possible, every member of it from committing
enormous crimes, or even from giving occasion
to such gross scandal as might disgust
the minds of the people.
In the state in which things were, through
the greater part of Europe, during the tenth,
eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and
for some time both before and after that period,
the constitution of the church of Rome
may be considered as the must formidable
combination that ever was formed against the
authority and security of civil government, as
well as against the liberty, reason, and happiness
of mankind, which can flourish only
where civil government is able to protect
them. In that constitution, the grossest delusions
of superstition were supported in such
a manner by the private interests of so great
a number of people, as put them out of all
danger from any assault of human reason;
because, though human reason might, perhaps,
have been able to unveil, even to the
eyes of the common people, some of the delusions
of superstition, it could never have dissolved
the ties of private interest. Had this
constitution been attacked by no other enemies
but the feeble efforts of human reason,
it must have endured for ever. But that immense
and well-built fabric, which all the
wisdom and virtue of man could never have
shaken, much less have overturned, was, by
the natural course of things, first weakened,
and afterwards in part destroyed; and is
now likely, in the course of a few centuries
more, perhaps, to crumble into ruins altogether.
The gradual improvements of arts, manufactures,
and commerce, the same causes which
destroyed the power of the grant barons, destroyed,
in the same manner, through the
greater part of Europe, the whole temporal
power of the clergy. In the produce of arts,
manufactures, and commerce, the clergy, like
the great barons, found something for which
they could exchange their rude produce, and
thereby discovered the means of spending their
whole revenues upon their own persons, without
giving any considerable share of them to
other people. Their charity became gradually
less extensive, their hospitality less liberal,
or less profuse. Their retainers became
consequently less numerous, and, by degrees,
dwindled away altogether. The clergy, too,
like the great barons, wished to get a better
rent from their landed estates, in order to spend
it, in the same manner, upon the gratification
of their own private vanity and folly. But
this increase of rent could be got only by
granting leases to their tenants, who thereby
became, in a great measure, independent of
them. The ties of interest, which bound the
inferior ranks of people to the clergy, were in
this manner gradually broken and dissolved.
They were even broken and dissolved sooner
than those which bound the same ranks of
people to the great barons; because the benefices
of the church being, the greater part of
them, much smaller than the estates of the
great barons, the possessor of each benefice
was much sooner able to spend the whole of
its revenue upon his own person. During
the greater part of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the power of the great barons was,
through the greater part of Europe, in full
vigour. But the temporal power of the clergy,
the absolute command which they had once
had over the great body of the people was
very much decayed. The power of the church
was, by that time, very nearly reduced, through
the greater part of Europe, to what arose
from their spiritual authority; and even that
spiritual authority was much weakened, when
it ceased to be supported by the charity and
hospitality of the clergy. The inferior ranks
of people no longer looked upon that order as
they had done before; as the comforters of
their distress, and the relievers of their indigence.
On the contrary, they were provoked
and disgusted by the vanity, luxury, and expense
of the richer clergy, who appeared to
spend upon their own pleasures what had always
before been regarded as the patrimony
of the poor.
In this situation of things, the sovereigns
in the different states of Europe endeavoured
to recover the influence which they had once
had in the disposal of the great benefices of
the church; by procuring to the deans and
chapters of each diocese the restoration of
their ancient right of electing the bishop; and
to the monks of each abbacy that of electing the
abbot. The reestablishing this ancient order
was the object of several statutes enacted in
England during the course of the fourteenth
century, particularly of what is called the statute
of provisors; and of the pragmatic sanction,
established in France in the fifteenth century.
In order to render the election valid, it
was necessary that the sovereign should both
consent to it before hand, and afterwards approve
of the person elected; and though the
election was still supposed to be free, he had,
however all the indirect means which his situation
necessarily afforded him, of influencing the
clergy in his own dominions. Other regulations,
of a similar tendency, were established
in other parts of Europe. But the power of
the pope, in the collation of the great benefices
of the church, seems, before the reformation,
to have been nowhere so effectually
and so universally restrained as in France and
England. The concordat afterwards, in the
sixteenth century, gave to the kings of France
the absolute right of presenting to all the
great, or what are called the consistorial, benefices
of the Gallican church.
Since the establishment of the pragmatic
sanction and of the concordat, the clergy of
France have, in general shewn less respect to
the decrees of the papal court, than the