stioned by Wetzel, a disciple of Arnold of
Brescia, in 1152, in a letter to Frederic Barbarossa, Martene and
Durand, _Veterum scriptorunt ... amplissima collectio_, Paris, 1724,
vol. ii, col. 554-557.

And yet, withal, they dared persecute humble souls who, by their pure
life, tried to realize the perfect ideal proposed by Christ! These
persecutors were not the true disciples of Jesus. The Roman Church
was the woman of the apocalypse,[1] drunk with the blood of the
Saints, and the Pope was Antichrist.

[1] Apoc. vii, 3, 18.

The sacraments of the Church were a mere figment of the imagination.
The Cathari made one sacrament out of Baptism, Confirmation, Penance
and Eucharist, which they called the _consolamentum_; they denied the
real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and they repudiated
marriage.

Baptism of water was to them an empty ceremony, as valueless as the
baptism of John. Christ had undoubtedly said: "Unless a man be born
again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom
of God."[1] But the acts of the Apostles proved that baptism was a
mere ceremony, for they declared that the Samaritans, although
baptized, had not thereby received the Holy Spirit, by Whom alone the
soul is purified from sin.[2]

[1] John iii, 5.

[2] Acts i. 5; viii. 14-17.

The Catholic Church also erred greatly in teaching infant baptism. As
their faculties were undeveloped, infants could not receive the Holy
Spirit. The Cathari--at least to the middle of the thirteenth
century--did not confer the _consolamentum_ upon newly born infants.
According to them, the Church could only abandon these little ones to
their unhappy destiny. If they died, they were either forever lost,
or, as others taught, condemned to undergo successive incarnations,
until they received the _consolamentum_, which classed them with "the
Perfected."

It was preposterous to imagine that Christ wished to change bread and
wine into His Body in the Eucharist. The Cathari considered
transubstantiation as the worst of abominations, since matter, in
every form, was the work of the Evil Spirit. They interpreted the
Gospel texts in a figurative sense: at "This is My Body," they said,
simply means: "This represents My Body," thus anticipating the
teaching of Carlstadt and Zwingli. They all agreed in denouncing
Catholics for daring to claim that they really partook of the Body of
Christ, as if Christ could enter a man's stomach, to say nothin