the beginning of the fifteenth century, and its author flourished a hundred years before Luther. It thus belongs to the age which must be accounted the darkest in the whole history of Christianity, when the light of God was well-nigh extinguished by the errors of men. Protestants, indeed, hardly think of the century before the Reformation as a time when Christianity existed at all; so vast is the accumulation of corruptions which meets the eye, that the religion of Christ almost seems to have disappeared.