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It is clear that, to some extent, such a transition is the result of that state of poverty to which the secular clergy have been reduced; and hence it is that many priests, particularly those in the country, have given themselves up to a variety of secular pursuits and speculations, which are expressly prohibited by the canon laws, and which appear incompatible with the dignity and character of their ministry.
But this secular celebration of Augustus is interesting aside from the relation of Juppiter and Apollo, for it affords another illustration of the skilful combination of new and old in the Augustan reorganisation. In form the festival is avowedly the old one, but in two respects at least it introduces a new element.
When Isabella of England met her bridegroom, the Emperor Frederick II, at Cologne, she was met by a number of such chariots, drawn by invisible horses, and filled with a crowd of priests who welcomed her with music and singing. But the religious processions were not only mingled with secular accessories of all kinds, but were often replaced by processions of clerical masks.
Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton boarding-school for ten years, and had been through "Keith on the Use of the Globes," was much scandalised at this "appropriation of the sacred edifice to secular purposes," as she called it, but she met with no encouragement.
Lastly the Visitors were authorised to seize any church furniture or jewels that they might judge would be better in secular custody. Once more, he had learned both from Cromwell, and from his own experience at Paul's Cross, how the laity itself was being carefully prepared for the blow that was impending, by an army of selected preachers who could be trusted to say what they were told.
It is a phase of the same fact to say that he also represented the active force of religious feeling in politics, as opposed to pure secular statesmanship.
They refuse to be guided and ruled. They rebel against spiritual and secular authority, and follow no longer the bell-wether with the timid gregariousness of servility and irresolution.
It was the trial of a spiritual offence in a secular court, and it was the virtual suspension of the law of the Church by the authority of the State. Still no embassy went to Rome. Christmas came and it had not gone.
Till, as we read in humility and in love, we learn to separate-off all that is local, and secular, and ecclesiastical, and circumstantial, and then we immensely enjoy and take lasting profit out of all that which is so truly Catholic and so truly spiritual. Teresa was an extraordinary woman in every way: and that comes out on every page of her Autobiography.
From the moment that Rome was separated from the authority of the Italian Kings, there existed two powers in the Peninsula the one secular, monarchical, with the military strength of the barbarians imposed upon its ancient municipal organization; the other ecclesiastical, pontifical, relying on the undefined ambitions of S. Peter's See and the unconquered instincts of the Roman people scattered through the still surviving cities.
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