r." No piling of
secondary motives will confront us with the true cause. Some of those
who fleshed their swords with preliminary bloodshed on their way to the
holy war may have owed their victims money; some who in 1348 shared the
worst crime that Christian nations have committed perhaps believed that
Jews spread the plague. But the problem is not there. Neither credulity
nor cupidity is equal to the burden. It needs no weighty scholar,
pressed down and running over with the produce of immense research, to
demonstrate how common men in a barbarous age were tempted and
demoralised by the tremendous power over pain, and death, and hell. We
have to learn by what reasoning process, by what ethical motive, men
trained to charity and mercy came to forsake the ancient ways and made
themselves cheerfully familiar with the mysteries of the
torture-chamber, the perpetual prison, and the stake. And this cleared
away, when it has been explained why the gentlest of women chose that
the keeper of her conscience should be Conrad of Marburg, and,
inversely, how that relentless slaughterer directed so pure a penitent
as Saint Elizabeth, a larger problem follows. After the first
generation, we find that the strongest, the most original, the most
independent minds in Europe--men born for opposition, who were neither
awed nor dazzled by canon law and scholastic theology, by the master of
sentences, the philosopher and the gloss--fully agreed with Guala and
Raymond. And we ask how it came about that, as the rigour of official
zeal relaxed, and there was no compulsion, the fallen cause was taken up
by the Council of Constance, the University of Paris, the
States-General, the House of Commons, and the first reformers; that
Ximenes outdid the early Dominicans, while Vives was teaching
toleration; that Fisher, with his friend's handy book of revolutionary
liberalism in his pocket, declared that violence is the best argument
with Protestants; that Luther, excommunicated for condemning
persecution, became a persecutor? Force of habit will not help us, nor
love and fear of authority, nor the unperceived absorption of
circumambient fumes.

Somewhere Mr. Lea, perhaps remembering Maryland, Rhode Island, and
Pennsylvania, speaks of "what was universal public opinion from the
thirteenth to the seventeenth century." The obstacle to this theory, as
of a ship labouring on the Bank, or an orb in the tail of a comet, is
that the opinion is associated with