The habitual use of such a method of administering justice required no little robustness of faith in the expected intervention of God to control the event. Even in the fifteenth century, when the combat was rapidly becoming obsolete, this faith is pictorially embodied in an illuminated MS. of Tallhöfer’s Kamp-recht, where a miniature represents the victor kneeling and returning thanks to God, while the vanquished is lying on his back with Satan grasping at his open mouth as though already seizing the soul of the criminal.[379] This robustness of faith was proof against experience and common sense, and sought to explain the frequent miscarriage of justice by any process of reasoning rather than the right one. Thus about the year 1100 a sacrilegious thief named Anselm stole the sacred vessels from the church of Laon and sold them to a merchant, from whom he exacted an oath of secrecy. Frightened at the excommunications fulminated by the authorities of the plundered church, the unhappy trader revealed the name of the robber. Anselm denied the accusation, offered the wager of battle, defeated the unfortunate receiver of stolen goods, and was proclaimed innocent. Encouraged by impunity, he repeated the offence, and after his conviction by the ordeal of cold water he confessed the previous crime. The doubts cast by this event on the efficacy of the judicial combat were, however, happily removed by the suggestion that the merchant had suffered for the violation of the oath which he had sworn to Anselm, and the reputation of the duel remained intact.[380] The frequent cases of this nature often did not admit of so ingenious an explanation of the criminal’s escape, and legal casuists assumed a condition of being, guilty in the sight of God, but not in that of man—a refinement of speculation which even finds place in the German codes of the thirteenth century;[381] and men contented themselves then, as they do still, with predicting future misfortunes and an eternity of punishment. The more direct solution, in cases of unjust condemnation, was very much like that which justified the defeat of Anselm’s merchant—that the unfortunate victim, though innocent of the special offence charged, suffered in consequence of other sins. This doctrine was even supported by the infallible authority of the papacy, as enunciated in 1203 by Innocent III. in a case wherein the priory of St. Sergius was unjustly convicted of theft by the judicial duel, and its possessions were consequently seized by the authorities of Spoleto.[382]