Why the attempted Reformation failed.

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of the sixteen dogmas attributed by the Inquisition at Carcassonne to the heretics of the neighbourhood, would seem to confirm our expectation: "Dicunt quòd simplex fornicatio non est peccatum aliquod." This note, made for the private use of the Inquisitors, had probably some foundation in fact: we may suppose that some one among the many sects into which the heretics of the South were divided, had fallen into immoral and antinomian tendencies. But this certainly was not the case with the Cathari as a body. Their contemporaries, friends, and enemies are unanimous in ascribing to them generally a purity of life, which stood in striking contrast with the manners of the age, and with the disorders of the Clergy in particular. The movement owed its strength, in a great measure, to a sincere horror of prevalent licentiousness; and the number of persons who made full profession, by enrolling themselves among the Perfect, was so small, that we can understand that it was limited to those who were capable of living up to their austere calling. The strict morality of the sectaries was sometimes actually the means of their detection. Thus, at Rheims, in 1170, a Priest who made base proposals to a beautiful young girl, discovered, by the terms in which she repelled his addresses, that she belonged to a society who had bound themselves to perpetual chastity. Such was the temper of the times, that this wretch was not ashamed or afraid to give information of his discovery to his ecclesiastical superiors, knowing that, in their eyes, his zeal against heresy would more than counterbalance the crime he had contemplated. The innocent girl was burnt at the stake, becoming the victim of priestly cruelty for having refused to be that of priestly lust.

The great practical evil resulting from the theoretical errors of the Cathari, was not so much any wrong they did, as the good they left undone. It was an attempt at reformation or religious revival, which failed for want of pure Christian principle in its promoters. They were unconsciously borne by the same current as the Church that persecuted them; and they tried to raise Christendom from its religious and moral degradation, by exaggerating the very influences which had produced the evil,-by yet more false views of human nature, and a sterner asceticism, and a stronger distinction between the spiritual man and the secular, rendering what they represented as Christianity unattainable by the great mass of mankind. With them, quite as much as with the Roman Catholics, salvation was made to depend upon adhesion to a given religious community; and, as the auditors generally put off receiving the consolamentum to the hour of death, this ceremony became invested with a magical virtue, like the sacraments of the dominant Church; and the hope of receiving it in their last moments encouraged the people to live in fatal security, without feeling the necessity of a moral change

and real reconciliation with God. The movement so far resembled the Reformation of the sixteenth century, that their formal principle was the same: the New Testament was in honour, and was made much more use of than in the Church of Rome. But the method of interpretation and the material principle were not the same: there were no forgotten truths recovered, no deep springs of spiritual life laid open. They believed themselves more antiCatholic than they were; and when the two mendicant orders were instituted, and the Church thereby diverted into its own channels the spirit of austerity which was abroad, it proved to be an effectual blow to the power and progress of the sectaries. Men predisposed to an ardent, but gloomy and unenlightened, piety, became Dominicans and Franciscans, instead of becoming heretics; and persecuted to death those with whom they would have been associated, but for this skilful manœuvre of the evervigilant and dexterous hierarchy.

Reinerius Sacchoni supposes the number of the Perfect of both sexes in his time, throughout the whole of Europe, amounted to four thousand persons only. It is true, he writes after the Crusade against the Albigenses, and after great severities of the Inquisition in Italy; still his estimate shows that the effective members of the sect must have been very few, in proportion to the number of auditors or followers who were under their influence. This, as it has been already intimated, was one reason why they did not succeed in working any moral change in the bulk of the population; it was also the reason of their weakness in the hour of danger. The immense majority of the multitudes who perished by the arms of Simon de Montfort and his Crusaders, were not themselves Cathari, but only respected and favoured the heretics; they had religious sympathies, but it was not their own faith that they defended. The King of Arragon, who died fighting their battles, was a Catholic. The Princes and nobles, who headed them in their heroic resistance, remained Catholics all through: they defended their own temporal interests in the first place, and they tried indirectly to tolerate the convictions of their subjects, but never went so far as to claim openly the right to do so. The Fourth Lateran Council saw the Counts of Toulouse, father and son, with the Counts of Comminges and Foix, on their knees at the feet of Innocent III. The very historian of the Albigenses, William of Tudela, writes as a Catholic: he execrates the cruelty and perfidy of the Crusaders; he accuses them of advisedly treating Catholic Princes and populations as heretical, in order to have an excuse for massacre and spoil; but he is evidently sustained in his indignation by no religious principle of his own. The Church of the Cathari was that of a select few, not that of the people.

Towards the close of the twelfth century, the Albigenses were so powerful in the south of France that, in 1165, we find

Character of Innocent III.

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Roman Catholic Prelates engaging in a free discussion with their leaders before all the leading nobles of the country, at Lombers, near Alby. Twelve years afterwards Raimond V. Count of Toulouse, being at war with the Viscount of Beziers, who protected the sectaries, addressed himself to the Kings of France and England for help to extirpate heresy in his own dominions, and in the neighbouring regions. This demand brought about the mission of a Papal Legate to Toulouse, followed by some severities in that city. The Bishop of Bath, and Henri, Abbot of Clairvaux, also ineffectually visited Beziers. The attention of the Papal See was by this time thoroughly roused, and the Third Lateran Council, held under Alexander III. in 1179, and at which many Prelates of the south of France were present, issued a terrible edict against the heretics of Languedoc and Gascony. All men were forbidden, under pain of excommunication, to receive them into their houses, or to have any dealings with them; church sepulture was to be refused to those who died impenitent; Princes were exhorted to seize the property of those who favoured heresy, and to reduce their persons to slavery. The result of this sentence was the short Crusade of 1181, headed by the Abbot of Clairvaux,bloody prelude of the horrors that were afterwards to be enacted in the same cause. The Viscount of Beziers was reduced to apparent submission, after his country had been cruelly devastated.

Great as was the amount of suffering inflicted upon the Cathari during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it had been always, more or less, local and partial persecution. There had been no general, persevering, systematic attempt to exterminate them. Meantime they had spread from Constantinople to Spain; they were masters in the Sclavonic Provinces, which now form the north-east of Turkey; they were formidable in Lombardy; they had audaciously insinuated themselves into the Pontifical city itself; above all, the only transalpine nation that had emerged from barbarism, had almost thrown off its allegiance to Rome; heresy sat enthroned in a central region, whence, in one generation, it could spread over France, Spain, and Italy. The Church was in peril; but the year 1198 witnessed the beginning of a pontificate, in which an iron will was to put forth in her service all the resources of rare intrepidity, unremitting vigilance, and far-seeing sagacity. Innocent III. was the very incarnation of the idea of the Papacy; he was distinguished by precisely the sort of character and talents which were qualified to effect the purposes of the hierarchy of which he was the head. Inspired by a lofty ambition, to which inferior temptations were sacrificed, he was above the grosser vices which had so often discredited the Papacy. Nor was his the vulgar ambition of personal aggran

dizement. Sincerely convinced that God had appointed the See of Rome to exercise supreme authority over the universal Christian world, in temporal matters as well as in spiritual, so that its empire should constitute the unity of society, he pursued the realization of this ideal with the most prodigious energy and success, clothing himself meanwhile with the moral grandeur that always attends intense devotion to any great purpose. Innocent exercised severe control over himself; for, as he expressed it, he who was not to be judged by men, would be the more severely judged by Almighty God. He exercised an equally stern control over the other members of the hierarchy, endeavouring to render them worthy of the superhuman dignity which he attributed to them. He completed the work of Gregory VII., by rendering the celibacy of the Clergy universally obligatory,-a violent remedy for their then prevalent licentiousness, but a means of procuring them consideration in the eyes of the people, of severing them from ordinary human interests, and of disciplining them into entire devotedness to their order. He won respect and sympathy for the Church, by the unflinching courage with which he maintained the sanctity of marriage against the caprices of powerful Princes, and in general by taking the side of the oppressed and wronged; yet none knew better how to stoop to compromise when success seemed impossible, and how to leave impenitent great men room for apparent reconciliation. Alternately inflexible and supple, with the ardour of a fanatic and the tact of a diplomatist, he piloted with penetrating glance between conflicting parties, choosing his instruments, friends, or clients, or giving them up again, with a single view to the great purpose of his life. This Pontiff was, far more than any contemporaneous Sovereign, the prominent great man of his age. He made his word respected in half-savage Scandinavia, cowed England's weak and brutal John, and then protected him against all his enemies, received England and Arragon as fiefs of the Apostolic See, reconciled, for a time at least, Bulgaria and Armenia with the Latin Church, bestowed the title of King repeatedly, and had his right to do so recognised by the world, made and unmade Emperors, protested against the Magna Charta, acted as Regent over Naples and Sicily with vigour, sustained the Crusaders in the conquest of Constantinople, founded the order of the Knights Sword-Bearers to extend the Church's frontiers, completed the edifice of her doctrines, destroyed the last vestiges of the independence of the city of Rome; and, with all this, took cognizance of innumerable public and domestic questions. No quarrel of an obscure Baron with a neighbouring monastery could escape unnoticed. His Legates were every where, making peace or scattering anathemas.

"O!" exclaimed he, in his discourse on the day of his conse

Severities of Innocent III. in his own Dominions.

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cration, "O! how I need prudence in order to be able to separate the leprous from the clean, good from evil, light from darkness, salvation from perdition......that I may not condemn to death the souls that ought to live, nor judge worthy of life those that should die !......Who am I, that I should be set above Kings, and occupy the seat of honour? for it is of me that it is said by the Prophet: 'I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.' (Jer. i. 10.)" Such words as these were the ominous utterance of a man, capable of persecuting to death the enemies of his idol, and thinking that he thereby did God service. Three years later, he said, in a letter to Otho, the one among the pretenders to the empire whom he then favoured, "At the beginning of the world, God put two great lights in the vault of Heaven, one to shine during the day, the other to give light by night. It is thus that he has established in the firmament of the Church two great dignities; one to shine by day, that is, to illumine intelligences on spiritual things, and deliver from their chains souls held fast in error; the other to give light by night,—that is, to punish hardened heretics and enemies of the faith, for the insult offered to Christ and His people, and to hold the temporal sword for the chastisement of malefactors, and the glory of the faithful." No language could better express the system partially acted upon in the Middle Ages, and which every energetic Pope tried to realize completely, the unity of Christian society in a theocracy, with the Bishop of Rome at its head, and the civil power occupying the place of executioner. This conception is the key of Innocent's conduct towards the thousands for whose blood he made himself responsible, doubtless, without one moment's hesitation or remorse. No sooner had he been chosen Pope, than he proceeded to prepare for the extermination of the heretics, those scorpions and locusts of the Apocalypse,―as one of the great ends of his reign.

Hurter, who held the office of Antistes or Chief of the Protestant Clergy of Schafhausen, when he wrote the Life of Innocent, but who has since thrown off the mask, and professed himself a Roman Catholic, asserts that the Pontiff he idolizes was at first disposed to act mildly towards the recusants; and this idea is apparently countenanced by his artful show of moderation, as far as the Count of Toulouse was concerned; but it is abundantly refuted by his severity from the very outset to the Italian Cathari, who were under his own jurisdiction. Orvieto, for instance, he appointed as Governor a young Roman nobleman, Peter Parentio, who wielded the scourge and the axe without mercy, until he was himself murdered by some of the townspeople driven to desperation. The possibility of such a catastrophe had suggested itself to Parentio and his master; and