number of insipid homilies, which they divided between themselves, and their stupid colleagues, that they might not be obliged through incapacity to discontinue preaching the doctrines of Christianity to their people” (p. 159).  “The progress of vice among the subordinate rulers and ministers of the Church was, at this time, truly deplorable....  In those very places, that were consecrated to the advancement of piety and the service of God, there was little else to be seen than ghostly ambition, insatiable avarice, pious frauds, intolerable pride, and a supercilious contempt of the natural rights of the people, with many other vices still more enormous” (p. 161).  The wealth of the Church increased rapidly; it grew fat on the wages of sin.  “Abandoned profligates, who had passed their days in the most enormous pursuits, and whose guilty consciences filled them with terror and remorse, were comforted with the delusive hopes of obtaining pardon, and making atonement for their crimes by leaving the greatest part of their fortune to some monastic society.  Multitudes, impelled by the unnatural dictates of a gloomy superstition, deprived their children of fertile lands and rich patrimonies in favour of the monks, by whose prayers they hoped to render the Deity propitious” (p. 161).  The only new sect of any importance in this century is that of the Monothelites, later known as Maronites; they taught that Christ had but one will, but the doctrine is wrapped up in so many subtleties as to be almost incomprehensible.  They were condemned, in the sixth General Council, held at Constantinople, A.D. 680.  It was during this century that “Boniface V. enacted that infamous law, by which the churches became places of refuge to all who fled thither for protection; a law which procured a sort of impunity to the most enormous crimes, and gave a loose rein to the licentiousness of the most abandoned profligates” (p. 164).  The effect of this law was that the monasteries became the refuge of bandits and murderers, who issued from them to plunder and to destroy, and paid for the security of their persons by bestowing on their hosts a portion of the spoil they had collected during their raids.  Such were the civilizing and purifying effects of Christianity.

CENTURY VIII.

Winfred, better known as Boniface, “the Apostle of Germany,” is, perhaps, the chief ecclesiastical figure of this century.  He taught Christianity right through Germany; was consecrated bishop in A.D. 723, created archbishop in A.D. 738, and Primate of Germany and Belgium in A.D. 746; in A.D. 755 he was murdered in Friesland, with fifty other ecclesiastics.  Much stress is laid upon his martyrdom by Christian writers, but Boniface, after all, only received from the Frieslanders the measure he had meted out to their brethren, and there seems no good reason why Christian missionaries should claim a monopoly of the right to kill.  Mosheim allows that he “often employed