Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/566

CHAPTER VIII. INTELLECT AND FAITH. The only heresies which really troubled the Church were those which obtained currency among the people unassisted by the in- genious quodlibets of dialecticians. Possibly there may be an ex- ception to this in the theories of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, which apparently owed their origin to the speculations of Amaury of Bene and David of Dinant ; but, as a whole, the Cathari and the Waldenses, the Spirituals and the Fraticelli, even the Huss- ites, had little or nothing in common with the fine-spun cobwebs of the schoolmen. For a heresy to take root and bear fruit, it must be able to inspire the zeal of martyrdom ; and for this it must spring from the heart, and not from the brain. We have seen how, during centuries, multitudes were ready to face death in its most awful form rather than abandon beliefs in which were entwined their sentiments and feelings and their hopes of the here- after ; but history records few cases, from Abelard to Master Eck- art and Galileo, in which intellectual conceptions, however firmly entertained, were strong enough to lead to the sacrifice. It is sen- timent rather than reason which renders heretics dangerous ; and all the pride of intellect was insufficient to nerve the scholar to maintain his thesis with the unfaltering resolution which enabled the peasant to approach the stake singing hymns and joyfully welcoming the flames which were to bear him to salvation. The schools, consequently, have little to show us in the shape of contests between free thought and authority pushed to the point of invoking the methods of the Inquisition. Yet the latter, by the system which it rendered practicable of enforcing uniform- ity of belief, exercised too potent an influence on the mental devel- opment of Europe for us to pass over this phase of its activity with- out some brief review. There were two tendencies at work to provoke collisions be-