n any way to education or to
the people, was really beneficial, and constituted an excellent
sanitary regulation which doubtless prevented, on a number of
occasions, the carriage of disease from place to place.

The decree of Pope John XXII., which has been falsely claimed to
forbid chemistry, was another example of Papal care for Christendom,
and not at all the obscurantist document it has been so loudly
proclaimed. Pope {124} John learned how much imposition was being
practiced on the people by certain so-called alchemists who claimed to
be able to make silver and gold out of baser metals. In order to
prevent this, within a year after his elevation to the pontificate he
issued not a bull, but a very different form of document--a
decretal--forbidding any "alchemies" of this kind. The punishment to
be inflicted, however, instead of being the penalty of death, as Dr.
Cruikshank, Dr. White and many others have declared, or at least let
it be understood from their mode of expression, was that the person
convicted of pretending to make gold and silver and selling it to
other people, should pay into the public treasury an amount equal to
the supposed amount of gold and silver that he had made. _The money
thus paid into the public treasury was to be given to the poor._

The best way to show exactly what Pope John intended by his decree is
to quote the decree. It does not occur in the ordinary collection of
the bulls of John XXII., for it was not, as we have said, a bull in
the canonical sense of the term, but a Papal document of minor
importance. There is an important distinction between a decree and a
bull, the former being but of lesser significance, usually referring
only to passing matters of discipline. The decretal may be found in
the Corpus Juris Canonica, Tome II., which was published at Lyons in
1779. It is among the decrees or constitutions known as Extravagantes.
[Footnote 14]

[Footnote 14: The meaning of this term we discussed in the previous
chapter on Anatomy in relation to the bull of Boniface and Liber VI.
The motto of the publisher of the volume in which it occurs deserves
quotation because of its apt application in the present circumstance.
It is in Latin: "Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris"--"What
you would not have done to yourself, don't do to another." If writers
about the Popes were as careful to substantiate accusations against
them as fully as they would like any accusations against thems