Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/38

 time to take part in the General Chapter at Cluny—and gradually more and more authority was delegated to the assessor, who insensibly developed into the Inquisitor, a special but permanent judge acting in the name of the Pope, by whom he was invested with the right and the duty to deal legally with offences against the Faith. And as just at this time there came into being two new Orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose members by their theological training and the very nature of their vows seemed eminently fitted to perform the inquisitorial task with complete success, absolutely uninfluenced by any worldly motive, it is natural that the new officials should have been selected from these Orders, and, owing to the importance attached by the Dominicans to the study of divinity, especially from their learned ranks.

It is very obvious why the Holy See so sagaciously preferred to assign the prosecution of heretics, a matter of the first importance, to an extraordinary tribunal rather than leave the trials in the hands of the bishops. Without taking into consideration the fact that these new duties would have seriously encroached upon, if not wholly absorbed, the time and activities of a bishop, the prelates who ruled most dioceses were the subject of some monarch with whom they might have come in conflict on many a delicate point which could easily be conceived to arise, and the result of such disagreement would have been fraught with endless political difficulties and internal embarrassments. A court of religious, responsible to the Pope alone, would act more fairly, more freely, without fear or favour. The profligate Philip I of France, for example, during his long, worthless, and dishonoured reign (1060–1108), by his evil courses drew upon himself the censure of the Church, whereupon he banished the Bishop of Beauvais and revoked the decisions of the episcopal courts. In a letter to William, Count of Poitiers, Pope S. Gregory VII energetically declares that if the King does not cease from molesting the bishops and interfering with their judicature a sentence of excommunication will be launched. In another letter the same pontiff complains of the disrespect shown to the ecclesiastical tribunals, and addressing the French bishops he cries: “Your king, who sooth to say should be termed not a king