ltem in articulo deviare_."[1] This
was also the view of the theologians and the canonists. St. Thomas
Aquinas, for instance, who speaks for the whole _schola_, did not
make any distinction between the Catharan heresy and any other purely
speculative heresy; he put them all on one level; every obdurate or
relapsed heretic deserved death.[2] The Inquisitors were so fully
persuaded of this truth that they prosecuted heretics whose heresy
was not discovered until ten or twenty years after their death, when
surely they were no longer able to cause any injury to society.[3]

[1] Constitution _Inconsutilem tunicam_.

[2] _Summa_ IIa, IIae, q. x, art. 8; q. xi, art. 3 and 4.

[3] Cf. Tanon, op. cit., pp. 407-412.

We need not wonder at these views and practices, for they were fully
in accord with the notion of justice current at the time. The rulers
in Church and State felt it their duty not only to defend the social
order, but to safeguard the interests of God in the world. They
deemed themselves in all sincerity the representatives of divine
authority here below. God's interests were their interests; it was
their duty, therefore, to punish all crimes against His law. Heresy,
therefore, a purely theological crime, became amenable to their
tribunal. In punishing it, they believed that they were merely
fulfilling one of the duties of their office. We have now to examine
and judge the penalties indicted upon heresy as such.

The first in order of importance was the death penalty of the stake,
inflicted upon all obdurate and relapsed heretics.

Relapsed heretics, when repentant, did not at first incur the death
penalty. Imprisonment was considered an adequate punishment, for it
gave them a chance to expiate their fault. The death penalty
inflicted later on placed the judges in a false position. On the one
hand, by granting absolution and giving communion to the prisoner,
they professed to believe in the sincerity of his repentance and
conversion, and yet by sending him to the stake for fear of a
relapse, they acted contrary to their convictions. To condemn a man
to death who was considered worthy of receiving the Holy Eucharist,
on the plea that he might one day commit the sin of heresy again,
appears to us a crying injustice.

But should even unrepentant heretics be put to death? No, taught St.
Augustine, and most of the early Fathers, who invoked in favor of the
guilty ones the higher law of "charity and Christian gentl