Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/662

 646 CONCLUSION. the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martyrdom. Ko prizes of ambition lay before them to tempt their departure from the safe and beaten track, no sympathizing crowds surrounded the piles of fagots and strengthened them in the fearful trial ; but scorn and hatred and loathing were their portion to the last. Save in cases of relapse, life could always be saved by recantation and return to the bosom of the Church, which recognized that even from a worldly point of view a converted heretic was more valuable than a martyred one, yet the steadfast resolution, which the orthodox character- ized as satanic hardening of the heart, was too common to excite surprise.* This inestimable material for the elevation of humanity was plucked up as tares and cast into the furnace. Society, so long as it was orthodox and docile, was allowed to wallow in all the wickedness which depravity might suggest. The supreme object of uniformity in faith was practically attained, and the moral con- dition of mankind was dismissed from consideration as of no impor- tance. Yet the incongruity between the ideal of Christianity and its realization was too unnatural for the situation to be permanent. In the Church as well as out of it there was a leaven working. While St. Birgitta was thundering her revelations in the unwill- ing ears of Gregory XL, William Langland, the monk of Malvern, sharpened his bitter denunciations of friar and prelate by remind- men could still be found hardy enough to defend the position of the Church tow- ards heretics, but it is a sign of the progress of humanity that this is no longer done by justifying the irrefragable facts of history, but by boldly denying them. In a recent work by M. le Chanoine Claessens, " Camerier secret de Sa SainteteV' who informs us that after long and serious study of the original sources he writes with scrupulous impartiality and with the calmness befitting history,we are told that the penalty of the Church for public and obstinate heretics is simply ex- communication, and that it has never allowed itself to employ any direct con- straint, whether for the conversion of Jews and Pagans or to bring back wan- dering Christians to unity. At the same time he is careful to make the reserva- tion that the Church possesses an incontestable right to use physical means to compel those who have been baptized to fulfil the obligations thus assumed. — Claessens. L'Inquisition et le regime pgnal pour la repression de Theresie dans les Pays-Bas du passe, Tournhout, 1886, p. 5.
 * It would scarce seem possible that, in the full light of the nineteenth century,