Henry M. Baird · 72 of 379

CHAPTER I · The monastic orders incur contempt.

It was a lamentable but notorious fact that, as a consequence of the unnatural divorce of religion and morality, the clergy, both secular and regular, by their excesses had incurred the contempt of the laity. If the Franciscan monks enjoyed an unenviable pre-eminence in this respect, so as to have come to constitute one of the stock characters in the "Heptameron" and similar works, scarcely less constant than the prodigals or parasites of the New Comedy, the other orders were but little behind them. And so Louise de Savoie made this significant entry in her diary: "In the year 1522, in December, my son and I, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, began to understand the hypocrites, white, black, gray, smoky, and of all colors; from whom may God, by his clemency and infinite goodness, be pleased to preserve and defend us. For, if Jesus Christ be not a liar, there is no more dangerous generation in all human kind." Bishops and cardinals won little more respect than the monks; for was it not the most prominent of the wearers of the purple who, as Chancellor of France, introduced venality into the most sacred offices of state, while by his quarrelsome and unscrupulous diplomacy he richly merited the bon mot of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, that he was more inclined to make four wars than, one peace?