$ 79. THE ORDEAL. 347
of the accusations if I am innocent, or let me perish by sudden death, if guilty." Then the pope calmly took the wafer, and called upon the trembling emperor to do the same, but Henry evaded it on the ground of the absence of both his friends and his enemies, and promised instead to submit to a trial by the imperial diet.
The purgatorial oath, when administered by wonder-working relics, was also a kind of ordeal of ecclesiastical origin. A false oath on the black cross in the convent of Abington, made from the nails of the crucifixion, and derived from the Emperor Constantino, was fatal to the malefactor. In many cases these relics were the means of eliciting confessions which could not have been obtained by legal devices.
The genuine spirit of Christianity, however, urged towards an abolition rather than improvement of all these ordeals. Occasionally such voices of protest were raised, though for a long time without eifect. Avitus, bishop of Vienne, in the beginning of the sixth century, remonstrated with Gundobald for giving prominence to the battle-ordeal in the Burgundian code. St. Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, before the middle of the ninth century (he died about 840) attacked the duel and the ordeal in two special treatises, which breathe the gospel spirit of humanity, fraternity and peace in advance of his age.1 He says that the ordeals are falsely called judgments of God; for God never prescribed them, never approved them, never willed them ; but on the contrary, he commands us, in the law and the gospel, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and has ap pointed judges for the settlement of controversies among men. He warns against a presumptuous interpretation of providence whose counsels are secret and not to be revealed by water and fire. Several popes, Leo IV. (847-855), Nicolas I. (858-867),
1 Liber adversm Legem Gundobadi (i. e.. Ley. Burgundionum] et impia certarmina quse per earn geruntur ; and Liber Contra Judicmm Dei. See his Opera ed. Baluzius, Paris 1666, T. I. 107 sqq., 300 sqq., and in Migne's Patrotogta, Tom. CIV. f. 113-126, and f. 250-258 (with the ootes of Baluzius).
348 FOURTH PEKIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
Stephen VI. (885-891), Sylvester II. (999-1003), Alex ander II. (1061-1073), Alexander III. (1159-1181), Colestin III. (1191-1198), Honorius III. (1222), and the fourth Lateran Council (1215), condemned more or less clearly the superstitious and frivolous provocation of miracles.1 It was by their influence, aided by secular legislation, that these Godtempting ordeals gradually disappeared during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the underlying idea survived in the torture which for a long time took the place of the ordeal.
§ 80. The Torture.
HENRY C. LEA: Superstition and Force (Philad. 1866), p. 281-391.
PAUL LACROIX : Manners, Customs, and Dress of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance Period (transl. from the French, N. York 1874), p. 407-434. BKACE: Gesta Christi, ch. XV.
The torture rests on the same idea as the ordeal.2 It is an attempt to prove innocence or guilt by imposing a physical pain which no man can bear without special aid from God. When the ordeal had fulfilled its mission, the torture was substituted as a more convenient mode and better fitted for an age less
1 " At length, when the Papal authority reached its culminating point, a vigorous and sustained effort to abolish the whole system was made by the Popes who occupied the pontifical throne from 1159-1227. Nothing can be more peremptory than the prohibition uttered by Alexander III. In 1181, Lucius III. pronounced null and void the acquittal of a priest charged with homicide, who had undergone the water-ordeal, and ordered him to prove his innocence with compurgators, and the blow was followed up by his successors. Under Innocent III., the Fourth Council of Lateran, in 1215, formally forbade the employment of any ecclesiastical ceremonies in such trials ; and as the moral influence of the ordeal depended entirely upon its religious associations, a strict observance of this canon must speedily have swept the whole system into oblivion. Yet at this very time the inquisitor Conrad of Marburg was employing in Germany the red-hot iron as a means of condemning his unfor tunate victims by wholesale, and the chronicler relates that, whether innocent or guilty, few escaped the test. The canon of Lateran, however, was actively followed up by the Papal legates, and the effect was soon discernible." Lea, p. 272.
2 Tortura from torqueo, to twist, to torment. Ital. and Spanish : tortura; French : torture ; Germ. : Fotter.