eemed only
to subsist by devouring each other, and, in the crush and tumult of
their feuds, stood so thick on the ground, as hardly to have elbow
room, the whole island presented one untiring round of treacheries,
massacres, conflagrations and plunderings, wholesale and retail, such
as is without example elsewhere in history, with no other hope, so
long as left to itself, of anything but an aggravation of the evil--if
that were possible. That Adrian, with such a state of things before
his eyes, should readily give his sanction to a project which, however
liable to be clogged by human imperfection, could not at any rate make
things worse, but haply might make them better, was surely a
proceeding quite consistent with the character of a wise and zealous
pope; of a pope too, who lived and thought when the crusades were at
their height, and who may, therefore, be very well supposed to have
viewed the condition of Ireland,--once the island of saints, but now
the scene of worse than pagan abominations,--as not less calculated
for the efforts of holy chivalry, than Palestine.

If then it can appear that Adrian might have acted, in his brief to
Henry, just as well out of motives of religious duty, as out of those
of court policy, it is a perverse thing to award him the latter rather
than the former; because to do so is to make him not less absurdly
than wickedly inconsistent with his previous and subsequent
career:--which was marked by one unswerving purpose to defend the Church
against the encroachments of secular power, to maintain her doctrines
intact, and to extend her boundaries to the utmost. Besides, it should
not be forgotten, that his brief was confirmed by his illustrious
successor, Alexander III., who thus gave his testimony to the
uprightness of intention which originated it, as well as to its proper
adaptation in the spirit of that age, to the emergency which elicited
it; an emergency which, from the terms used by Alexander in conveying
his confirmation, would seem by no means to have diminished, but
rather to have increased in the mean time. In short, it is nothing
better than a logical solecism, to wish to maintain that two such
popes as Adrian IV. and Alexander III., educated in the school of the
sublime Hildebrand, and ranking among the very foremost of his
disciples, by the intelligent and dauntless manner in which they
withstood the storm of imperial usurpation, which threatened to
shatter the Church under t