It has been urged that the attitude adopted by the Church was a most unwilling attitude, forced upon it by influences too powerful to resist, that the main motive power of persecution came not from the Church, but from the lay authority and from public opinion. The theory is advanced that during the period, roughly from 1000 to 1150, when the position of the heretic was a matter of legal uncertainty, the clergy opposed the violence evinced against heretics, and in eventually yielding they submitted to the strength of a custom which constituted a sort of _jus non scriptum_.[275] But there is not much force in this plea. To acquiesce in a _jus non scriptum_ argues either indifference or impotence: and the Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was neither indifferent nor impotent. Nor is the opposition of the clergy to mob violence an argument to the point. A dislike for mob law and lynching does not necessarily betoken disapproval of capital punishment.[276] It is true—and this is very important—that spontaneously, without any direct incitement from the clergy, the people regarded the heretic with intense abhorrence. We ought probably to add that in the absence of written law on the subject there was a rather vague idea, shared by the mob and their rulers, that not only death, but a particularly terrible kind of death, was an appropriate punishment for the heretic—this idea being perhaps derived from the fact that Roman law had at different times meted out this doom for certain kinds of heretics, particularly Manichæans, and other offenders, such as sorcerers and witches. It is true also that the heretics upon whom the mob turned were generally Manichæan. Yet no one who has any knowledge of the position of the mediæval Church can honestly maintain on these grounds that the Church had no responsibility for the rigour displayed towards the heretic. The heretic was regarded as an offender against society, because it was a Christian society. Heresy, being error in the faith, was investigated and recognized by the Church. The clergy, not the mob, discovered the heresy and the heretic; for such discovery could not be made without theological knowledge, of which the mob were ignorant. And such knowledge as they possessed, were it reasoned understanding or merely half-assimilated fragments of doctrine, was derived solely from clerical instruction. It was difficult for any sort of knowledge to come from any other source. Heresy was regarded as dangerous to the community, because, to begin with, the Church had found it dangerous to itself. The intellectual and spiritual atmosphere with which Christendom was permeated was of the Church’s making. The attempt, therefore, to absolve the Church from responsibility for the measures taken against heresy in these centuries—by whomsoever they were taken—involves a wholly erroneous, indeed an absurd, under-estimate of the authority of the Church.