those wars had ended in leaving the Holy Land in the hands of the Saracens; the many thousand Christian warriors who had returned from them did not hesitate to declare that they had found their antagonists not such as had been pictured by the Church, but valiant, courteous, just.  Through the gay cities of the South of France a love of romantic literature had been spreading; the wandering troubadours had been singing their songs—­songs far from being restricted to ladye- love and feats of war; often their burden was the awful atrocities that had been perpetrated by papal authority—­ the religious massacres of Languedoc; often their burden was the illicit amours of the clergy.  From Moorish Spain the gentle and gallant idea of chivalry had been brought, and with it the noble sentiment of “personal honor,” destined in the course of time to give a code of its own to Europe.

Effect of the great schism.  The return of the papacy to Rome was far from restoring the influence of the popes over the Italian Peninsula.  More than two generations had passed away since their departure, and, had they come back even in their original strength, they could not have resisted the intellectual progress that had been made during their absence.  The papacy, however, came back not to rule, but to be divided against itself, to encounter the Great Schism.  Out of its dissensions emerged two rival popes; eventually there were three, each pressing his claims upon the religious, each cursing his rival.  A sentiment of indignation soon spread all over Europe, a determination that the shameful scenes which were then enacting should be ended.  How could the dogma of a Vicar of God upon earth, the dogma of an infallible pope, be sustained in presence of such scandals?  Herein lay the cause of that resolution of the ablest ecclesiastics of those times (which, alas for Europe! could not be carried into effect), that a general council should be made the permanent religious parliament of the whole continent, with the pope as its chief executive officer.  Had that intention been accomplished, there would have been at this day no conflict between science and religion; the convulsion of the Reformation would have been avoided; there would have been no jarring Protestant sects.  But the Councils of Constance and Basle failed to shake off the Italian yoke, failed to attain that noble result.

Catholicism was thus weakening; as its leaden pressure lifted, the intellect of man expanded.  The Saracens had invented the method of making paper from linen rags and from cotton.  The Venetians had brought from China to Europe the art of printing.  The former of these inventions was essential to the latter.  Hence forth, without the possibility of a check, there was intellectual intercommunication among all men.

Invention of printing.  The invention of printing was a severe blow to Catholicism, which had, previously, enjoyed the inappreciable advantage of a monopoly of intercommunication.  From its central seat, orders could be disseminated through all the ecclesiastical ranks, and fulminated through the pulpits.  This monopoly and the amazing power it conferred were destroyed by the press.  In modern times, the influence of the pulpit has become insignificant.  The pulpit has been thoroughly supplanted by the newspaper.