artyrdom for
their adherence.[2204] The most distinguished of the martyrs of the
spirituals was Bernard Delicieux, who found himself at war with the
Inquisition and the pope, and who, after a trial in which all the arts
of browbeating and torture were exhausted, died a prisoner, in chains,
on bread and water.[2205] The other party also had its martyrs, who were
willing to die for the doctrine that Christ and his apostles did not
live by beggary.[2206] Any doctrine that the apostles lived in poverty,
by begging, was a criticism of the hierarchy as it then was. John XXII,
another non-sentimental pope, declared that the doctrine that Christ and
his apostles lived in negation of property was a heresy. Then Francis of
Assisi and all who had held the same opinions as he became
heretics.[2207] In 1368 the strict Franciscans split off and formed the
order of the Observantines, and in 1487 the Recollects, another order of
strict observers of the rule, was founded in Spain, with the
authorization of Innocent VIII. The stricter orders were always more
enthusiastically devoted to the service of the papacy.[2208]

+696. Whether poverty is a good.+ The history of the mendicant orders is
an almost incomprehensible story of wrongheadedness. That poverty is a
good is an inversion of common sense. That men do not want what they
must have to live is a denial of all philosophy. The mendicants did not
invent these dogmas. They were in the mores, and they made the
mendicants. That the mendicants at once became greedy, avaricious, and
luxurious, emissaries of tyranny and executioners of cruelty, was only
an instance of the extravagances of human nature.

+697. Clerical celibacy.+ If according to Christian standards virginity
was the sole right rule and marriage was only a concession, it might
justly be argued that the clergy ought to live up to the real standard,
not the conventional concession. This was the best argument for
sacerdotal celibacy. It was well understood, and not disputed, that
celibacy was a rule of the church, and not an ordinance of Christ or the
Gospel. It was an ascetic practice which was enjoined and enforced on
the clergy. They never obeyed it. The rule produced sin and vice, and
introduced moral discord and turpitude into the lives of thousands of
the best men of the Middle Ages. In the baser days of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries the current practice was a recognized violation of
professed duty and virtue, und