The people despised the clergy, and were favourably disposed to every
reformer; at the same time they were entirely under the sway of a
superstitious awe of the administrators of mysterious magic which, by
appropriate practices, or by means of presents, could be turned to
advantage. The fetichism of relics flourished everywhere; a sufficient
number of pieces of the Cross of Christ were sold and worshipped to
furnish trees for a big forest--to say nothing of the bones of numerous
saints with which many monasteries, more especially French monasteries,
did a lucrative trade. Even at the time this traffic repelled the finer
intellects; in A.D. 1200, Guibert, the abbot of Novigentum, preached
against the cult of the saints and the worship of relics, adducing all
the well-known arguments which to this day, however, have proved
insufficient to overcome the evil. In Guibert's words, "It was an
abominable nuisance that certain limbs should be detached from the body,
thereby defying the law that all bodies must turn to dust.
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