snapped. By the suicidal methods of Excommunication and Interdict all
ranks were schooled into doing without the rites of religion, the
baptism of their children, or the blessing upon the marriage union.
In the meantime it was notorious that even in high places there were
instances not a few of Christians who had denied the faith and had
given themselves up to strange beliefs, of which the creed of the
Moslem was not the worst. Men must have received with a smile the
doctrine that Marriage was a Sacrament when everybody knew that,
among the upper classes at least, the bonds of matrimony were soluble
almost at pleasure. [Footnote: Eleanor of Aquitaine, consort of Henry
II., had been divorced by Louis VII. of France. Constance of
Brittany, mother of Arthur--Shakespeare's idealized Constance--left
her husband, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, to unite herself with Guy of
Flanders. Conrad of Montferat divorced the daughter of Isaac Angelus,
Emperor of Constantinople, to marry Isabella, daughter of Amalric,
King of Jerusalem, the bride repudiating her husband Henfrid of
Thouars. Philip II. of France married the sister of the King of
Denmark one day and divorced her the next; then married a German
lady, left her, and returned to the repudiated Dane. King John in
1189 divorced Hawisia, Countess of Gloucester, and took Isabella of
Angouleme to wife, but how little he cared to be faithful to the one
or the other the chronicles disdain to ask.] It seems hardly worth
while to notice that the observance of Sunday was almost universally
neglected, or that sermons had become so rare that when Eustace,
Abbot of Flai, preached in various places in England in 1200,
miracles were said to have ensued as the ordinary effects of his
eloquence. Earnestness in such an age seemed in itself miraculous.
Here and there men and women, hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, raised their sobbing prayer to heaven that the Lord
would shortly accomplish the number of his elect and hasten his