The London Quarterly Review VOL.IV April and July,1855

Orange-River Sovereignty. With Maps and Illustra-
tions-Tait's Meditationes Hebraica: or, Doctrinal and
Practical Exposition of the Epistle of St. Paul to the
Hebrews, in a Series of Lectures. New and enlarged
Edition-Guizot's Meditations and Moral Reflections.

Translated by the late Marquis of Ormonde-Muspratt's

Chemistry, Theoretical, Practical, and Analytical, as

applied and relating to the Arts and Manufactures...... 521

THE

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW.

APRIL, 1855.

ART. I.-1. Geschichte der neu-manichæischen Ketzer, u. s. w. (History of the new Manichæan Heretics. By DR. CHRISTOPHER ULRICH HAHN.) Stuttgart, 1845.

2. (Review of the foregoing Work, by SCHMIDT, in the Jena) Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung. March, 1846.

3. Histoire et Doctrine de la Secte des Cathares ou Albigeois. (History and Doctrine of the Sect of the Cathari or Albigenses. By C. SCHMIDT, Professor in the Protestant Faculty of Theology at Strasburg. Two Vols. Paris and Geneva, 1849.)

4. (Review of the foregoing, by HAHN, in the) Studien und Kritiken (for 1852. Part IV.)

5. Ein Katharisches Ritual. (Catharic Ritual. Edited by PROFESSOR CUNITZ, in Vol. IV. of Miscellanies published by the Theological Society of Strasburg, 1852.)

6. (Articles by PROFESSOR REUSS, on the Vaudois and Catharic Versions of the Bible, in the Strasburg) Revue de Théologie. (December, 1852, and February, 1853.)

7. Histoire du Pape Innocent III. (HURTER'S History of Pope Innocent III. Translated from the German by M. DE SAINT-CHERON.) Bruxelles.

8. Histoire de la Croisade contre les Hérétiques Albigeois. (History of the Crusade against the Albigenses, in Provençal Poetry. By WILLIAM OF TUDela. Edited by FAuriel. Paris, 1837.)

THE sympathies of every true Protestant are naturally enlisted on the side of all the victims of medieval Papal persecution, without exception. We admire the courage of men who dared

VOL. IV. NO. VII.

to brave the resentment of the Hierarchy, at a time when the doing so involved the sacrifice of fortune and life and honour; we recognise in the tortured prisoners of the Inquisition the champions of our own dearest rights; our every feeling of humanity is outraged by the spectacle of the perfidies and studied cruelties by which Rome achieved her triumphs, the persevering, vigilant, and implacable hatred with which she pursued her adversaries. Hence, when ecclesiastical historians of all parties tell us that some of those persecuted sectaries were really heretics, who rejected at once the divinity and the real humanity of our Lord, attributed the creation to a malignant deity, and blasphemed the God of the Old Testament, one's first impression is to reject the accusation as a calumny. If Roman Catholic writers do not hesitate frequently to attribute to the Reformers sentiments they never uttered, though their voluminous works are extant to confute the charge, how much more readily, may we suspect, has a malignant imagination given itself scope in the case of men, from whose ashes no voice of rectification or apology can be heard, since their writings have perished with their persons!

On a first view, many considerations present themselves to confirm our doubts. Not only does the Manichæism of the Albigenses appear to rest essentially upon the testimony of their persecutors; it must be added, that testimony is not always consistent with itself. The heretics of the South of France are accused by some of condemning marriage, and by others of marrying within prohibited degrees of kindred; they are accused of rejecting the Old Testament, and yet one of their offences was the translating great parts of it into the vulgar tongue, and the committing them to memory; they are said to have despised sacraments, and yet were detected administering something very like the Lord's Supper in their conventicles; we are told, in the same breath, that they would not shed the blood of animals, and that they repeatedly assassinated Inquisitors. There are, it is true, innumerable confessions of Manichæan doctrine attributed to sufferers at their trials, and at the stake; but we know that the torture was generally employed to make the accused condemn themselves, and it is easy to conceive that unfortunate beings under such circumstances might be brought, like Topsy, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," to confess any thing that came into their own or their interlocutors' heads; and there were certainly instances in which persons were tortured into the admission of doctrines which they had at first disavowed. A prosecution of Cathari at Arras in 1025 furnishes one such case, and that of Vezelay, in 1167, another.

As early as the year 1595, we find a French Protestant, Jean Chassanion, of Monistrol, in Velay,-one of the very regions which had been watered by the blood of the Albigenses,-dedi

The Albigenses distinct from the Vaudois.

cating to the Princess Catherine of Navarre a book, in which he identifies the Albigenses with the Vaudois, treats them as martyrs for the truth's sake, and asserts that they had never held the errors attributed to them. The learned Basnage, and Abbadie, and Beausobre, the celebrated author of the "History of Manichæism," maintained the same view: so did the Vaudois historians of the seventeenth century, Perrin and Leger. Even Voltaire, in his hostility to Popery, tells the readers of his Essay Sur les Mœurs et l'Esprit des Nations, that the Manichæans, Vaudois, or Lollards, (!) were the remains of the primitive Christians of Gaul. In England, Jones, Blair, and most other writers on the subject, have assumed both the orthodoxy of the Albigenses, and their identity with the Vaudois. Mr. Stanley Faber, in particular, so late as 1838, earnestly endeavoured to defend them against the accusation of dualistic heresy.

On the other hand, almost all the writers of the Middle Ages agree in distinguishing between the two sects, or, rather, groups of sects, and in imputing Manichæan principles to that which was the most widely spread of the two in South-Eastern Europe, in Italy, and in France. Bossuet and Fleury urged the unanimity of this testimony against the Protestant writers of their own time. The learned Limborch, when editing the Records of the Inquisition of Toulouse, which had fallen into his hands, confesses its perusal had changed his opinion, and convinced him of the Manichæan character of the theology of the Albigenses. Mosheim adopted the same side of the controversy; and he has been followed by all the ecclesiastical historians of Germany, including Neander, Gieseler, and those especially who have devoted their labours to the sects of the Middle Ages, as Hahn, Schmidt, Herzog, &c.

Notwithstanding all our first impressions to the contrary, we have been unwillingly obliged to adopt the conclusions of the latter class of writers. The monks and Inquisitors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were under no necessity of accusing their victims of Manichæism, if the charge were false; for the Church of Rome was all-powerful, and those who resisted her claims and her doctrines from the most simple evangelical motives, were sent out of the world as readily and as mercilessly as those who were accused of departing altogether from the ground of Christian theism. Moreover, the decrees of Councils, the manuals of Inquisitors, and the polemical treatises of Roman Catholic writers of the Middle Ages, with some exceptions, give a tolerably correct idea of the doctrine of the Waldenses, as can be ascertained by the still remaining literature of that interesting people: it is natural, therefore, to suppose that their account of other contemporaneous heresies is faithful in the main. Those documents, be it remembered, were many of them

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