by John Huss, one of the doctors at the University of Prague. When the
University discovered this, it solemnly condemned Wickliff’s books, and
prohibited them from being read. John Huss did not venture upon any
overt opposition; but, as the doctors of the University were Germans,
he called to his aid the vanity of the Bohemians and the personal
ill-will of King Wenceslaus against the Germans, who had deposed him
from the empire. The situation of the professors became untenable,
and they left with their two thousand pupils for Leipsic, where they
founded the University. John Huss was joined by several ecclesiastics,
who were anxious to acquire liberty of action; but the leading
Bohemian professors, convoked by the archbishop to examine the works
of Wickliff which John Huss had distributed amongst the Bohemian
nobles, decided that the possessors of these books should surrender
them to be burnt. John Huss again endeavoured to temporise, promising
the archbishop to correct in his preaching anything which might have
escaped him contrary to Christian doctrine; for, in his view, this
promise did not prevent him from propagating the doctrine of Wickliff,
which he believed to be quite orthodox. He was supported by Jerome of
Prague, a man of position, who, in addition to his ardour and daring,
was a bachelor in theology, though a layman. The latter was so zealous
in his partisanship, that he upon one occasion stopped three Carmelite
monks who had been combating the theories of Wickliff, and threw one of
them into the Moldau. Denounced to the pope by the clergy of Prague,
John Huss and his adherents were declared heretics and excommunicated.
A rebellion got up in Prague by his partisans, headed by the impetuous
Jerome, cost a great number of them their lives, the senate visiting
their crimes with capital punishment. John Huss appealed from the
sentence of the pope to the next council; and this, which was held
at Rome in 1413, condemned afresh the writings of Wickliff and
excommunicated John Huss, who had not put in an appearance, although he
was cited before the Council. The Chancellor Gerson, the illustrious
Dean of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris, which
had just condemned the nineteen errors of John Huss, wrote to the
Archbishop of Prague, exhorting him to take the necessary steps for
repressing this heresy.
That prelate, in conformity with Gerson’s advice, obtained the support
of the King of Bohemia; and it was decreed that all those who still
adhered to the condemned theories of Wickliff should be expelled from
the kingdom. John Huss was thus compelled to leave the city, but he
declaimed as vehemently as ever against the Church, and especially
against the pope.
[Illustration:
Fig. 315.--John Huss, the celebrated Heresiarch, born in Bohemia;
tried, condemned, and burnt at Constance in 1415.
Fig. 316.--Jerome of Prague, a Disciple of John Huss, born at
Prague about 1378; burnt alive for heresy at Constance in 1416.
After the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon,
Geneva, 1581.]
The Council of Constance, convoked for the 1st of November, 1414, was
ordered to examine his doctrines. John Huss, far from flinching at this
decisive moment, vehemently called upon his adversaries, by public
placards, to come and put him to confusion before the council. “If,”
he stated in these placards, “I can be convicted of any error, or of
having taught anything contrary to the Christian faith, I am ready to
undergo the punishment inflicted upon heretics.” He then solicited and
obtained from the Emperor Sigismund a safe-conduct, in which it was
stated that, “out of respect for the imperial majesty he was to be let
freely and safely pass, sojourn, remain, and return, and be provided,
if necessary, with other fitting passports.” John Huss left Prague on
the 11th of October (Figs. 315 and 316), and on the 20th, in a letter
written from Nuremberg, he expresses his satisfaction at the reception
which he has everywhere met with, especially from the ecclesiastics,
who seemed disposed to accept his doctrine. Upon reaching Constance, on
the 3rd of November, he expounded his ideas very freely, both by word
of mouth and in writing; and, in spite of the excommunication hurled
against him, he said mass every day in a private room, but without
making any secret of it, to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood.
Upon the 28th of November he was arrested and cast into prison. After
many witnesses had been examined, thirty-nine articles taken from his
speeches and writings were read in public, the most important of which
declared “that the elect alone are members of the Catholic Church;
that St. Peter neither is nor ever has been the chief of that Church;
that by the commission of mortal sin the ecclesiastical and civil
authorities lose their rights and privileges; and lastly, that the
condemnation of the forty-five articles of Wickliff was unreasonable
and unjust.” The venerable Peter d’Ailly exhorted John Huss to submit
himself to the judgment of the council; the emperor did the same,
threatening him, if he refused, with the rigour of the law. Upon the
following day he was given a recantation to sign, which he would not
consent to do. A fortnight afterwards, on the 24th of June, his books
were condemned to be burnt. On the 6th of July the council declared him
to be a heretic, and degraded him from his ecclesiastical orders, by
which process he was handed over to the secular arm. The emperor, who
was present, had him immediately seized by the count-palatine, and the
civil law, which condemned stubborn heretics to the stake, was applied
in all its rigour. John Huss submitted to his fate with courage. Jerome
of Prague at first signed the formula of recantation, but he soon
afterwards disavowed it; and, after publicly declaring that he adopted
the whole doctrine of John Huss, he also was sent to the stake.
These pitiless measures failed to intimidate the partisans of John
Huss; on the contrary, they became converted into a horde of fanatics,
in which all the sects hostile to the Church became indiscriminately
merged. Ziska, the chamberlain of King Wenceslaus, placing himself at
their head, ravaged Bohemia, pillaged the monasteries, massacred the
monks, constituted himself absolute master of the country, holding in
check the whole military force of the empire. After his death (1424)
the Hussites, far from giving in their submission and avowing their
errors, continued supreme in Germany, so that Luther had only to cast
seed upon the ground which they had bedewed with blood.
By a strange anomaly, the Hussites remained firmly attached to the
dogma of the eucharist; and the chief inducement of the people to join
their party was, in several cases, the privilege of being able to
receive the communion in both kinds. The Hussites, assembled to the
number of forty thousand in their celebrated camp of Tabor, by the
wayside, without any preliminary confession, received the communion
under the elements of bread and wine. Their leader signed himself
Ziska of the Chalice; and when the moderate section of the party
separated themselves from the more advanced section, he chose the name
of Calixtines to indicate his own followers. The Protestants, on the
contrary, were not long in coming to deny the real and abiding presence
of Christ in the eucharistic elements. The importance attached to this
dogma drew general attention to the extraordinary case of a woman
possessed, who travelled through the dioceses of Laon and Soissons
towards the middle of the sixteenth century. This was a young woman,
recently married, of the name of Nicole, belonging to a humble but very
honest family. There were many public exorcisms, and the paroxysms of
the patient were always allayed by the giving of the sacrament. The
case was much criticised; it was submitted to a scrupulous examination,
and the agitation which it gave rise to was so great that the
authorities intervened. Nicole was handed over to the royal delegates
(Fig. 317), “who ordered that all the experiments should be made by
physicians and surgeons officially appointed, and selected from among
Catholics and Protestants alike, so that there should be no suspicion
attaching to their reports.” The evidence of these doctors did away
with all idea of fraud, which the judicial authorities would have had
no hesitation in punishing had it been practised. The Prince de Condé,
Governor of Picardy, and one of the warmest upholders of the Reformed
Religion, so called, detained for several days at his residence the
possessed woman, together with her parents, who accompanied her
wherever she went; but his interrogatories failed to shake their
conviction that Nicole had been possessed, and that the eucharist had
restored her. At last, a royal order enabled these poor people to
return to their own home at Vervins.
[Illustration: Fig. 317.--Exorcism of a person possessed with
a devil in the Church of Notre-Dame, at Laon, by the bishop of
that city, on the 8th of February, 1566.--Reduced Fac-simile of
an Engraving in the “Manuel de la Victoire du Corps de Dieu sur
l’Esprit malin,” by Jean Boulaese: 16mo., Paris, 1575.]
The ecclesiastical authority, seconded as it was by the orthodox
sovereigns, had been nearly always sufficient to suppress the
heretical movements, which were circumscribed within a few provinces
or dioceses; but the violent dissensions of Rome with the Empire, the
two rival camps, formed during two centuries between the popes and
the anti-popes, the independent position acquired by the communes
after reiterated uprisings against their bishops and nobles, rendered
necessary the intervention of a judicial authority in the religious
quarrels and contentions springing out of the heresies and schisms
which were constantly arising. The creation of this authority, half
civil and half ecclesiastical, emanating from the throne, was mainly
with a view to protect the legacy of the past against the encroachments
and the audacious claims of the future. This is how it came to pass
that, from the fourteenth century, the courts styled Cours des Grand
Jours, the presidential tribunals, the parliaments, and even the
bailiwicks, together with the Châtelet of Paris, intervened in matters
of worship, though their rulings were not always in accordance with
canonical law. The Inquisition failed to effect a permanent lodgment in
France, but the ordinary tribunals claimed for themselves the right to
take cognizance of crimes of heresy without having recourse to the aid
of the ecclesiastical authorities.
[Illustration: Fig. 318.--Allegorical Picture of the Excesses
committed by the Huguenots.--The lion bound and tamed represents
France reduced to a deplorable position by the heretics, as
much by civil war, pillage, violence, and bloodshed, as by the
impiety of which they left traces everywhere, profaning churches,
breaking the sacred vessels, and treading under foot the crosses,
the images, and the relics of the saints.--After a Drawing from
the Manuscript “De Tristibus Franciæ,” preserved in the Library
of Lyons. (Sixteenth Century.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 319.--John Knox, Propagator of the Reformed
Religion, so-called, in Scotland; born at Gifford in 1504, died
in 1572.
Fig. 320.--Ulrich Zwingle, the first champion of religious reform
in Switzerland; born and died at Wildhaus, in the Canton of St.
Gall, 1484–1531.
From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” Jean de Laon,
Geneva, 1581.]
[Illustration: Fig. 321.--The Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
Paris, August 24th, 1572.--The principal subject is the murder
of Coligny. To the left, the admiral is leaving the Louvre, and
while reading a memorandum is wounded by an arquebuse fired by
Maurevert from a window (August 22nd); in the background, one of
his equerries is communicating this fact to King Charles IX.,
whom he finds playing at tennis. To the right, Coligny, attacked
by soldiers in his hotel, Rue Béthisy, is assassinated by Besme,
and his body, thrown from the window, falls at the Duc de Guise’s
feet. In the next house Téligny and other Protestants are being
massacred.--After a German Engraving, a reprint of one of the
Supplementary Plates of the Collection engraved by Jean Tortorel
and Jacques Perrissin.]
When Luther’s protests against Rome and Catholicism (1517) first burst
upon the world, the heresy of Reform had long slumbered in a chrysalis
state, so to speak, awaiting only some circumstance to favour its
development. “The egg was laid,” as Erasmus remarked, “Luther had
but to incubate and hatch it.” The corruption of the higher classes,
of the clergy, and of the people, increased his chances of success.
The suppression of celibacy amongst the clergy, and of monastic vows,
was looked upon with secret favour by the depraved among the bishops,
priests, and monks; the prospect of seeing all the property of the
Church fall into their possession excited the cupidity of the princes
and nobles; and the rejection of ecclesiastical teaching flattered
the vanity of the people, who were made supreme judges of the dogmas
through the right which had been given to them, themselves to interpret
the Bible, now translated into the vulgar tongue. For two centuries
Rationalism had been disseminating the leaven of revolt against the
authority of the past, and the advent of printing lent it fresh
force. The apostle of the new doctrine had only to pronounce the word
negation, and an army of disciples rose up to follow him and fight
under his banner--disciples who, at first obedient to his command,
soon became rebellious, and impatient to obtain for themselves the
liberty of inquiry and the independence of principles which Luther
despotically endeavoured to reserve exclusively for himself.
Carlstadt, Œcolampadius, Hutten, Zwingle (Fig. 320), Schwenckfeld,
Munzer, Staupitz, Knox (Fig. 319), and many others, while following
in the footsteps of the famous Wittenberg professor, had their own
school: “The teachings crashed like avalanches, the doctrines rattled
like the tempest; there was a dark abyss of neologies, inconsistencies,
and contradictions, amidst which no ray of the eternal sun of grace
was visible,” to quote the poetic simile of Wieland. The intellectual
movement was none the less gigantic, especially in Germany and in
the countries bordering on the Moselle. A deluge of statements, of
pamphlets, and of stories, some true and others false, issuing, most
of them anonymously, from an infinity of printing-presses, were
rapidly disseminated, and made their way into every district; the
allegorical eucharist of Zwingle, the revolutionary appeal of Munzer
to the Franconian monks, the restoration of the _letter_ by
Schwenckfeld, the _trope_ of Carlstadt against Luther, assumed
a thousand different forms; while the indefatigable Luther himself,
in turn a Demosthenes, a Petronius, a Danubian peasant, a beer-sodden
drunkard, spun out in fifteen thousand folio pages his senseless
Protestant theories--a chaos of eloquence, poesy, impassioned similes,
tangible truths, audacious falsehoods, venom, hatred, jealousy, and
filth. The famous Leipsic dispute, the sessions of Worms and of
Augsburg, the war of extermination of the peasantry, the quarrel about
images, the interview of Mauburg, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in
France (Fig. 321)--in a word, the numerous revolutions of this great
religious drama which Europe was watching with nervous anxiety, are
brought into less marked relief in the large works since published by
learned controversialists, than in these desultory pages, scattered to
the winds, sung at the street-corners, accompanied by denunciations,
threats and sanguinary struggles between the irreconcilable factions of
Catholic and Huguenot.
[Illustration: Fig. 322.--Martin Luther.--Reduced Fac-simile of
a Portrait by Lucas de Cranach (1520), published in the fly-leaf
of a sermon preached by Luther against the authority of the Roman
Church (in octavo, Wittenberg, 1522), when he threw off his garb
of an Augustine monk. The Latin distich renders famous both
the artist and the original in these words:--“If Luther leaves
imperishable traces of his genius, Lucas (Cranach) perpetuates
for ever the features which death will efface.”]
Lutheranism, in consequence of a revolt in the cloister, had led to
anarchy in the Church, to the exile of Carlstadt, who was compelled
to beg his bread from village to village, to the persecutions against
Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld, and to the massacre of a hundred
thousand rebellious peasants in Thuringia and Swabia. A multitude of
sects--the Sacramentarians, the Œcolampadians, the Antinomians, the
Majorists, and the Anabaptists were given birth to by the heresy of
Luther; there were as many popes as there were dissenting churches.
The Lutheran creed was still confined to the countries on the other
side of the Rhine, when the French sectaries, Farel and Froment (Fig.
324), set out to revolutionise Geneva and the neighbouring country.
An unjust hatred for the House of Savoy attracted to their standard a
large body of patriots, who, aspiring after a democratic independence,
hoped to rid themselves of hereditary monarchy and to break with
Catholicism, its main ally.
[Illustration: Fig. 323.--John Calvin, called the Pope of Geneva,
chief of the so-called Reformed Church; born at Noyon in 1509,
died at Geneva in 1564.--Fac-simile of a Wood Engraving from
the works of Theodore Beza, translated from the Latin by Simon
Goulart--“Les Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres” (4to, Jean
de Laon, Geneva, 1581).--One of the engraved frontispieces of
this collection bears the monogram of Jean Cousin.]
In England, the king separated himself from the Roman Church. Henry
VIII., unable to obtain from Pope Clement VIII. a bull annulling his
marriage with Catherine of Arragon, and permitting him to espouse Anne
Boleyn, declared himself to be the supreme and only head of the Church
in his own kingdom, but he did not touch upon the dogmas which he had
defended against Luther; thus it was a schism rather than a heresy.
Under his successors, in conformity with a decision of the English
Parliament, a synod assembled in London drew up the Confession of Faith
for the Anglican Church, which differs less than any other, in regard
to dogma and discipline, from the traditions of the Catholic Church.
[Illustration: Fig. 324.--William Farel, preacher of the
so-called Reformed faith; born at Gap in 1489, died at Geneva in
1565.--From the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” 4to,
Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.]
Calvin, upon arriving at Geneva, his mind imbued with those evangelical
novelties which constituted a heresy essentially French, found the
Reformation already accomplished there. Its passage was marked only
too plainly by ruins and blood-stains; the stripping of the vanquished
by their conquerors had turned a religious reform into a social
revolution. Calvin, a jealous and inflexible sectary, laid hold upon
reform as an instrument of despotism. In order to become head of the
Church as well as head of the State, he proclaimed the doctrinal
negation of authority, thus beginning where Luther ended. To the
Saxon-like creed of the great Reformer, he adapted a mixed system
concerning the Lord’s Supper borrowed from Zwingle and Œcolampadius;
he was ardent and pitiless, as the sad fate of Servet and of Gruet
too clearly prove; he was determined to reign by terror, for he was
a slave of politics rather than of spiritual ideas. This it is which
constitutes so marked and characteristic a difference between the two
champions of Protestantism, between the rebellious monk of Wittenberg
and the apostate priest of Noyon. Calvin entered upon an overt struggle
with all the renegades of the Catholic school, with Gentilis, Ochino,
Castalion, and Westphalz; his doctrine and his teaching were alike
divergent from those of Zwingle in the mountains of Switzerland, of
Melancthon in the University of Wittenberg, of Œcolampadius at the
foot of the Hauenstein, of Martin Bucer at Strasburg, and of Brentzen
at Tubingen. Amongst the Geneva sectaries, two friends, Farel and
Beza, alone remained faithful to him, more through compatibility of
temperament than from identity of principles. The French Huguenots had,
however, accepted as their supreme chief a theocrat like Calvin, who,
for four-and-twenty years, never stepped without an escort of swords,
of faggots, and of executioners (Fig. 325).
[Illustration: Fig. 325.--Violence of the French Huguenots
against the Catholics.--A. Noble lady of Montbrun (Charente)
being tortured by soldiers whom she had hospitably welcomed.
They are burning the soles of her feet with red-hot irons, and
with the sharp edges of the irons cutting the skin from her
legs in strips.--B. Master Jean Arnould, Procureur-Royal at
Angoulême, after having had his limbs mutilated, is strangled in
his own house.--C. The widow of the Procureur at the criminal
court of that city, seventy years of age, being dragged by the
hair through the streets.--Fac-simile of a Copper-plate in the
“Theatrum Crudelitatum nostri Temporis” (4to, Antwerp, 1587).]
[Illustration: Fig. 326.--Seal of an imaginary Bull of Lucifer,
taken from the “Roi Modus,” a Manuscript of the Fifteenth
Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels. The inscription
on the seal seems to be cabalistic; at any rate, it is
unintelligible.]
It is therefore to Calvin and his personal influence that must be
attributed the violent and merciless character which reform took during
the sixteenth century, when the horrors of religious warfare were
excused by the necessity of preaching the word of God to Christians who
were anxious to hear it!
THE INQUISITION.
General Principles of the Inquisition; its Existence amongst
the Greeks and Romans.--The Papal Inquisition.--The Inquisition
in France.--The Albigenses.--The Royal Spanish Inquisition; its
Political Purpose; it is opposed by the Popes.--Inquisitors of
Toledo excommunicated by Leo X.--The Holy Hermandad.--The Spies
of the Inquisition.--The Holy Office and the Supreme.--The
Prisons of the Inquisition.--The _Auto-da-fé_.--The
Inquisition in the Netherlands.--The Protestant Inquisition in
Holland, Germany, France, England, and Switzerland.
At all times and in all places religion, which is the basis of society,
has had to be protected and fostered in the public interest. This
is why most men, especially those placed in authority, have always
attached the highest importance to philosophical ideas and opinions,
and still more to religious ideas. In fact, experience has shown only
too plainly since the formation of civilised States, that a change of
religious belief necessarily brings about a social transformation,
and that a political revolution is but the putting into practice
of a theory invented and propounded by a more or less hostile and
mischievous philosophy; hence the established principle which ordains
that human and divine law should alike be respected. It would
therefore be erroneous to regard the Inquisition as an exceptional and
abnormal fact, peculiar to the Middle Ages. The search into religious
creeds--for such is the meaning of the word _inquisition_--was
not only a natural consequence of the existence of forms of religion,
but an imperious function of government. All history--of antiquity as
well as that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance--bears witness to
this fact. It is consoling to find that, as a general rule, even in
the midst of the fiercest persecutions, there were men of lofty views
and generous sentiments who did not hesitate to protest with undaunted
courage against the tyrannical and sanguinary excesses, by means of
which it was attempted to impose upon nations and upon individuals a
religious conviction which ought to be the offspring of reason, and
which should be the sole result of liberty of conscience.
[Illustration: Fig. 327.--Funereal Lamp from the Catacombs,
representing a young Christian woman crowned with the palm leaves
of martyrdom.--Terra-cotta of the Third Century, in the Vatican
Museum.]