Were these opinions heretical or not? They were declared to be so by John XXII; but amid the warring religious factions of the period it was no easy matter to say what was orthodox and what was not. The controversy regarding mendicancy raged. The Minorites declared Pope John a heretic because he would not agree that mendicancy was enjoined by Scripture. The view of the Pope was shared and soberly argued by Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh. It was not only the worldly cleric necessarily that failed to find warrant for the contentions of the Spirituals in the Bible.[133] A second new tenet of the time—the dogma of the Beatific Vision—John XXII, after first inclining to believe, latterly decided to reject; and in 1331 a certain English Dominican, for daring to assert that the souls of the righteous were immediately wafted into the presence of God and beheld Him without having to wait for the Day of Resurrection, was by the Pope’s orders brought before the Inquisition, and was thrown into gaol. John’s political opponents in Germany and France, together with the Spiritual Franciscans, immediately asserted the truth of the doctrine he had denounced, the French King writing to point out that the Pope’s ruling must seriously invalidate the belief in the invocation of saints and also all pardons and indulgences. John was forced to give way, and on his death-bed affirmed his adhesion to the doctrine of the Beatific Vision. As he did not make a formal recantation, however, of his previous error, Michael of Cesena held him to have died a contumacious heretic.[134] A third new doctrine, a little later on, after considerable and powerful opposition, gained a great triumph mainly through the instrumentality of the University of Paris, which forced Pope Clement VII to acknowledge its truth. This was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It had been resolutely condemned by St. Bernard, Peter Lombard, and later by Thomas Aquinas. But the appeal to the popular imagination of Mariolatry was too strong, strong enough even to defeat the decision of the great Doctor. It became inconceivable to the popular imagination, which ever tended to prefer the sweetness and gentleness of the Virgin to the awfulness of the Trinity, to believe that she could have had any connection whatever with sin. In 1387, when a certain Dominican professor at Paris preached a sermon maintaining that the Virgin was conceived in sin, there was a violent uproar, leading to Clement VII’s consenting to declare all those who held this view to be heretics.[135] The confusion as to the definition of orthodoxy and heresy, inevitably produced by the introduction of such new tenets as those just enumerated, was heightened by the decadent unreality of philosophy, when it permitted of the idea of a double truth, one theological, the other philosophical, and rendered it possible for a scholar to assert that even such cardinal doctrines as