The famines, the
extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of the peasantry up and down
Europe--these were chords struck from the same mysterious harp; but
these were transitory chords. There had been others of deeper and more
ominous sound. The termination of the Crusades, the destruction of the
Templars, the Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused or suffered by the
house of Anjou, and by the Emperor--these were full of a more permanent
significance. But, since then, the colossal figure of feudalism was
seen standing, as it were on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from earth:
that was a revolution unparalleled; yet _that_ was a trifle by
comparison with the more fearful revolutions that were mining below the
Church. By her own internal schisms, by the abominable spectacle of a
double Pope--so that no man, except through political bias, could even
guess which was Heaven's vicegerent, and which the creature of Hell--
the Church was rehearsing, as in still earlier forms she had already
rehearsed, those vast rents in her foundations which no man should ever
heal.
These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the skies that to the
scientific gazer first caught the colors of the _new_ morning in
advance. But the whole vast range alike of sweeping glooms overhead
dwelt upon all meditative minds, even upon those that could not
distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms.
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