lous multitude, filled with the kindling interaction of
enthusiasm, of course prodigies would abound, fables would
flourish, and faith would be doubly generated and fortified. In
commemoration of a miraculous act of virtue performed by St.
Francis, the pope offered to all who should enter the church at
Assisi between the eve of the 1st and the eve of the 2d of August
each year that being the anniversary of the saint's achievement a
free pardon for all the sins committed by them since their
baptism. More than sixty thousand pilgrims sometimes flocked
thither on that day. Every year some were crushed to death in the
suffocating pressure at the entrance of the church. Nearly two
thousand friars walked in procession; and for a series of years
the pilgrimage to Portiuncula might have vied with that to the
temple of Juggernaut.33

Nothing tends more to strengthen any given belief than to see it
everywhere carried into practice and to act in accordance with it.
Thus was it with the mediaval doctrine of the future life. Its
applications and results were constantly and universally thrust
into notice by the sale of indulgences and the launching of
excommunications. Early in the ninth century, Charlemagne
complained that the bishops and abbots forced property from
foolish people by promises and threats: "Suadendo de coelestis
regni beatitudine, comminando de oeterno supplicio inferni."34 The
rival mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans,
acquired great riches and power by the traffic in indulgences.
They even had the impudence to affirm that the members of their
orders were privileged above all other men in the next world.
Milton alludes to those who credited these monstrous assumptions:
"And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying, put on the weeds of
Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised."

The Council of Basle censured the claim of the Franciscan monks
that their founder annually descended to purgatory and led thence
to heaven the souls of all those who had belonged to his order.
The Carmelites also asserted that the Virgin Mary appeared to
Simon Stockius, the general of their order, and gave him a solemn
promise that the souls of such as left the world with the
Carmelite scapulary upon their shoulders should be infallibly
preserved from eternal damnation. Mosheim says that Pope Benedict
XIV. was an open defender of this ridiculous fiction.35

If any one would appreciate the full mediaval doctrine