sertion of this compromise in the canon law shows the importance attached to it, and that it was regarded as a lasting settlement, applicable throughout Latin Christendom. Its effect is seen in the inclusion, among the heresies of Jean Lallier condemned in Paris in 1484, of those which revived the doctrine of Jean de Poilly and declared that John XXII. had no power to pronounce it heretical. Yet, at the Lateran Council, in 1515, a determined effort was made by the bishops to obtain the revocation of the special privileges of the Mendicants. By refusing to vote for any measures they obtained a promise of this, but skilful delay enabled Leo X. to elude performance till the following year, when a compromise was effected, which merely shows by what it forbade to the Mendicants how contemptuous had been their defiance of episcopal authority. They lost little by this, for in 1519 Erasmus complains in a letter to Albert, Cardinal - Archbishop of Mainz, "The world is overburdened with the tyranny of the Mendicants, who, though they are the satellites of the Roman See, are yet so numerous and powerful that they are formidable to the pope himself and even to kings. To them, when the pope aids them, he is more than God, when he displeases them he is worthless as a dream."[1]
It must be confessed that both Dominicans and Franciscans had greatly fallen away from the virtues of their founders. Scarce had the Orders commenced to spread when false brethren were found who, contrary to their vow of poverty, made use of their faculty of preaching for purposes of filthy gain; and as early as 1233 we find Gregory IX. sharply reminding the Dominican chapter-general that the poverty professed by the Order should be genuine and not fictitious. The wide employment of the friars by the popes as political emissaries necessarily diverted them from their spiritual functions, attracted ambitious and restless men into their ranks, and gave the institutions a worldly character thor-
- ↑ D'Argentré, Collect. Judic. de nov. Error. I. ii. 180-4, 243, 251, 340, 347, 352, 354, 356.— Religieux de S. Denis, Hist, de Charles VI., Liv. xxix. ch. 10. — Gersoni Sermo contra Bullam Mendicantium.— Alph. de Spina Fortalicium Fidei. fol. 61 (Ed. 1494).— C. 2 Extravagant, i. 9.— Ripoll III. 206, 256, 268.— Wadding, ann. 1457, No. 61.— H. Cornel. Agrippae Epistt. ii. 49.— Raynald. Annal. ann. 1515, No. 1. — Concil. Lateran. Sess. xi. (Harduin. IX. 1832). — Erasmi Epist. 10 Lib. xij. (Ed. 1642, pp. 585-6).
