sition. In Spain they
succeeded in getting the offending volumes of the _Acta_ censured, but
in Rome they were less successful, and so hot did the controversy
become that in 1698 a decree was issued imposing silence upon both
parties, until a formal decision should be promulgated--which has not
yet been done.

The historical origin of the Carmelites must be placed at the middle of
the 12th century, when a crusader from Calabria, named Berthold, and ten
companions established themselves as hermits near the cave of Elias on
Mount Carmel. A Greek monk, Phocas, who visited the Holy Land in 1185,
gives an account of them, and says that the ruins of an ancient building
existed on Mount Carmel; but though it is likely enough that there had
previously been Christian monks and hermits on the spot, it is
impossible to place the beginning of the Carmelite institute before
Berthold. About 1210 the hermits on Carmel received from Albert, Latin
patriarch of Jerusalem, a rule comprising sixteen articles. This was the
primitive Carmelite rule. The life prescribed was strictly eremitical:
the monks were to live in separate cells or huts, devoted to prayer and
work; they met only in the oratory for the liturgical services, and were
to live a life of great silence, seclusion, abstinence and austerity.
This rule received papal approbation in 1226. Soon, however, the losses
of the Christian arms in Palestine made Carmel an unsafe place of
residence for western hermits, and so, c. 1240, they migrated first to
Cyprus and thence to Sicily, France and England. In England the first
establishment was at Alnwick and the second at Aylesford, where the
first general chapter of the order was held in 1247, and St Simon Stock,
an English anchorite who had joined the order, was elected general.
During his generalate the institute was adapted to the conditions of the
western lands to which it had been transplanted, and for this purpose
the original rule had to be in many ways altered: the austerities were
mitigated, and the life was turned from eremitical into cenobitical, but
on the mendicant rather than the monastic model. The polity and
government were also organized on the same lines, and the Carmelites
were turned into mendicants and became one of the four great orders of
Mendicant Friars, in England distinguished as the "White Friars" from
the white mantle worn over the dark brown habit. This change was made
and the new rule approved in 1247, and u