barbarity. But if, on his
own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down
were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle itself, false?

If we consider merely the immediate results obtained by the use of
brute force, we may indeed admit that it benefited the Church by
bringing back some of her erring children. But at the same time these
cruel measures turned away from Catholicism in the course of ages
many sensitive souls, who failed to recognize Christ's Church in a
society which practiced such cruelty in union with the State.
According, therefore, to St. Augustine's own argument, his theory has
been proved false by its fatal consequences.

We must, therefore, return to the first theory of St. Augustine, and
be content to win heretics back to the true faith by purely moral
constraint. The penalties, decreed or consented to by the Church,
ought to be medicinal in character, viz., pilgrimages, flogging,
wearing the crosses, and the like. Imprisonment may even be included
in the list, for temporary imprisonment has a well-defined expiatory
character. In fact that is why in the beginning the monasteries made
it a punishment for heresy. If, later on, the Church frequently
inflicted the penalty of life imprisonment, she did so because by a
legal fiction she attributed to it a purely penitential character.
Any one of these punishments, therefore, may be considered lawful,
provided it is not arbitrarily inflicted. This theory does not permit
the Church to abandon impenitent heretics to the secular arm. It
grants her only the right of excommunication, according to the
penitential discipline and the primitive canon law of the days of
Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Lactantius, and Hilary.

. . . . . . . .

But is this return to antiquity conformable to the spirit of the
Church? Can it be reconciled in particular with one of the condemned
propositions of the Syllabus: _Ecclesia vis inferendae potestatem non
habet_?[1] _The Church has no right to use force_.

[1] Proposit, xxiv.

Without discussing this proposition at length, let us first state
that authorities are not agreed on its precise meaning. Every
Catholic will admit that the Church has a coercive power, in both the
external and the internal forum. But the question under dispute--and
this the Syllabus does not touch--is whether the coercive power
comprises merely spiritual penalties, or temporal and corporal
penalties as well. The editor o