Granted, then, the permanent necessity of some sort of reaction against heresy, what then would be the past precedents upon which a learned twelfth-century churchman could look back, in order to guide his action? In the Gospels themselves he would find the Pharisees denounced in violent terms. He would read St. Paul writing of “... Hymenæus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”[18] Later, he would find Christian Emperors (beginning with Constantine, the first of them) enacting laws against the defeated party in Church councils, which laws went so far at one time as to threaten with death those in whose possession Arian writings should be found. In particular, he would find Manicheanism constantly under the ban. Diocletian, among the last of the pagan Emperors, as well as his Christian successors, including those who tolerated all other sects claiming to be Christian, so he might learn, had all persistently attacked the Manicheans. To be sure he would find almost no capital sentences, and a good deal of insistence, from various fathers and early doctors of the Church, upon the idea that faith was necessarily a matter of persuasion, and therefore could not be imposed by force. Nevertheless, he would learn that a goodly number of writers, among them the two great names of St. Augustine and Pope St. Leo, had gone so far as to approve of the death penalty when inflicted upon heretics by the State. Even in the times nearer to him, the Dark Ages, when heresy and philosophic discussion had been equally rare, our imagined twelfth-century scholar might learn by reading Alcuin, Charlemagne’s teacher, that the principal use of philosophy is that by its aid “... the holy doctors and defenders of our Catholic Faith have triumphed over all heresiarchs.”[19] Even in those sleepy days, then, the Christian scholar was ardently concerned with the refutation of heresy. But in all probability, even the twelfth century scholar was more concerned with the Church as a factor in social life than with the intellectual pros and cons as to the lawfulness of taking action against her enemies. To the mediæval, no other centre of organized charity, of hospitality to travellers, above all of education, was even thinkable. If men travelled, they would be going on pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint; if they made war they preferred to make it against the “paynim.” The learned man, who would almost certainly be in orders himself, would think of the Church as the chief bond of human society, and the unlearned laity, whether gentle or simple, would feel this quite as strongly, and without the qualifications and distinctions which go with the intellectual life. Furthermore, had not the Church herself laid it down, in the rolling phrases of the Athanasian creed, that unless a man hold the Catholic Faith (therein defined) he cannot be saved?