With Boniface the Papacy was utterly humiliated. In 1309, within eighteen years of the fall of Acre into the hands of the Moslems, the popes were in exile at Avignon, and the government of the church became the foot-ball of secular ambition. Clement V. (1305-12) ascended the papal throne as the creature of Philip the Fair of France, and was forced to lend himself to that monarch’s cruel and unjust persecution of the Templars, which order was abolished and its Grand Master burned at the stake in 1312. With the diminished prestige of the Papacy came the renaissance of freer thought throughout the world. The failure of the crusades to conquer the Moslem, and the futile experiments of war upon heretical sects like the Waldenses and Albigenses, led to a partial suppression of the epidemic for forceful conversions, and to a healthful recollection of our Saviour’s command to Peter, “Put up thy sword.” In this better condition of the human mind germinated the modern evangelical methods, the first-fruit of which was to appear in the Protestant Reformation. There was something in the life of the crusaders that was favorable to the growth of a new political sentiment, a popular, not to say a democratic, impulse, which directly conduced to our modern civil liberties. In their long and adventurous marches, in the common camp and fighting together within or beneath the same fortresses, the lord and his retainers came close to one another. The common man saw that his muscles were as strong, his mind as astute, his character as good, as that of his crested superior. Manhood rediscovered itself on those Eastern plains. The returned knight could no longer disdain intercourse with the brave men whose hamlet nestled beneath his castle walls. Their common courage, the many scenes with which both classes were familiar, the dangers they had shared, were repeated in story and song about the castle gate. Aristocratic presumption more than once evoked insurrection among the brawny fellows, who sang: “We, too, are men; As great hearts have we, And our strength as theirs.” In their home forays there were to be seen, together with the ensigns of the feudal lords, the popular banners of the parishes. Indeed, the new power of the people came to be the reliance of the king in his contest with rebel lords. Thus everywhere were silently germinated the forces of the commune and of the Third Estate in France, whose first assembly was held in 1302. In 1215 England secured for itself Magna Charta, the central regulation of which was that no freeman should “be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate but by the judgment of his peers” and “by laws of the land,” a grant to liberty which stood in spite of the fact that the Pope declared it to be null and void. In 1265 there came together the first regular Parliament of England with the House of Commons a constituent branch.