Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/166

 150 FRANCE. cution had done its work, and the Waldenses were permanently severed. Theirs was the true Church, and that of the pope was but a house of hes, whose excommunication was not to be re- garded, and whose decrees were not to be obeyed. They had a complete organization, consisting of bishops, priests, and deacons, and they held in some large city one or two general chapters ev- ery year, in which orders were conferred and measures for mission work were perfected. The Waldensian orders, however, did not confer exclusive supernatural power. Although they still believed in transubstantiation, the making of the body and blood of Christ depended on the purity of the ministrant ; a sinner was impotent to effect it, while it could be done by any righteous man or wom- an. It was the same with absolution : they held the power of the keys direct from Christ, and heard confessions and imposed pen- ance. Their antisacerdotaUsm was strongly expressed in the sim- plification of their faith. There was no purgatory, and conse- quently masses for the dead or the invocation of the suffrages of the saints were of no avail; the saints, in fact, neither heard nor helped man, and the miracles performed in their name in the churches were fictitious. The fasts and feasts prescribed in the calendar were not to be observed, and the indulgences so lavishly sold were useless. As of old, oaths and homicide were forbidden. Yet enough of the traditional ascetic tendencies were preserved to lead to the existence of a monastic fraternity whose members divested themselves of aU indi^dual property, and promised chas- tity, with obedience to a superior. Bernard Gui refers, with a brevity which shows how httle importance he attached to them, to stories about sexual abominations performed in nocturnal as- semblies, and he indicates the growth of popular superstition by a brief allusion to a dog which appears in these gatherings and sprinkles the sectaries Avith his tail.* , The non-resistance doctrines of the Waldenses rendered them, as a rule, a comparatively easy prey, but human nature sometimes •asserted itself, and a sharp persecution carried on at this period by Frere Jacques Bernard, Inquisitor of Provence, provoked a bloody reprisal. In 1321 he sent two deputies — Freres Catalan Fabri and Pierre Paschal— to the diocese of Valence to make in-
 * Bernard. Guidon. Practica P. v. (Doat, XXX.).