for the Church of which they were the head the right to use only the spiritual sword. Without enumerating all the modern authors who hold this view, we will quote a work which has just appeared with the imprimatur of Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4] [1] _Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastici_, 5 ed., Paris, vol. i, pp. 169, 170. [2] _Nicolai_, Ep. ad Albinum archiepiscop., in the _Decretum_, Causa xxxiii, quæst. ii, cap. _Inter hæc_. [3] Celestine, according to the criminal code of his day, declared that a guilty cleric, once excommunicated and anathematized, ought to be abandoned to the secular arm, _cum Ecclesia non habeat ultra quid faciat_. Decretals, cap. x, _De judiciis_, lib. ii, tit. i. This was the common teaching. [4] Salvatore di Bartolo. _Nuova expozitione dei criteri teologici_, Roma, 104, pp. 303, 314. The first edition of this work was put upon the Index. The second edition, revised and corrected, and published with the approbation of Father Lepidi, has all the more weight and authority. Indeed, to maintain that the Church should use material force, is at once to make her subject to the State; for we can hardly picture her with her own police and gendarmes, ready to punish her rebellious children. Every Catholic believes that the Church is an independent society, fully able to carry out her divine mission without the aid of the secular arm. Whether governments are favorable or hostile to her, she must pursue her course and carry on her work of salvation under them all. . . . . . . . . "Heresy," writes Jean Guiraud, "in the Middle Ages was nearly always connected with some antisocial sect. In a period when the human mind usually expressed itself in a theological form, socialism, communism, and anarchy appeared under the form of heresy. By the very nature of things, therefore, the interests of both Church and State were identical; this explains the question of the suppression of heresy in the Middle Ages."[1] [1] Jean Guiraud, _La répression de l'hérésie au moyen âge_, in the _Questions d'archéologie et d'histoire_, p. 44. We are not surprised, therefore, that when Church and State found themselves menaced by the same peril, they agreed on the means of defence. If we deduct, from the total number of heretics burned or imprisoned the disturbers of the social order and the criminals against the common law, the number of condemned heretics will be very small.