tenet held by the universal Church, were almost all agreed to retain the punishment by which those tenets had been vindicated. St. Thomas Aquinas says:— “The crime of heresy must be considered first in itself and then in its connexion with the Church. If we consider the crime in itself, heretics deserve not only to be cut off from the Church by excommunication, but to be cut off from the world by death. They are more guilty than those who coin false money, for it is more grave to corrupt the faith which is the life of the soul, than to falsify coins, by which that of the body is supported; and thus they are justly put to death like other malefactors. Considered in connexion with the Church, it is clear that she, ever merciful and desirous of obtaining the conversion of those who are in error, does not at once condemn the heretic, but exhorts him to repentance, according to the teaching of the apostle. It is only when he shows himself obstinate, and if she despairs of his salvation, that she cuts him off from herself, and abandons him to the secular arm that he may be put to death.”[525] The fourth Lateran Council decreed, that no beneficed clerk, or any clerk in holy orders, might take any part, even the most mechanical and subordinate, in the judicial doing to death of a criminal.[526] Heresy was, however, looked upon as an ecclesiastical as well as a civil offence, the delinquent first committing a grave crime against God, by denying and attacking the truths which He had revealed, so that by his example he led other men astray. Secondly, by so doing he raised tumults, and endangered the peace of the commonwealth. He was, therefore, tried in the ecclesiastical courts, and if found guilty and obdurate, was handed over to the State for punishment. “Cognisance of heresies, errors and Lollardies appertaineth to the judge of holy Church.”[527] Long before the rise of Lollardy, burning at the stake was the recognised punishment for heresy, just as decapitation and hanging were the penalty for the crimes of treason and murder. An obstinate Albigensian was burned in London in 1210, and in 1222 a deacon suffered death at Oxford, for turning Jew, and marrying a Jewess.[528] The first Act of Parliament against heresy was passed in the reign of Henry IV. (1401) and dealt with the suppression of Lollardy. Nevertheless, the placing of the new law on the statute book was not followed by any great increase in the number of punishments, and there were more burnings in the reign of Henry VIII. than in the whole of the previous century. The second authority on the Catholic side on the subject of the punishment of heresy is an Englishman, Sir Thomas More, who says:—