ancis was neither
more nor less than the advent of a new Christianity and a new
Christ, like in all respects to the first, but superior to it by
poverty. Therefore all the democratic and communistic movements
of later times,--the third order of St. Francis, the Beghards,
Lollards, Bisocs, Fraticelli, Spiritual Brethren, Humiliati, and
Poor Men of Lyons [Waldenses], who were exterminated by the state
and the prisons of the Dominicans, have their origin in the old
leaven of Katharism, Joachimism, and the eternal gospel."[460]

+219. Popular mania for poverty and beggary.+ The strength of the
mendicant orders was in their popularity. They reconquered for the
church the respect of the masses. Then they became the inquisitors, and
the abusers of power for their own interests, and fell into great
disfavor. Their history shows well the course of interaction between the
masses and the rulers, and the course of institutions born in popular
mores but abused to serve private interests. The mendicant orders
furnished the army of papal absolutism. The Roman Catholic writers say
that the popes saved the world from the despotism of emperors. What is
true is that the pope and the emperor contended for the mastery, and the
masses gave it to the pope. What the popes did with it we know. That is
history. What the emperors would have done with it is matter for
conjecture. It is very probable that they would have abused the power as
badly as the popes did, but conjectural history is idle.

+220. Delusions.+ Of popular delusions one of the most striking and
recurrent examples is the belief that new and despised religious sects,
which are forced to meet in private, practice obscene and abominable
orgies. The early Christians were accused of such rites, and they
charged dissenting sects with the same.[461] The Manichaeans, Waldenses,
Huguenots, Puritans, Luciferans, Brothers of the Free Spirit, and so on
through the whole list of heretical sects, have been so charged. Lea, in
his History of the Inquisition, mentions over a dozen cases of such
charges, some of which were true. Nowadays the same assertions are made
against freemasons by Roman Catholics.[462] Jews are believed by the
peasants of eastern Europe to practice abominable rites in secret. The
idea that secret sects use the blood of people not of their sect,
especially of babies, in base rites is only a variant of the broad idea
about secret rites. It is sometim