Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/35

 trary to thy monastic calling and vows—to concern thyself in worldly as well as spiritual businesses and hast violated all ecclesiastical law and order, by our episcopal authority we condemn thee to be severely scourged and according to the provision of the Church to be closely imprisoned.)

From these instances it will be seen that the Church throughout all those centuries of violence, rapine, invasion, and war, when often primitive savagery reigned supreme and the most hideous cruelty was the general order of the day, dealt very gently with the rebel and the heretic, whom she might have executed wholesale with the greatest ease; no voice would have been raised in protest save that of her own pontiffs, doctors, and Saints; nay, rather, such repression would have been universally applauded as eminently proper and just. But it was the civil power who arraigned the anarch and the misbeliever, who sentenced him to death.

About the year 1000, however, the venom of Manichæism obtained a new footing in the West, where it had died out early in the sixth century. Between 1030–40 an important Manichæan community was discovered at the Castle of Monteforte, near Asti, in Piedmont. Some of the members were arrested by the Bishop of Asti and a number of noblemen in the neighbourhood, and upon their refusal to retract the civil arm burned them. Others, by order of the Archbishop of Milan, Ariberto, were brought to that city since he hoped to convert them. They answered his efforts by attempts to make proselytes; whereupon Lanzano, a prominent noble and leader of the popular party, caused the magistrates to intervene and when they had been taken into the custody of the State they were executed without further respite. For the next two hundred years Manichæism spread its infernal teaching in secret until, towards the year 1200, the plague had infected all Italy and Southern Europe, had reached northwards to Germany, where it was completely organized, and was not unknown in England, since as early as 1159 thirty foreign Manichees had privily settled here. They were discovered in 1166, and handed over to the secular authorities by the Bishops of the Council of Oxford. In high wrath Henry II ordered them them to be scourged, branded in the forehead, and cast adrift in the cold