REFORMATION 469 REFORMATION most adequate to their claims, they un- doubtedly went far to make the idea a reality. But the energies of the human spirit were bound sooner or later to issue in developments with which mediae- val conceptions were fundamentally irreconcilable. But in the 13th century along every line of man's activity, there were protests, conscious and uncon- scious, against the system typified in the Roman Church. The most remarkable of these protests was the order of ideas associated with the name of Joachim of Flora in Calabria (died 1202). Under the name of the "Eternal Gospel" (used for the first time in 1254) these ideas ran a course which for a time seriously thieatened the exist- ence of the mediaeval Church. The new teaching struck at the very root of the Sapal system , for its essence was that the our had come when a new dispensation, that of the Holy Spirit, should supersede the provisional Gospel delivered by Christ. During the second half of the 13th and the first half of the 14th ceiitury the influence of these ideas is traceable in every country of Christen- dom, and it was only the unflinching action of the Church that postponed its disintegration for over three centuries. Numerous sects which either sprang from or were quickened by this move- ment speak clearly to the revolutionary fever that had seized on men's spirits and was impelling them to other ideals than the traditions of Rome. Mainly the offspring of the third order of St, Francis, these sects swarmed throughout every Christian country under the names of Beguins, Bekhards, Fratricelli, Flagel- lants, Lollards, Apostolic Brethren, etc., and everywhere spread discontent with the existing Church. Even John Knox (in answer to a letter by James Tyrie, a Scottish Jesuit) claims Joachim of Flora as an ally in the work which it was the labor of his own life to achieve — the change of the papacy, and the promotion of what he deemed a pure Gospel. Simultaneously with this manifestation of revolutionary feeling there were tend- encies in the sphere of pure thought in essential antagonism to the teaching of the Church. The labor of the thinkers of the Middle Ages was to reconcile faith, as inculcated by religious author- ity, with human reason as they found it embodied in the accessible writings of Aristotle. In the 13th century, the Arabic texts of Aristotle, and notably that of the great commentator Aver- rhoes, made their way into the Christian schools, and thenceforward a leaven of skepticism was a present element in all the universities of Europe. As a result of the teaching of Averrhoes, a name of the most sinister import to every true son of the Church, materialism and pan- theism became common creeds among thinkers, and the notion spread even among intelligent laymen that Christian- ity was not the absolute thing the Church had taught them to believe. In Dante's (died 1321) fierce exclamation that the knife is the one reply to him who denies the immortality of the soul we have the outburst of a passionate faith in presence of a wide-spread libertinism of thought. But the most serious menace against the integrity of the papal system lay in the political development of Europe during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages. As the countries of west- ern Europe became more and more in- dividualized, their peoples grew every year into a fuller consciousness of dis- tinct national interests and national ideals. While this was the tendency of the various nations, the Pope during these centuries gradually lost his position as the disinterested umpire of Europe, and sank into an Italian prince, with a temporal policy of his own which led him to seek allies among other poten- tates, as they fell in with his own special ends of the moment. But such alliances naturally gave offense to the princes ex- cluded from them, and led to a sus- picious discontent with the Roman see, which, as was afterward proved in the case of England, needed only the requi- site occasion to flame into outright re- bellion. The saving of Philip Augustus (died 1223)— "Happy Saladin, who has no Pope!" — expressed the feeling which every century grew stronger, that the Pope would become an impossible factor in European politics. To this feeling should be added the fact that, as the middle classes grew in intelligence and well-being they looked with en'y on the immense wealth of the clergy, and grumbled at the large sums that annu- ally went to the coffers of Rome. During the 14th and 15th centuries mediaevalism gave every sign of a har- monic phase of human development. By the so-called Babylonish Captivity, when the papal residence was fixed for 70 years at Avignon (1305-1376), and by the Great Schism (1378-1417), during which the spectacle was seen of first two and afterward three Popes claiming to be the vicars of God on earth, the papacy suffered a loss of prestige in the eyes of all Europe which it never after- ward fully recovered. It was the fur- ther misfortune of the Church during this eclipse of its ancient gloi*y that spiritual life seemed to have gone out of every rank of its clergy. Testimonies from every country prove beyond ques-
