In Switzerland from 1516 to 1525 - James Aitken Wylie

machinery of civil government that Church left
standing, but she contrived to place her own
functionaries in these chairs of rule. She talked
loftily of the kingly dignity, she styled princes the
"anointed of heaven;" but she deprived their
sceptres of all real power by the crosiers of her
bishops. In the year 1480 we find the inhabitants of
the Pays-de-Vaud complaining to Philibert, Duke
of Savoy, their liege lord, that his subjects who had
the misfortune to be in debt were made answerable,
not in his courts, but to the officer of the Bishop of
Lausanne, by whom they were visited with the
penalty of excommunication. The duke did not take
the matter so quietly as many others. He fulminated
a decree, dated "Chambeer, August 31st," against
this usurpation of his jurisdiction on the part of the
bishop.
It remains only that we touch on what was the
saddest part of the corruption of those melancholy
days, the libertinism of the clergy. Its frightful
excess makes the full and open exposure of the
scandal impossible. Oftener than once did the
Swiss cantons complain that their spiritual guides
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