Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/422

 as domiciles, the selection of the one which alone can fill that character often leads to appeals even up to the highest court. The residence of a man’s wife and family as contrasted with his place of business, his exercise of political or municipal functions, and any conduct which tends to connect his children with a given country, as by their education or the start given them in life, as well as other indications, are often cited as important; but none of them are in themselves decisive. The situation must be considered as a whole. When the question is between the domicile of origin and an alleged one of choice, its solution is rendered a little easier than it is when the question is between two alleged domiciles of choice, the burden of proof lying on the party which contends that the domicile of origin has been abandoned.

In the state of the law which has been described it will not be found surprising that an act of parliament, 24 & 25 Vict. c. 121, recites that by the operation of the law of domicile the expectation and belief of British subjects dying abroad with regard to the distribution of their property are often defeated, and enacts that when a convention to that effect has been made with any foreign country, no British subject dying in such country shall be deemed to have acquired a domicile therein, unless he has been resident in such country for one year previous to death and has made a declaration in writing of his intention to become domiciled; and that British subjects so dying without having so resided and made such declaration shall be deemed for all purposes of testate or intestate succession as to movables to retain the domicile they possessed at the time of going to reside in such foreign country. Similar exemptions are conferred on the subjects of the foreign state dying in Great Britain or Ireland. But the act does not apply to foreigners who have obtained letters of naturalization in any part of the British dominions. It has not been availed of, and is indeed an anachronism, ignoring as it does the fact that domicile has no longer a world-wide importance, owing to the substitution for it of political nationality as a test of private law in so many important countries. The United States of America is not one of those countries, but there the importance of domicile suffers from the habit of referring questions of capacity to the law of the place of contract instead of to any personal law.

 DOMINIC, SAINT (1170–1221), founder of the Dominican Order of Preaching Friars, was born in 1170 at Calaroga in Old Castile. He spent ten or twelve years in study, chiefly theological, at Palencia, and then, about 1195, he was ordained and became a canon in the cathedral chapter of Osma, his native diocese. The bishop induced his canons to follow the Rule of St Augustine and thus make themselves (q.v.); and so Dominic became a canon regular and soon the prior or provost of the cathedral community. The years from 1195 to 1203 have been filled up with fabulous stories of missions to the Moors; but Dominic stayed at Osma, preaching much in the cathedral, until 1203, when he accompanied the bishop on an embassy in behalf of the king of Castile to “The Marches.” This has commonly been taken as Denmark, but more probably it was the French or Italian Marches. When the embassy was over, the bishop and Dominic repaired to Rome, and Innocent III. charged them to preach among the Albigensian heretics in Languedoc. For ten years (1205–1215) this mission in Languedoc was the work of Dominic’s life.

The (q.v.) have received much sympathy, as being a kind of pre-Reformation Protestants; but it is now recognized that their tenets were an extreme form of Manichaeism. They believed in the existence of two gods, a good (whose son was Christ) and an evil (whose son was Satan); matter is the creation of the evil principle, and therefore essentially evil, and the greatest of all sins is sexual intercourse, even in marriage; sinful also is the possession of material goods, and the eating of flesh meat, and many other things. So great was the abhorrence of matter that some even thought it an act of religion to commit suicide by voluntary starvation, or to starve children to death (see article “Neu-Manichäer” by Otto Zöckler in ed. 3 of Herzog’s Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie (1903); or c. iii. of Paul Sabatier’s Life of St Francis). Such tenets were destructive not only of Catholicism but of Christianity of any kind and of civil society itself; and for this reason so unecclesiastical a person as the emperor Frederick II. tried to suppress the kindred sects in Italy. In 1208, after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III. called on the Christian princes to suppress the Albigensian heresy by force of arms, and for seven years the south of France was devastated by one of the most bloodthirsty wars in history, the Albigenses being slaughtered by thousands and their property confiscated wholesale.

During this time, it is the judgment of the most recent Protestant writer on St Dominic that, though keeping on good terms with Simon de Montfort, the leader, and praying for the success of the crusaders’ arms during the battle of Muret, “yet, so far as can be seen from the sources, Dominic took no part in the crusade, but endeavoured to carry his spiritual activity on the same lines as before. The oldest trustworthy sources know nothing of his having exercised the office of Inquisitor during the Albigensian war” (Grützmacher). This verdict of a fair-minded and highly competent Protestant church historian on the most controverted point of Dominic’s career is of great value. His method was to travel over the country on foot and barefooted, in extreme poverty, simplicity and austerity, preaching and instructing in highways and villages and towns, and in the castles of the nobility, controverting and discussing with the heretics. He used often to organize formal disputations with Albigensian leaders, lasting a number of days. Many times plots were laid against his life. Though in his ten years of preaching a large number of converts were made, it has to be said that the results were not such as had been hoped for, and after it all, and after the crusade, the population still remained at heart Albigensian. A sense of failure appears in Dominic’s last sermon in Languedoc: “For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.’ We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land ... and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.” The threat that seems to be conveyed in these words, of trying to promote a new crusade, was never carried out; the remaining years of Dominic’s life were wholly given up to the founding of his order.

The Order of Dominicans grew out of the little band of volunteers that had joined Dominic in his mission among the Albigenses. He had become possessed with the idea of addressing wider circles and of forming an order whose vocation should be to preach and missionize throughout the whole world. By 1214 the nucleus of such an institute was formed round Dominic and was known as the “Holy Preaching.” In 1215 the bishop of Toulouse, Dominic’s great friend, established them in a church and house of the city, and Dominic went to Rome to obtain the permission of Innocent III. to found his order of preachers. The course of events is traced in the article. After three years, in 1218, the full permission he desired was given by Honorius III. These last years of his life were spent in journeying backwards and forwards between Toulouse and Rome, where his abode was at the basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine, given to him by the pope; and then in extended journeys all over Italy, and to Paris, and into Spain, establishing friaries and organizing the order wherever he went. It propagated and spread with extraordinary rapidity, so that by Dominic’s death in 1221, only five or six years after the first practical steps towards the execution of the idea, there were over 500 friars and 60 friaries, divided into 8 provinces embracing the whole of western Europe. Thus Dominic was at his death able to contemplate his great creation solidly established, and well launched on its career to preach to the whole world.

It appears that at the end of his life Dominic had the idea of going himself to preach to the heathen Kuman Tatars on the Dnieper and the Volga. But this was not to be; he was worn out by the incessant toils and fatigues and austerities of his laborious life, and he died at his monastery at Bologna, on the