seemed probable that a single generation would suffice to spread
the reformed doctrine to Lisbon, to London, and to Naples. But
this was not to be. Rome cried for help to the warriors of
northern France. She appealed at once to their superstition and
to their cupidity. To the devout believer she promised pardons as
ample as those with which she had rewarded the deliverers of the
Holy Sepulchre. To the rapacious and profligate she offered the
plunder of fertile plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the
ingenious and polished inhabitants of the Languedocian provinces
were far better qualified to enrich and embellish their country
than to defend it. Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in
the "gay science," elevated above many vulgar superstitions, they
wanted that iron courage, and that skill in martial exercises,
which distinguished the chivalry of the region beyond the Loire,
and were ill fitted to face enemies who, in every country from
Ireland to Palestine, had been victorious against tenfold odds. A
war, distinguished even among wars of religion by merciless
atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and with that heresy
the prosperity the civilisation, the literature, the national
existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened part
of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by
that fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her
crusaders had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to
strengthen her whole system of polity. At this period were
instituted the Order of Francis, the Order of Dominic, the
Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual police was
everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote
mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple
Catholic, who was content to be no wiser than his fathers, found,
wherever he turned, a friendly voice to encourage him. The path