e process, and heresy is
exterminated, as Unitarianism was in Poland--as the Huguenots were by the
massacres of St. Bartholomew--as Protestantism was crushed out in the Low
Countries by Alva, and in Spain by Torquemada and the _auto da fes_ of
Madrid. After a similar fashion, Bombastes Furioso proposed to
annihilate his enemies single-handed. His plan was to take them
half-a-dozen at a time, and when he had cut off the heads of the first
division, a second was to follow to receive a similar favour at his
hands, and so on till all were slain. Power has always dealt with
heretics after this fashion; in this way Churchmen endeavoured to put
down Puritanism in England, Presbyterianism in Scotland, Popery in
Ireland. To Henry IV. is due in this country the first permission to
send heretics to the stake. The Preamble of the Act of 1401, _De
Heretico Comburendo_, is as follows: "Divers false and perverse people,
of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the sacraments
of the Church, and of the authority of the same, against the law of God
and of the Church,--usurping the office of preaching,--do perversely and
maliciously, in divers places within the realm, preach and teach divers
new doctrines and wicked erroneous opinions contrary to the faith and
determination of Holy Church. And of such sect and wicked doctrines they
make unlawful conventicles, they hold and exercise schools, they make and
write books, they do wickedly instruct and inform people, and excite and
stir them to sedition and insurrection, and make great strife and
division among the people, and other enormities horrible to be heard
daily do perpetrate and commit. The diocesans cannot by their
jurisdiction spiritual, without aid of the king's majesty, sufficiently
correct these said false and perverse people, nor refrain their malice,
because they do go from diocess to diocess, and will not appear before
the said diocesans; but the jurisdiction spiritual, the keys of the
Church, and the censures of the same they do utterly condemn and despise,
and so these wicked preachings and doctrines they do from day to day
contrive and exercise to the destruction of all order and rule, right and
reason."

The Bishops by this Act received arbitrary power to arrest and imprison
on suspicion, without check or restraint of law, at their will and
pleasure. Prisoners who refused to abjure their errors, who persisted in
heresy or relapsed into it after abjur