Ceremony of incensing a cross.

Councils of Placentia and Clermont, in 1095.

The other engraving represents the popish custom of incensing a new cross. All crosses designed for public places, for high roads. and cross ways, as they are seen in popish countries, and for the tops of Romish chapels, where one is always placed, are consecrated with much ceremony. Candles are first lighted at the foot of the cross, after which the celebrant, having on his pontifical ornaments, sits down before the cross, and makes a discourse to the people upon its excellence; after which prayers and anthems follow. Then he sprinkles and afterward incenses the cross, as represented in the engraving; which being performed, candles are set upon the top of each arm of the cross. In the engraving, two of the attendants are seen with the candles lighted and prepared, when the childish and unmeaning ceremony is over, to affix them on the two arms of the cross. How long the candles remain there, before the piece of wood is regarded as sufficiently holy for its contemplated destination, I am unable to say.

§ 20.-Pope Urban, though inferior in ability and courage to the imperious Hildebrand, was yet fully equal to him in pride and arrogance. At a council held at Placentia, in 1095, he confirmed all the laws and anathemas enacted by Gregory, to terrify and to crush the rebels to the holy See, and at the council of Clermont, held in November of the same year, Urban proceeded a step further than even Gregory had done, by enacting a decree forbidding the bishops and the rest of the clergy to take the oath of allegiance to their respective kings or governments. Ne episcopus vel sacerdos regi vel alicui laico in manibus ligiam fidelitatem faciunt.' The council of Clermont, just mentioned, has become celebrated in history from the fact that through the persuasions of Peter the hermit, pope Urban resolved, on this occasion, upon the commencement of those expeditions to the holy land called the Crusades.

The object of these holy wars, which occupy so conspicuous a figure in the history of the period of which we are now treating, was the recovery of the city of Jerusalem, and the holy sepulchre, from the hands of the Turkish infidels, by whom it had been taken in the year 1065. For centuries past, the practice had prevailed of making pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the tenth century, this custom had much increased, and had become almost universal, from a general belief which prevailed of the near approach of the end of the world, arising from a misinterpretation of Rev., chap. xx., 2-5. Toward the conclusion of the century, crowds of men and women flocked from all parts of Europe, to Jerusalem, in the frantic hope of expiating their sins by the long and painful journey to the Holy land. When the dreaded epoch assigned by these misguided individuals, for the end of the world, had passed by, the current of pilgrimages still continued to flow on in the direction it had taken, and that too in spite of the heavy tax of a piece of gold per head laid upon the pilgrims, and the brutal cruelties and indignities to which they were often exposed, from the barbarians and infidel conquerors of the holy city. Thus it appears that among the causes which eventually gave birth to the Crusades, was the wide-spread

Popular and wide spread panic of the end of the world, in the year 1000.

delusion of the immediate conflagration of the world, in the year one thousand of the Christian era.*

*The language in which Mosheim relates the effects of this wide-spread delusion, is so striking, and the lesson it teaches so important, viz.: the folly of attempting to be wise above what is written, or to fathom what God has wisely concealed, viz. the time of the end of the world, that I shall embrace the opportunity of quoting it in the present note. Speaking of the darkness of the tenth century, when this opinion was propagated, he says, "That the whole Christian world was covered at this time, with a thick and gloomy veil of superstition, is evident from a prodigious number of testimonies and examples which it is needless to mention. This horrible cloud, which hid almost every ray of truth from the eyes of the multitude, furnished a favorable opportunity to the priests and monks of propagating many absurd and ridiculous opinions, which dishonored so frequently the Latin church, and produced from time to time such violent agitations. None occasioned such a universal panic, nor such dreadful impressions of terror and dismay, as the notion that now prevailed, of the immediate approach of the day of judgment. Hence prodigious numbers of people abandoned all their civil connexions, and their parental relations, and giving over to the churches or monasteries all their lands, treasures, and worldly effects, repaired with the utmost precipitation to Palestine, where they imagined that Christ would descend from heaven to judge the world. Others devoted themselves by a solemn and voluntary oath to the service of the churches, convents, and priesthood, whose slaves they became, in the most rigorous sense of that word, performing daily their heavy tasks; and all this from a notion that the Supreme Judge would diminish the severity of their sentence, and look upon them with a more favorable and propitious eye, on account of their having made themselves the slaves of his ministers. When an eclipse of the sun or moon happened to be visible, the cities were deserted, and their miserable inhabitants fled for refuge to hollow caverns, and hid themselves among the craggy rocks, and under the bending summits of steep mountains. The opulent attempted to bribe the Deity, and the saintly tribe, by rich donations conferred upon the sacerdotal and monastic orders, who were looked upon as the immediate vicegerents of heaven. In many places, temples, palaces, and noble edifices, both public and private, were suffered to decay, nay, were deliberately pulled down, from a notion that they were no longer of any use, since the final dissolution of all things was at hand. In a word, no language is sufficient to express the confusion and despair that tormented the minds of miserable mortals upon this occasion. This general delusion was indeed opposed and combated by the discerning few, who endeavored to dispel these groundless terrors, and to efface the notion from which they arose, in the minds of the people. But their attempts were ineffectual; nor could the dreadful apprehensions of the superstitious multitude be entirely removed before the conclusion of this century." As an undeniable evidence, both of the existence of this panic, and of its profitable results to its artful propagators and fomenters, may be mentioned the fact that almost all the donations that were made to the church about this time, assign as the cause of the donation, and the motive of the donor, the fact that the end of the world was just now at hand, and that therefore, of course, the property would be no longer of value. They generally commenced with these words: "Appropinquante mundi termino, &c." i. e., the end of the world being now at hand, &c. (Mosheim, ii., page 410.) Similar panics to the above, originating from the presumption of ignorant and visionary men, who have predicted the day and the hour, or at least the year of the world's conflagration, are not peculiar to the dark ages. They have been produced to a more limited extent in different countries and in various ages of the world, but in no one instance on record has the delusion been so universal as amid the gloom of this midnight of the world. The extent to which such infatuations have prevailed, has invariably been proportioned to the degree of the darkness and ignorance existing in the field of their propagation. Amid the enlightenment of the nineteenth century, there is but little danger of delusions of this kind shaking the universal foundations of society as they did in the tenth, or, if they exist at all, extending beyond the very narrow circle of the credulous and unenlightened portion of the community.

Peter the hermit returns from Palestine, and engages pope Urban to sanction a Crusade.

Of many thousands who passed into Asia, says a recent historian of the Crusades,* a few isolated individuals only returned; but these every day, as they passed through the different countries of Europe, on their journey back, spread indignation and horror by their account of the dreadful sufferings of the Christians in Judea. Various letters are reported as having been sent by the emperors of the East, to the different princes of Europe, soliciting aid to repel the encroachments of the infidel; and if but a very small portion of the crimes and cruelty attributed to the Turks by these epistles, were believed by the Christians, it is not at all astonishing that wrath and horror took possession of every chivalrous bosom. The lightning of the crusade was in the people's hearts, and it wanted but one electric touch to make it flash forth upon the world.

§ 21. At this time a man, of whose early days we have no authentic knowledge, but that he was born at Amiens, and from a soldier had become a priest, after living for some time a hermit, became seized with the desire of visiting Jerusalem. Peter the hermit was, according to all accounts, small in stature and mean in person; but his eyes possessed a peculiar fire and intelligence, and his eloquence was powerful and flowing. Peter accomplished in safety his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paid the piece of gold demanded at the gates, and took up his lodging in the house of one of the pious Christians of the holy city. Here his first emotion seems to have been indignant horror at the barbarous and sacrilegious brutality of the Turks. The venerable prelate of Tyre represents him as conferring eagerly with his host upon the enormous cruelties of the infidels, even before visiting the general objects of devotion. Doubtless the ardent, passionate, enthusiastic mind of Peter had been wrought upon at every step he took in the holy land, by the miserable state of his brethren, till his feelings and imagination became excited to almost frantic vehemence.

Upon the return of Peter to Italy, he immediately sought the pontiff Urban, and laid before him such a touching recital of the suffering pilgrims in the holy land, as brought tears from his eyes; the general scheme of the crusade was sanctioned instantly, by his authority; and, promising his quick and active concurrence, he sent the pilgrim to preach the deliverance of the holy land, through all the countries of Europe. Peter wanted neither zeal nor activityfrom town to town, from province to province, from country to country, he spread the cry of vengeance on the Turks, and deliverance to Jerusalem! The warlike spirit of the people was at its height; the genius of chivalry was in the vigor of its early youth; the enthusiasm of religion had now a great and terrible object before it, and all the gates of the human heart were open to the eloquence of the preacher. That eloquence was not exerted in vain; nations arose at his word, and grasped the spear, and it only wanted some one to direct and point the great enterprise that was

* James, in his History of Chivalry and the Crusades.