uman
thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never be able to
understand the doings of European men.

This earth, then, or at least the habitable part of it, was considered as
most probably a flat plane. Below that plane, or in the centre of the
earth, was the realm of endless fire. It could be entered (as by the
Welsh knight who went down into St. Patrick's Purgatory) by certain
caves. By listening at the craters of volcanoes, which were its mouths,
the cries of the tortured might be heard in the depths of the earth.

In that 'Tartarus' every human being born into the world was doomed to be
endlessly burnt alive: only in the Church, 'extra quam nulla salus,' was
there escape from the common doom. But to that doom, excommunication,
which thrust a man from the pale of the Church, condemned the sinner
afresh, with curses the most explicit and most horrible.

The superior clergy, therefore, with whom the anathematizing power lay,
believed firmly that they could, proprio motu, upon due cause shewn,
cause any man or woman to be burned alive through endless ages. And what
was more, the Teutonic laity, with that intense awe of the unseen which
they had brought with them out of the wilderness, believed it likewise,
and trembled. It paralysed the wisest, as well as the fiercest, that
belief. Instead of disgusting the kings of the earth, it gave them over,
bound hand and foot by their own guilty consciences, into the dominion of
the clergy; and the belief that Charles Martel was damned, only knit (as
M. Sismondi well remarks) his descendants the Carlovingians more closely
to the Church which possest so terrible a weapon.

Whether they were right or wrong in these beliefs is a question not to be
discussed in this chair. My duty is only to point out to you the
universal existence of those beliefs, and the historic fact that they
gave the clergy a character supernatural, magical, divine, with a reserve
of power before which all trembled, from the beggar to the king; and
also, that all struggles between the temporal and spiritual powers, like
that between Henry and Becket, can only be seen justly in the light of
the practical meaning of that excommunication which Becket so freely
employed. I must also point out to you that so enormous a power (too
great for the shoulders of mortal man) was certain to be, and actually
was, fearfully abused, not only by its direct exercise, but also by
bargaining with men, thr