inseparable. The Provengals were in advance of their age; darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people; but here, on the borders of France, Spain, and Italy, arose and shone the light of learning, cultivation and refinement. The darkness became visible to the light, the enormous corruption of the Church, the ignorance* and ill-lives of its clergy became, the one ridiculous, the other scandalous. Then came the reading of the scriptures, the preaching of better things, exhorting to a better life, setting before men more elevating doctrines. Then the spirit of mental freedom began to work, people were bold enough to examine the doctrines they were taught by the light that the gifts of God, reason and revelation, afforded them, and to venture to assert in contradiction to Rome, that if our blessed Lord's body "had been as large as their mountains, it must then have been consumed by the numbers who pretended to have eaten it."

But the genius of Pope Innocent III, was in the ascendant, and while it governed the political affairs of the world, directed the arms of the Crusaders in overthrowing the Greek empire at Constantinople, and erecting the Latin,-controuling, or menacing those of Germany, Spain, France, Hungary,-guiding, in short, the helm of universal government; yet inspecting and repressing the first dawnings of mental energy, the efforts of human reason, or the

*I am not quite sure if it were or not, in Hallam's History of Literature, I read the story of a preaching Monk of this period, who delivered from the pulpit a legendary narrative of a malefactor, who, when about to be hung supplicated the aid of the Virgin Mary; she descended from the heavens, stood (invisibly it is to be supposed) upon the scaffold, and held up the culprit's feet, so that the executioner could not hang him. The reprieved criminal in gratitude, went into a Convent until his natural hour of death arrived.

strugglings of that spiritual life, which were altogether inimical to the boundless sway of him whom men ventured to style-" Our Lord God the Pope," and therefore singled out the happy and polite land of 'Provence,' as that were the light of reason, knowledge and truth, had dawned the brightest and must be quenched the soonest. It is not uncharitable thus to speak; it is not the narrow spirit of bigotry that dictates the thought;-history records a more unvarnished tale:' the character of the disciples of Rome have changed with the changes of time and men; but if that Church is infallible, it must be unchangeable,-looking to its character in the past, let us determine whether we shall approximate to it at the present.

Two monks of Citeaux despatched into Languedoc and Provence, as religious inquisitors, prepared the way for their preaching brethren of St. Dominic, and that strange symbol of their new religious order to which the Albigensian heresy gave rise the inquisition.

Two and two, these monks, who took their title from the Spaniard whom Innocent placed at their head as St. Dominic, marched through the villages bare-footed, not only preaching their own doctrines, but drawing from the simple people a declaration of theirs, and obtaining exact statements of the names and abodes of the most prominent, enlightened, or zealous of the Provençal heretics. Those who were yet in the communion of the Church of Rome, were asked why they did not exterminate the heretics. The answer was, we cannot do so; we live among them, they are our friends and our relations, and we see the goodness of their lives.

The heretics they questioned according to the subtle jesuitries of what are termed "The Schools," drawing from persons who were only in the alphabet of learning the most absurd conclusions from grave and scriptural premises.

Count Raymond of Toulouse, whose history is so connected with the Albigensic Crusades, was undoubtedly one of those uncertain, undecided characters who are more calculated to injure than to benefit the cause to which they attach themselves; his was a struggle for political freedom, for the preservation of his own rights, but these were blended with the lives, liberties and properties of the persecuted, slaughtered people of God. Such was the case of many a Provençal lord, and many a gallant knight of that period; and without wilful perversion of facts, of which an abundance is to be found in the Romish historians, some discrepancy may naturally be expected in accounts of a conflict wherein these two distinct classes were mingled with some of those real heretics and fanatics who are sure to spring up, as tares among wheat in every out-burst of mental liberty, or awakening of religious zeal.

A nobler character than Count Raymond of Toulouse, was his nephew young Raymond Roger, Viscount of Beziers-the cruelly betrayed and murdered victim of the Church, to which he had remained attached even while fighting for the lives and liberties of his Albigensian subjects and friends.

"Pestilential man," wrote Pope Innocent to his uncle Raymond "what pride has seized your heart, to refuse peace with your neighbours, and brave the divine laws by protecting the enemies of the faith? Do you not fear eternal flames, ought you

not to dread the temporal chastisements you have provoked by so many crimes?"

Raymond however found his interest lay in uniting in the cause of his oppressed subjects, and deprived of the aid of their lord in extinguishing the fast spreading schism, Innocent thought of preaching a Crusade against the Provençals instead of the Musselmans.

The terms of the Papal grant to Philip Augustus, king of France, in reward of his taking the cross against his people, were-temporally-the possession of their properties; and spiritually-the plenary indulgence granted to the Crusaders against the Infidels in the Holy Land.

Frightened into submission at the hostile preparations making against him, the weak, vacillating Raymond, engaged to exterminate the heretics from his states; but his heart was not in the work; it went on too slowly to please Peter de Castelnau, the Pope's Legate, who, coming to visit this Sovereign Lord, called him a purjurer, a supporter of heretics, a traitor, and finally pronounced once more, the sentence of excommunication-that fearful ban of spiritual law, whose effect on the yet believing child of Rome, is well typified by the extinguished light in which the ceremony of cursing by Bell, Book, and Candle, is made to terminate-leaving him in darkness of soul and heart beneath that deadly curse, whose blighting denunciations are intended to follow him, step by step of his earthly way, breathing its withering breath in all that he loves, all that he has, all that he does--leaving him not, even when the grave opens its hiding-place from the hate and scorn of men; but following him to the unseen world, and

clinging to his soul as an infected garment, destroying rest, and peace, and hope for ever and ever. The fate of our Becket fell upon the Legate, Castelnau; in an hostelry beside the Rhone he was murdered; or at least killed in a brawl with one of Raymond's followers. This sealed the Count's fate, he was anathematised in all churches; thus ran the Papal Bull on the occasion-" and as, following the canonical sanctions of the Holy Fathers, we must not keep faith with those, who keep not faith with God, and who are separated from the communion of the faithful, we discharge, by Apostolic authority, all those who believe themselves bound towards this Count, by any oath either of alliance or fidelity; we permit every Catholic man to pursue his person, to occupy and retain his territories, especially for the purpose of exterminating heresy."

The preaching of this Home Crusade, was scarcely less ardent than that to the East, and Arnold Amalric, the zealous, but what we should term, bloodthirsty, Abbot of Citeaux, was nearly as successful in it as Peter the Hermit had been.

War was both a pastime and a passion: the warriors of the recent Crusades were glad to fight again, and those who had not assumed the cross for Palestine, were eager to embrace it where the immunities were the same, the trials and difficulties less, the profits perhaps more certain.

Thousands and thousands eagerly placed on the front of their white mantles the sacred symbol of the Christian faith, and by wearing it there, instead of on the shoulder, shewed that they went forth to destroy those, who according to the way that they called heresy, worshipped the God of their fathers.