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.