A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION 567
rare as the Wandering J e\v. In resting his case on the Pyrenees, Mr, Lea shows his usual judgment. But his very confident note is a too easyand contemptuous wayof settling a controversy which is still wearily extant from Spain to Silesia, in which some new fact comes to light every year, and drops into obscurity, riddled \vith the shafts of critics. An instance of too facile use of authorities occurs at the siege of Béziers. "A fervent Cistercian contemporary informs us that when Arnaud was asked whether the Catholics should be spared, he feared the heretics would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and fiercely replied, '!(ill them all, for God knows his o\vn.'" Caesarius, to whom we owe the locus classicus, was a Cistercian and a con- temporary, but he was not so fervent as that, for he tells it as
report, not as a fact, with a caution which ought
not to have evaporated. "Fertur dixisse: Caedite eos. N ovit enim Dominus qui sunt eius ! " The Catholic de- fenders had been summoned to separate from the Cathari, and had replied that they were determined to share their fate. It was then resolved to make an example, which we are assured bore fruit afterwards. The hasty zeal of Citeaux adopted the speech of the abbot and gave it currency. But its rejection by the French scholars, Tamizey de Larroque and Auguste Molinier, was a \varn- ing against presenting it with a smooth surface, as a thing tested and ascertained. Mr. Lea, in other passages, has shown his disbelief in Caesarius of Heisterbach, and knows that history written in reliance upon him would be history fi t for the moon. Words as ferocious are recorded of another legate at a different siege (Langlois, Règne de Philippe Ie H ardz: p. 156). Their tragic significance for history is not in the mouth of an angry crusader at the storming of a fortress, but in the pen of an inoffensive monk, watching and praying under the peaceful summit of the Seven Mountains. Mr. Lea undertakes to dispute no doctrine and to pro- pose no moral. He starts with an avo,vèd desire not to say what may be construed injuriously to the character or feelings of men. He writes pure history, and is methodi.
