Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/96

 80 THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS. be ruled by love and poverty be universal. Some of them placed this in 1325, others in 1330, others again in fourteen years from 1321. Thus the scheme of the Everlasting Gospel was formally adopted and brought to realization. There were two churches- one the carnal Church of Home, the Whore of Babylon, the Syna- gogue of Satan, drunk with the blood of the saints, over which John XXII. pretended to preside, although he had forfeited his station and become a heretic of heretics when he consented to the death of the martyrs of Marseilles. The other was the true Church, the Church of the Holy Ghost, which would speedily triumph through the arms of Frederic of Trinacria. St. Francis would be resurrected in the flesh, and then would commence the third age and the seventh and last state of mankind. Meanwhile, the sacra- ments were already obsolete and no longer requisite for salvation. It is to this period of frenzied exaltation that we may doubtless attribute the interpolations of Olivi's writings.* This new Church had some sort of organization. In the trial of Xaprous Boneta at Carcassonne, in 1325, there is an allusion to a Frere Guillem Giraud, who had been ordained by God as pope in place of John XXII. , whose sin had been as great as Adam's, and who had thus been deposed by the divine will. There were not lacking saints and martyrs, besides Francis and Olivi. Fragments of the bodies and bones of those who perished at the stake were treasured up as relics, and even pieces of the stakes at which they suffered. These were set before altars in their houses, or carried about the person as amulets. In this cult, the four martyrs of Marseilles were pre-eminently honored ; their suffrages with God were as potent as those of St. Laurence or St. Vincent, and in them Christ had been spiritually crucified on the four arms of the cross. One poor wretch, who was burned at Toulouse in 1322, had in- serted in his litany the names of seventv Spirituals who had suf- fered ; he invoked them among the other saints, attaching equal importance to their intervention ; and this was doubtless a cus- tomary and recognized form of devotion. Yet this cult was sim- pler than that of the orthodox Church, for it was held that the lica P. v.— Doat, XXVII. 7 sqq.— Johann. S. Victor. Chron. ann. 1316-19 Olura- tori S. R. I. III. ii. 478-9).
 * Lib. Sententt. Inq. Tolosan. pp. 298-99. 302-6, 316.— Bern. Guidon. Prac-