e following grounds: "Seeing that every human being, which is
made in the image of Our Lord, should generally be free by natural
right." The history of Christian communities is full of these happy
inconsistencies; when a moral and just principle is implanted in the
soul, absolute power itself does not completely escape from its healthy
influence, and the good makes its way athwart the evil, just as a source
of fresh and pure water ceases not to flow through and spread over a land
wasted by the crimes or follies of men.

It is desirable to give an idea and an example of the conduct which was
already beginning to be adopted and of the authority which was already
beginning to be exercised in France, amidst the feudal reaction that set
in against Philip the Handsome and amidst the feeble government of his
sons, by that magistracy, of such recent and petty origin, which was
called upon to defend, in the king's name, order and justice against the
count-less anarchical tyrannies scattered over the national territory.
During the early years of the fifteenth century, a lord of Gascony,
Jordan de Lisle, "of most noble origin, but most ignoble deeds," says a
contemporary chronicler, "abandoned himself to all manner of
irregularities and crimes." Confident in his strength and his
connections,--for Pope John XXII. had given his niece to him in
marriage,--"he committed homicides, entertained evil-doers and murderers,
countenanced robbers, and rose against the king. He killed, with the
man's own truncheon, one of the king's servants who was wearing the royal
livery according to the custom of the royal servants. When his misdeeds
were known, he was summoned for trial to Paris; and he went thither
surrounded by a stately retinue of counts, nobles, and barons of
Aquitaine. He was confined, at first, in the prison of Chatelet; and
when a hearing had been accorded to his reply and to what he alleged in
his defence against the crimes of which he was accused, he was finally
pronounced worthy of death by the doctors of the parliament, and on
Trinity-eve he was dragged at the tail of horses and hanged, as he
deserved, on the public gallows at Paris." It was, assuredly, a
difficult and a dangerous task for the obscure members of this
parliament, scarcely organized as it was and quite lately established
for a permanence in Paris, to put down such disorders and such men.
In the course of its long career the French magistracy has committed ma