On the Catholic side, two authorities may be quoted in favour of the punishment of heresy as a crime; and the standpoint from which it was so regarded may be briefly stated thus. Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church was universally recognised as the sole depositary of revealed truth. To the mediæval mind, he who was convicted of spreading doctrine contrary to the teaching of this divine institution was worse than a fratricide, since by poisoning the wells of truth, he murdered not his brother’s perishable body, but his immortal soul, and was, therefore, deserving of death. It is difficult for us, whose minds are necessarily imbued with modern ideas, to realise the mode of thought concerning novelties of doctrine which agitated all the countries of Europe in the middle ages, and which still agitated them when so much that was purely mediæval had passed away. Nor can we estimate to the full the depth of those profound convictions, on the subject of revealed religion, which called forth the ecclesiastical and civil enactments, framed to prevent any tampering with dogma. We have in our days no practical experience of a system _universally_ admitted and recognised to be the sole depositary of revealed truth, such as the Catholic Church was acknowledged to be, before the rise and growth of Protestantism. Accustomed to the presence of religious speculation, doubt, and unbelief around us, or at least to the existence of varying creeds, we are familiar with the notion that every man may weigh and consider the credibility of each doctrine proposed to him, and that he is at liberty to accept or reject it, to halve or to double it, according to the promptings of his own individual judgment. Religious truth has come to be considered so much a personal affair, that Roman Catholics are perhaps alone in looking upon it as a divine deposit, a purely objective matter, independent of what this or that man may think, and to be accepted undoubtingly by the faithful. And this was precisely the state of the pre-Reformation mind. But the opinion is sometimes expressed in our own day, that were the Catholic Church again powerful, as in the middle ages, we should see a recurrence of persecution as determined as any that marked with horror the former annals of our country. The notion is as absurd as it would be to imagine that if the Puritans were again masters, they would bring back the thumbkin, the boots, the rack and the sword, in order to enforce the uselessness of good works. No organised persecution could ever be possible where the general trend of ideas was not in its favour. Our thicker-skinned ancestors had far less sympathy with bodily suffering, and a much lower appreciation of the value of human life than ourselves. In an age when coiners and forgers were punished with death, it would have seemed incongruous that apostates and heretics should fare more softly.[524] The Reformers, who rejected nearly every