²⁷³ Hist, of France, vol. xii. p. 270,271.
It was, without doubt, impossible but that these scandalous abuses, multiplied and extended through the lapse of time from Hildebrand to Boniface IX. and Benedict XIII., should excite the indignation of upright minds and honest hearts. The French, much more christianized in the fourteenth century than the people of Italy or Germany, evinced, by this alone, more zeal in repressing the irregularities and excesses of the clergy. They had seconded Philip the Fair against Boniface VIII.; under Philip of Valois, Peter de Cugnieres had expressed their honourable wishes; and more than twenty years before their renunciation of Benedict XIII. as of Boniface IX. they had, under Charles V. enquired into the limits of ecclesiastical authority. A monument of this discussion has been preserved to us under the title of “The Verger’s dream, or Disputation between the clerk and the squire:”²⁷⁶ a work the author of which is not well known; but which we would attribute to John de Lignano, or to Charles de Louvieres, rather than to any other. The clerk in it claims for the successor of St. Peter, the title of Vicar-General of Jesus Christ upon earth.—The squire distinguishes two eras in our Saviour’s history, one of preaching and humility before his death, the other of power and of glory after his resurrection. St Peter, according to the squire and the pope as well as St. Peter, can represent but the poor and the modest: Jesus, preaching the gospel, and affecting over thrones and temporal things, no sort of pretension, acknowledging that his kingdom is not of this world, submitting himself to the civil power, and, in fine, rendering to Cesar, that which to Cesar belongs.
²⁷⁶ “The Verger’s dream,” one of the most ancient monuments of French literature and of the liberties of the Gallican Church, occupies the half of a folio volume, in the collection of proofs of, and treatises on these liberties.
FOUR great councils were held in the fifteenth century, all previous to the year 1460. The council of Pisa in 1409: it is not reverenced as an oecumenical one; it nevertheless, in deposing. Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. elected Alexander III. to their place. This act did not extinguish the schism; on the contrary it occasioned at once three popes.
