This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of
persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were
admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly
exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy
name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest
of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable
offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief,
such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the
example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and
debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions
of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right
and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen
a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart
fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial
courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and
of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare
souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the
depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the
moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the
priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of
comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he
writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible
sketch of universal immorality which nothing could purify
but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not
often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral
aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders,
under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to
describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,