le of the
fourteenth century, the teaching of Wickliffe gained ground in England;
Huss and others followed on the Continent; and they were succeeded by
Luther. That energy of Popes, those intercessions of holy men, which
hitherto had found matter in the affairs of the East, now found a more
urgent incentive in the troubles which were taking place at home.

4. The increase of national prosperity and strength, to which the
alienation of kings and states from the Holy See must be ascribed, in
various ways indisposed them to the continuance of the war against the
misbelievers. Rulers and people, who were increasing in wealth, did not
like to spend their substance on objects both distant and spiritual.
Wealth is a present good, and has a tendency to fix the mind on the
visible and tangible, to the prejudice of both faith and secular policy.
The rich and happy will not go to war, if they can help it; and trade,
of course, does not care for the religious tenets of those who offer to
enter into relations with it, whether of interchange or of purchase. Nor
was this all; when nations began to know their own strength, they had a
tendency to be jealous of each other, as well as to be indifferent to
the interests of religion; and the two most valiant nations of Europe,
France and England, gave up the Holy Wars, only to go to war one with
another. As in the twelfth century, we read of Coeur de Lion in
Palestine, and in the thirteenth, of St. Louis in Egypt, so in the
fourteenth do we read the sad tale of Poitiers and Cressy, and in the
fifteenth of Agincourt. People are apt to ask what good came of the
prowess shown at Ascalon or Damietta; forgetting that they should rather
ask themselves what good came of the conquests of our Edwards and
Henries, of which they are so proud. If Richard's prowess ended in his
imprisonment in Germany, and St. Louis died in Africa, yet there is
another history which ends as ingloriously in the Maid of Orleans, and
the expulsion of tyrants from a soil they had usurped. In vain did the
Popes attempt to turn the restless destructiveness of the European
commonwealth into a safer channel. In vain did the Legates of the Holy
See interpose between Edward of England and the French king; in their
very presence was a French town delivered over by the English conqueror
to a three days' pillage.[61] In vain did one Pope take a vow of
never-dying hostility to the Turks; in vain did another, close upon his
end, repai