In Germany to the Leipsic Disputation - James Aitken Wylie

surface. The luxury, lewdness, and impiety that
shocked him in the first Italian towns he had
entered, and which had attended him in every step
of his journey since crossing the Alps, were all
repeated in Rome on a scale of seven-fold
magnitude. His practice of saying mass at all the
more favored churches brought him into daily
contact with the priests; he saw them behind the
scenes; he heard their talk, and he could not
conceal from himself – though the discovery
unspeakably shocked and pained him – that these
men were simply playing a part, and that in private
they held in contempt and treated with mockery the
very rites which in public they celebrated with so
great a show of devotion. If he was shocked at their
profane levity, they on their part were no less
astonished at his solemn credulity, and jeered him
as a dull German, who had not genius enough to be
a skeptic, nor cunning enough to be a hypocrite – a
fossilized specimen, in short, of a fanaticism
common enough in the twelfth century, but which
it amazed them to find still existing in the
sixteenth.
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