Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/27

Rh tion of the heretic. Innocent III set on foot the organized crusades for the extirpation of heresy with the sword in Southern France. Thomas Aquinas, d. 1274, made the solemn statement that as coin-clippers, who offend against the majesty of the state, are put to death, so heretics, who offend against the church, deserve to be put out of the world.

This principle was incorporated in the civil codes of the Schwabenspiegel and Sachsenspiegel and in the laws of Frederick II who proscribed death in the flames for heretics. In accordance with the old axiom that the church does not desire blood—ecclesiam non sitit sanguinem—it did not of itself execute the death sentence. However, it was participant in the execution, for it threatened civil magistrates with severest spiritual penalties who hesitated to execute it. Gregory IX demanded from the Roman senator a promise to search out heretics and to put them to death within eight days of their condemnation by the ecclesiastical tribunal. Louis IX, in France, and parliament by its act of 1401, in England, introduced the law of death. The horrors of the system of torture were authorized by Innocent IV, the successor of Gregory IX. Later, it remained for Sixtus IV in 1478 to open the second volume in the history of the horrors of the mediæval inquisition by sanctioning the holy office of Spain.

Thus, by papal assumption and scholastic definition and state legislation, the claim was made to the awful power of shutting up dissenters eternally in hell and of depriving them of life on the earth.

In opposing this usage, Huss appealed to the example of Christ and the purpose of the Gospel. Christ did not assume civil authority. He refused the title of king. He did