[691] One center of these reform movements was the celebrated French monastery of Cluny. The influences which radiated from the cloisters of this convent had a profound effect for centuries upon the moral life of Christendom.
[692] See Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi.
[693] History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, p. 266.
[694] “There was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations.... The value of such an ideal on an age hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated” (Lea, History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, pp. 260 f.). See also Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 325.
[695] See above, p. 262.
[696] “Ethics on the basis of authority becomes a mere legal casuistry.”—Hall, The History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), pp. 296, 326.
[697] “But meanwhile by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule.”—Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 143.
[698] It must be borne in mind that the spirit of the Renaissance was at work long before the Renaissance.
[699] In this there is substantial agreement among historians of the Inquisition: consult Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, pp. 236 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 98, 395 f.; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), essay vi, “The Theory of Persecution”; Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, article on “Inquisition.”
[700] “The case for theological persecution is unanswerable if we admit the fundamental supposition that one faith is known to be true and necessary for salvation.”—Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 155.