"By St. Louis!" he exclaimed in
indignation, "it could be no gentleman who wrote that stuff!"
Our second anecdote is probably more generally known: Andrew Forman, who
was bishop of Moray and papal legate for Scotland, at an entertainment
given by him at Rome to the Pope and cardinals, blundered so in his
Latinity when he said grace that his Holiness and the cardinals lost
their gravity. The disconcerted bishop concluded his blessing by giving
"a' the fause carles to the de'il," to which the company, not
understanding his Scotch Latinity, said "Amen!"
When such was the condition of the bishops, it is not surprising to find
that few of the ordinary priests were acquainted with even the rudiments
of the Latin tongue, and they consequently mumbled over masses which
they did not understand. A rector of a parish, we are told, going to law
with his parishioners about paving the church, cited these words,
_Paveant illi, non paveam ego_, which, ascribing them to St. Peter, he
thus construed: "They are to pave the church, not I"--and this was
allowed to be good law by a judge who was himself an ecclesiastic.
We have an amusing example of the ignorance of the lower orders of
churchmen during the "dark ages" in No. xii of _A Hundred Mery Talys_,
as follows: "The archdekyn of Essex, that had ben longe in auctorite, in
a tyme of vysytacyon, whan all the prestys apperyd before hym, called
aside iii.
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