The chronicle of Tours gives the same description, adding only one remarkable particular, confirmed by the abbé Fleury and the abbé de Vertot—that the holy viaticum was excepted, like the baptism of infants, from the privation of holy things. The kingdom was in this situation for nine months; it was some time before Innocent III. permitted the preaching of sermons and the sacrament of confirmation. The king was so much enraged that he drove the bishops and all the other ecclesiastics from their abodes, and confiscated their property.
But it is singular that the bishops were sometimes solicited by sovereigns themselves to pronounce an interdict upon lands of their vassals. By letters dated February, 1356, confirming those of Guy, count of Nevers, and his wife Matilda, in favor of the citizens of Nevers, Charles V., regent of the kingdom, prays the archbishops of Lyons, Bourges, and Sens, and the bishops of Autun, Langres, Auxerre, and Nevers, to pronounce an excommunication against the count of Nevers, and an interdict upon his lands, if he does not fulfil the agreement he has made with the inhabitants. We also find in the collection of the ordinances of the third line of kings, many letters like that of King John, authorizing the bishops to put under interdict those places whose privileges their lords would seek to infringe.
And to conclude, though it appears incredible, the Jesuit Daniel relates that, in the year 998, King Robert was excommunicated by Gregory V., for having married his kinswoman in the fourth degree. All the bishops who had assisted at this marriage were interdicted from the communion, until they had been to Rome, and rendered satisfaction to the holy see. The people, and even the court, separated from the king; he had only two domestics left, who purified by fire whatever he had touched. Cardinal Damien and Romualde also add, that Robert being gone one morning, as was his custom, to say his prayers at the door of St. Bartholomew's church, for he dared not enter it, Abbon, abbot of Fleury, followed by two women of the palace, carrying a large gilt dish covered with a napkin, accosted him, announced that Bertha was just brought to bed; and uncovering the dish, said: "Behold the effects of your disobedience to the decrees of the Church, and the seal of anathema on the fruit of your love!" Robert looked, and saw a monster with the head and neck of a duck! Bertha was repudiated; and the excommunication was at last taken off.
Urban II., on the contrary, excommunicated Robert's grandson, Philip I., for having put away his kinswoman. This pope pronounced the sentence of excommunication in the king's own dominions, at Clermont, in Auvergne, where his holiness was come to seek an asylum, in the same council in which the crusade was preached, and in which, for the first time, the name of pope (papa) was given to the bishop of Rome, to the exclusion of the other bishops, who had formerly taken it.
It will be seen that these canonical pains were medicinal rather than mortal; but Gregory VII. and some of his successors ventured to assert, that an excommunicated sovereign was deprived of his dominions, and that his subjects were not obliged to obey him. However, supposing that a king can be excommunicated in certain serious cases, excommunication, being a penalty purely spiritual, cannot dispense with the obedience which his subjects owe to him, as holding his authority from God Himself. This was constantly acknowledged by the parliaments, and also by the clergy of France, in the excommunications pronounced by Boniface VII., against Philip the Fair; by Julius II., against Louis XII.; by Sixtus V., against Henry III.; by Gregory XIII., against Henry IV.; and it is likewise the doctrine of the celebrated assembly of the clergy in 1682.
ZEAL.
This, in religion, is a pure and enlightened attachment to the maintenance and progress of the worship which is due to the Divinity; but when this zeal is persecuting, blind, and false, it becomes the greatest scourge of humanity.
See what the emperor Julian says of the Christians of his time: "The Galileans," he observes, "have suffered exile and imprisonment under my predecessor; those who are by turns called heretics, have been mutually massacred. I have recalled the banished, liberated the prisoners; I have restored their property to the proscribed; I have forced them to live in peace; but such is the restless rage of the Galileans, that they complain of being no longer able to devour each other."
This picture will not appear extravagant if we attend to the atrocious calumnies with which the Christians reciprocally blackened each other. For instance, St. Augustine accuses the Manichæans of forcing their elect to receive the eucharist, after having obscenely polluted it. After him, St. Cyril of Jerusalem has accused them of the same infamy in these terms: "I dare not mention in what these sacrilegious wretches wet their ischas, which they give to their unhappy votaries, and exhibit in the midst of their altar, and with which the Manichæan soils his mouth and tongue. Let the men call to mind what they are accustomed to experience in dreaming, and the women in their periodical affections." Pope St. Leo, in one of his sermons, also calls the sacrifice of the Manichæans the same turpitude. Finally, Suidas and Cedrenus have still further improved on the calumny, in asserting that the Manichæans held nocturnal assemblies, in which, after extinguishing the flambeaux, they committed the most enormous indecencies.