present the truths of Scripture to the
people in the most intelligible and picturesque way. Ascension Day was
one of the festivals of the Church which most especially needed some
such educational and popular celebration, to impress upon men's minds
how Christ by ascending to His Father to free them from the Devil and
from everlasting death, had opened wide the gates of heaven, and
_taken captivity captive_. No more striking significance could have
been given to the meaning of the festival than by the public release
of a prisoner who had been condemned to death. By slow degrees this
release became an annual grace accorded to the Church in its holy
office of public instructor.

And it was no new thing to invest with such extraordinary privileges
the powerful princes of a church which was the visible representative
of Divine Providence on earth.[23] The bishops of Orleans, for
instance, possessed even until the last years of Louis XV. the
prerogative of pardoning every single criminal in the prisons on the
day of their solemn entry into their episcopal see. This, at first
sight, appears a wider power than any possessed by a bishop of Rouen,
who, on one day in the year, voted as a canon in his Chapterhouse for
the release of one prisoner and his accomplices. But the opportunity
of the bishops of Orleans came only once in a lifetime, that of the
Chapterhouse of Rouen was renewed against all opposition every year
for some six centuries, and M. Floquet has discovered a manuscript
which proves that the prerogative of pardon was granted in addition,
within certain limits, to the bishop by virtue of his office, as it
was in 1393, when Guillaume de Vienne entered his diocese in state on
a Sunday in September 1393. Yet no historian seems yet to have
noticed this most striking fact. How it must have impressed the
popular imagination may easily be estimated from the known horrors of
the dungeons and "lakes of misery" in which, at Rouen and most
mediaeval cities, the criminals were condemned to linger. The
"resurrection of the dead" would be no exaggerated description for the
act of pardon which released a prisoner from the hideous dens of a
twelfth-century jail. Certainly no act could more clearly fix on all
men's minds the meaning of a sacred season and the power of the
Church.

[Footnote 23: Outside France the Bishop of Geneva is a famous example
of this ecclesiastical right of pardon; and even limiting ourselves to
French Terri