authority.

Indeed, to maintain that the Church should use material force, is at
once to make her subject to the State; for we can hardly picture her
with her own police and gendarmes, ready to punish her rebellious
children. Every Catholic believes that the Church is an independent
society, fully able to carry out her divine mission without the aid
of the secular arm. Whether governments are favorable or hostile to
her, she must pursue her course and carry on her work of salvation
under them all.

. . . . . . . .

"Heresy," writes Jean Guiraud, "in the Middle Ages was nearly always
connected with some antisocial sect. In a period when the human mind
usually expressed itself in a theological form, socialism, communism,
and anarchy appeared under the form of heresy. By the very nature of
things, therefore, the interests of both Church and State were
identical; this explains the question of the suppression of heresy in
the Middle Ages."[1]

[1] Jean Guiraud, _La repression de l'heresie au moyen age_, in the
_Questions d'archeologie et d'histoire_, p. 44.

We are not surprised, therefore, that when Church and State found
themselves menaced by the same peril, they agreed on the means of
defence. If we deduct, from the total number of heretics burned or
imprisoned the disturbers of the social order and the criminals
against the common law, the number of condemned heretics will be very
small.

Heretics in the Middle Ages were considered amenable to the laws of
both Church and State. Men of that time could not conceive of God and
His revelation without defenders in a Christian kingdom. Magistrates
were considered responsible for the sins committed against the law of
God. Indirectly, therefore, heresy was amenable to their tribunal.
They felt it their right and duty to punish not only crimes against
society, but sins against faith.

The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, therefore, an
institution whose severity and cruelty are explained by the ideas and
manners of the age. We will never understand it, unless we consider
it in its environment, and from the viewpoint of men like St. Thomas
Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by their genius.
Critics who are ignorant of the Middle Ages may feel at liberty to
shower insult and contempt upon a judicial system whose severity is
naturally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always imply a
reasonable judgment, and to abuse an institution is not n