Even in the full heat of the Albigensian Crusade, we still find him favouring an accused canon of Bar-sur-Aube, an incident which can only receive its full value by being told in connection with the very different things then going on in Languedoc. But, however careful to go lightly in doubtful cases, Innocent was very different toward proved and defiant heretics. Luchaire would have us believe that when the great Pope calls the heretics a scourge, a pestilence, filth, an ulcer infecting society, a savage beast, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a fox that destroys the Lord’s vine, a villainous inn-keeper who poisons his guests by selling them adulterated wines, when he seems to believe in their secret sexual orgies, he is only repeating a set of stock phrases and that he was in no way animated by “fanaticism,” or by any especial hatred towards heresy. The learned Frenchman goes so far as to suggest that Innocent “proceeded rigorously against heresy ... more because of the necessities of his policy than because of the ardour of his faith.”[29] Nevertheless, such assertions are without a scrap of definite proof, as far as Luchaire’s published work is concerned. Moreover, he admits that Innocent, along with almost all his contemporaries, felt “repulsion” for the heretics. Finally, the American of to-day will be apt to say sadly that a French anti-clerical cannot even know what real fanaticism is, since, in political action, France has not for centuries even “seen the animal” in its strength. Certainly Innocent appealed not only to the Scriptures but also to human reason against the heretics. Thus he makes great play with the logical impossibility of the Manichean idea of two contradictory gods. That is characteristic not only of the man but of the time in which he lived, with its great scholastics, a time that believed in logic as devoutly as our own time believes in “science.” Most certainly he recognized that occasions for scandal given by the clergy were at the bottom of much of the trouble. He keeps insisting that the sacraments in the hands of a priest of evil life do not lose their virtue any more than medicines in the hands of a doctor who might, personally, be far from well himself. Above all, he worked to remove the causes of scandal by improving the conduct of the clergy. But this is merely to say that anger did not blind him to facts (he had the fits of anger usually found in dominant natures). Certainly he was no vulgar ranter, but from this it by no means follows that his faith was not ardent and his feeling against heresy correspondingly keen.