table barter with the valiant but illiterate barbarians,
exchanging possessions in heaven for the wealth of the earth, and
selling for money immunities or indulgences for sin. But in another
respect they had looked upon them with dread--they had felt the edge of
the French and German sword. The educated classes, though seeking the
widest liberty of thought for themselves, were not disposed to more than
a very select propagandism of opinions, which plainly could only be
detrimental to the pecuniary interests of their country. Their faith had
long ago ceased to be that of conviction; it had become a mere outward
patriotic acquiescence. Even those who were willing enough to indulge
themselves in the utmost latitude of personal free-thinking never made
an objection when some indiscreet zealot of their own kind was compelled
by ecclesiastical pressure to flee beyond the Alps. No part of Europe
was so full of irreligion as Italy. It amounted to a philosophical
infidelity among the higher classes; to Arianism among the middle and
less instructed; to an utter carelessness, not even giving itself the
trouble of disbelief, among the low. [Sidenote: State of their
universities.] The universities and learned academies were hot-beds of
heresy; thus the University of Padua was accused of having been for long
a focus of atheism, and again and again learned academies, as those of
Modena and Venice, had been suppressed for heresy. [Sidenote: State of
the learned academies.] The device of the Academy of the Lyncei
indicated only too plainly the spirit of these institutions; it was a
lynx, with its eyes turned upward to heaven, tearing the triple-headed
Cerberus with its claws. Nor was this alarming condition restricted to
Italy; France had long participated in it. From the University of Paris,
that watch-tower of the Church, the alarm had often been sounded; now it
was against men, now against books. Once, under its suggestions, the
reading of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle had been prohibited,
and works of philosophy interdicted until they should have been
corrected by the theologians of the Church. The physical heresies of
Galileo, the pantheism of Caesalpinus had friendly counterparts in
France. Even the head of the Church, Leo X., at the beginning of the
Reformation, could not escape obloquy, and stories were circulated
touching his elevation to the pontificate at once prejudicial to his
morals and to his belief.

[Sidenote