lly defining the respective provinces of the lay and
clerical judges. Prelates and inquisitors were authorized to proceed, in
accordance with canon law, to obtain information alike against clergymen
and laymen, in case of suspected heresy, and the secular judges were
strictly enjoined to afford them all needed assistance in execution of
their writs of summons and arrest. But all persons guilty of open
heresy, and not actually in holy orders, must be given over, together
with the documents relating to their offences, to the royal judges and
to the courts of parliament, and by them tried as seditious disturbers
of the peace and tranquillity of the commonwealth and of the king's
subjects, secret conspirators against the prosperity of his estate, and
rebels against his authority and laws.[438] In order, however, to secure
to the ecclesiastical tribunals their full control over clergymen, it
was provided that any churchman condemned to banishment, or any other
punishment short of death, should immediately after the "amende
honorable," and before execution of sentence, be remitted to his
spiritual superiors to undergo deprivation of office, and such other
penalties as canon law might prescribe.[439]

[Sidenote: Heresy to be punished as sedition.]

[Sidenote: Repression proves a failure.]

But the succession of edicts, each surpassing the last in severity, had
not rendered the path of the judges, whether lay or ghostly, altogether
easy. There were found prisoners, accused of holding and teaching
heretical doctrines, well skilled in holy lore, however ignorant of the
casuistry of the schools, who made good their assertion that they could
give a warrant for all their distinctive tenets from the Sacred
Scriptures. Their arguments were so cogent, their citations were so
apposite, that the auditors who had come with the expectation of
witnessing the confusion of a heretic, often departed absorbed in
serious consideration of a system that had so much the appearance of
truth when defended by a simple man in jeopardy of his life, and when
fortified by the authority of the Bible. More learned reformers had
appealed successfully to the Fathers to whose teachings the church
avowed its implicit obedience. It was clear that some standard of
orthodoxy must be established. For, if St. Augustine or St. Cyprian
might be brought up to prove the errors of the priests, what was it but
allowing the reformers to place the Roman Church at the bar,