Henry Charles Lea

“ Even in modern times we have seen, in outbursts like the Revolution of ’89, the possibilities of popular frenzy when reason is dethroned by passion. Yet the madness of the Reign of Terror is no unapt illustration of the violent emotions to which mediæval populations were subject, for good or for evil, giving occasion to the startling contrasts which render the period so picturesque, and relieve the sordidness of its daily life with splendid exhibitions of the loftiest enthusiasm or with hideous deeds of brutality. ”

“ Thus in a foray of 1429, which cut a swath through Franconia, Saxony, and the Vogtland, over a hundred castles and fortified towns were captured, and an immense booty was carried back to Bohemia. Misnia, Lusatia, Silesia, Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary in turn felt the weight of the Hussite sword, while the prompt retirement of the invaders in every case showed that retaliation and not conquest was their object. It was no wonder that a general cry for peace went up among those who bore the brunt of the effort to reassert the papal supremacy. ”

“ I adjure thee by the God who in thee cleansed Naaman, the Syrian, of his leprosy;—saying, O holy water, O blessed water, water which washest the dust and sins of the world, I adjure thee by the living God that thou shalt show thyself pure, nor retain any false image, but shalt be exorcised water, to make manifest and reveal and bring to naught all falsehood, and to make manifest and bring to light all truth; so that he who shall place his hand in thee, if his cause be just and true, shall receive no hurt ”

“ A man like San Giovanni Capistrano could scarce walk the streets of a city without an armed guard to preserve his life from the surging crowds eager to secure a rag of his garments as a relic or to carry away some odour of his holiness by touching him with a stick. Venice, which cared little for an interdict, offered in vain ten thousand ducats, in 1455, for a seamless coat of Christ. ”

“ Such was the condition of Castile when the death of the miserable Henry IV, December 12, 1474, cast the responsibility of royalty on his sister Isabella and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon. The power of the crown was eclipsed; the land was ravaged with interminable war between nobles who were practically independent; the sentiment of loyalty and patriotism seemed extinct: deceit and treachery, false oaths—whatever would serve cupidity and ambition—were universal; justice was bought and sold; private vengeance was exercised without restraint; there was no security for life and property. ”

“ The really effective weapons of the Holy Office, the real curses with which it afflicted the people, can be looked for in its dungeons and its confiscations, in the humiliating penances of the saffron crosses, and in the invisible police with which it benumbed the heart and soul of every man who had once fallen into its hands.
A few words will suffice as to the repulsive subject of the execution itself. When the populace was called together to view the last agonies of the martyrs of heresy, its pious zeal was not mocked by any ill-advised devices of mercy. ”

“ In the forty-second generation there will be a purgation which will separate the wheat from the chaff—such tribulations as man has never yet endured: fortunately they will be short, or all flesh would perish utterly. After this, religion will be renewed; man will live in peace and justice and joy, as in the Sabbath which closed the labors of creation; all shall know God, from sea to sea, to the utmost confines of the earth, and the glory of the Holy Ghost shall be perfect. ”

“ Then Gregory, referring to the crimes imputed to himself by the emperor’s partisans, said that he could easily refute them by abundant witnesses; “but lest I should seem to rely rather on human than on divine testimony, and that I may remove from the minds of all, by immediate satisfaction, every scruple, behold this body of our Lord which I am about to take. Let it be to me this day a test of my innocence, and may the Omnipotent God this day by his judgment absolve me of the accusations if I am innocent, or let me perish by sudden death if guilty!” ”

“ There is not one who does right, in no one is there pity or truth. There is no recognition of God upon earth; you are Christians in name, but you do the work of heathen. Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood. What wonder if God, indignant at your acts, places on your necks Mahomet, the leader of the Turks, like another Nebuchadnezzar, for you are either swollen with pride, or rapacious with avarice, or cruel in wrath, or livid with envy, or incestuous in lust, or unsparing in cruelty. ”

“ To allow a heresiarch who had become conspicuous to all Christendom, like Huss, to evade the punishment due to his crimes on so flimsy a pretext as that of his having confided himself to them on a promise of safety to which the public faith was pledged, would have seemed to the most conscientious jurists of the council the most absurd of solecisms. In point of fact, the best men who were there—the Gersons, the Peter d’Aillys, the Zabarellas—were as unflinching as the worst creatures of the curia. ”

“ It is enough to know that the inquisitors used their utmost efforts to stamp out what they deemed heresy, and the tale of their victims is not the gauge of their cruelty but of the number of heretics whom they could discover. Save when pride or cupidity or ambition may have been the impelling motive, the men are not to be blamed, but the teaching which gave them such a conception of the duty so relentlessly performed, and framed a system of procedure which shrouded their acts in darkness and deprived the accused of his legitimate means of defence. ”

“ Unaccustomed to restraint, vigorous manhood asserted itself in all its greatness and its littleness, whether in wreaking cruel vengeance upon the defenceless or in offering itself joyfully as a sacrifice to humanity. Thrills of delirious emotion spread from land to land, arousing the populations from their lethargy in blind attempts to achieve they scarcely knew what—in crusades which bleached the sands of Palestine with Christian bones, in wild excesses of flagellation, in purposeless wanderings of the Pastoureaux. ”

“ The result of this was that Germany lay exposed defenceless to the rapacity and oppression of the Roman Curia. Its multitudinous sovereigns had vindicated their independence at the cost of depriving themselves of the strength to be derived from centralised union. Germany was the ordinary resource of a Pope in financial straits, through the exaction of a tithe, the raising of the annates, or the issue in unstinted volume of the treasure of the merits of Christ in the form of an unremitting stream of indulgences which sucked up as with a sponge the savings of the people. ”

“ In these last Córtes the Aragonese prayed that the Inquisition should take cognizance of no cases save those of religion and said that they grieved greatly that it embraced infinite things as distant as possible from its jurisdiction and they presented many cases not pertaining in any way to its duties. In truth at present the Inquisition interposes in everything, without respect to any one of whatever rank or position, and we may say positively that this tribunal is the real master which rules and dominates all Spain. ”

“ As the criminal could defend himself with the sword against the faida or feud of his adversary, or could compound for his guilt with money, the suggestion of torturing him to extort a confession would seem an absurd violation of all his rights. Crimes were regarded solely as injuries to individuals, and the idea that society at large was interested in their discovery, punishment, and prevention, was entirely too abstract to have any influence on the legislation of so barbarous an age. ”

“ Few more touching narratives can be conceived than those which could be constructed from the artless confessions extorted from the peasant-folk who fell into the hands of the inquisitors—the humble alms which they gave, pieces of bread, fish, scraps of cloth, or small coins, the hiding-places which they constructed in their cabins, the guidance given by night through places of danger, and, more than all, the steadfast fidelity which refused to betray their pastors when the inquisitor suddenly appeared and offered the alternative of free pardon or the dungeon and confiscation. ”

“ The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. ”

“ That the majority of the Spanish mystics were thoroughly pure in heart there can be no doubt, but spiritual exaltation, shared by the two sexes, had the ever-present risk that it might insensibly become carnal, when those who fancied themselves to be advancing in the path of perfection might suddenly find that the flesh had deceived the spirit. This was an experience as old as mysticism itself, and the eloquent warning which St. Bonaventura addressed to his brethren shows, by the vividness of its details, that he must have witnessed more than one such fall from grace. ”

“ Each age has its own sins and follies to answer for—happiest that which best succeeds in hiding them, for it can scarce do more. Here, at the close of the nineteenth century, when the triumph of human intelligence over the forces of nature, stimulating the progress of material prosperity, has deluded us into sacrificing our psychical to our intellectual being—even here the duality of our nature reasserts itself, and in the crudity of Mormonism and in the fantastic mysteries of spiritism we see a protest against the despotism of mere reason. ”

“ Yet there are few pages in the history of humanity more touching, few records of self-sacrifice more inspiring, few examples more instructive of the height to which the soul can rise above the weaknesses of the flesh, than those which we may glean from the fragmentary documents of the Inquisition and the scanty references of the chroniclers to the abhorred heretics so industriously tracked and so pitilessly despatched. ”

“ As civilization slowly advanced, as the midnight of the Dark Ages began to yield to the approaching dawn of modern ideas, as the hopelessness of humanity grew less abject, the Manichæan theory grew less attractive. The world was gradually awakening to new aims and new possibilities; it was outgrowing the dreary philosophy of pessimism, and was unconsciously preparing for the yet unknown future in which man was to regard Nature not as an enemy, but as a teacher. ”

“ No tie of kindred served as an excuse for concealing heresy. The son must denounce the father, and the husband was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death. Every human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy; children were taught to desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband. No pledge was to remain unbroken. It was an old rule that faith was not to be kept with heretics - as Innocent III. emphatically phrased it, "according to the canons, faith is not to be kept with him who keeps not faith with God." ”