of the Papal power, however, his whole
character has been called into question, and a distinguished modern
educator has used every effort to place him in the pillory of history,
as one of the men who have done most to hamper progress in science and
education in all world history. The amusing thing is the utter
inequality between the document itself and its supposed effects. Of
course it had no such effect as President White claims for it, and,
indeed, he seems never to have seen the document in its entirety
before it was called forcibly to his attention long after his
declarations with regard to it were published. The real attitude of
Pope John XXII. with regard to education and the sciences, which was
exactly the reverse of that predicated of him by his modern colleague
in education, will be the subject of the next chapter.

{129}

There is another document of John XXII., the bull _Super Illius
Specula_, that has been sometimes quoted, or rather misquoted, and
which indeed at first I was inclined to think was the bull referred to
by Dr. Cruikshank. This second Papal document, however, was not issued
until 1326. It is concerned entirely with the practice of magic. The
Pope knew that many people, by pretended intercourse with the devil or
with spirits of various kinds, claimed to be able to injure, to obtain
precious information, to interpret the future and the past, and to
clear up most of the mysteries that bother mankind. We have them still
with us--the palmist, the fortune-teller, the fake-spiritist. In order
to prevent such impostures, John issued a bull forbidding such
practices under pain of excommunication. It is almost needless to say
that this Papal document must have effected quite as much good for the
people at large as did the previous one forbidding "alchemies," which
must have prevented the robbing of foolish dupes who were taken with
the idea that the alchemists whom they employed could make gold and
silver. Of this second Papal document, this time really a bull, we
shall, because President White has given it an even falser
construction than the one we have just been discussing, have more to
say in the next chapter.

We must return, however, to the decretal _Spondent pariter,_--the
decree supposed to have forbidden chemistry; for as with regard to the
bull of Boniface VIII., previously discussed, it seems that it is
necessary not only to show that the decree was not actually intended
by the Popes to p