It is certain that the early Christians would have strongly denounced such laws as too much like the pagan laws under which they were persecuted. St. Hilary voiced their mind when he said: "The Church threatens exile and imprisonment; she in whom men formerly believed while in exile and prison, now wishes to make men believe her by force."[1] St. Augustine was of the same mind. He thus addressed the Manicheans, the most hated sect of his time: "Let those who have never known the troubles of a mind in search for the truth, proceed against you with rigor. It is impossible for me to do so, for I for years was cruelly tossed about by your false doctrines, which I advocated and defended to the best of my ability. I ought to bear with you now, as men bore with me, when I blindly accepted your doctrines."[2] Wazo, Bishop of Liège, wrote in a similar strain in the eleventh century.[3] [1] _Liber contra Auxentium_, cap. iv; cf. supra, p. 6. [2] _Contra epistolam Manichæi, quam vocant Fundamenti_, n. 2 and 3, supra, p. 12. [3] _Vita Vasonis_, cap. xxv and xxvi, Migne, P.L., vol. cxlii, col. 752, 753; cf. supra, p. 51. But, continued St. Augustine, retracting his first theory,--and nearly all the Middle Ages agreed with him,--"these severe penalties are lawful and good when they serve to convert heretics by inspiring them with a salutary fear." The end here justifies the means. Such reasoning was calculated to lead men to great extremes, and was responsible for the cruel teaching of the theologians of the school, who were more logically consistent than the Bishop of Hippo. They endeavored to terrorize heretics by the specter of the stake. St. Augustine, bold as he was, shrank from such barbarity. But if, on his own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle itself, false? If we consider merely the immediate results obtained by the use of brute force, we may indeed admit that it benefited the Church by bringing back some of her erring children. But at the same time these cruel measures turned away from Catholicism in the course of ages many sensitive souls, who failed to recognize Christ's Church in a society which practiced such cruelty in union with the State. According, therefore, to St. Augustine's own argument, his theory has been proved false by its fatal consequences.