastical
discipline which had so often exercised a salutary check upon the
unruly had become seriously relaxed of late, both in town and country;
they had been put to too great a strain and had snapped. By the suicidal
methods of Excommunication and Interdict all ranks were schooled
into doing without the rites of religion, the baptism of their children, or
the blessing upon the marriage union. In the meantime it was notorious
that even in high places there were instances not a few of Christians
who had denied the faith and had given themselves up to strange beliefs,
of which the creed of the Moslem was not the worst. Men must have
received with a smile the doctrine that Marriage was a Sacrament when

everybody knew that, among the upper classes at least, the bonds of
matrimony were soluble almost at pleasure. [Footnote: Eleanor of
Aquitaine, consort of Henry II., had been divorced by Louis VII. of
France. Constance of Brittany, mother of Arthur--Shakespeare's
idealized Constance--left her husband, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, to
unite herself with Guy of Flanders. Conrad of Montferat divorced the
daughter of Isaac Angelus, Emperor of Constantinople, to marry
Isabella, daughter of Amalric, King of Jerusalem, the bride repudiating
her husband Henfrid of Thouars. Philip II. of France married the sister
of the King of Denmark one day and divorced her the next; then
married a German lady, left her, and returned to the repudiated Dane.
King John in 1189 divorced Hawisia, Countess of Gloucester, and took
Isabella of Angouleme to wife, but how little he cared to be faithful to
the one or the other the chronicles disdain to ask.] It seems hardly
worth while to notice that the observance of Sunday was almost
universally neglected, or that sermons had become so rare that when
Eustace, Abbot of Flai, preached in various places in England in 1200,
miracles were said to have ensued as the ordinary effects of his
eloquence. Earnestness in such an age seemed in itself miraculous.
Here and there men and women, hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, raised their sobbing prayer to heaven that the Lord
would shortly accomplish the number of his elect and hasten his
coming, and Abbot Joachim's dreams were talked of and his vague
mutterings made the sanguine hope for better days. Among those
mutterings had there not been a speech of the two heavenly witnesses
who were to do--ah! what were they not to do? And these heavenly
witnesses, who were they? When and where would they appear?
Eight years before King Richard was in Sicily a child had been born in
the thriving