§ 138. CATHOLIC INTOLERANCE. 697
himself been a Manichsean heretic for nine years, justified forcible measures against the Donatists, in contradiction to his noble sentiment: "Nothing conquers but truth, the victory of truth is love." ^ The same Christian Father who ruled the thinking of the Church for many centuries, and moulded the theology of the Reformers, excluded all unbaptized infants from salvation, though Christ emphatically included them in the kingdom of heaven. Leo I., the greatest of the early popes, advocated the death penalty for heresy and approved of the execution of the Priscillianists. Thomas Aquinas, the master theologian of the Middle Ages, lent the weight of his authority to the doctrine of persecution, and demonstrated from the Old Testament and from reason that heretics are worse criminals than debasers of money, and ought to be put to death by the civil magistrate.'^ Heresy was regarded as the greatest sin, and worse than murder, because it destroyed the soul. It took the place of idolatry in the Mosaic law.
The Theodosian Code was completed in the Justinian Code (527-534) ; the Justinian Code passed into the Holy Roman Empire, and became the basis of the legislation of Christian Europe. Rome ruled the world longer by law and by the cross than she had ruled it by the sword. The canon law likewise condemns to the flames persons convicted of heresy.^ This law was generally accepted on the Continent in the thirteenth century.* England in her isolation was more independent, and built society on the foundation
^ Conip. vol. III. 144 sq.
2 Summa Theol. Secanda Secundce, Quest. XI. {de hceresi). Art. 3. In Migne's ed. Tom. III. 107.
3 See Boehmer, /ns<. Juris Canonici, 1747, lib. V. tit. 7, § 10.
* Friedberg, Lehrbuch des kathoUschen and evangelischen Kirchenreckts, 2d ed. 1884, p. 221: "Im XIII. Jahrhundert erfolgt iiberall die rechtliche staatliche Feststellung der Todesstra/e und Vermogensconfiscation fur Ketzerei, und die Kirche hat diese staatlir.hen Strafen nicM nur gebilligt, sondern audi verlangt, und die weltliche Obrigkeit, die sie niclit verhdnge, selbst mit der Strafe der Ketzerei bedroht."
698 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
of the common law; but Henry IV. and his Parliament devised the sanguinary statute de hceretico comburendo, by which William Sawtre, a parish priest, was publicly burnt at gmithfield (Feb. 26, 1401) for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the bones of Wiclif were burnt by Bishop Fleming of Lincoln (in 1428). The statute continued in force till 1677, when it was formally abolished.
On this legal and theological foundation the mediaeval Church has soiled her annals with the blood of an army of heretics which is much larger than the army of Christian martyrs under heathen Rome. We need only refer to the crusades against the Albigenses and Waldenses, which were sanctioned by Innocent III., one of the best and greatest of popes ; the tortures and autos-da-fe of the Spanish Inquisition, which were celebrated with religious festivities ; the fifty thousand or more Protestants who were executed during the reign of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands (1567- 1573) ; the several hundred martyrs who were burned in Smithfield under the reign of the bloody Mary; and the, repeated wholesale persecutions of the innocent Waldenses in France and Piedmont, which cried to heaven for vengeance.
It is vain to shift the responsibility upon the civil government. Pope Gregory XIII. commemorated the massacre of St. Bartholomew not only by a Te Deum in the churches of Rome, but more deliberately and permanently by a medal which represents " The Slaughter of the Huguenots " by an angel of wrath. The French bishops, under the lead of the great Bossuet, lauded Louis XIV. as a new Constantine, a new Theodosius, a new Charlemagne, a new exterminator of heretics, for his revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the infamous dragoonades against the Huguenots.
Among the more prominent individual cases of persecution, we may mention the burning of Hus (1415) and Jerome of Prague (1416) by order of the Council of Con-