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For some seven centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire persecutions for heresy were very rare and very slight. This, however, cannot be attributed to mercy. Although some of the old heresies survived, yet they were so sapped of their vitality that they were no longer openly flaunted in defiance of the mother-Church, but were practised in such obscurity as, in the main, to escape observation.

Fresh schisms, on the other hand, do not appear to have sprung up during that spell. Largely this would be due to the clear formulation of the Catholic theology by the various œcumenical councils held in the years that followed upon the Christian emancipation, and by the intellectual breadth of these doctrines, which were entirely adequate and all-sufficient to the intellectual capacity of the time. But this state of things could only have endured at the cost of arresting man’s intellectual progress. A certain restraint and curb undoubtedly was exerted, but definitely to check the imaginative and reasoning faculties of man has never been within the power of any creed, and never can be. It was in vain that the Church sought to coerce thought and to stifle the learning that struck at her very foundations and discovered the error of the cosmic and historical conceptions upon which her theology was based; in vain that she entrenched herself within her doctrines, and adhered rigidly to the form she had adopted.

Upon this uncompromising rigidity of the Catholic Church much censure has been poured. The present aim is a cold survey of certain features of history, and in such a task all polemical matters should be avoided. Yet it may be permissible to say a word here to elucidate rather than to defend an attitude that has been unduly abused.

It is admitted that the unyielding policy of the Church was one that militated seriously against intellectual evolution, and on that account it is to be deplored. But let the unbiassed mind consider for a moment the alternative. The admission of error is the commencement of disruption. Where one error is admitted, a thread is drawn from a weft whose threads are interdependent for the stability of the whole. Who has yielded once has set up a precedent that will be urged against him to make him yield again, and yet again, until he shall have yielded all, and, having nothing left, must suffer an imperceptible effacement.

When all is considered, there is an indisputable dignity in the attitude of a Church which, claiming that what she teaches rests not upon human knowledge but upon divine inspiration, refuses to cede one jot of her doctrines to man’s discoveries; holding—and incontestably, so long as the premise is admitted—that however certain may appear the truths which human subtlety has disclosed, however false may appear the doctrines to which she owes her being, it still remains that the former are human and the latter divine of origin. Between the two she proudly holds that there is no disputing; that error possible to man is impossible to divinity; that man’s perception of error in the divine tenets of the Church is no more than the manifestation of his own liability to err.

The Church of Rome realized that either she must be entirely, or entirely cease to be. And it is matter for unprejudiced consideration whether the spectacle of her immobility is not more dignified than would have been that of her yielding up her divinities one by one to the expanding humanities, and thus gradually undergoing a course of dismemberment which must in the end remove her last claim to existence. In the attitude she assumed she remained the absolute mistress of her votaries; had she departed from it she must have become their abject servant.

Dr. Rule invites his readers to notice attentively that “no Church but that of Rome ever had an Inquisition.”8 But he neglects to carry the consideration to its logical conclusion, and to add that in no Christian Church but that of Rome could an Inquisition be possible. For it would be impossible to offend heretically against any Church that accommodates itself to new habits of thought in a measure as these occur, and gives way step by step before the onslaught of learning.9

The Church of Rome presented her immutable formularies, her unchangeable doctrines to the world. “This,” she announced, “is my teaching. By this I hold. This you must accept without reservations, in its entirety, or you are no child of mine.”

With that there could be no cavil. Had she but added the admission of man’s liberty to accept or reject her teaching, had she but left man free to confess or not her doctrines as his conscience and intelligence directed, all would have been well. Unfortunately she accounted it her duty to go further; she used coercion and compulsion to such an extent that she imbued her children with the spirit of the eighteenth-century Jacobin, exclaiming, “Be my brother, or I kill you!”

Unable by intellectual means to stem the intellectual secession from her ranks, she had recourse to physical measures, and revived the fiercely coercive methods of the first centuries.

A serious heretical outbreak had been occurring in Southern France. There, it would seem, all the schisms that had disturbed the Church since her foundation were gathered together—Arians, Manichæans, and Gnostics—to which were added certain more recent sects, such as the Cathars, the Waldenses, and the Boni Homines, or Good People.

These new-comers deserve a word of explanation.

The Cathars, like the Gnostics, were dualists; indeed, their creed was little more than a development of Gnosticism. They believed that the earth was the only hell or purgatory, that it was given over to the power of the devil, and that human bodies were no more than the prisons of the angel spirits that fell with Lucifer. In heaven their celestial bodies still awaited them, but they could not resume these until they had worked out their expiation. To accomplish this a man must die reconciled with God; failing that, another earthly existence awaited him in the body of man or beast, according to his deserts. It will be seen that, saving for abundant Christian elements introduced into this faith, it was little more than a revival of metempsychosis, the oldest and most fascinating of intelligent beliefs.

The Waldenses, or Vaudois, with whom were allied the Good People, were the earliest Protestants, as we understand the term. They claimed for every man the right to interpret the Bible and to celebrate the sacraments of the Church without the need of being in holy orders. Further, they denied that the Roman Church was the Church of Christ.

These sects were known collectively as the Albigenses, so called because the Council of Lombers, convoked to pronounce their condemnation, had been held in the Diocese of Albi in 1165.