Page:History of Freedom.djvu/574

 53 0

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

group believed that this had been done fraudulently, and resolved to rnake their complaint to the Pope; but Cardinal Mathieu, seeing that a storm was rising, and that he would be called on to be the spokesman of his friends, hurried away to spend Christmas at Besançon. All the votes of his group \vere thrown away. Even the bishop of Grenoble, who had obtained twenty-nine votes at one meeting, and thirteen at the other, was excluded from the Commission. It was constituted as the managers of the election desired, and the first trial of strength appeared to have annihilated the opposition. The force under entire control of the court could be estimated from the number of votes cast blindly for candidates not put forward by their own countrymen, and unknown to others, who had therefore no recommendation but that of the official list. According to this test Rome could dispose of 5 50 votes. The moment of this triumph was chosen for the production, of an act already two months old, by \vhich many ancient censures were revoked, and many were rene\ved. The legislation of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century appointed nearly two hundred cases by \vhich excommunication \vas incurred 'ipso facto, with- out inquiry or sentence. They had generally fallen into oblivion, or \vere remembered as instances of former extravagance; but they had not been abrogated, and, as they were in part defensible, they were a trouble to timorous consciences. There was reason to expect that this question, which had often occupied the attention of the bishops, would be brought before the Council; and the demand for a reform could not have been withstood. The diffièulty \vas anticipated by s\veeping a\vay as many censures as it was thought safe to abandon, and deciding, independently of the bishops, what must be retained. The Pope reserved to himself ãlone the faculty of absolving from the sin of harbouring or defending the mem bers of aDY sect, of causing priests to be tried by secular courts, of violating asylum or alienating the real property of the Church. The prohibition of anonymous \vriting was restricted to works on theology, and the