t--and, indeed, I
know not what all would be the offenses which our prosecutors would
have discovered in the document. It is less than a year since,
according to the newspapers, a disciplinary inquiry was instituted
with respect to a memorial of a very different tenor, wherein one of
our universities declined the mandatory suggestions addressed to the
university by the ministers in regard to a given appointment. But,
at that earlier day, in the dark ages, such was not the custom. On the
other hand, in compliance with the university's demands, the treasurer
of the crown, Audry Griffart, together with many others of the high
officers of finance, was taken into custody, while others avoided a
like fate only by escaping into a church vested with the right of
asylum.

That was in 1412. But already eighty years before that date there
occurred another, and perhaps even more significant case, which I may
touch upon more briefly. Pope John XXII. promulgated a new
construction of the dogma of _visio beatifica_ and had it preached in
the churches. The University of Paris,--_nec pontificis reverentia
prohibuit_, says the report, _quominus veritati insistereat_,--"reverence
of the holy father prevented not the university from declaring the
truth"--, although the matter then in question was an article of the
faith and lay within a field within which the competence of the pope
could not be doubted, still the university, on the 22d of January, 1332,
put forth a decree in which this construction of the dogma was classed
to be erroneous.

Philip VI. served this decree upon the pope, then resident at Avignon,
with the declaration that, unless he recanted as the decree required,
he would have him burned as a heretic. And the pope, in fact,
recanted, although he was then on his deathbed. All of which you may
find set forth in Bulas, _Historia Universitatis Parisiensis_. (Paris,
1668, fol. Tom. IV. p. 375 _et seq_.)

These instances, which might be multiplied at will, may suffice to
show how unqualified was the freedom of science even in early days,
constrained by no punitive limitation at the hands of pope or king;
for, be it remembered, in the Middle Ages, science had, as I have
before remarked, only a corporate existence in its bearers, the
universities. So that the view for which I speak has practically been
accepted as much as five hundred years back, even in Catholic times
and among Latin peoples.

But now comes Protestantism and