of an excursion to the Mountains of Piedmont. Farther researches may yet disclose more abundant facts to complete the memoirs of the sufferings and virtues of the witnesses. Yet while the purity of their doctrine and the integrity of their lives may be held confessed on the word of an arch persecutor, the annals of the vatican, and the records of the inquisition, are as full of evidence corroborative of the testimony of Jesus, as any book written by an infidel, and amply illustrate the severity of the persecution of the saints, to which though our limits preclude detail, some slight allusion may here be made, in a combined view of corresponding predictions.

The witnesses were clothed in sackcloth. The little horn of the fourth beast, or the papal power, was to wear out the saints of the Most High. The men of understanding were to fall, to try them, and to purge, and to make them white to the time of the end: because it is yet for a time appointed. It is the character of the brethren of Jesus that they loved not their lives unto the death. The great whore that sitteth upon many waters was drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Rev. xvii. 6. (See table).

The persecution, even unto the death, that the saints of the Most High and the witnesses of Jesus were to endure, is a matter of the plainest prediction: and there is no need for searching into any secret records to discover the proof; for this thing was not done in a corner. The design of papal persecution was to extirpate heresy; and the most savage torture of the martyrs was, with that intent, exhibited openly. The gospel of Jesus inculcates brotherly love, and even the love of our enemies. But the time was, while it was hid, that the stake was a scene round which the persecutors exulted with joy, and shouted with transport at each cry of the expiring victims. The history of papal persecutions leads

us far beyond the period of the dawn of the Reformation; and so drunken with blood was the church of Rome, that the reign of the bloody Mary, by which they are best known in Britain, appears but as the sprinkling of a few drops from a large cup already full to the brim.

Heretics and heathens were involved, according to the papal creed, in the same condemnation. And when the perils of the desert and the sabres of the Saracens had somewhat quashed the frenzied spirit of military crusading for the recovery and possession of the Holy Land, absolution was held forth at the cheaper rate and safer charge of extirpating heresy within the precincts of Christendom. A new order of holy wars was proclaimed. And by the authority of the pope, the monks of Citeaux, with a zeal outrivalling that of Peter the hermit, the great preacher of the Palestine war, proclaimed a crusade against the Albigenses. In the year 1208, "in the name of the pope and of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, they promised to all who should perish in this holy expedition plenary absolution of all sins committed from the day of their birth to that of their death."* A campaign of forty days, in so holy a cause, was reckoned, by papal infallibility, merit enough to secure eternal salvation. Bull after bull was fulminated from the court of Rome. And never had the cross been taken up with a more unanimous consent." "The immense preparations resounded throughout Europe, and filled Languedoc with terror."+

66

The preaching of a crusade against the saints of the Most High, was combined with the invention and

*Sismondi's Hist. of the Crusades against the Albigenses, p. 24. The history of the Crusades against the Albigenses has been extracted from Sismondi's History of the French, and translated into English in separate volumes.

† Ibid. p. 25.

active agency of the inquisition, in wearing them out. While one class of monks preached in every church a war of extermination, year after year another, with father Dominic at their head, who gave rise to the order of the Dominicans, searched out in every village the victims of papal tyranny, and the fires of the inquisition were added to all the horrors of a war, of which the barbarous atrocity never was exceeded. A few extracts from the pages of Sismondi, in depicting the cruelties of which the crusade against the Albigenses was full, will shew, beyond the wish of any heart that can be touched with humanity, how war was made with the saints, how the witnesses were clothed with sackcloth, how the churchmen of Rome sought to wear them out, and yet how they loved not their lives unto the death. Though the slaughter was often indiscriminate, the witnesses were first sought out before the crusade began, and the malignant ingenuity of demons was added to the most savage ferocity of men.

"While the Bernardins were recruiting soldiers for the cross, Innocent III. charged a new congregation, (at the head of which he placed the Spaniard saint Dominic,) to go on foot two by two through the villages, to preach the faith in the midst of them, to enlighten them by controversial discussions, to display to them all the zeal of Christian charity, and to obtain from their confidence exact information as to the number and dwellings of those who had wandered from the church, in order to burn them when the opportunity should arrive. Thus began the order of the preaching brethren of St. Dominic, or of the inquisitors." "*

These apostles of the inquisition, though going out two by two, differed as much from the first preachers of the gospel of peace, as the fanatic robbers who were the apostles of Mahomet. Yet they were but the fit heralds, or rather the blood-hounds of the war

* Sismondi's History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, pp. 24, 25.

against the saints which, close upon their footsteps, pursued their tract.

"As the crusade approached, the bishop of Beziers delivered to the legate of the pope a list of those among his flock whom he suspected of heresy, and wished to see consigned to the flames. The citizens refused to surrender them to the avengers of the faith, notwithstanding that the assemblage of the tents and pavilions of the crusaders was so great, that it appeared as if the world was collected there. All the inhabitants of the country had taken refuge in Beziers. The city was taken. The immense multitude were massacred in the churches, whither they had fled; seven thousand dead bodies were counted in that of the Magdalen alone. When the crusaders had massacred the last living creature in Beziers, and pillaged the houses of all that they had thought worth carrying off, they set fire to the city in every part at once, and reduced it to a vast funeral pile. Not a house remained standing, not one human being alive. Historians differ as to the number of victims. The abbot of Citeaux, feeling some shame for the butchery which he had ordered, in his letter to Innocent III. reduces it to fifteen thousand, others make it amount to sixty."* "The legate was profoundly penetrated with the maxim of Innocent III., that to keep faith with those who have it not, is an offence against faith." In the siege and assault of Lavaur, 'the bishops, the abbot of Courdieu, who exercised the functions of vice-legate, and all the priests, clothed with their pontifical habits, giving themselves up to the joy of seeing the carnage begin, sang the hymn Veni Creator. The knights mounted the breach. Resistance was impossible; and the only care of Simon de Montfort was to prevent the crusaders from instantly falling upon the inhabitants, and to beseech them rather to make prisoners, that the priests of the living God might not be deprived of their promised joys. Our pilgrims,' continues the monk of Vaux-Cernay, collected the innumerable heretics that the castle contained, and burned them alive with the utmost joy. In Bernard's life of Innocent III. their number is stated at 400. The castle of Montjoyre was abandoned, but burned by the crusaders. The castle of Cassero afforded them more satisfaction, as it furnished human victims for their sacrifices. It was surrendered on capitulation; and the pilgrims, seizing nearly sixty heretics, burned them with infinite joy. This was always the phrase employed by the monk who was the witness and the panegyrist of the crusade.‡

"One of the articles of the capitulation of the castle of Minerva provided, that the heretics themselves, if they were converted,

* Sismondi's History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, pp. 34-37.

Ibid. pp. 76, 77.

+ Ibid. p. 78.

might quit the castle and have their lives saved. When the capitulation was read in the council of war, 'Robert of Mauvoisin,' says. the monk of Vaux-Cernay, a nobleman, and entirely devoted to the Catholic faith, cried, that the pilgrims would never consent to that; that it was not to shew mercy to the heretics, but to put them to death, they had taken the cross.' But the Abbot Arnold replied, fear not, for I believe that there will be very few converted.' The legate was not deceived in this bloody hope. The crusaders took possession of the castle of Minerva on the 22d July, 1210; they entered, singing Te Deum, and preceded by the cross and the standards of Montfort. The heretics were, in the mean time, assembled, the men in one house, the women in another, and there on their knees, and resigned to their fate, they prepared themselves, by prayer, for the punishment that awaited them. The abbot Guy de Faux-Cernay, to fulfil the capitulation, came and began to preach to them the catholic faith; but his auditors interrupted him by an unanimous cry-We will have none of your faith,' said they, we have renounced the church of Rome, your labour is vain; for neither death nor life shall make us renounce the opinions that we have embraced.' The abbot then passed to the assembly of the women, but he found them as resolute and more enthusiastic still in their declarations. The count of Montfort, in his turn, visited both. Already he had piled up an enormous mass of dry wood. converted to the catholic faith,' said he to the assembled Albigenses, or ascend this pile.' None were shaken. They set fire to the pile, which covered the whole square with a tremendous conflagration. And the heretics were then conducted to the place. But violence was not necessary to compel them to enter the flames; they voluntarily precipitated themselves into them, to the number of one hundred and forty, after having commended their souls to God, in whose cause they suffered martyrdom."*

Be

They loved not their lives unto the death; but the church of Rome was drunken with the blood of the saints.

"Innocent III., at first, excited the sanguinary spirit which then lorded it over Europe. It was but too true that the whole of Christendom then demanded the renewal of those scenes of carnage, that it prided itself on the slaughter of the heretics, that it was in the name of public opinion that the fathers of Lavaur required new massacres.† Kings, nobles, priests, and people

* Sismondi's History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, pp. 64, 65. † Ibid. p. 95.