Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/621

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 605 struck admiration. Then an image of the Virgin wept, and it was explained that her grief arose from the disregard of her warnings of what would befall the city unless it ceased to receive a pension from France, unless it expelled the Franciscans, and unless it ceased to believe in the Immaculate Conception. People flocked from all the region around, and the fame of the miraculous apparitions spread, when the magistrates of Berne Avere surprised by Letser, the favored recipient of the visitations, taking refuge with them, and begging protection from his superiors, who were torturing and endeavoring to poison him. An investigation developed the whole plot. Wigand Wirt, Master of the Obser- vantine Dominicans, and professor of theology, had had, in 1501, a quarrel with a parish priest in Frankfort, in which they abused each other from their respective pulpits. In a sermon the priest thanked God that he did not belong to an Order which had slain the Emperor Henry VII. with a poisoned host, and which denied the Immaculate Conception. Wirt, who was present, shouted to him that he was a liar and a heretic. An uproar followed, in which the Order sustained Wirt and appealed to Julius II., who appointed a commission. The result was adverse to Wirt, who left Frankfort filled with wrath, and published a savage attack upon his adversaries, which the Archbishop of Mainz caused to be pub- licly burned, while all his suffragans prohibited its circulation. Greatly excited, the Dominicans, in a chapter held at Wimpffen, resolved to prove by miracle the falsity of the Immaculate Con- ception. Frankfort was at first selected as the theatre, but was abandoned through fear of the archbishop ; then Niirnberg, but the number of learned men there was an obstacle, and Berne was finally chosen as a city populous and powerful, but simple and unlearned. The officials of the Dominican convent there, John Vetter the prior, Francis Ulchi the sub-prior, Stephen Bolshorst the lector, and Henry Steinecker the procurator, undertook to carry out the design, and selected as an instrument a tailor of Zur- zach, John Letser, who had been recently admitted to the Order. To suit the taste of the age, it was proved on the trial that they had commenced by invoking the assistance of the devil and had signed compacts with him in their blood, but their own ingenuity was sufficient for what followed, though Ave are told that Avhen they produced the stigmata on Letser they first rendered him