Just at this point of our history we meet, through the subtlety of Satan, the most extreme and opposite of characters. Hildebrand's one object was to subdue the outer world; the self-inflicted cruelties of others were to subdue the world within themselves.
Peter Damiano, bishop of Ostia, was severely ascetic. He wore sackcloth secretly, he fasted, he watched, he prayed, and, in order to tame his passions, he could rise in the night, stand for hours in a stream, until his limbs were stiff with cold, and spend the remainder of the night in visiting churches, and reciting the Psalter. The avowed object for which he so labored was the restoration of the dignity of the priesthood, and a stricter church discipline. Such is the delusive power of the enemy within the church of Rome. But a monk, named -
Dominic, was considered the great hero of this warfare against the poor unoffending body. Satan concealed from his dupe the difference between the body and the deeds of the body. Dominic wore next to his skin a tight iron cuirass, which he never put off, except to chastise himself. His body and his arms were confined by iron rings, his neck was loaded with heavy chains, his scanty clothes were worn to rags, his food consisted of the coarsest fare, his skin was as black as a negro's, from the effects of his discipline. His usual exercise was to recite the Psalter twice a day, while he flogged himself with both hands, at the rate of a thousand lashes to ten psalters. It was reckoned that three thousand lashes were equal to a year's penance; the whole Psalter, therefore, with this accompaniment, was equivalent to five years. In Lent, or on occasions of special penitence, the daily average rose to three psalters; he "easily"(?) got through twenty—equal to a hundred years of penance—in six days. Once, at the beginning of Lent, he begged that a penance of a thousand years might be imposed on him, and he cleared off the whole before Easter.
These flagellations were supposed to have the effect of a satisfaction for other men's sins—works of supererogation, which formed the capital for the sale of indulgences, which we shall hear of by-and-by. Death mercifully put an end to his pitiable delusions in the year 1062.
Take another example of ecclesiastical life, for Satan found something to suit every taste.
The worldly prelates were in the habit of riding forth attended with troops of soldiers, with swords and lances. They were surrounded with armed men like a heathen general. Every day royal banquets, every day parades; the table loaded with delicacies; the guests, their voluptuous favorites. Crime and licentiousness held revel in the palaces of the prelates. So great was the wickedness of Rome in the tenth century, that historians in general consent to draw a veil over it for the sake of our common humanity. Can our deluded countrymen who are hastening over to Rome, know,
that within a period of a century and a half, about this time, so dreadful were the scenes of the Vatican, that "two popes were murdered, five were driven into exile, four were deposed, and three resigned their hazardous dignity. Some were raised to the pontifical chair by arms, some by money, and some received the tiara from the hands of princely courtesans It would be heretical to say that the gates of hell had prevailed against the seat and center of Catholicism; but Baronius himself might be cited to prove that they had rolled back on their infernal hinges to send forth malignant spirits, commissioned to empty on her devoted head the vials of bitterness and wrath."
We now turn to the immediate object of our history—the career of Hildebrand, as Gregory the Seventh, from whose lips we shall hear an account of the infallible popes very different from the above.