the Middle Ages. See how penance, and
voluntary suffering, and unnecessary exposure of the health, and eager
attention to the sick in loathsome and contagious diseases, and the
severest and most protracted fastings and vigils, enter into their
piety; and how these extorted popular admiration, and received the
applause and rewards of the rulers of the Church. I never read a book
which left on my mind such repulsive impressions of mediaeval piety as
the Life of Catherine of Sienna, by her confessor,--himself one of the
great ecclesiastical dignitaries of the age. I never read anything so
debasing and degrading to our humanity. One turns with disgust from the
narration of her lauded penances.

So we see in the Church of the Middle Ages--the Church of Saint
Theresa--two great ideas struggling for the mastery, yet both obscured
and perverted: faith in a crucified Redeemer, which gave consolation and
hope; and penance, rather than repentance, which sought to impose the
fetters of the ancient spiritual despotisms. In the early Church, faith
and repentance went hand in hand together to conquer the world, and to
introduce joy and peace and hope among believers. In the Middle Ages,
faith was divorced from repentance, and took penance instead as a
companion,--an old enemy; so that there was discord in the Christian
camp, and fears returned, and joys were clouded. Sometimes faith
prevailed over penance, as in the monastery of Bec, where Anselm taught
a cheerful philosophy,--or in the monastery of Clairvaux, where Bernard
lived in seraphic ecstasies, his soul going out in love and joy; and
then again penance prevailed, as in those grim retreats where hard
inquisitors inflicted their cruel torments. But penance, on the whole,
was the ruling power, and cast over society its funereal veil of
dreariness and fear. Yet penance, enslaving as it was, still clung to
the infinite value of the soul, the grandest fact in all revelations,
and hence society did not relax into Paganism. Penance would save the
soul, though surrounding it with gloom, maceration, heavy labors, bitter
tears, terrible anxieties. The wearied pilgrim, the isolated monk, the
weeping nun, the groaning peasant, the penitent baron, were not thrown
into absolute despair, since there was a possibility of appeasing divine
wrath, and since they all knew that Christ had died in order to save
some,--yea, all who conformed to the direction of those spiritual guides
which the Church