and had frequented the
French churchmen, who (save in the highest ranks of the hierarchy) were
keenly alive to the need of reform, and ready, in many instances, to
sacrifice their own privileges in the public cause. These men, living in
their provincial cures or abbeys, were necessarily in closer contact
with the people, better acquainted with their needs and more competent
to relieve them, than the city demagogues theorising in Parisian
coffee-houses on the Rights of Man and the Code of Nature. But the voice
of the demagogues carried farther than that of the clergy; and such
revolutionary notions as crossed the Alps had more to do with the
founding of future Utopias than with the remedy of present evils.

Even in France the temperate counsels of the clergy were being overruled
by the sentimental imprudences of the nobles and by the bluster of the
politicians. It was to put Odo on his guard against these two influences
that de Crucis was chiefly anxious; but the intelligent cooperation of
the clergy was sadly lacking in his administrative scheme. He knew that
Odo could not count on the support of the Church party, and that he must
make what use he could of the liberals in his attempts at reform. The
clergy of Pianura had been in power too long to believe in the necessity
of conceding anything to the new spirit; and since the banishment of the
Society of Jesus the presumption of the other orders had increased
instead of diminishing. The priests, whatever their failings, had
attached the needy by a lavish bounty; and they had a powerful auxiliary
in the Madonna of the Mountain, who drew pilgrims from all parts of
Italy and thus contributed to the material welfare of the state as well
as to its spiritual privileges. To the common people their Virgin was
not only a protection against disease and famine, but a kind of oracle,
who by divers signs and tokens gave evidence of divine approval or
displeasure; and it was naturally to the priests that the faithful
looked for a reading of these phenomena. This gave the clergy a powerful
hold on the religious sensibilities of the people; and more than once
the manifest disapproval of the Mountain Madonna had turned the scales
against some economic measure which threatened the rights of her augurs.

De Crucis understood the force of these traditional influences; but Odo,
in common with the more cultivated men of his day, had lived too long in
an atmosphere of polite scepticism to mea