io AWAY FROM ROME!
favoured a modicum of ecclesiastical reform and respected the truth that man's need to worship God is ineradicable, allied it with many trends in Jansenism, especially those that lay rooted in hostility to Rome. Everywhere at the Courts a conservative and a reformistic tendency were represented, and these clashed most sharply over the question of the Papacy. Many good things are attributable to this liberalisric movement the abolition of serfdom, witchcraft mania, and the use of the torture, as well as of the bitter animosity with which the confessions treated one another. Last but not least, the human spirit was granted the freest possible mobility, so that no out- ward force any longer stood between it and union with Rome and Catholic teaching. Yet in comparison the inner dynamism and rich- ness of the Middle Ages had been incomparably more powerful. There is no more subjectivistic and no more objectivistic man than Augustine; there has never been a more daring "liberal" than Frederic II. No epoch in history reveals such radical antitheses and such a courageous philosophy, ready to carry on despite prison and stake, as do the thousand years of continuous intellectual battle which we call the Middle Ages.
The Popes of the eighteenth century number no Hildebrands or Innocent Ills among them. They did not break, for the reason that they bent like reeds. Their good fortune was their wisdom, and this their wisdom was the good fortune of the Papacy. Innocent XI had ad- dressed the Rot Soleil once more in the sharp language of the mediaeval time. For the sake of the freedom of Church he permitted thirty- five dioceses in Christian France to remain without bishops during six years. The most farsighted minds there realized that churches which separate themselves from the Pope are bound fast by Kings. The Papal decrees were left lying in the customs' offices, and saints who were embarrassing to the monarch were deprived of the cult, yes, even of the feast day. "God Himself," says a contemporary, "is under suspicion as being a rival to the state." Clement XI, Benedict XIII, Clement XII, had to take cognizance of the fact that their Nuncios were banned from Bourbon courts and from Portugal. Jan- senism gained ground in Vienna, Brussels, on the Iberian peninsula, and throughout the whole of Italy. With it there came passionate
OPPOSITION
