the Augsburg Confession, referred its origins not to the
mystics nor to the humanists, but to bold leaders branded by the church
as heretics. Though from the earliest age Christendom never lacked
minds independent enough {35} to differ from authority and characters
strong enough to attempt to cut away what they considered rotten in
ecclesiastical doctrine and practice, the first heretics that can
really be considered as harbingers of the Reformation were two sects
dwelling in Southern France, the Albigenses and the Waldenses.
[Sidenote: Albigenses] The former, first met with in the eleventh
century, derived part of their doctrines from oriental Manichaeism,
part from primitive gnosticism. The latter were the followers of Peter
Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons who, about 1170, sold his goods and
went among the poor preaching the gospel. [Sidenote: Waldenses]
Though quite distinct in origin both sects owed their success with the
people to their attacks on the corrupt lives of the clergy, to their
use of the vernacular New Testament, to their repudiation of part of
the sacramental system, and to their own earnest and ascetic morality.
The story of their savage suppression, at the instigation of Pope
Innocent III, [Sidenote: 1209-29] in the Albigensian crusade, is one of
the darkest blots on the pages of history. A few remnants of them
survived in the mountains of Savoy and Piedmont, harried from time to
time by blood-thirsty pontiffs. In obedience to a summons of Innocent
VIII King Charles VIII of France massacred many of them. [Sidenote:
1437]

The spiritual ancestors of Luther, however, were not so much the French
heretics as two Englishmen, Occam and Wyclif. [Sidenote: Occam, d. c.
1349] William of Occam, a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, was the
most powerful scholastic critic of the existing church. Untouched by
the classic air breathed by the humanists, he said all that could be
said against the church from her own medieval standpoint. He taught
determinism; he maintained that the final seat of authority was the
Scripture; he showed that such fundamental dogmas as the existence of
God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, cannot be deduced by logic from
the given premises; he {36} proposed a modification of the doctrine of
transubstantiation in the interests of reason, approaching closely in
his ideas to the "consubstantiation" of Luther. Defining the church as
the congregation of the faithful, he undermined