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ition and hypocrisy among the laity, and prepared the road for a tyranny not less oppressive than that of India or ancient Egypt. Indeed the two earliest instances of ecclesiastical interference with the rights of sovereigns--namely, the deposition of Wamba in Spain and that of Louis the Debonair--were founded upon this austere system of penitence. But it is true that a repentance redeemed by money or performed by a substitute could have no salutary effect on the sinner; and some of the modes of atonement which the church most approved were particularly hostile to public morals. None was so usual as pilgrimage, whether to Jerusalem or Rome, which were the great objects of devotion; or to the shrine of some national saint--a James of Compostella, a David, or a Thomas a Becket. This licensed vagrancy was naturally productive of dissoluteness, especially among the women. Our English ladies, in their zeal to obtain the spiritual treasures of Rome, are said to have relaxed the necessary caution about one that was in their own custody.[543] There is a capitulary of Charlemagne directed against itinerant penitents, who probably considered the iron chain around their necks an expiation of future as well as past offences.[544] The crusades may be considered as martial pilgrimages on an enormous scale, and their influence upon general morality seems to have been altogether pernicious. Those who served under the cross would not indeed have lived very virtuously at home; but the confidence in their own merits, which the principle of such expeditions inspired, must have aggravated the ferocity and dissoluteness of their ancient habits. Several historians attest the depravation of morals which existed both among the crusaders and in the states formed out of their conquests.[545] [Sidenote: Want of law.] While religion had thus lost almost every quality that renders it conducive to the good order of society, the control of human law was still less efficacious. But this part of my subject has been anticipated in other passages of the present work; and I shall only glance at the want of regular subordination, which rendered legislative and judicial edicts a dead letter, and at the incessant private warfare, rendered legitimate by the usages of most continental nations. Such hostilities, conducted as they must usually have been with injustice and cruelty, could not fail to produce a degree of rapacious ferocity in the general dispo
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