emperor, who stood for
three days, barefooted and fasting, in the snow in the courtyard of
Canossa, before he was received back into the kingdom of God. The
kingdom of God was synonymous with the Church; Jews and pagans were the
natural children of the devil, but the dissenter, the heretic who dared
to question a single proposition of the divine system, or was bold
enough to think on original lines--in other words in contradiction to
tradition--voluntarily turned his back on God, and with seeing eyes went
into the kingdom of the devil. He was wholly evil, and no earthly
punishment fitted his crime. The emperor Theodosius, as far back as A.D.
380, had called such heretics "insane and demented," and the burning of
their bodies at the stake which prevented their souls from falling into
the hands of the devil, was looked upon as a great and undeserved mercy.
But not only during their lifetime, but after their death, too, the hand
of the Church fell heavily on all those who had strayed beyond her pale;
their bodies were dragged from their graves and thrown into the
carrion-pit. A man whom the Church had excommunicated was buried in the
cemetery of a German convent. The Archbishop of Mayence ordered the
exhumation of the body, threatening to interdict divine service in the
convent if his command were disobeyed. But the abbess, Hildegarde of
Bingen (1098-1179), a woman of great mental power and an inspired seer,
opposed him. Having received a direct message from God, she wrote to the
bishop as follows: "Conforming to my custom, I looked up to the true
light, and God commanded me to withhold my consent to the exhumation of
the body, because He Himself took the dead man from the pale of the
Church, so that He might lead him to the beatitude of the blessed.... It
were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the
command of my Lord." The saint had interpreted the will of God, and the
archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received
absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded. But the bishop's yielding by
no means countenanced the belief that God might, for once, tolerate the
body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it--the vision of
the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.

All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to
everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at
the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certai