provinces were
far better qualified to enrich and embellish their country than to
defend it. Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in the "gay
science," elevated above many vulgar superstitions, they wanted that
iron courage, and that skill in martial exercises, which distinguished
the chivalry of the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to face
enemies who, in every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been
victorious against tenfold odds. A war, distinguished even among wars of
religion by merciless atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and
with that heresy the prosperity, the civilization, the literature, the
national existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened
part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that
fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders had
narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole
system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis,
the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new
spiritual police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on
a remote mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple
Catholic, who was content to be no wiser than his fathers, found,
wherever he turned, a friendly voice to encourage him. The path of the
heretic was beset by innumerable spies; and the Church, lately in danger
of utter subversion, now appeared to be impregnably fortified by the
love, the reverence, and the terror of mankind.

A century and a half passed away; and then came the second great rising
up of the human intellect against the spiritual domination of Rome.
During the two generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the
power of the Papacy had been at the height. Frederic the Second, the
ablest and most accomplished of the long line of German Caesars, had in
vain exhausted all the resources of military and political skill in the
attempt to defend the rights of the civil power against the
encroachments of the Church. The vengeance of the priesthood had pursued
his house to the third generation. Manfred had perished on the field of
battle, Conradin on the scaffold. Then a turn took place. The secular
authority, long unduly depressed, regained the ascendant with startling
rapidity. The change is doubtless to be ascribed chiefly to the general
disgust excited by the way in which the Church had abused its power and
its success. But something