ssions and vices natural to it, and who, in this respect, displayed
in his government human virtues exalted to the height of Christian. For
all his moral sympathy, and superior as he was to his age, St. Louis,
nevertheless, shared, and even helped to prolong, two of its greatest
mistakes; as a Christian he misconceived the rights of conscience in
respect of religion, and, as a king, he brought upon his people
deplorable evils and perils for the sake of a fruitless enterprise. War
against religious liberty was, for a long course of ages, the crime of
Christian communities and the source of the most cruel evils as well as
of the most formidable irreligious reactions the world has had to
undergo. The thirteenth century was the culminating period of this fatal
notion and the sanction of it conferred by civil legislation as well as
ecclesiastical teaching. St. Louis joined, so far, with sincere
conviction, in the general and ruling idea of his age; and the jumbled
code which bears the name of _Etablissements de Saint Louis,_ and in
which there are collected many ordinances anterior or posterior to his
reign, formally condemns heretics to death, and bids the civil judges to
see to the execution, in this respect, of the bishops' sentences. In
1255 St. Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV. leave for the
Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the
inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the
old domains of the Counts of Toulouse. The bishops, it is true, were to
be consulted before condemnation could be pronounced by the inquisitors
against a heretic; but that was a mark of respect for the episcopate and
for the rights of the Gallican Church rather than a guarantee for liberty
of conscience; and such was St. Louis's feeling upon this subject, that
liberty, or rather the most limited justice, was less to be expected from
the kingship than from the episcopate. St. Louis's extreme severity
towards what he called the knavish oath (_vilain serment_), that is,
blasphemy, an offence for which there is no definition save what is
contained in the bare name of it, is, perhaps, the most striking
indication of the state of men's minds, and especially of the king's, in
this respect. Every blasphemer was to receive on his mouth the imprint
of a red-hot iron. "One day the king had a burgher of Paris branded in
this way; and violent murmurs were raised in the capital and came