they then called it, to one cavaliere servente at a time. Some of the most distinguished women of former days, women held in such high esteem by whole governments that they received the freedom of cities, the homage of the great, the honor of magnificent monuments, and occupied thrones with emperors and kings, were professional harlots, not making and not needing to make a secret of their "professions."

Like Edmund, "the bastard," in "Richard the Third," even such a man as Erasmus, the admired of popes, the associate of emperors, statesmen, scholars, and rulers, boasts of his being an illegitimate son, a "love child," as such offspring were then admiringly called, as if there were no love in marriage, and not the product of nauseous legal dalliance," as he scornfully calls the offspring of wedlock. These are the words of Erasmus the half-priest, and no one thought the less of him because of his vulgarities. See his Ship of Fools," and "In Praise of Folly," a filthy book, dedicated to no less a person than Sir Thomas More.

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In a book of to-day, by Victor Auburton, Munich, entitled "Die Kunst Sterbt," he writes about art in connection with the Middle Ages, the ages of faith when the church was untrammeled by the modern heresy of Protestantism. He asks, "What were the Middle Ages when the church ruled supreme and could put her foot on the neck of prostrate kings when she thought it suited her purpose?" and answers his own question as follows: "Nothing but this: pestilence;

civil war; tyranny; dirt; superstition; slaughter of Jews, and, when she could, Mohammedans; robbery, pillage, thumb-screws, anathemas,- just hell and abomination."

CHAPTER IV

We are not surprised by what mere newspaper readers say about the degeneracy of to-day, with the exaggerated publicity given to vice and corresponding concealment of virtue, especially in America, because, as a rule, ignorant of the past, they lack necessary perspective; but we are astonished when scholars wail thus of present day deterioration, mostly, it would seem, of their own imagining, apparently oblivious of the not only worse, but utterly appalling, degradation, not merely tolerated but encouraged in former times, when so many of the most powerful families had their origin in crime, when numbers of the most influential were the product of illicit unions, natural children a matter of course, when some of the "pious " Kings of the past were so particular and exclusive as to have private and discriminating "orphanages" for their own "bastard" children, and no one thought less, of a monarch because he was lecherous. What protection could divorce give to outraged virtue under such conditions?

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The bar-sinister was indeed frequently applied as a handicap in the way of inheritance, but as a state act, for political purposes, rather than as a condemnation of licentiousness, and men were not ostracised from society, as with us, because of their being fathers,

out of wedlock, of innumerable illegitimate children. As an illustration of higher moral standards to-day as compared with days of yore, let the intelligent reader think for a moment of the comparative trifles that are enough to defeat, say, a candidate for office in free America to-day, as compared with that past, when, according to a great historian, "the atmosphere of society was not only obscured by superstition, but reeked with all manner of pestilent forces"; when even popes, presumably the highest example of excellence, because of their depravity were strangled in dungeons, degraded, banished; when mere boys, for example, Benedict IX, in the eleventh century, were raised to the papacy by bribery at the age of twelve years, and of whom his successor in office, Victor III, subsequently declared that "his life was so foul and execrable that he shuddered to describe it." Driven from the pontifical chair by a tumult of popular rage and disgust, he regained it by bloody violence, and at last sold the office, which he seemed to have valued only for the liberty it gave to his vices, when it was purchased by Gregory VI. See Neander's "History of the Christian Religion," vol. viii, page 376. Could such a thing happen to-day without the whole Christian world's feeling outraged?

We are horrified and think the world coming to a dishonorable end when there is merely suspected bribery at a ward election, or some politician, representing perhaps a district in disgrace, calls a colleague out of his name," or a partisan in the heat of con

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test applies a few irrelevant epithets to a man of an opposite faction, or even uses bad grammar in addressing his constituents; but think, in comparison, of elections in times before Luther, when men's throats were cut with impunity because of political differences, families wiped out of existence during the heat of electoral campaigns, and even the church exercised the vilest political methods in crushing an enemy, carrying it often to the point of annihilation.

Imagine what the condition must have been preceding the period when there were three popes reigning in Rome at the same time (remember the papacy stood for the highest civilization and morality),— Benedict IX officiating at St. John Lateran, Sylvester in St. Peter's, and Gregory VI in St. Maria Maggiore,— and each with partisans so violent that they stopped at no crime to accomplish their purpose.

At the Council of Rheims, 991 A. D., the Bishop of Orleans declared that "the ecclesiastics of his day were monstrous brutes, utterly destitute of all knowledge, human or divine." See Synodus Remiensis, pp. 60-61. If the divines were thus, what could be expected of the profane public?

"When the heroic and devout Hildebrand was appointed director of the great monastery of St. Paul, outside the gates of Rome, he found cattle stabled in the basilica and monks waited upon by abandoned women."

In that beneficent past, to which deluded partiality asks us to look with admiring approval, when there