An excess of devotion, which had its origin in the wish to avert the wrath of God, gave birth in Italy quite spontaneously to the sect known as the Flagellants. This strange infatuation for scourging began at Perugia, whence it passed to Rome and afterwards to Germany and Poland. The nobles, the elders, the people of all classes, the poor and even the children, traversed the streets of the towns and the country districts with bare shoulders, scourging themselves mercilessly with whips having leathern thongs (Fig. 312). These fanatics who travelled through all Europe, firmly believed that an angel had brought a missive from Jesus Christ, which declared that there was only one way for a Christian to obtain pardon for his sins, viz. to leave his native country and scourge himself for thirty-three consecutive days, in commemoration of the thirty-three years which Christ had passed upon earth. The Apostolicals, the Dulcinists, the Beghards, the Flagellants, the Spiritual Brothers, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Turlupins, &c., adopted these superstitious ideas, and constituted distinct sects which were condemned by the Church as heretical. The sectaries appealed from the sentence: the civil tribunals backed up the ecclesiastical ones; the faggots were kindled and a vast number of heretics perished; many, however, escaped, and, joining the Albigenses, they formed the sect of the Lollards. The Englishman Wickliff, whose heresy had pervaded all Britain (1368–1384), openly attacked the Court of Rome, the upper clergy, the liturgy, and the sacraments, with an audacity all the greater because he felt that he had the support of the people at large and of several sovereigns. The University of Oxford made a critical examination of Wickliff’s books, and found them to contain two hundred and seventy-eight reprehensible propositions, which it submitted for censure to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. After he had declaimed against the Church, its customs and its institutions, Wickliff attacked the very foundations of civil society, by his doctrine that, to possess any right or authority upon earth, it was necessary to be in a state of grace. Consequently kings, nobles, and the landowners were to lose their political and domanial rights, since they were in a state of mortal sin, just as the pope, the bishops, and the priests through sin were to lose their spiritual powers. He moreover denied the existence of free-will; and his allegation that everything which man did he was necessarily obliged to do, implied that all punishment was unjust, for no one is guilty who acts under compulsion. Lastly, he only recognised the existence of God to make Him responsible for evil, maintaining that God also is moved by an invincible necessity, that He looks with approval on those who sin, that He even constrains men to commit sin; “so that,” as Bossuet remarks, “the religion of this so-called Reformer was worse