me members of this little association continued refractory and refused
to obey either the bishop or the pope.[750]

In the eighth and ninth centuries, when the Vulgate had ceased to be
generally intelligible, there is no reason to suspect any intention in
the church to deprive the laity of the Scriptures. Translations were
freely made into the vernacular languages, and perhaps read in churches,
although the acts of saints were generally deemed more instructive.
Louis the Debonair is said to have caused a German version of the New
Testament to be made. Otfrid, in the same century, rendered the gospels,
or rather abridged them, into German verse. This work is still extant,
and is in several respects an object of curiosity.[751] In the eleventh
or twelfth century we find translations of the Psalms, Job, Kings, and
the Maccabees into French.[752] But after the diffusion of heretical
opinions, or, what was much the same thing, of free inquiry, it became
expedient to secure the orthodox faith from lawless interpretation.
Accordingly, the council of Toulouse in 1229 prohibited the laity from
possessing the Scriptures; and this precaution was frequently repeated
upon subsequent occasions.[753]

The ecclesiastical history of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries
teems with new sectaries and schismatics, various in their aberrations
of opinion, but all concurring in detestation of the established
church.[754] They endured severe persecutions with a sincerity and
firmness which in any cause ought to command respect. But in general we
find an extravagant fanaticism among them; and I do not know how to look
for any amelioration of society from the Franciscan seceders, who
quibbled about the property of things consumed by use, or from the
mystical visionaries of different appellations, whose moral practice was
sometimes more than equivocal. Those who feel any curiosity about such
subjects, which are by no means unimportant, as they illustrate the
history of the human mind, will find them treated very fully by Mosheim.
But the original sources of information are not always accessible in
this country, and the research would perhaps be more fatiguing than
profitable.

[Sidenote: Lollards of England.]

I shall, for an opposite reason, pass lightly over the great revolution
in religious opinion wrought in England by Wicliffe, which will
generally be familiar to the reader from our common historians. Nor am I
concerned to treat of the