malice prepense, was not made a felony until the fifteenth century, in a criminal law so severe that, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the robbing of a hawk's nest was similarly a felony; and as recently as 1833 a child of nine was sentenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane of glass and stealing twopence worth of paint.[1]
The nations thus habituated to the most savage cruelty, moreover, regarded the propagation of heresy with peculiar detestation, as not merely a sin, but as the worst of crimes. Heresy itself, says Bishop Lucas of Tuy, justifies, by comparison, the infidelity of the Jews; its pollution cleanses the filthy madness of Mahomet; its vileness renders pure even Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever is worst in other sin becomes holy in comparison with the turpitude of heresy. Less rhetorical, but equally emphatic, is Thomas Aquinas, when his merciless logic demonstrates that the sin of heresy separates man from God more than all other sins, and therefore it is the worst of sins, and is to be punished more severely. Of all kinds of infidelity, that of heresy is the worst. So sensitive did the clerical mind become on the subject that Stephen Palecz of Prague declared, in a sermon before the Council of Constance, that if a belief was Catholic in a thousand points, and false in one, the whole was heretical. The heretic, therefore, who labored, as all earnest heretics necessarily did, to convert others to his way of
- ↑ Ademari S. Cibardi Hist, Lib. II. c. 36.-Dooms of Æthelstan, II. vi (Thorpe, T. 219).-Bracton. Lib. III. Tract. i. c. 6.-Legg. Ville de Arkes § 26 (ID'Achery III. 608)-Hist. Diplom. Frid. II. Introd. p. cxcvi.; IV. 414.-Gode-
frid. S. Pantal. Annal. ann. 1233.-Fazelli de Reb. Siculis Iecad. IL. Lib. viii. p 442. Isambert. Anc. Loix Franç. I. 295.-Legg. Opstalbom. § 3, 4.-Treuga Henrici c. 1224 (Böhlau, Nove Constitut. Dom. Alberti, Weimar, 1858, pp. 76 77)-Registre Criminel du Châtelet de Paris, pssim (Paris, 1801).-Beauma noir, Coutumcs du Beauvoisis, c. 30, No. 12.- Antiqua Dueum Mediolan. Decreta, pp. 187-88 (Mediolani, 1654).-Legg. Capital. Caroli V. c. 103-197 (Goldast. Constitt. Imp. III. 537-55)-London Atheneum, Mar. 15, 1873, p. 338.-R. Christian
V.Jur. Danic. art. 7.-Willenburgii de Except. et Ponis Cleric, p. 41 (Jena, 1740) -5 Henry IV. c. 5.-Description of Britaine, Bk. I. e. 6 (Holinshed's Chronicles Ed. 1577 I 106).-London Athencum, 1885 No. 3024, p. 466
It has seemed to me, however, that a sensible increase in the scverity of punisbment is traccable after the thirteenth century, and I am inclincd to attribute this to the influence exercised by the Inquisition over the criminal jurisprudence of Europe
