26. Up to 1555 it was the teaching of the Popes that only those should be burnt who persisted obstinately in maintaining a doctrine condemned by the Church, and those who had relapsed after recanting into the same or some other heresy. But in that year Paul IV. established the new principle that certain doctrines, if only just put forward and at once retracted, should be punished with death. Thus whoever rejected any ecclesiastical definition on the Trinity, or denied the perpetual virginity of Mary and maintained that the scriptural language about “brothers of Jesus” was to be taken literally of children of Mary, was to be classed with the “relapsed” and to be executed, even though he recanted. 27. Up to 1751, theologians, especially Italians, who defended trials for witchcraft and the reality of an express compact with Satan, together with the various preternatural crimes wrought thereby and the carnal intercourse of men and demons (_incubi et succubi_), used to appeal to the infallible authority of the Popes, the Bulls of Innocent VIII., Sixtus V., Gregory XV. and several more besides, in which these things are affirmed and assumed and the due penalties prescribed for them.(130) 28. If an oath that has been taken is prejudicial to the interests of the Church (_e.g._, in money matters), it must be broken. So teaches Innocent III.(131) 29. The Popes can dispense at their pleasure oaths of allegiance taken by a people to their King, as Gregory VII., Alexander III., Innocent III., and many others have done. 30. They can also absolve a sovereign from the treaties he has sworn to observe or from his oath to the Constitution of his country, or give full power to his confessor to absolve him from any oath he finds it inconvenient to keep. Such a plenary power Clement VI. gave to King John of France and his successors.(132) Thus Clement VII. absolved the Emperor Charles V. from his oath restricting his absolutism over popular rights in Belgium, and again from his oath not to banish the Moriscos from their home. And Paul IV. announced to the Emperors Charles and Ferdinand that he dispensed their oath to observe the Augsburg religious peace.(133)