been among men a public and
a private conscience, and that these two, alas! have generally been very
different. It is an old saying, that 'committees have no consciences;'
and it is too true. A body of men acting in concert for a public purpose
will do things which they would shrink from with disgust, if the same
trick would merely put money into their private purses; and this is too
often the case when the public object is a good one. Then the end seems
to sanctify the means, to almost any amount of chicanery.

So it was with those old monks. An abbey had no conscience. An order of
monks had no conscience. A Benedictine, a Dominican, a Franciscan, who
had not himself a penny in the world, and never intended to have one,
would play tricks, lie, cheat, slander, forge, for the honour and the
wealth of his order; when for himself, and in himself, he may have been
an honest God-fearing man enough. So it was; one more ugly fruit of an
unnatural attempt to be not good men, but something more than men; by
trying to be more than men, they ended by being less than men. That was
their sin, and that sin, when it had conceived, brought forth death.

LECTURE X--THE LOMBARD LAWS

I have tried to shew you how the Teutonic nations were Christianized. I
have tried to explain to you why the clergy who converted them were,
nevertheless, more or less permanently antagonistic to them. I shall
have, hereafter, to tell you something of one of the most famous
instances of that antagonism: of the destruction of the liberties of the
Lombards by that Latin clergy. But at first you ought to know something
of the manners of these Lombards; and that you may learn best by studying
their Code.

They are valuable to you, as giving you a fair specimen of the laws of an
old Teutonic people. You may profitably compare them with the old
Gothic, Franco-Salic, Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian laws, all
formed on the same primaeval model, agreeing often in minute details, and
betokening one primaeval origin, of awful antiquity. By studying them,
moreover, you may gain some notion of that primaeval liberty and self-
government, common at first to all the race, but preserved alone by
England;--to which the descendants of these very Lombards are at this
very moment so manfully working their way back.

These laws were collected and published in writing by king Rothar, A.D.
643, 76 years after Alboin came into Italy. The cause, h