[57] wholesale burnings and hangings of men, women and children.  The resistance of the people was broken down, though the heresy was not eradicated, and the struggle ended in 1229 with the complete humiliation of the Count of Toulouse.  The important point of the episode is this:  the Church introduced into the public law of Europe the new principle that a sovran held his crown on the condition that he should extirpate heresy.  If he hesitated to persecute at the command of the Pope, he must be coerced; his lands were forfeited; and his dominions were thrown open to be seized by any one whom the Church could induce to attack him.  The Popes thus established a theocratic system in which all other interests were to be subordinated to the grand duty of maintaining the purity of the Faith.

But in order to root out heresy it was necessary to discover it in its most secret retreats.  The Albigeois had been crushed, but the poison of their doctrine was not yet destroyed.  The organized system of searching out heretics known as the Inquisition was founded by Pope Gregory IX about A.D. 1233, and fully established by a Bull of Innocent IV (A.D. 1252) which regulated the machinery of persecution “as an integral part of the social edifice in every city and every

[58] State.”  This powerful engine for the suppression of the freedom of men’s religious opinions is unique in history.

The bishops were not equal to the new talk undertaken by the Church, and in every ecclesiastical province suitable monks were selected and to them was delegated the authority of the Pope for discovering heretics.  These inquisitors had unlimited authority, they were subject to no supervision and responsible to no man.  It would not have been easy to establish this system but for the fact that contemporary secular rulers had inaugurated independently a merciless legislation against heresy.  The Emperor Frederick II, who was himself undoubtedly a freethinker, made laws for his extensive dominions in Italy and Germany (between 1220 and 1235), enacting that all heretics should be outlawed, that those who did not recant should be burned, those who recanted should be imprisoned, but if they relapsed should be executed; that their property should be confiscated, their houses destroyed, and their children, to the second generation, ineligible to positions of emolument unless they had betrayed their father or some other heretic.

Frederick’s legislation consecrated the stake as the proper punishment for heresy.  This

[59] cruel form of death for that crime seems to have been first inflicted on heretics by a French king (1017).  We must remember that in the Middle Ages, and much later, crimes of all kinds were punished with the utmost cruelty.  In England in the reign of Henry VIII there is a case of prisoners being boiled to death.  Heresy was the foulest of all crimes; and to prevail against it was to prevail against the legions of hell.  The cruel enactments against heretics were strongly supported by the public opinion of the masses.