working use of the relics of martyrs
and saints to exorcise demons from the possessed and to heal the
sick, and by her anathemas against all who were supposed to be
hostile to her formulas, she infused the ideas of her doctrinal
system into the intellect, heart, and fancy of the common people,
and nourished the collateral horrors, until every wave of her wand
convulsed the world. In a pastoral letter addressed to the
Carlovingian prince Louis, the grandson of Charlemagne, a letter
probably composed by the famous Hincmar, bearing date 858, and
signed by the Bishops of Rheims and Rouen, a Gallic synod
authoritatively declared that Charles Martel was damned; "that on
the opening of his tomb the spectators were affrighted by a smell
of fire and the aspect of a horrid dragon, and that a saint of the
times was indulged with a pleasant vision of the soul and body of
this great hero burning to all eternity in the abyss of hell."

28 Early English Miscellanies, No. 2.

29 London Antiquaries' Archaologis, vol. xxxv. art. 22.

30 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. i., appendix.

A tremendous impulse, vivifying and emphasizing the eschatological
notions of the time, an impulse whose effects did not cease when
it died, was imparted by that frightful epidemic expectation of
the impending end of the world which wellnigh universally
prevailed in Christendom about the year 1000. Many of the charters
given at that time commence with the words, "As the world is now
drawing to a close." 31 This expectation drew additional strength
from the unutterable sufferings famine, oppression, pestilence,
war, superstition then weighing on the people. "The idea of the
end of the world," we quote from Michelet, "sad as that world was,
was at once the hope and the terror of the Middle Age. Look at
those antique statues of the tenth and eleventh centuries, mute,
meager, their pinched and stiffened lineaments grinning with a
look of living suffering allied to the repulsiveness of death. See
how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired yet dreaded
moment when the resurrection shall redeem them from their
unspeakable sorrows and raise them from nothingness into existence
and from the grave to God."

Furthermore, this superstitious character of the mediaval belief
in the future life acquired breadth and intensity from the
profound general ignorance and trembling credulousness of that
whole period on all subjects. It was an age of marvels, rom