Spirit, and was either imprisoned for life or burnt. Such a recantation the theologian De Lure or Edeline was compelled to make about 1460; but it did not save him. When the priest Cornelius Loos Callidius affirmed, a century later, that the unhappy women only confessed under torture what they had never done, and that thus gold and silver was obtained by a new sort of alchemy out of men's blood, the Papal Nuncio imprisoned him. He had to recant, but relapsed, and after a long imprisonment only escaped by his death the fate of his contemporary Flade, the Trèves counsellor, who was burnt for assailing the trials of witches on the strength of the so-called canon of Ancyra. As late as 1623, Gregory xv. ordered that any one who made a pact with Satan, producing impotence in animals, or injuring the fruits of the earth, should be imprisoned for life by the Inquisition. At last, when these mischievous practices of the Inquisition had been carried on for 170 years, and countless victims had been sacrificed to the fancies of the Popes and monks, an instruction of the Roman Inquisition appeared in 1657, containing the shameful admission that for a long time not a single process had been rightly conducted by the inquisitors, that they had wickedly erred through their reckless 1 Disquis. Mag. iii. 58, 227 seq.

application of torture and other irregularities, and that most dangerous mistakes were still made daily by them, as by the other spiritual tribunals, and thus unrighteous sentences of death were passed, whereupon certain mitigations and precautions were enjoined.1 It is even now ordered in the Roman ritual, which, according to Papal injunction, is to be inviolably observed and exclusively used by every priest, that any one who has swallowed charmed articles (malefica signa vel instrumenta) must drive out Satan, who has thereby gained possession of him, by an emetic.2

§ XVIII.-Dominican Forgeries and their Consequences.

How far the principle that Roman decisions are immutable and infallible, had been already introduced, by means of the forgeries and fictions before referred to, at the beginning of the twelfth century, may be perceived from the French Bishop Ivo, who has adopted into his Decretum a copious store of such spurious pieces. His logic-and it has been repeated countless times since-comes simply to this: the Popes have asserted that this or that prerogative belongs to them, we must therefore believe that they really pos1 It may be found in Pignatelli, Consultat. Noviss. i. 123; and without any alterations in Carena, De Offic. Inquis., in the Appendix. 2 Rit. Rom. (ed. Antwerp, 1669), p. 167.

sess it. He observes, naïvely enough, "We are taught by the Roman Church that no one may call in question its decisions, therefore we must flee to it for refuge from itself, ie., simply submit; "1 and accordingly it is clear to him that to contradict a Papal ordinance is heresy. This implies that a bishop is orthodox who submits to a Papal injunction, though convinced that it is prejudicial to his Church; a heretic, if he opposes the incipient abuse or usurpation. This view involved momentous results: it has disarmed the Church; it has caused the neglect of that first principle of moral and political prudence, that an abuse should be resisted at the beginning, and thus made the corruption in the Church incurable, and the attempted reformation too late when it was at last undertaken.

About the middle of the thirteenth century a new and comprehensive fabrication was effected, which was not less eventful in its results than the pseudo-Isidorian, though in a different way. As the one served to transform the constitution and canon law of the Church, the other penetrated her dogmatic theology and ruled the schools.

In the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth century, 1 Epist. 159.

theologians had not occupied themselves with the doctrine of Church authority, and, in some cases, had quite remarkably avoided pronouncing on the position of the Pope in the Church. Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, the compilers of "Sentences," Robert Pulleyn, Peter of Poitiers, Peter Lombard, and after them Rupert of Deutz, William of Paris, and Vincent of Beauvais, refrained from entering at all on the subject. The true fathers of scholasticism-Alexander of Hales, Alanus of Ryssel, and even Albertus Magnus, the most fertile of all theologians of that period—have equally abstained from investigating it. Only in one passage, when explaining the wellknown prayer of Christ for Peter in St. Luke's Gospel, Albert observes that it implies that a successor of Peter cannot wholly and finally (finaliter) lose the faith.

The controversy with the Greeks, which the presence of Dominicans in the East had again brought to the surface, gave occasion for new inventions. To the Greeks, the Isidorio-Gregorian Papacy, which the Dominicans put before them as the sole genuine and saving form of Church government, was utterly unknown and incomprehensible. No attention had been paid at Constantinople to such claims when urged by Nicolas I., and in a more developed form by Leo IX. and Gregory IX.

in their letters to emperors and patriarchs, nor does any reply seem to have been sent. In Eastern estimation, "the Patriarch of old Rome" was indeed the first of the patriarchs, to whom belonged the primacy in the Church, provided he did not render himself unworthy of it through heterodoxy; but the absolute monarchy which the emissaries of Rome preached was something wholly different. The Orientals held the Pope's action to be limited by the consent of the other patriarchs, in all important concerns affecting the whole Church; they could not conceive any arbitrary and autocratic power existing in the Church. Some special means therefore had to be found for getting at them.

A Latin theologian, probably a Dominican, who had resided among the Greeks, composed a catena of spurious passages of Greek Councils and Fathers, St. Chrysostom, the two Cyrils, and a pretended Maximus, containing a dogmatic basis for these novel Papal claims. In 1261 it was laid before Urban IV., who at once availed himself of the fabrication in his letter to the Emperor, Michael Palæologus, discreetly concealing the names of the witnesses. He wanted to prove from these newly invented texts, professedly eight hundred years old, that "the Apostolic throne" is the sole authority