No attempt has been made in these pages to present the heresies of the Middle Ages in any heroic light, to slur over the pernicious crudities of many of them. As between the spiritual and intellectual ideals represented by the mediæval Church and those represented by the majority of the sectaries the choice is self-evident. Wycliffites and Husites stand obviously on a far higher plane, but Petrobrusians, Cathari, Dolcinists, Flagellants and many others had no fertile ideas to bequeath to a later day and were, at best perhaps, a nuisance in their own. Yet it has to be remembered that not only noble-minded men like Hus and Jerome of Prague, whose creed, whether true or not, was in any case sane and pure and exalted, but also innumerable others, whom we know only as names in inquisitorial records, who whatever the faith they professed stood constant through physical and mental anguish, to perish perhaps at the last at the stake in a world barren of pity with no friendly faces to encourage them—these suffered for a great ideal, that of fidelity to the spirit of truthfulness, of intellectual integrity. All who have died rather than be false to themselves and their vision of truth, thus demonstrating to the world their conviction that belief is worth dying for—whether Catholics or Protestants or the most erring of mediæval heretics—have done service to the cause of human progress. For, if it be true that only through the tragic experience of centuries of religious persecution could mankind attain to the establishment of the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, then every one of us to-day who enjoys the benefits of such liberty owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who for conscience’ sake braved obloquy, torture-chamber and fire. NOTE ON AUTHORITIES A full bibliography of the subject of Heresy and its Repression in the Middle Ages would be exceedingly lengthy. All that is attempted here is to give a select list of a few of the most useful, important and most easily accessible works. The most thorough bibliography for the subject available is that in T. de Cauzons, _Histoire de l’Inquisition en France_ (_q.v._), the list of books covering forty pages and including 850 works. This is for the history of the tribunal in France alone. It has to be borne in mind that by far the greater part of our contemporary evidence for the history of mediæval heresies is hostile evidence, consisting of denunciations of them by orthodox theologians, the treatises of inquisitors who condemned their adherents, notes made of evidence given by defendants. Only those heretics who were themselves philosophers or theologians—and these, such as Siger of Brabant, Wycliffe and Hus, are relatively very few—have left their own records behind them. Due allowance, therefore, has to be made in using most contemporary authorities for considerable bias. I INQUISITORIAL TREATISES