[Sidenote: Foreign influence for reforming the papacy.] It had become absolutely necessary that something should be done for the reformation of the papacy. Its crimes, such as we have related in Chapter XII., Vol. I., outraged religious men. To the master-spirit of the movement for accomplishing this end we must closely look. He is the representative of influences that were presently to exert a most important agency. [Sidenote: Life of Gerbert.] In the train of the Emperor Otho III., when he resolved to put a stop to all this wickedness, was Gerbert, a French ecclesiastic, born in Auvergne. In his boyhood, while a scholar in the Abbey of Avrillac, he attracted the attention of his superiors; among others, of the Count of Barcelona, who took him to Spain. There he became a proficient in the mathematics, astronomy, and physics of the Mohammedan schools. [Sidenote: His Saracen education.] He spoke Arabic with the fluency of a Saracen. His residence at Cordova, where the khalif patronized all the learning and science of the age, and his subsequent residence in Rome, where he found an inconceivable ignorance and immorality, were not lost upon his future life. He established a school at Rheims, where he taught logic, music, astronomy, explained Virgil, Statius, Terence, and introduced what were at that time regarded as wonders, the globe and the abacus. He laboured to persuade his countrymen that learning is far to be preferred to the sports of the field. He observed the stars through tubes, invented a clock, and an organ played by steam. He composed a work on Rhetoric. Appointed Abbot of Bobbio, he fell into a misunderstanding with his monks, and had to retire first to Rome, and then to resume his school at Rheims. In the political events connected with the rise of Hugh Capet, he was again brought into prominence. [Sidenote: His reproaches against the Church.] The speech of the Bishop of Orleans at the Council of Rheims, which was his composition, shows us how his Mohammedan education had led him to look upon the state of things in Christendom: "There is not one at Rome, it is notorious, who knows enough of letters to qualify him for a door-keeper; with what face shall he presume to teach who has never learned?" He does not hesitate to allude to papal briberies and papal crimes: "If King Hugh's embassadors could have bribed the pope and Crescentius, his affairs had taken a different turn." He recounts the disgraces and crimes of the pontiffs: how John XII. had cut off the nose and tongue of John the Cardinal; how Boniface had strangled John XIII.; how John XIV. had been starved to death in the dungeons of the Castle of St. Angelo. He demands, "To such monsters, full of all infamy, void of all knowledge, human and divine, are all the priests of God to submit--men distinguished throughout the world for their learning and holy lives? The pontiff who so sins against his brother--who, when