lph, he desired to
concentrate power, not to limit or divide it. Of the sacred immunities
of conscience he had no clearer vision than Dante. But he opposed
persecution in the shape in which he knew it, and the patriarchs of
European emancipation have not done more. He never says that there is no
case in which a religion may be proscribed; but he speaks of none in
which a religion may be imposed. He discusses, not intolerance, but the
divine authority to persecute, and pleads for a secular law. It does not
appear how he would deal with a Thug. "Nemo quantumcumque peccans contra
disciplinas speculativas aut operativas quascumque punitur vel arcetur
in hoc saeculo praecise in quantum huiusmodi, sed in quantum peccat
contra praeceptum humanae legis.... Si humana lege prohibitum fuerit
haereticum aut aliter infidelem in regione manere, qui talis in ipsa
repertus fuerit, tanquam legis humanae transgressor, poena vel supplicio
huic transgressioni eadem lege statutis, in hoc saeculo debet arceri."
The difference is slight between the two readings. One asserts that
Marsilius was tolerant in effect; the other denies that he was tolerant
in principle.

Mr. Lea does not love to recognise the existence of much traditional
toleration. Few lights are allowed to deepen his shadows. If a stream of
tolerant thought descended from the early ages to the time when the
companion of Vespucci brought his improbable tale from Utopia, then the
views of Bacon, of Dante, of Gerson cannot be accounted for by the
ascendency of a unanimous persuasion. It is because all men were born to
the same inheritance of enforced conformity that we glide so easily
towards the studied increase of pain. If some men were able to perceive
what lay in the other scale, if they made a free choice, after
deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what
happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn
from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled
thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance
was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, and the
few who shrank half-hearted from the gallows and the flames were
exceptions, were men navigating craft of their own away from the track
of St. Peter. Even in his own age he is not careful to show that the
Waldenses opposed persecution, not in self-defence, but in the necessary
sequence of thought. And when he describes