ed to happen. A precursor of Hegel, he
taught three eras: the dominion of the Father, or the first era,
characterised by fear and the severity of the law; the dominion of the
Son, or the era of faith and compassion; and the dominion of the Holy
Ghost, or the era of love. This last era was beginning to dawn, and in
many places Joachim's words were regarded as the prophecies of a seer.
Thus the monk, Gerhard of Borgo San Domino, claimed for the dawning
third era the preaching of a new gospel of the Holy Ghost, an
unmistakable proof that the spirit of heresy was the outcome of
religious enthusiasm.

The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every
reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a
superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by
appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to
advantage. The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient
number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to
furnish trees for a big forest--to say nothing of the bones of numerous
saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries,
did a lucrative trade. Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer
intellects; in A.D. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached
against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all
the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved
insufficient to overcome the evil. In Guibert's words, "It was an
abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body,
thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust. How can the
bones of any man be worth framing in gold and silver," he asked, "when
the body of the Son of God was laid beneath a miserable stone?" He
exhorted the people to turn from the visible and obvious to the
invisible. He maintained that the worship of relics was opposed to true
religion because "not until the disciples were bereaved of the bodily
presence of Christ could the Holy Ghost descend upon them." He even
rejected the prevalent, entirely materialistic, view of a life after
death, and dared to suggest that the torments of hell should be
interpreted spiritually. "The eternal contemplation of the Lord is the
supreme bliss of the righteous; who could dare to deny that the misery
of the damned consists in the eternal bereavement of the face of the
Lord?"

Religion had been lost; what should have been a vi