looked upon as a great and undeserved mercy.  But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale; their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the carrion-pit.  A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the cemetery of a German convent.  The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the convent if his command were disobeyed.  But the abbess, Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179), a woman of great mental power and an inspired seer, opposed him.  Having received a direct message from God, she wrote to the bishop as follows:  “Conforming to my custom, I looked up to the true light, and God commanded me to withhold my consent to the exhumation of the body, because He Himself took the dead man from the pale of the Church, so that He might lead him to the beatitude of the blessed....  It were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the command of my Lord.”  The saint had interpreted the will of God, and the archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded.  But the bishop’s yielding by no means countenanced the belief that God might, for once, tolerate the body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it—­the vision of the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.

All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to everlasting perdition—­this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain damnation for the sake of mundane pleasures—­a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.  Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry.  A single ungodly thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair.  The worship of the devil, far from being an invention of fanatical monks, actually existed, and was often the last consolation of those who held themselves forsaken by God.  The hierarchy did not hesitate a moment to make the utmost use or the power conferred upon them by the mental attitude of the people.  The government of kings and princes, in addition to the ecclesiastical government, could only be a transient, sinful condition; the time was bound to come when the pope would be king of the earth, and the great lords of the world his vassals, appointed by him to keep the wicked world in check, and deposed by him if he found them incapable, worshippers of the devil, or disobedient to the Church.  The whole world was a hierarchy whose apex reached heaven and bore, as the representative of its invisible summit, the pope.  He stood, to quote Innocent III., “in