Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/292

 276 POLITICAL HERESY.— THE STATE. bility of the charge, of the means employed to obtain proof for its support, and the lack of coherence in the proof so obtained, it ap- pears to me that no judicial mind in possession of the facts can hesitate to pronounce a sentence, not merely of not proven, but of acquittal. The theory that there were inner grades in the Order, by which those alone to be trusted were initiated in its secret doc- trines, is perfectly untenable. As there is no evidence of any kind to support it, it is a matter of mere conjecture, which is sufficiently negatived by the fact that with scarce an exception those who con- fessed, whether ploughmen or knights, relate the sacrilege as tak- ing place on their admission. If the witnesses on whom the pros- ecution relied are to be believed at all, the infection pervaded the whole Order. Yet it is by no means improbable that there may have been some foundation for the popular gossip that the neophyte at his reception was forced to kiss the posteriors of his preceptor. As we have seen, a large majority of the Order consisted of serving brethren on whom the knights looked down with infinite con- tempt. Some such occasional command on the part of a reckless knight, to enforce the principle of absolute obedience, in admitting a plebeian to nominal fraternity and equality, would not have been foreign to the manners of the age. Who can say, moreover, that men, soured with the disillusion of life within the Order, chafing under the bonds of their irrevocable vow, and perhaps re- leased from all religious convictions amid the license of the East, may not occasionally have tested the obedience of a neophyte by bidding him to spit at the cross on the mantle that had grown hateful to him '(- Xo one who recognizes the wayward perversity d'Aumones, a serving brother who stated that at his reception his preceptor turned all the other brethren out of the chapel, and after some difficulty forced him to spit at the cross, after which he said " Go, fool, and confess." This Jean at once did, to a Franciscan who imposed on him only the penance of three Fri- day fasts, saying that it was intended as a test of constancy in case of capture by the Saracens (Proces, I. 588-91). Another serving brother, Pierre de Cherrut, related that after he had been forced to renounce God his preceptor smiled disdainfully at him, as though de- spising him (lb. I. 531). Equally suggestive is the story, told by the serving brother Eudes de Bures,
 * This would seem not unlikely if we are to believe the confession of Jean