were fearless men,
sturdily fighting for their convictions. The fundamental ideal of these
reformers was the suppression of the outward pomp of the Church and the
return to the simplicity of the gospels. Their fates varied. The gentle
St. Francis of Assisi was canonised; the illumined Eckhart, on the other
hand, was tortured; most of them, like the ardent Arnold of Brescia,
were burnt at the stake. This conduct of the hierarchy towards the truly
religious men is easily explained. The Church was faced by a problem; on
the one hand, the genuine and profound piety of these men was
unmistakable, but on the other, the contrast of their teaching with
Church tradition was too obvious, and by many of them too strongly
emphasised to be silently ignored.

The Provencal heretic, Peter of Bruis, seems to have been the first
reformer who preached against iconolatry and even objected to the images
of the Crucified. He ordered churches to be razed to the ground because
he acknowledged only the invisible community of the saints. He was burnt
at St. Giles' by an infuriated mob. More powerful, and far more
numerous than his followers, the Peterbrusians, were the Cathari and
the Waldenses (founded by Peter Valdez A.D. 1177) who soon spread to
Northern Italy and amalgamated with the sect of the Lombards. The
Cathari advocated a simple and ascetic life, in accordance with the
teaching of primitive Christianity, refrained from all ecclesiastical
ceremonies and despised the sacraments, particularly baptism. More
radical than later reformers, they rejected the doctrine of
transubstantiation, and saw in the eucharist only a symbol of the union
of God and the soul. This made their name synonymous with heresy. But by
far the most famous of heretical sects was the sect of the Waldenses or
Albigenses. It numbered amongst its adherents--if not publicly, at any
rate secretly--many of the great Provencal lords, and there can be no
doubt that this community was permeated by the spirit of a renewed
Christianity, the Christianity of St. Francis and the German mystics.
The Albigenses believed that not Christ, but His semblance only, had
been crucified; they rejected the God of the Old Testament and their
doctrine of the two creators,--the devil who created the objective
world, and the true God who created the spiritual world--is reminiscent
of the loftiest Parseeism and the profoundest gnosticism. They regarded
man as placed between good and evil; the ch