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were all agreed in thinking that heretics must be destroyed with fire and sword.* No calculation can ascertain, with any precision, the dissipation of wrath, or the destruction of human life, which were the consequences of the crusade against the Albigenses. There was scarcely a peasant who did not reckon in his family some unhappy one, whose life had been cut off by the sword of Montfort's soldiers; not one but had repeatedly witnessed the ravaging of his property by them. Simon de Montfort was to them the representation of the evil spirit; the prototype of all the persecutions they had endured. The number of the slain, in

France alone, has been computed at a million."

They MADE WAR with the saints, and prevailed against them.

"Raymond VII., count of Toulouse, was compelled to promise that he would henceforth make war against all those who had remained faithful to him; and that he would pay to every individual who should arrest a heretic two marks for each of his subjects who might be carried before the tribunals."§

It was with the saints that they made war.

"The heretics supported their doctrines by the authority of the Holy Scriptures; the first indication of heresy was, therefore, considered to be the citation either of the epistles or the gospels; secondly, any exhortation against lying; and, finally, any signs of compassion shown to the prisoners of the inquisition. The council of Toulouse (held in November, 1229) for the first time decided, that the reading of the holy books should not be permitted to the people. We prohibit,' says the fourteenth canon, p. 430, the laics from having the books of the Old and New Testaments; unless it be at most that any one wishes to have, from devotion, a psalter, a breviary for the divine offices, or the honour of the blessed Mary; but we forbid them in the most express manner to have the above books translated into the vulgar tongue."||

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"But that which perhaps exceeded all the other calamities of the Albigenses was the establishment of the inquisition. The only expedient for maintaining the unity of the faith which the

* Sismondi's History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, p. 208. † Ibid. pp. 128, 129. Mede, in Apoc. p. 503. § Sismondi, p. 218. Labbei Consil. Tolosan. tom. v. p. 1784-1786, et seq. Flewry, Hist. Eccles, liv, lxxix. n. 58. Vide Sismondi, p. 227.

church has ever known, was to burn those who separated from it. For two hundred years the fires had been kindled, yet every day Catholics abandoned the faith of their fathers to embrace that which must conduct them to the flames."*

The Vaudois, in the secluded valleys of the mountains of Piedmont, were subjected to a like relentless persecution. The inquisition was established at Turin, the capital of the Duke of Savoy. In spots where a scanty subsistence could only be procured by laborious industry, papal tyranny sought out its victims. There every house was a house of prayer; in every family there was an altar for the worship of God, but in none was an image to be found; every child was instructed in the knowledge of Jesus, and fed with the bread of life, and they would not worship the consecrated wafer as a God; they looked on life as a time of purifying, and disowned all faith in purgatory. The craft of the priest was in danger. And the purer that was the doctrine, and the holier the lives of the witnesses of Jesus, the more surely were they clothed in sackcloth, and the churchmen of Rome, thirsting for their blood, would not be satiated till they were drunken with it. The emissaries of the inquisition, at first sought out their victims, who were either immured in the dungeons of Turin, and secretly tortured, or publicly executed, to intimidate heretics. But to quote the words of M. Acland,

"This was a process too slow and too partial to satisfy the unrelenting fury of the church of Rome. Bull after buil, and army after army, issued forth to the devastation of the valleys, the spirit of which may be collected from the following specimen. In 1477, Innocent VIII. having commented on the heresies of the Vaudois, commands all archbishops, bishops, vicars, &c. to obey his inquisitor, to render him assistance, and to engage the people to take up arms, with a view to so holy and necessary an extermination. Accordingly, he granted indulgences to all who would make a crusade against the Vaudois, and full authority to

* Labbei Consil. Tolosan. tom. v. p. 1784-1786, et seq. Flewry, Hist. Eccles. liv. lxxix. n. 58. Vide Sismondi, p. 246.

apply to their own use whatsoever property they could seize. Animated by these spiritual and temporal stimulants, 18,000 regular troops, and 600 uncommanded vagabonds burst upon the vallies; and had not a feeling of compunction speedily visited the sovereign, (Philip VII., duke of Savoy,) the work of destruction would probably have been complete, and his successors saved from the infamy of assisting in subsequent transactions of the same character. Such was the style of the persecutions, which, at small intervals, and in different degrees, mark the whole history of this suffering and faithful people during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries."*

"This persecution was carried on with peculiar marks of rage and enormity in the years 1655, 1686, and 1696, and seemed to portend nothing less than the total destruction and entire extinction of that unhappy nation. The most horrid scenes of violence and bloodshed were exhibited on this theatre of papal tyranny."† "Thousands were massacred, and many put to death with tortures of a more horrid and revolting nature than any recorded in the Spanish inquisition; and the most barbarous cruelty was united to indecency the most brutal and profligate. The very recital of these scenes would be sufficient to make the book that contained it a scorn and a horror to society."

An inquisitor-general testifies to the faithfulness of the witnesses; a monk records the monstrous cruelties exercised against the Albigenses; and an attested document, written by the commander of a French regiment, and which is preserved in the university of Cambridge, gives an illustration of the barbarities to which the faithful Vaudois were subjected, which were of so shocking a nature, that he resigned his command rather than be a participator or a witness of such iniquitous actions. "I was witness," says Du Petit Bourg, "to many great violences and cruelties exercised by the banditti and soldiers of Piedmont upon all of every age, sex, and condition, many of whom I myself saw massacred, dismembered, hung up, &c. with many horrid circumstances of barbarity."§

It were loathsome to tell of children smothered in the cradle, or dashed from the rocks, or suffocated,

*Acland, pp. 12, 13. † Mosheim, cent. 17, part. ii. chap. 2. Gilly's Narrative, p. 146. § Ibid. p. 216.

sect. 5.

together with their mothers, in a cave; of villages burnt to ashes, and their inhabitants exterminated, of women flying by hundreds from a blazing church, and butchered by a brutal soldiery, or of the execrations of an infuriated mob, while the witnesses of Jesus were suffering martyrdom. But such allusions may here be needful, while Piedmont is in view, that it may afterwards be more clearly seen how righteous are the judgments of God. Milton describes the scene with the power, without the fiction, of a poet. And without looking alone to the righteous retribution which awaits iniquity, he has obviously in view the words of the prophet,-that higher inspiration which no poetry alone can ever reach.

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
E'en them that kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not; in thy book record their groans,
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
An hundred fold, who, having learned the way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe!

MILTON.

The inquisition, which originated in the persecution of the witnesses, is too faithful an index of the sufferings which they endured. Its history, wherever it was established, is one tale of horror. Its victims were indeed clothed with sackcloth. The witnesses of Jesus were questioned by torture; and their testimony to the faith led the way to the dungeon and the stake. Yet the inquisition was but one of many modes by which, age after age, the

man of sin, who exalted himself above all, sought to wear out the saints of the Most High. Power was given them to testify, though the invention of their enemies was racked to devise new modes of the most aggravated torture. And if ever the malignity of demons had full scope on earth, it was practised in vain against the anointed ones of the Lord. The shedding of their blood, that would not for ever be unavenged, served to exemplify and perfect the faith and patience of the saints. The law of the members overmastering the law of the mind, needs not a witness wherever faith is wanting. But, throughout ages, the opposite proof was given to the world, that the power which man has of killing the body, under whatever form of death, was unable to resist the faith which overcomes the world, or to extinguish in the mind the light of the gospel, or the hopes of the Christian. Manifold are the instances in which, rather than deny their Lord, the victims of papal barbarity threw themselves into the flames, and their last word was that of witnesses.

The persecution of the Albigenses and the Vaudois disseminated, the doctrines which they preached, wherever they fled from the fiery inquisition. And notwithstanding the zeal of a corrupt priesthood in suppressing them, the seeds of the glorious Reformation were sown extensively throughout Europe, especially in Germany and Britain. The light of the gospel penetrated the gloom, and survived all the fires of the inquisition, though they were kindled in many countries. "The seed of the church," as at the first, sprung forth the most vigorously around the stake where the ashes of the martyrs were mingled with their blood. Even a war of extermination, which, as in France, did there extinguish the light, spread it the more rapidly into other regions, and prepared them for an easier riddance of the

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