eager to avenge his legate, and to vindicate the rights of the Church, immediately proclaimed Raymond a spiritual outlaw, called upon all the faithful to assist in his destruction, and promised the same indulgences which had ever been granted to the champions of the holy sepulchre, to those who should enter upon the new crusade against Raymond and the Albigenses. All Europe resounded with preparations for the holy war; and, in 1209, five hundred thousand soldiers, each wearing the symbol of the cross, according to the writers of that age, gathered round the infected provinces. They formed three great armies, over each of which presided an archbishop, a bishop or a mitred abbot. The great military captain was Simon de Montfort, lord of a fief, near Paris, and, in right of his mother, an English lady, Earl of Leicester. Raymond quailed before the approaching tempest. He made the most abject submission to the pope, and, in proof of his sincerity placed seven of his strongest fortified places in his hands. But this was not enough. He was compelled to appear naked to his shirt in his cathedral church, with a rope round his neck, each end of which was carried by a bishop, by whom he was then severely scourged in the presence of a vast assembly of his subjects. He then swore, upon the consecrated wafer, to submit to whatever the Church of Rome should command, to take the cross against his own subjects, and assist, to the utmost of his power, in the destruction of the Albigenses.

Roger of Beziers, nephew to Raymond, and the head of one of his seven fiefs or baronies, displayed a braver spirit, and resolved to defend his people against the allied crusaders and the Church itself. But he had miscalculated his power of resistance. His castles were abandoned, burnt, or captured, and at the bidding of the legate Amalric, and amidst the acclamations of the ferocious crusaders, the heretics taken prisoners were cast into the flames. Beziers fell at the first assault; its inhabitants, in number three and twenty thousand, were put to the sword. The knights inquired of the papal legate how they should distinguish the Catholics from the heretics. "Kill them all," said he, "God knoweth them that are his." Seven thousand citizens took refuge in the church of the Magdalen; and as many dead bodies were afterwards counted on the spot. A vast multitude crowded the church of St. Nicaise; it afforded no

sanctuary, not one survived. From Beziers, of which nothing but a burning pile of ruins was left, the crusaders marched to Carcassonne. There Roger commanded in person, and sustained a long siege with valour; at length, trusting to a safe-conduct from the Abbé de Citeaux, the legate, and the military leaders, confirmed by their oaths, he visited their camp, proposing to negotiate. But faith was not kept. The legate had him arrested, and handed over to De Montfort. He soon after died in prison, as all men believed by violence. Carcassonne was presented to De Montfort by the legate and his clergy. Soon after, he received from the hands of Innocent, at the Lateran council, the county of Toulouse, and other lands belonging to Raymond, as a reward for his zeal in behalf of the Church. Raymond himself had fled to Rome to throw himself upon the pope's compassion, and solicit the restoration of his dignities; but he was treated with insolence and once more excommunicated. A change, at length, seemed to dawn upon his distracted fortunes. He raised a few followers and once more took up arms, and his kinsman, Pedro of Arragon, fearing, no doubt, the rapid extension of the papacy on all sides, marched, with a thousand knights to his aid: he was joined by the counts of Foix and of Comminges, and the viscount Bearn, his vassals. But Pedro was killed in battle, on the 12th of September, 1213; Raymond and his allies submitted to the conqueror, and the power of De Montfort was supreme. An insurrection took place, however, in 1218, and he was slain at Toulouse. Raymond died 1222. Within two years, Philippe, king of France, and Innocent III., were also removed from the scene. The Albigenses breathed again, and proclaimed the younger Raymond.

Honorius III. was now pope, and he resolved to follow in the steps of his predecessor, and complete the extermination of heresy. He offered great assistance in money, and the lands he should subdue, to Louis VIII., the young French king, to resume the crusade against the Albigenses. But the war was prosecuted with little success; Raymond VIII. was still in possession of the dominions of his ancestors, and it was necessary to set other machinery, still more formidable, to work.

About the beginning of the century, Innocent had sent an extraordinary commission of ecclesiastics into the disturbed pro

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vinces to stimulate the languid zeal of the resident clergy and to root out the rising heresy. They received their instructions from Rome, and held themselves independent of the bishops or other spiritual authorities. Rainier, a Cistertian monk, and Castelneau, the legate, were first sent: they were joined, in 1206, by the famous Dominic, a Spanish friar, the founder of the order of Dominicans. They obtained the house, or castle, of a noble convert near Narbonne, about A.D. 1210, and here, having full authority from the pope himself to inflict capital punishment upon heretics, they first opened that dreadful tribunal, which immediately obtained, and yet retains, the name of the INQUISITION. On the one hand, they offered to those who would recant the remission of all their sins, full indulgences, and various other privileges; on the other, torture, imprisonment, the axe, the halter, and the stake, to the obstinate in heresy. The terror struck by this new tribunal was great; but this was not the least of its advantages to the papal cause. Similar courts were erected in various places, though the officers sometimes fell the victims of public indignation; and in 1229, by the advice of the cardinal of St. Angelo, the pope's legate, the council of Toulouse established in every considerable city of France a Society of Inquisitors. This institution, however, was superseded by Gregory IX. in 1233, who committed to the Dominicans, now formally established as a religious order, the task of discovering and bringing to judgment the heretics of France. Soon after, the legate appointed Pierre Cellan and Guillaume Arnaud inquisitors at Toulouse, and he then set up a similar court wherever the Dominicans had a monastery, Carcassonne and Toulouse being the two chief tribunals. The numbers of the wretched Albigenses who perished by these means is incalculable, and the torments inflicted are too frightful to be repeated. Multitudes, reclaimed by terror, were reconciled to the Church; thousands perished in the fire. These terrible courts took cognizance not only of heresy, but of the crimes, scarcely less odious, of magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and Judaism. The Inquisition was soon afterwards established in Italy and Spain, and the Emperor of Germany was induced to issue an edict granting the Inquisitors protection, and giving legal sanction to their office.

Thus, afflicted by war, and scourged with the scorpions of the

inquisitors, the Albigenses slowly wasted away. In 1225, Louis (the Saint Louis of France) took the cross and marched into Languedoc, to the avowed extermination of the heretics. He died in a few months, or probably their name would have been blotted out at once; but the war was continued by the regent, his widow, in the name of the young king. In April, 1229, Raymond abdicated his feudal sovereignty, and was brought to Paris, and scourged by the priest in the church of Nôtre Dame. "The Church of the Albigenses," says Sir James Stephen, “had been drowned in blood. Those supposed heretics had been swept from the soil of France. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders, and of the slain, are such as almost surpass belief. Languedoc had been invaded during a long succession of years by armies more numerous than had ever been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman Empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry and unrestrained by discipline, that they provided for all their wants by the sword. More than threefourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages every inhabitant had been massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some member had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort's soldiers, or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent, or so fearful in its character!"

AMERICA, EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF. This Church, although

in the first instance an offshoot of the Church of England, and still retaining an affectionate intercourse with it, has certain peculiar features of its own, and must be considered as a distinct and independent communion. Episcopacy in the United States dates from the first charter of an English sovereign to her earliest settlers. In the year 1606, James I. chartered the infant colony of Virginia, and drew up, it is said with his own hands, a code of laws for their government. Religion was especially enjoined to be established according to the doctrines and rites of the Church of England; and no emigrant might withdraw his allegiance from king James, or dissent from the national faith.

Kindness to the savages was also enjoined, with the use of all proper means for their conversion. The settlers were of the rank of English gentlemen; and they long retained its two characteristics of loyalty to the Throne and warm attachment to the Church. During the Commonwealth their numbers were increased by a vast body of emigrant Cavaliers; and so recently as the beginning of the last century, Spotswood, the governor, wrote home (in 1711), "This government is in perfect peace and tranquillity, under a due obedience to the royal authority and a gentlemanly conformity to the Church of England." The generosity of the Virginian settlers is worthy of commendation. The Puritans, in 1620, established themselves to the north of Virginia, at Boston and Rhode Island; and they treated Churchmen with great severity; actually expelling two brothers, the Browns, for using the Book of Common Prayer, and sending them back to England. This, however, did not prevent the royalists of Virginia from cultivating a friendly intercourse with the Puritans. "I find," says Mr. Bancroft, in his history of America, "no traces of persecutions in the earliest history of Virginia." In 1642, just when the civil war broke out at home, the Virginian colonists, conscious of their importance to the mother-country, asserted their dignity; their colonial legislature declared itself entitled to all the rights and privileges of an English parliament, and at once proceeded to act upon the principle, and to provide a constitution for the Church. In March, 1643, it was especially ordered that no minister should preach or teach, publicly or privately, except in conformity to the Church of England; and Nonconformists were banished from the colony. But this appears to have been done with reference to their political rather than to their religious principles. The Revolution in England had given political importance to religious sects; to tolerate puritanism was to nourish a republican party; and this act of intolerance was carried out with comparatively little bitterness. The act of the Virginia Assembly of 1642, impressed some features which the American Episcopal Church retains to this day. It gave the right of presentation to the parish. The licence of the bishop of London was necessary, but the parishioners could always find means to evade his authority; sometimes by refusing to elect, at others by receiving a minister who might happen to be agreeable to them and dis