measures in his decree Excommunicamus. Strict enquiry must be made everywhere; mere suspects must prove their innocence or recant or finally be condemned; and all civil authorities must be compelled, on pain of heresy themselves, to swear publicly "that they will strive in good faith, to the utmost of their power, to exterminate from the lands subject to their obedience all heretics who have been marked by the Church." And one of the main errors which calls for these desperate measures is disbelief in Transubstantiation.

From this it will be seen how false it is to represent the Inquisition mainly as a bulwark against social anarchy, or even to suggest that the needs of the State were here comparable with those of the Church. The fact that the pope, when once he felt the necessity of declaring war against heresy, could count upon enlisting a sufficient army of layfolk to back him up, is no proof that these layfolk were in the forefront of the battle: they were rather in the position of the German people in 1914, when once the Kaiser had decided to mobilize. But a pope like Innocent III, and a philosopher like Aquinas, were far more concerned for men's morals than for the framework of the civil State. And even morals sank into insignificance before Faith. Innocent III preached no crusade against the immoral Archbishops of Narbonne and Auch. The list of their sins was terrible, and he publicly recognized that this supplied the greatest force to the heretics; yet both were suffered to continue in their office for more than twenty years. The Church could easily have commanded the physical force necessary to expel these episcopal sinners, if that had indeed been her first and main concern. Instead of this, she levied her armies against the religious nonconformists, even though St. Bernard had tacitly admitted that, outwardly at least, these men's morals contrasted favourably with those of the clergy. With Innocent III in the thirteenth century, as with the greatest orthodox writers down to Newman in the nineteenth, Faith came first in importance, Morals second (in so far as they can be judged by men's outward actions), and Civilization a bad third.

For instance, Raymond Lull's proposition that God, in His mercy, would save more souls than He damned, cannot in any sense be called antinomian or anti-social. On the contrary, in our modern society, which is far more law-abiding on the whole than medieval society ever was, the enormous majority of citizens, including those who claim to inherit medieval orthodoxy, would

probably side rather with Lull than with Aquinas on that point; and they would certainly repudiate Berthold of Regensburg, who, with implicit ecclesiastical approval, calculated the chances of salvation at one in a hundred thousand. Yet any unrepentant believer in Lull's proposition came as definitely under the ban of the Inquisition, and was as inevitably doomed to the stake, as an Albigensian who might condemn flesh-eating and marriage and oaths as mortal sins, and who might be ready to take up arms in defence of those doctrines. Good friar Berthold's estimate was far more anti-social than even that violent outburst of a heretic in 1247: "If I could lay hold on that god who, out of a thousand men whom he had made, should save one and damn all the rest, then I would tear and rend him tooth and nail as a traitor, and would count him for a false traitor and spit in his face."* On this subject of the proportion of damned to saved, there is probably far closer agreement between the present pope and the president of the Baptist Union, than between either of them and Innocent III. To Innocent, the mere framework of civil society was a thing temporary and insignificant compared with the Church.

It is sometimes argued that this is idle academic logic-chopping; that, as a matter of fact and practice, medieval Church and State were simply two aspects of the same society; and that he who attacked the one necessarily attacked the other. There is a halftruth here; but those who argue from it as a complete and final verity go farther astray, perhaps, than those others who have neglected it altogether. In spite of medieval academic theories, Church and State were seldom, if ever, identical and absolutely harmonious in practice. Indeed, their frequent rivalries and discords are perhaps even more significant for social history than their concord. It is true that each, when attacked from outside, was glad to invoke the other as ally: "If you touch me, the State, you attack the very foundations of religion": or, " If you touch me, the Church, you attack the very foundations of human society." But such words as these have not survived the acid test of experience. Four centuries ago, the medieval Church was revolutionized. At the present day, even its nominal adherents number only about one-third of the Caucasian race and not onesixth of the whole world. Moreover, even within the Church

*Douais. "Documents," etc., vol. 2 (1900), p. 100. Another count against this heretic was his assertion that officials who condemned heretics to death were homicides, since death-sentences were immoral. VOL. 246. NO. 501.

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itself, there have been revulsions of thought on points which are of capital importance for human destiny. Yet civil society has not fallen to pieces; on the contrary, it secures far completer obedience to its laws, with far less exertion or friction, than it secured before the Reformation.

But it has needed the experience of many years to establish this truth; and, in 1200, most men admitted in theory, and were frequently willing to admit in practice, the quasi-identity of Church and State. From this it followed, as a matter of course, that those who could not conform to the Church were ordinarily punished by the State, and (if the Church so decided) even to the death. But, in insisting upon this as a very grievous miscalculation, let me not seem to ignore that it was also very human, and that a modern Prime Minister, with all the country behind him, may easily blunder in a fashion which will be equally obvious to later generations. It is for the apologist, if he is so inclined, to draw a hard-and-fast distinction here, and to argue that a pope could never have miscalculated in this field of morals so far as a Prime Minister can.

Among the modern apologists (though not on this particular point) we must put Mr. Bernard Shaw, who, with something like Mr. Maycock's historical qualifications, comes to something like the same conclusions, and who has doubtless exercised far more influence. Thousands of readers will form their conception of the Inquisition from "St. Joan," just as thousands in the past owed their ideas of nunnery-life to Scott's "Marmion," and as thousands of earlier readers were dominated by the Joan of Henry VI." Moreover, it adds to this confusion that Mr. Shaw, who takes many matters of real importance so lightly, here conceives his own function of historian in such deadly earnest. It may almost be said that the absurdities of his preface are the natural shadows of his dramatic brilliancy. The strength of the play lies in its happy adaptation to a modern audience. We and our neighbours, in the circumstances among which Mr. Shaw places his characters, would indeed feel and act thus ; apart from a few characteristic exaggerations, his pathos and his comedy are alike true; true, that is, to their particular atmosphere. But Joan and her contemporaries were not modern people; and their atmosphere was often far outside Mr. Shaw's imagination or his reading.

Therefore, while the play moves us to tears and laughter, the

preface is often frankly foolish. It assures us that "Joan got a fairer trial from the Church and the Inquisition than any prisoner of her type and in her situation gets nowadays in any official secular court"; that " Joan was persecuted essentially as she would be persecuted to-day "; that in her case the Inquisition was "essentially merciful"; that the worst of bygone atrocities caused less misery than a modern prison, and "that there was not the smallest ground for the self-complacent conviction of the nineteenth century that it was more tolerant than the fifteenth" ("Preface," pp. 10, 33, 38, 46). These assertions, for all their tone of conviction, are merely temperamental outbursts and tricks of Mr. Shaw's trade. Wherever he claims to be writing most seriously, his reasons amount under analysis to this, that, having discovered a few resemblances, he claims the right of treating them as identities. There were injustices in fifteenth century France, there are injustices in modern England; we have an M in Macedon and in Monmouth; therefore there is nothing to choose between the two. Mr. Shaw's emphasis on unexpected superficial resemblances is, as an occasional inspiration, childlike and engaging; but, as a stock literary cliché, it becomes merely childish; and the author's truth to modern human nature renders him all the more misleading when he sets himself to tickle the groundlings with paradoxes on the medieval Inquisition.

It would be ridiculous to reason seriously with this kind of thing, if Mr. Maycock's book were not here to show us how easily such irresponsible paradoxes may be passed on from journalist to journalist until they are accepted almost as truisms. Let us remind ourselves, then, that the medieval nonconformist became not only an excommunicate, which might not so much matter to a man convinced that he was nearer to the truth, but also an outlaw, which was far more serious. When once well-meaning folk like the Waldenses and the Fraticelli had been thus driven underground, it was easy to invent any lies about them.* Men accused

*Lea, in his anxiety to be impartial, accepts a great deal of evidence against the Albigensians which, if it were admitted in any modern law court against Mr. Shaw, might indeed go a little way towards justifying his tirades against the society of his own day. That some of these men held strongly anti-social doctrines need not be doubted; but that the whole mass of them would have overturned existing society is a far more doubtful proposition. There is no evidence against them which Mr. Shaw would dream of accepting, unless it helped him to some new paradox.

them of promiscuous lust in their secret conventicles; or of an abomination called barilotto, which added to this promiscuity the crime of roasting a new-born child in public at a fire and drinking a sacramental cup mingled with the ashes. One unhappy Italian peasant, Antonio da Sacco (A.D. 1466), persistently denied complicity in this crime, until torture extorted a confession from him. Then," as soon as he was taken off the rack, he denied that he had ever been at the barilotto, but he had indeed heard talk [of it]." He recognized now, however, that he had previously obeyed the devil; he was willing now to confess to the orthodox priests, and to serve the pope "in any service, even in the stable and in double chains." This crawling surrender, said his judges, was an evident victory for the truth: "for the holy martyrs, who suffered for the true Faith, not only feared no torments, but laughed at them and overcame them; yet this Antonio, at the very first stage of torture, was conquered by the truth." However, even in this, his deepest humiliation, the man protested against his previous confession of infamy.

He said of his own accord : "See, my lords! yesterday, on the rack, I said that I had twice been at the barilotto; this is not true. I have a wife, young and fair, and a comely daughter here in prison at Santo Spirito; and for that cause I would never have permitted [such a thing]." Moreover, coming nearer and nearer, he said humbly," My lords, pardon me !

No historian of the Inquisition has yet taken notice, so far as I know, of this poor wretch and his fellow-peasants, as portrayed in their persecutors' official records; yet there is perhaps no document which throws more significant light on what might be done at any moment in the name of Christ's religion.* What did Antonio's protest avail? The orthodox multitude believed these things against heretics as they would have believed them against us if we had lived in those days. If Mr. Shaw could go back to a society which rewarded the provocative paradox-monger no longer with dollars and popularity but with outlawry; and if he had then attempted to write or talk as we laugh with him, or at him, for writing and talking to-day, then he would either have disappeared nameless and unlamented, or we should possess some casual mention of him as a bestial degenerate, who lurked for a few years among the dregs of the people, and finally met his deserts. It is

*Ehrle and Denifle, " Archiv," etc., vol iv, pp. 129 ff.