Preaching, although very rare, contributed to thicken the darkness, it would seem, rather than to dispel it. Bossuet acknowledges this with precautions which but half conceal his thoughts: “Many preachers preached only indulgences, pilgrimages, alms to the religious orders, and made the essence of piety to consist in these practices, which were but its accessories. They did not speak so much as they should have done of the grace of Jesus Christ.”[2] The Bible was silent beneath the dust of old libraries. It was kept in some places fastened with an iron chain; sad image of the interdiction with which it was stricken in the Catholic world. After having forbidden it to the faithful, the clergy, by a very simple consequence, had closed the Bible in their own schools. A short while before the Reformation, the professors of Germany had been prohibited from explaining the Holy Word in their public and private lectures. The original tongues of the Old and New Testament were, so to say, suspected of heresy; and when Luther raised his voice, it would have been difficult to find in the church of Rome any doctors capable of discussing with him the text of the Scriptures. In this deep silence of the sacred authors, ignorance, prejudice, ambition, avarice, had free speech. The priest frequently used this liberty not for the glory of God, but of himself; and religion, destined to transform man into the image of his Creator, ended by transforming the Creator himself into the image of cupidinous and intolerant man. Theology, after having shone with a splendid light in the brilliant days of scholasticism, had by degrees lost its ardour as well as its authority, and had become an enormous collection of curious and frivolous questions. Incessantly occupied with sharpening in puerile disputes the point of its logic, it no longer answered the wants of the human mind any more than those of the human heart. The masses of the people appeared to follow, in general, their accustomed way; but from habit and tradition, rather than from devotion. The enthusiasm of the Middle Age had evaporated, and it would have been vain to seek in the Church for those mighty inspirations, which caused all Europe to rise at the time of the crusades. Some pious men dwelt in the presbyteries, in the cloisters, among the laity, striving to seize the truth through the veil with which it had been covered; but they were scattered, suspected, and cast down with grief. Discipline had shared the alterations of doctrine. The pontiff of Rome having, under favour of the false Decretals, usurped the title and the functions of universal bishop, pretended to the exercise of most of the rights which belonged, in the first ages, to the heads of dioceses; and as he was not ubiquitous, as he was obedient to his passions or to his interests more than to his duties, he aggravated the abuses which he ought to have extirpated.