195. Fashion not trivial; not subject to argument. Fashion is by no means trivial. It is a form of the dominance of the group over the individual, and it is quite as often harmful as beneficial. There is no arguing with the fashion. In the case of dress we can sometimes tell what princess or actress started the fashion, and we sometimes know, in the case of ideas, who set them afloat. Generally, however, it is not known who started a fashion in dress. The authority of fashion is imperative as to everything which it touches. The sanctions are ridicule and powerlessness. The dissenter hurts himself; he never affects the fashion. No woman, whatever her age or position or her opinion about the crinoline fashion, could avoid wearing one. No effort to introduce a fashion of "rational dress" for women has ever yet succeeded. An artist, novelist, poet, or playwright of a school which is out of fashion fails and is lost. An opponent of the notions which are current can get no hearing. The fashion, therefore, operates a selection in which success and merit are often divorced from each other, but the selection is pitiless. The canons of criticism are set by fashion. It follows that there is no rational effect of fashion. There was a rule in goblinism: Say naught but good of the dead. The rule was dictated by fear that the ghost would be angry and return to avenge the dead. The rule has come down to us and is an imperative one. Eulogies on the dead are, therefore, conventional falsehoods. It is quite impossible for any one to depart from the fashion. The principle is in fashion that one should take the side of the weaker party in a contest. This principle has no rational ground at all. There is simply a slight probability that the stronger will be in the wrong. Fashion requires that we should all affect nonpartisanship in discussion, although it is absurd to do so. Of course these weighty rules on important matters go over into the mores, but they are fashions because they are arbitrary, have no rational grounds, cannot be put to any test, and have no sanction except that everybody submits to them.

196. Remoter effects of fashion. The selective effect of fashion, in spite of its irrationality and independently of the goodness or badness of its effect on interests, is a reflection on the intelligence of men. It accounts for many heterogeneous phenomena in society. The fashions influence the mores. They can make a thing modest or immodest, proper or improper, and, if they last long enough, they affect the sense and the standards of modesty and propriety. Fashions of banking and trading affect standards of honesty, or definitions of cheating and gambling. Public shows, dances, punishments, and executions affect, in time, standards of decency, taste in amusement, sentiments of humanity, views as to what is interesting and attractive. Methods of argument which are fashionable may train people to flippancy, sophistry, levity of mind, and may destroy the power to think and reason correctly. Scherr[409] says that fashion served as a means to transfer to Germany the depravation of morals which had corrupted the Latin nations in the sixteenth century. Fashions now spread through all civilized nations by contact and contagion. They are spread by literature.

197. Slang and expletives. Slang and expletives are fashions in language. Expletives are of all grades from simple interjections to the strongest profanity. Many expletives are ancient religious formulas of objurgation, obsecration, asseveration, anathema, etc. They express a desire to curse or bless, invite or repel. Where the original sense is lost they sink into interjections, the whole sense of which is in the accent. Their use rises and falls with fashion in nations, classes, groups, and families, and it controls the habits of individuals. Whether certain persons use a pious dialect, a learned (pedantic) dialect, a gambler's slang, a phraseology of excessive adjectives and silly expletives, or profane expressions, oaths, and phrases which abuse sacred things, depends on birth and training. In this sense each dialect is the language for each group and corresponds to the mores of the group. There may be some psychology of expletives,[410] but they seem to be accounted for, like slang, by the expediency of expression, which is the purpose of all language. There is a need for expression which will win attention and impress the memory. A strong expletive shocks an opponent, or it is an instinctive reaction on a situation which threatens the well-being of the speaker. It is a vent to emotion which gives relief from it when other relief is not possible. This last is one of the chief useful reasons for expletives. However, even then they are a vicious habit, for stronger and stronger expressions are required to win the same subjective effects. Old expressions lose force. Slang is the new coinage. The mintage is often graphic and droll; it is also often stupid and vulgar. A selection goes on. Some of it is rejected and some enters into the language. Expletives also go out of fashion. The strain for effect can be satisfied only by constantly greater and greater excess. It becomes a bad personal habit to use grotesque and extravagant expressions. Slang and expletives destroy the power of clear and cogent expression in speech or writing; and they must affect powers of thinking. Although slang is a new coinage which reinvigorates the language, the fashion of slang and expletives must be rated, like the fashion of using tobacco and alcohol, as at best a form of play, a habit and custom which springs from no need and conduces to no interest. The acts result in an idle satisfaction of the doer, and the good or ill effects all fall within his own organism. The prevalence of such fashions in a society becomes a fact of its mores, for there will be rational effects on interests. The selective effect of them is in the resistance to the fashions or subjection to them. They are only to a limited extent enforced by social sanctions. There is personal liberty in regard to them. Resistance depends on independent judgment and self-control, and produces independence and self-control; that is, it affects character. Groups are differentiated inside the society of those who resist and those who do not, and the effect on the mores (character of the group) results. The selective effects appear in the competition of life between the two groups.

198. Poses, fads, and cant. When fashion seizes upon an idea or usage and elevates it to a feature of a society at a period, it is, as was said above, affected by those who cannot attain to the real type and who exaggerate its external forms. The humanism of the Renaissance produced an affectation of learning, dilettante interest in collecting manuscripts, and zeal for style which was genuine in scholars, but was an affectation of the followers. There was also an affectation of pagan philosophy and of alienation from Christianity. The euphuists in England in the sixteenth century, the precieuses of Moliere's time, the illuminati of the eighteenth century, are instances of groups of people who took up a whim and exaggerated conduct of a certain type, practicing an affectation. There are poses which are practiced as a fashion for a time. Fads get currency. Dandyism, athleticism, pedantry of various kinds, reforms of various kinds, movements, causes, and questions are phenomena of fads around which groups cluster, formed of persons who have a common taste and sentiment. Poses go with them. Poses are also affected by those who select a type of character which is approved. The dandy has had a score of slang names within two centuries corresponding to varieties of the pose and dress which he affected. He has now given way to the athlete, who is quite a different type. The Byronic pose prevailed for a generation. Goethe's Werther inspired a pose. They would both now be ridiculed. Favorite heroes in novels have often set a pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a response from a certain number who thus cluster into a self-selected union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. Gloom and savagery, passion and crime, luxury and lust, romance and adventure, adultery and divorce, self-indulgence and cynicism, the reality of foulness and decay, are so suggested as to become centers on which receptive minds will organize and congenial ones will combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest is just as distinct as that of the religious sectarian. Each of the little groups operates its own selection, but each is small. They interfere with and neutralize each other, but a general drift may be imparted by them to the mores. Our age is optimistic by virtue of the economic opportunities, power, and prosperity which it enjoys. The writers above mentioned are all pessimistic. They do not affect the age except upon the surface, by entertaining it, but they disturb its moral philosophy, they confuse its standards and codes, and they corrupt its tastes. They set fashions in literature which the writers of the second class imitate. In general, they relax the inhibitions which have come down to us in our mores without giving by suggestion an independence of character which would replace the traditions by sound judgments. Their influence will be greater when it has been diluted so as to reach the great mass. It hardly can be worse than that of the literature which is now used by that class.

199. Illustrations. In the later days of Greece the study of Homer became an affectation. Dio Chrysostom tells of a visit he made to a colony on the Borysthenes, in which nearly all could read the Iliad, and heard it more willingly than anything else.[411] The Athenians, especially the gilded youth, affected Spartan manners and ways. The dandies went about with uncut hair, unwashed hands, and they practiced fist-fights. They were as proud of torn ears as German students are of cuts on their faces.[412] The religious and social reforms of Augustus were a pose. They lacked sincerity and were adopted for a political purpose. Men took them up who did not conform their own conduct to them. Hence a "general social falsehood" was the result.[413] In the fourth and fifth centuries all the well-to-do classes spent their time in making imitations of the ancient literature and philosophy. They tried to imitate Seneca and Pliny, writing compositions and letters, and pursuing a mode of life which they supposed the men of the period of glory had lived.[414] The French of the fifteenth century had the greatest fear of ridicule; the Italians feared most that they might appear to be simpletons.[415] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the "chevaliers transis" wore furs in summer and summer mantles in winter. They meant to prove that "love suffices for everything."[416] Old pictures of the sixteenth century show that it was considered modest to squint. A Spaniard thought that it showed friendship for any one to squint at him. It was also considered a sign of probity to have the lips primly closed and drawn.[417] The Italian cicisbeo in the seventeenth century was a cavalier servente, who attended a married lady. Such men practiced extravagances and affectations, and are generally described as effeminate.[418]

200. Heroes, scapegoats and butts, caricature. Fashion sets, for any group at any time, its pet likes and dislikes. The mass must have its heroes, but also its victims and scapegoats and the butts of its ridicule. Caricature is futile when it is destitute of point. The test of it lies in the popular response which shows whether it has touched the core of the thing or not. When it can do this it reveals the real truth about the thing better than a volume of argument could do it. Sometimes a popular conviction is produced by a single incident which is a very important societal fact. The voyage of the Oregon from the Pacific (1898) convinced the American people that they must cut a canal through the isthmus. Probably this conviction was a non sequitur, but argument cannot overcome it, and it will control action with all the financial and other consequences which must ensue. A satire, an epigram, or a caricature may suffice to produce such a conviction.

201. Caricature. The mere rhetorical form may have the greatest importance. A caricature often stings national vanity. A state may be represented as afraid, as having "backed down," as having appeared ridiculous. Group vanity is often a stronger motive than personal vanity, and the desire to gratify it will prove stronger than any rational conviction.

202. Relation of fads, etc., to mores. Thus the vanities, desires, prejudices, faiths, likes, and dislikes, which pervade a society, coerce dissenters and become stronger and stronger mass phenomena. They then affect interests. Then they wind strands of influence and control around individuals and demand sacrifices. In their combination they weave webs of action which constitute life and history. The selection which they exert, drawing in some and repelling others, produces results on the societal fabric of a later time. The consequences react on character, moral tone, life philosophy, ethical principles, and ruling sentiments. Thus they affect the mores, or even enter into them. The whole is handed on to the rising generation to be their outfit of knowledge, faith, and policy, and their rules of duty and well living.

203. Ideals. An ideal is entirely unscientific. It is a phantasm which has little or no connection with fact. Ideals are very often formed in the effort to escape from the hard task of dealing with facts, which is the function of science and art. There is no process by which to reach an ideal. There are no tests by which to verify it. It is therefore impossible to frame a proposition about an ideal which can be proved or disproved. It follows that the use of ideals is to be strictly limited to proper cases, and that the attempt to use ideals in social discussion does not deserve serious consideration. An ideal differs from a model in that the model is deduced from reality but within the bounds of reality. It is subject to approved methods of attainment and realization. An ideal also differs from a standard, for a standard must be real.

204. When ideals may be used. What are the proper cases for the use of ideals? Ideals can be useful when they are formed in the imagination of the person who is to realize them by his own exertions, for then the ideal and the programme of action are in the same consciousness, and therefore the defects of an ideal are reduced or removed. Ideals are useful (a) in homiletics, which are chiefly occupied with attempts at suggestion. In limited cases a preacher or teacher can suggest ideals which, if apprehended and adopted, become types toward which young persons may train themselves. Even then these cases merge in the next class. (b) Ideals are useful in self-education. The idea is then taken up from books or from admired persons by suggestion and imitation, or from autosuggestion, but generally from a combination of the two. An ideal from autosuggestion produces enthusiasm. The fantastic character of the ideal, if the person is young, is unimportant. His will is enlisted to work for it. He can constantly compare the ideal with his experience. The ideal is at last shorn down to reality and merges in sober plans of effort. (c) A far larger field for ideals is afforded by vanity. As vanity is itself a subjective affection, but one which can be awakened only in society, it uses the imagination to suppose cases, plan unlimited schemes, devise types of self-decoration and dreams of superiority, distinction, power, success, and glory. The creations are all phantasms. The ends are all ideals. These ideals may not be extravagant. Vanity generally creates them by raising to a higher pitch some treatment of the body or dress, some admired trait of character, some action which has won glory, or given pleasure and won applause. This whole field for ideals is largely influenced by suggestion from the current tastes and fashionable standards in the group, but autosuggestion is also very active in it. (d) Ideals also find a great field in marriage. In this case ideals of happiness have powerfully affected the institution at all its stages. Experience of marriage has been partly pleasant and partly the contrary. The experience has stimulated the reflection: How blessed it would be if only this or that unpleasant detail could be corrected! This has led to idealization or the imaginative conception of a modified institution. Our novels now sometimes aid in this idealization. Men loved their daughters with zealous and protective affection long before they loved their wives. The father's love reached out to follow his daughter into matrimony and to secure for her some stipulations which should free wedlock for her from pain or care which other wives had to endure. These stipulations were always guided by idealization. The rich and great were first able to realize the modifications. These then passed into fashion, custom, and the mores, and the institution was perfected and refined by them.

205. Ideals of beauty. The educated ideals under the second and third of the above heads become mass phenomena under the influence of fashion, when they control many or all. Ideal types of beauty are adopted by a group. Uncivilized people adopt such types of bodily beauty (sec. 189). The origin of them is unknown. A Samoan mother presses her thumb on the nose of her baby to flatten it.[419] An Indian mother puts a board on the forehead of her baby to make it recede. Teeth are knocked out, or filed into prescribed shapes, or blackened. The skin is painted, cut into scars, or tattooed. Goblinism may have furnished the original motives for some deformations, but the natural physical features of the group which distinguish it from others, or the features produced by goblinistic usages, come to be the standard of beauty for the group. Those features are accentuated and exaggerated by the deformations which are practiced. The aim is at an ideal perfection of physical beauty. All fashion in dress has the same philosophy. In other cases, also, it seems that fashion is pursuing a fleeting and impossible ideal of perfect beauty, style, grace, dexterity, etc., which shall give distinction and superiority or impose subjection.

206. The man-as-he-should-be. Group ideals may be types of character. In the Old Testament the ideal type is the "just man," who conformed to ritual standards at all points. A Moslem is a man who is "faithful" to Islam, which is self-surrender to the Omnipotent One.[420] The type of the perfect man-as-he-should-be in the Mahabharata is one who will give his all to a Brahmin. The god Siva, disguised as a Brahmin, came to a hero. He ordered the hero to kill his own son and serve his corpse for the Brahmin to eat. The hero obeyed at once. The Brahmin set the hero's buildings on fire, but the latter served the dish without heeding the fire. The Brahmin ordered him to eat of the dish. He prepared to obey, but was excused from this trial. He had triumphantly stood the test. There was nothing he would not do for a Brahmin.[421] The poem also contains a type of female perfection in person and character,—Savitri. [422] The Greeks had many standards of personal excellence and social worth which entered to some extent into their mores. The ideal types were noble and refined. They have affected the mores of the class educated in the "humanities" since the Renaissance. They have never been truly incorporated in the mores of any society. Olbos was wealth, with grace, opulence, elegance, and generosity, and so wealth when not sordid or arrogant, the opposite of plutocratic. Arete was capacity, capability, and practical efficiency,—executive ability. Aidos was the opposite of "cheek." Sophrosyne was continence, self-control. Kalokagathie contained notions of economic, aesthetic, and moral good, fused into a single concept.[423] The eleutheros was the gentleman endowed with all admirable qualities.[424] The Greeks proved that people could sink very low while talking very nobly. The ideals were in the literature, not in the mores. "Their predisposition, their will, and their fate formed a consistent whole, and their decline was a consequence of the social and political life which they lived."[425] In the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. the man-as-he-should-be was religious,—a hermit or a monk. In any case he was an ascetic. In Charlemagne's time the preferred type was changed. It became the warrior and knight, and led up to chivalry. A new poetry flourished to develop and propagate the new ideal. In mediaeval society there were strongly defined ideals of the man-as-he-should-be. Milte was generosity of heart and mind. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the noble desire of the lord to share all he had with his retainers, which desire called out their devotion to him.[426] The minstrels meant by it lavishness of gifts to themselves. Maze was the cardinal virtue. It meant observation of the limits in all actions and manifestations of feeling, the opposite of excess and extravagance.[427] The church taught admiration of arbitrary ideals of ecclesiastical virtues. The ideals were ascetic. They seem to have been derived from the fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, but they offer an example of borrowed and adopted ideals which were fully incorporated in the popular mores. The age accepted ascetic standards of goodness and character. The religious classes and the lay classes did not fall under the same standards of conduct and duty. It was the business of the former to live by the full standard. All classes, however, accepted the standards as valid, and the layman conformed to them at times, or as far as worldly life would permit. Elizabeth of Thuringia seems to be the ideal of the married woman, but her saintliness interfered with her other duties, and even her own time does not seem to have been sure in its judgment of her. That she was flogged is a fact which has many relations to her character and her age.[428] All admired men who practiced asceticism and self-discipline. The types of the age were knightliness and saintliness. They were both highly elaborated. The knightly type began to develop in the time of Charlemagne and ran through the crusades. It contained grotesque and absurd elements. The story of the crusades is a criticism upon it. The knight was a fantastic person, who might do isolated deeds of valor, but who could not make a plan, work persistently to a purpose, cooperate with others, or either enforce or submit to discipline. Both the knight and the saint were ideal types which exerted a controlling power of selection through centuries.

207. The standard type of man. Is the ideal of the man-as-he-should-be to be found, for us, in the "common man," or in the highest product of our culture? That is a most vital question for any society. It includes the question whether the society has a discord in itself as to its own ideal of the type of men it wants to produce. In the upper strata of the masses, amongst the educated, industrious, sober-minded people of good incomes, there exists the best family life. The children live constantly with their parents, and the latter watch over the health, manners, and morals of the children unceasingly from birth to maturity. The same parents make great sacrifices for the education of their children, although the class, as a class, has means to secure what is necessary without hard sacrifice. The point is that they value education highly and get it. We also multiply educational institutions. We feel sure that all this is good work. The churches and all good literature constantly inculcate good manners and morals according to the standards in the present mores. Here is a set of objects to be prized and worked for in families, schools, self-education, literature, and art, which go to the production of a type of men as the highest product of our civilization. Then suddenly we are told that the common man is wise beyond all the philosophers. The man on the curbstone is the arbiter of our destinies, and the standard man. "Culture" is derided and sneered at. This latter view has great popularity. It brings up a serious question: whether we are spoiling our children by educating them. Are we spoiling them for political power? Are we putting them under disabilities for public influence? It is related of an English statesman, that when asked by an American mother whether she should send her son to Oxford, he replied: "Why send him to Oxford? Send him to Washington, where he will learn democracy. That is what he will need to know." Certainly it behooves us to know whether we are spoiling our sons by sending them to the universities, and whether we ought not rather to send them to Tammany Hall. Either on one side or the other there is a great mass of empty phrases and false but inflated rhetoric.

208. Who does the thinking? The notion that "the group thinks" deserves to be put by the side of the great freaks of philosophy which have been put forth from age to age. Only the elite of any society, in any age, think, and the world's thinking is carried on by them by the transplanting of ideas from mind to mind, under the stress and strain of clashing argument and tugging debate. If the group thinks, then thought costs nothing, but in truth thought costs beyond everything else, for thousands search and talk while only one finds; when he finds something, a step is won and all begins over again. If this is so, it ought to be universally known and recognized. All the mores would then conform to it.

209. The gentleman. In modern English-speaking society the "gentleman" is the name for the man-as-he-should-be. The type is not fixed and the definition is not established. It is a collective and social ideal. Gentlemen are a group in society who have selected a code and standard of conduct as most conducive to prosperous and pleasant social relations. Therefore manners are an essential element in the type. A gentleman is one who has been educated to conform to the type, and that he has the cachet is indicated by his admission to the group. Novels develop and transmit the ideal; clubs are the tribunal of it. It is a floating notion which varies with the mores. The modern reader finds very few cases in Greek literature of what he can recognize as gentlemen. Orestes in the Electra of Euripides opens the discussion of what makes the worth of a man, but after saying that it is not wealth or poverty, and not valor in war, he flinches the question and says that it is better to leave it untouched. The peasant, married to Electra, certainly acts the gentleman. He also says of Orestes and Pylades, that if they really are as noble as they seem, they will be as well satisfied with humble fare as with grand fare. A gentleman of a century ago would not be approved now. A gentleman of to-day in the society of a century ago would be thought to have rowdy manners. Artificial manners are not in the taste of our time; athletics are. The "gentleman" always tends to an arbitrary definition. It appears now that he must have some skill at sports and games. The selective force of the social type of the gentleman is obvious in our own society. The sentiment noblesse oblige was once the name for the coercive force exerted on a noble by the code of his class. Now that fixed classes are gone and the gentleman is only defined by the usage and taste of an informal class, it is a term for the duties which go with social superiority of any kind, so far as those duties are prescribed and sanctioned by public opinion.

210. Social standard set by taboos. It may be still more important to notice that the standard social type is defined by taboos with only social sanctions. The negative side of noblesse oblige is more important than the positive. A gentleman is under more restraints than a non-gentleman. In the eighteenth century he patronized cockfights and prize fights, and he could get drunk, gamble, tell falsehoods, and deceive women without losing caste. He now finds that noblesse oblige forbids all these things, and that it puts him under disabilities in politics and business.

A society exerts a positive selection on individuals by its definition of crimes and by its criminal jurisprudence. The taboos are turned into laws and are enforced by positive penalties.

211. Crimes. The number and variety of crimes depends on the positive action of the state. What things are crimes in a state, therefore, indicates what the ruling authority desires to prevent. The motives have often been entirely selfish on the part of a king or a ruling caste, or they were dictated by a desire to further the vanity of such persons. By judicial precedent at Rome it was made a crime to beat a slave, or to undress near a statue of the emperor, or to carry a coin bearing his image into a latrine or a lupanar.[429] Xiphilin, in his epitome of the history of Dio Cassius, inserts a story that, in the reign of Domitian, a woman was executed for undressing near the statue of that emperor.[430] The notions in the mores of what ought to be prevented have been very variable and arbitrary. Juvenal denounces a consul who while in office drove his own chariot, although by night.[431] Seneca was shocked at the criminal luxury of putting snow in wine.[432] Pliny is equally shocked at the fashion of wearing gold rings.[433] Lecky, after citing these cases, refers to the denunciations uttered by the church fathers against women who wore false hair. Painting the face is an old fault of women, against which moral teachers of all ages have thundered. Very recently, amongst us, clergymen have denounced women for not wearing bonnets in church, because Paul said that she "dishonoreth her head, for that is even all one as if she were shaven."[434] These were not indeed cases of crimes, but of alleged vices or sins. In sumptuary laws we have cases of legislation which made fashions crimes. In the eighteenth century there was little legislation against brothels, drinking places, or gambling houses. We make it a crime to sell rum, but not to drink it. On the other hand, until recently commercial transactions and the lending of money for interest were so restricted in accordance with ethical and economic faiths that they were environed by crimes which are now obsolete. Heresy and sorcery were once very great crimes. Witchcraft and usury were abominable crimes.

212. Criminal law. In the original administration of justice it appears that there was only one punishment for the violation of taboo, sin and crime being coincident: that was death. Then, in cases, banishment was substituted for death, although this was only a change in form, since a banished man could not exist alone. In either case the selection was of the simplest kind. The society extruded from itself one who violated its rules. This is the fundamental sense of all punishments, like execution, transportation, or imprisonment, which remove the culprit from the society, permanently or for a time. Other punishments contained originally a large element of vengeance, vengeance being a primary impulse of great force to satisfy those whom the crimes injured and to deter others from the same crime. The administration of justice, therefore, bore witness to the judgment of the society as to what conduct and character should be selected for preservation or caused to cease. In all modern states the power to make acts crimes has been abused, and the motive of punishment has been so lost that we wrangle as to what it is. The ruling coterie uses the power to make things crimes to serve its own interests. Protectionists make it criminal to import goods. Governments do the same to further their fiscal purposes. They also make it criminal to immigrate or emigrate, or to coin money, even of full weight and fineness, or to carry letters and parcels. In England it is made a crime to violate railroad regulations. In some cases regulations for barber shops are enforced by making violations crimes. Generally, sanitary rules are so enforced. In the latest case it has been made a crime to spit in public places. The criminal law expresses the mores of the time when they have reached very concrete and definite formulae of prohibition. Perhaps the administration of it expresses the mores still more clearly. It is now recognized as true that frightful penalties do not exert a proportionately deterrent effect. Our mores do not permit us to inflict pain in order to compel men to confess, or to put them in solitary confinement in dark and loathsome dungeons, or to let our prisons become sinks of vice and misery or schools of crime. The selective effect of punishment is the one which we seem to aim at, although not very intelligently.

213. Mass phenomena of fear and hope. Manias and delusions are mental phenomena, but they are social. They are diseases of the mind, but they are epidemic. They are contagious, not as cholera is contagious, but contact with others is essential to them. They are mass phenomena.[435] Some great hope (the good to be obtained by taking the heads of murdered men or from appeasing the gods by sacrificing one's children) or some great fear (drought, failure of food, purgatory), if common to the whole, makes them adopt any suggestion of a means to realize the hope or avert the feared calamity. Often there is no such quasi-rational reason for common action. Hysteria, especially amongst women and children, produces manias of falsehood, deceit (fasting women), trances, and witchcraft. In mediaeval convents sometimes half the inmates were afflicted at the same time. Nervous depression and irritation produced physical acts of relief. One irritated another, and one surpassed another, until there was a catastrophe for the group.[436] Religious enthusiasm has produced innumerable manias and delusions. Mediaeval Christianity, Mohammedanism, Persia, and modern Russia furnish cases. Martyrdom proves nothing with regard to the truth or value of a religion. All the sects have had martyrs. Martyrdom, even under torture, has been sought, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, not only by Christians[437] but by Donatists,[438] Manichaeans, and other most abominated heretics. Even the Adamites produced martyrs who went joyously to death.[439] Quakers really provoked their own martyrdom in early New England.

214. Manias, delusions. The phenomena of manias, popular delusions, group hallucinations, self-immolation, etc., show the possibilities of mental contagion in a group. They are responses to hope or fear which affect large numbers at the same time. They are often produced by public calamities, or other ills of life. Those who suffer feel themselves selected as victims, and they ask, Who has done this to us, and why? Often people who are not victims interpret a natural incident by egoistic reference. This is done not on account of the destruction wrought by an earthquake or a tornado, but from pure terror at what is not understood, e.g. an eclipse.[440] Pilgrimages and crusades were cases of mania and delusion. The element of delusion was in the notion of high merit which could be won in pursuing the crusades. Very often manias and delusions are pure products of fashion, as in the case of the children's crusades, when the children caught the infection of the crusades, but did not know what they were doing, or why, and rushed on their own destruction. Often manias are logical deductions from notions (especially religious notions) which have been suggested, as in the case of the flagellants. It is the ills of life which drive people to such deductions, and they bear witness to excessive nervous excitement. The mediaeval dancing mania was more purely nervous. The demonism and demonology of the Middle Ages was a fertile source for such deductions, which went far to produce the witchcraft mania. The demonistic notions taught by the church furnished popular deductions, which the church took up and reduced to dogmatic form, and returned as such to the masses. Thus the notions of sorcery, heresy, and witchcraft were developed.

215. Monstrous mass phenomena of mediaeval society. There must have been a deep and strong anthropological reason for the development of monstrous social phenomena in mediaeval society. The Latin world was disintegrated to its first elements between the sixth century and the tenth. Such a dissolution of society abolished the inherited mores with all their restraints and inhibitions, and left society to the control of fierce barbaric, that is physical, forces. At the same period the Latin world absorbed hordes of barbarians who were still on a low nomadic warrior stage of civilization, and who adopted the ruins of Roman culture without assimilating them. The Christian church contributed crass superstitions about the other world and the relations of this world to it. The product was the Merovingian and Carlovingian history. Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.[441] These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in the early Middle Ages. Every sentiment was extravagant. Men were under some mighty gregarious instinct which drove them to act in masses, and they passed from one great passion or enthusiastic impulse to another at very short intervals. The passions of hatred and revenge were manifested, upon occasion, to the extremity of fiendishness. Nothing which the mind could conceive of seemed to be renounced as excessive (Clement V, John XXII). Gregory IX pursued the heretics and the emperor with an absorption of his whole being and a rancor which we cannot understand. Poverty was elevated into a noble virtue and a transcendent merit.[442] This was the height of ascetic absurdity, since poverty is only want, and the next step would be a cult of suicide. The mendicant orders fought each other malignantly. Every difference of opinion made a war of extermination. Civil contests were carried on with extravagant ferocity as to the means used and as to the exultation of success or the penalty of failure. What was lacking was discipline. There was no authority or doctrine which could set limits to private passion. Life was held cheap. The gallows and the pit were in use all the time. The most marked product of invention was instruments of torture. Men and women were burned to death for frivolous reasons. Punishments taught people to gloat over suffering. Torture was inflicted as idly as we take testimony. With all this went deep faith in the efficacy of ritual and great other-worldliness, that is, immediate apprehension of the other world in this one. All the mores were adjusted to these features of faith and practice. It all proceeded out of the masses of the people. The church was borne along like a chip on the tide. The church hung back from the crusades until the depth of the popular interest had been tested. Then the crusades were declared to be the "will of God." This gave their own idea back again to the masses with the approval of the societal authority. The masses insisted on having acts and apparatus provided by which to satisfy their application of dogma. The power of the keys and the treasure of salvation were provided accordingly. The souls of the people were torn by the antagonism between the wild passions of the age and the ecclesiastical restraints on conduct. They feared the wrath of God and hell to come. The ritual and sacramental system furnished a remedy. The flagellants were a phenomenon of seething, popular passion, outside of the church and unapproved by its authority. Antony of Padua ([Symbol: cross] 1231) started the movement by his sermons on repentance and the wrath of God. Processions of weeping, praying, self-scourging, and half-naked penitents appeared in the streets of all the towns of Christendom. "Nearly all enemies made friends. Usurers and robbers made haste to restore ill-gotten goods, and other vicious men confessed and renounced vanity. Prisons were opened. Prisoners were released. Exiles were allowed to return. Men and women accomplished works of pity and holiness, as if they feared the all-powerful God would consume them with fire from heaven."[443] This movement was altogether popular. It broke out again in 1349, in connection with the Black Death. Flagellation for thirty-three and a half days was held to purge from all sin. This was heresy and the flagellants were persecuted. The theory was a purely popular application by the masses of the church doctrine of penance, outside of the church system. It reappeared from time to time. The dancing mania began at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1373 and lasted for several years.[444] It was an outlet for high nervous tension under which the population was suffering on account of great calamities, social distress, and superstitious interpretations of the same. In short, the period was one of monstrous phenomena, extravagant passions, and unreasonable acts.

216. Gregariousness of the Middle Ages. "To estimate fully the force of these popular ebullitions in the Middle Ages, we must bear in mind the susceptibility of the people to contagious emotions and enthusiasms of which we know little in our colder day. A trifle might start a movement which the wisest could not explain nor the most powerful restrain. It was during the preaching of this crusade [of 1208, against the Albigenses] that villages and towns in Germany were filled with women who, unable to expend their religious ardor in taking the cross, stripped themselves naked and ran silently through the roads and streets. Still more symptomatic of the diseased spirituality of the time was the crusade of the children, which desolated thousands of homes. From vast districts of territory, incited apparently by a simultaneous and spontaneous impulse, crowds of children set forth, without leaders or guides, in search of the Holy Land; and their only answer, when questioned as to their object, was that they were going to Jerusalem. Vainly did parents lock their children up; they would break loose and disappear; and the few who eventually found their way home again could give no reason for the overmastering longing which had carried them away. Nor must we lose sight of other and less creditable springs of action which brought to all crusades the vile, who came for license and spoil, and the base, who sought the immunity conferred by the quality of crusader."[445] "To comprehend fully the magnitude and influence of these movements we must bear in mind the impressionable character of the populations and their readiness to yield to contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach masses so easily swayed and so full of blind yearnings to escape from the ignoble life to which they were condemned. How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe after another about the middle of the thirteenth century. The dumb, untutored minds began to ask whether an existence of hopeless and brutal misery was all that was to be realized from the promises of the gospel. The church had made no real effort at internal reform; it was still grasping, covetous, licentious, and a strange desire for something—they knew not exactly what—began to take possession of men's hearts and spread like an epidemic from village to village and from land to land."[446]

What we see here is the power of mere gregariousness, the impulse of acting in a crowd, without knowledge or purpose. The mere sense of being in the current movement, or "in the fashion," is a pleasure. When the movement is great in its compass and the numbers involved there is an exhilaration about being in it. If the notions by which it is enthused are great, or holy and noble, in form and pretense, even if not really so, it may become demonic, and it may accomplish incredible things. We had a grand illustration of this at the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861, both in the North and South. Dissent on both sides was overwhelmed and all were swept away into the prevailing current.

217. The mendicant orders. The mendicant orders responded to the deepest popular faiths and highest standards of the thirteenth century. Francis of Assisi ([Symbol: cross] 1226) took up the notion that it was wrong to own property, or at least meritorious to renounce it, and affirmed that Christ and his apostles repudiated all property and lived on alms. The Timotheists of the fifth century had held this notion, but were rated as heretics.[447] Poverty, for Francis, did not mean a little property, but absolute rejection of all property. This was necessarily only a pose. He had to use other men's property, the use being right. Therefore he could only renounce productive labor. The popular religious temper of the time revered simplicity, humility, self-denial, and renunciation of "the world" as especially evangelical virtues. They were thought to be summed up in poverty. That Francis was a hero of this type of religion has been universally admitted. The virtues were just the ones which the Roman court did not show. Jacques de Vitry, an enthusiastic preacher against the Albigenses, went through Italy to Palestine in 1216. He left a journal[448] in which he recorded his sadness at observing that, at the papal court, all were busy with secular affairs, kings and kingdoms, quarrels and lawsuits, so that it was almost impossible to speak about spiritual matters. He greatly admired the Franciscans, who were trying to renew primitive Christianity and save souls, thus shaming the prelates, who were "dogs who do not bark." The Count of Chiusi gave to Francis the mountain La Verna for retirement and meditation. Armed men were necessary to take possession of it against the beasts and robbers who had possession of it.[449] Carmichael believes that Francis received the stigmata, which he describes in detail. The Francis of tradition is a fabulous person, created out of the pet ideas of his time.[450] The historical person was a visionary. Dominic was a zealot. He wanted to convert all heretics by preaching or other means.

218. Other mendicant orders. De Vitry found Humiliati in Lombardy, who were living by ideas like those of Francis. The Augustinian hermits were founded in 1256, the Carmelites in 1245, and the Servites, or Servants of Mary, about 1275.[451] These were all mendicants, and they bear witness to the character of the notions of the time about poverty. It was a mania, and is fully expressed in the Romaunt de la Rose. Perhaps Francis did not mean to "found an order." He wanted to live in a certain way with a few friends. The spontaneous and very rapid spread of his order proves that it was concordant with a great popular taste. Francis was a dreamer and enthusiast, not a politician or organizer at all. In his testament he says: "After the Lord had given me care of the brethren, no one showed me what I ought to do, but the Highest Himself revealed to me that I ought to live according to the mode of the Holy Gospel." He was not thwarted and subjugated by the curia during his life, but his ideals were not maintained by the men in the order. The man who was later pope Gregory IX aided him to organize the order and to make it practically efficient, that is, to take the enthusiasm out of it and make it practical.[452] The popes of the thirteenth century approved. There was in the principles of the order an antagonism to the church as it was, and also an antagonism to common sense. The church authorities wanted to bring the order into practical use, and suspected it of the heresies of Florus. It therefore split into "conventuals," who conformed to the methods of conventual life, and the "spirituals," who clung to the doctrines and rules of the founder. The latter became "observantines" (1368) and "recollects" (1487).[453] The two branches hated each other and fought on all occasions. In 1275 the spirituals were treated as heretics, imprisoned in chains, and forbidden the sacrament.[454] John XXII condemned their doctrine as heretical. This put the observantines in the same position as other heretical sects. They must be rebels and heretics or give up ideas which seemed to them the sum of all truth and wisdom. Generally they clung to their ideas like the heretics.[455] One of their heroes was Bernard Delicieux ([Symbol: cross] 1320), who is celebrated as the only man who ever dared to resist the Inquisition. He was tortured twice, and condemned to imprisonment in chains on bread and water. He lived only a few months under this punishment.[456] Out of admiration immense sums were given to the mendicants, and they became notorious for avarice and worldly self-seeking.[457] As early as 1257 Bonaventura, the head of the order, reproached them with these faults.[458] "Some of the venomous hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for the two great orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic may perhaps be due to an ancient grudge against them as a papal police founded in the interests of orthodoxy, but the chief point aimed at is the mixture of hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them odious to all classes of society."[459] "In general the Franciscans seem to us far less orthodox than the Dominicans. They issued from a popular movement which was irregular, unecclesiastical, very little conformed to the ideas of the hierarchy about discipline." "The followers of St. Francis continued to contain ardent-minded men who maintained that the Franciscan reform had not produced all its due results; that that reform was superior to popes and to the dispensations issued at Rome; that the appearance of the seraphic Francis 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 sometimes said that the charges were invented to make sects unpopular, but it is more probable that they arose from the secrecy of the meetings only. Christians are so charged now in China.[463] The story of the discovery of such misbehavior always contains the same explanation—a husband followed his wife to the meeting and saw the proceedings.[464]

221. Manias need suggestion. Manias and delusions are like fashions and fads in that they always seem to need a suggestion from some outside source, and often it is impossible to find such a source. A strong popular belief, like the belief in Satan and demons, furnishes a ground for a general disposition to hold some other people responsible for all the ills which befall one's self. Then the disposition to act cruelly against the suspected person arises to a mental disease, and by cooperation of others under the same aberration makes a mania.[465] The explanation lies in autosuggestion or fixed ideas with the development loosely ranged under hysteria, which is the contagious form of nervous affection. The term "epidemic" can be applied only figuratively. "Mental disease occurs only on the ground of a specific constitutional and generally hereditary predisposition. It cannot therefore be spread epidemically, any more than diabetes or gout."[466] The epidemic element is due to hysterical imitation. In like manner, epidemics or manias of suicide occur by imitation, e.g. amongst the Circumcellions, a subdivision of the Donatists, in Africa, in the middle of the fourth century A.D.[467] Cognate with this was the mania for martyrdom which it required all the authority of the church to restrain.[468] Josephus[469] says of the Galileans, followers of Judas of Galilee, that they were famous for their indifference to death. Convents were often seats of frightful epidemics of hysteria. The accepted religious notions furnished a fruitful soil for it. To be possessed by devils was a distinction, and vanity was drawn into play.[470] Autosuggestion was shown by actions which were, or were supposed to be, the actions proper for "possessed" people. Ascetic practices prepared the person to fall a victim to the contagion of hysteria. The predisposition was also cultivated by the religious ecstasies, the miracle and wonder faiths, and the current superstitions. Then there was the fact which nearly any one may have experienced, that an old and familiar story becomes mixed with memory, so that he thinks that what he heard of happened to himself. Untrained people also form strong convictions from notions which have been long and firmly held without evidence, and they offer to others the firmness of their own convictions as grounds for accepting the same faith without proof. Ritual acts and ascetic observances which others can see, also conduct and zeal in prayer or singing, and the odors of incense, help this transfer of faith without or against proof. These appeals to suggestibility all come under the head of drama. Nowadays the novels with a tendency operate the same suggestion. A favorite field for it is sociological doctrine. In this field it is a favorite process to proceed by ideals, but ideals, as above shown (secs. 203, 204), are fantastic and easily degenerate into manias when they become mass phenomena. Mariolatry, the near end of the world, the coming of the Paraclete, are subjects of repeated manias, especially for minds unsettled by excessive ascetic observances. It follows from all these cases of mental aberration that the minds of the masses of a society cannot be acted on by deliberation and critical investigation, or by the weight of sound reasoning. There is a mysticism of democracy and a transcendentalism of political philosophy in the masses to-day, which can be operated on by the old methods of suggestion. The stock exchange shows the possibility of suggestion. What one ought to do is to perceive and hold fast to the truth, but also to know the delusion which the mass are about to adopt; but it is only the most exceptional men who can hold to a personal opinion against the opinion of the surrounding crowd.

222. Power of the crowd over the individual. The manias and delusions therefore dominate the individual like the fashions, fads, and affectations. It is the power of the crowd over the individual which is constant. The truth and justice of the popular opinion is of very inferior importance. The manias and delusions also operate selection, but not always in the same way, or in any way which can be defined. He who resists a mania may be trodden under foot like any other heretic. There occur cases, however, in which he wins by dissent. If he can outlive the mania, he will probably gain at a later time, when its folly is proved to all.

223. Discipline by pain. He who wants to make another do something, or to prevent him from doing something, may, if the former is the stronger, connect act or omission with the infliction of pain. This is only an imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain. It is, apparently, the most primary application of force or coercion. It combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish, or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim desist. The punishment may be imprisonment (i.e. temporary exclusion from the society), or fine, or scourging, or other painful treatment. The sense of punishment is the same whether the punishment be physical pain or other disagreeable experience. Although we have come to adopt modern ideas about the infliction of physical pain in punishment, we cannot depart far from its fundamental theory and motive. In the past, physical pain has been employed also, in lynching and in regular proceedings, to enforce conformity, and to suppress dissent from the current mores of the society. The physical proceedings are measures to produce conformity which differ from boycotting and other methods of manifesting disapproval and inflicting unpopularity in that they are positive and physical. Then the selection is positive and is pursued by external and physical sanctions.

224. The mediaeval church operated societal selection. It is evident that the mediaeval church was a machine to exert societal selection. The great reason for its strength as such is that it never made the mores of the age; it proceeded out of them. It contributed, through a thousand previous years, phantasms about the other world and dogmas about the relation of this world to that one. These dogmas became mixed with all the experience of life in the days of civic decline and misery, and produced the mores of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All the great doctrines then took on the form of manias or delusions. In the early centuries of the Christian era "catholic" meant Christendom in its entirety, in contrast with the separate congregations, so that the concepts "all congregations" and the "universal church" are identical. However, the church over the whole world was thought to have been founded by the apostles, so that that only could be true which was found everywhere in Christendom. So "catholic" came to have a pregnant meaning, and got dogmatic and political connotations.[471] In the eleventh century all Christendom was reduced to civic fragments in which tyranny, oppression, and strife prevailed. It was not strange that "catholicity" was revived as an idea of a peace pact by means of which the church might unite Christendom into a peace group for the welfare of mankind (sec. 14). This was a grand idea. If the Christian church had devoted itself to the realization of it, by forms of constitutional liberty, the history of the world would have been different. The church, however, used "catholicity" as a name for universal submission to the bishop of Rome and for hierarchical discipline, and used all means to try to realize that conception. By the Inquisition and other apparatus it attempted to enforce conformity to this idea, and exercised a societal selection against all dissenters from it. The ecclesiastics of Cluny, in the eleventh century, gave form to this high-church doctrine, and they combined with it a rational effort to raise the clergy to honor for learning and piety, as a necessary step for the success of their church policy. The circumstances and ideas of the time gave to these efforts the form of a struggle for a monarchical constitution of the church. In the thirteenth century this monarchy came into collision with the empire as the other aspirant to the rule of Christendom. Already the papacy was losing moral hold on its subjects. The clergy were criticised for worldliness, arrogance, and tyranny, and the antagonism of the dynastic states, so far as they existed, found expression in popular literature. Walter von der Vogelweide is regarded as a forerunner of the Reformation on account of his bitter criticisms of the hierarchy.[472] It is, however, very noteworthy that, in spite of the popular language of the writers and their appeals to common experience, they did not break the people away from their ecclesiastical allegiance, and also that the church authorities paid little heed to the criticisms of these persons. The miracle and moral plays were in the taste of the age entirely. Besides being gross, they were irreligious and blasphemous. Ecclesiastics tolerated them nevertheless.[473] The authorities moved only when "the faith" was brought in question. "The faith," therefore, acquired a technical signification of great importance. It was elevated to the domain of sentiment and duty and surrounded with pathos (sec. 178), while its meaning was undefined. In time it came to mean obedience to papal authority. Thus all the circumstances and streams of faith and sentiment of the eleventh and twelfth centuries concentrated in the hands of the hierarchy the control of society, because there was no other organ to accept the deposit. The Cluny programme was a programme of reform in the church such as everybody wanted. It gathered all "the good men" in a common will and purpose. The ideals and the means were selected, and the advocates of the same became the selected classes in society. They remained such long after the movement was spent and lost, but the notion remained that every good man, or would-be good man, ought to stand with the church.

225. The mediaeval church. In the crusades the church went to war with Islam, another aspirant to rule mankind. It undoubtedly drilled and disciplined its own adherents by the crusades and thus confirmed its power. It is also certain that the crusades were popular and only put into effect the wish of the great body of Christians. It was the masses, therefore, who made the mediaeval church. It possessed a corporate organization and hierarchy which was a body of personal interests, in which ambition, cupidity, and love of power were awakened. The church was venal, sensual, gross, and inhuman, because the mores of the age were such. How could the church be other than the age was? Where was it to find inspiration or illumination from without which should make ecclesiastics anything but men of their age? The men of that age left on record their testimony that the church was in no way better than the society.[474] From the end of the twelfth century man after man and sect after sect arose, whose inspiration was moral indignation at the vices and abuses in the church. Wycliffe denied transubstantiation on rationalistic grounds, but his work all consisted in criticism of hierarchical abuses and of the principles which made the abuses possible. The church never was on the level of the better mores of any time. Every investigation which we make leads us not to the church as the inspirer and leader, but to the dissenting apostles of righteousness, to the great fluctuations in the mores (chivalry, woman service, city growth, arts, and inventions), to the momentum of interests, to the variations in the folkways which travel (crusades and pilgrimages), commerce, industrial arts, money, credit, gunpowder, the printing press, etc., produced.

226. Sacerdotal celibacy. The church rode upon the tide and tried to keep possession of the social power and use it for the interest of ecclesiastics. Asceticism was in the mores. Everybody accepted the ascetic standard of merit and holiness as correct and just, whether he lived by it or not. Sacerdotal celibacy was a case of asceticism. Every one knew that it had come about in church history and was not scriptural or primitive. It was in the notions of the age that there were stages in righteousness, and that religious persons were bound to live by higher stages than persons not technically religious. Renunciation of sex was higher righteousness than realization of sex, as is taught in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians. This notion existed amongst heathen and pagans. The priests in the Melkart temple at Gades (Cadiz) were bound to celibacy.[475]

The merit of celibacy is a very old religious idea in Hindostan. The Todas have a celibate priesthood.[476] "It is one of the inconsistencies of the Hindu religion that it enjoins the duty of marriage on all, yet honors celibacy as a condition of great sanctity, and a means of acquiring extraordinary religious merit and influence."[477] "All the ascetic sects of the Saivas are celibates."[478] Lamas at Shang (98 deg. E. 36 deg. N.) are allowed to marry, but not in Tibet.[479] The Christian notion of the third century was that clerics ought to come up to the higher standard. This was the purest and highest reason for celibacy. It had been a standard of perfection in the Christian church for six hundred years before Hildebrand. Whatever motives of policy or ecclesiastical ambition may have been mixed with it in the eleventh century, it had the merit of bringing doctrine and practice into accord.

227. The masses wanted clerical celibacy. It is to be noticed that clerical celibacy was a demand of the masses amongst church members, and that the demand came directly out of Christian mores. In the fourth century this doctrine was derived from sacramentarianism. The notion became fixed that there was an inherent and necessary incongruity between marriage and the celebration of the sacrament of the mass. "In the course of the fourth century it was a recognized principle that clerical marriages were criminal. They were celebrated, however, habitually, and usually with the greatest openness."[480] That means that they were in antagonism with church opinion and its tendency at that time. Sacerdotalism triumphed in the fifth century. "Throughout the struggle the papacy had a most efficient ally in the people." Preachers exhorted the people to holiness, and the people required this of the clergy, and enforced it by riots and mob violence. Cases are cited which "bring before us the popular tendencies and modes of thought, and show us how powerful an instrument the passions of the people became, when skilfully aroused and directed by those in authority."[481] The fundamental notion which underlies all asceticism was here at work, viz., that virtue has stages, that a man can be more than good, or worse than bad. The council of Constantinople, in 680, made new rules against the marriage of the clergy, because the old ones were neglected and forgotten. The motive stated was the welfare of the people, who regarded such marriages as scandalous. The excess in temper and doctrine was a mark of the period. The learned would have held the doctrine as a metaphysical truth only, but the masses turned it into a practical rule. The share of the masses in the establishment of the rule is a very important fact. Lea thinks that they were manipulated by the ecclesiastics.[482] In the religious revival of the eleventh century the marriage of the clergy was "popularly regarded as a heresy and a scandal." There was no defense of it.[483] It was an undisputed fact that celibacy was not scriptural or primitive.[484] At that time "all orders, from bishops down, without shame or concealment, were publicly married and lived with their wives as laymen, leaving their children fully provided for in their wills.... This laxity prevailed throughout the whole of Latin Christendom, sacerdotal marriage being everywhere so common that it was no longer punished as unlawful and scarcely even reprehended."[485] "Not a thought of the worldly advantages consequent on the reform appears to have crossed the mind of Damiani. To him it was simply a matter of conscience that the ministers of Christ should be adorned with the austere purity through which alone lay the path to salvation. Accordingly, the arguments which he employs in his endless disputations carefully avoid the practical reasons which were the principal motive for enforcing celibacy. His main reliance was on the assumption that, as Christ was born of a virgin, so he should be served and the eucharist be handled only by virgins."[486] This took up again the fifth-century doctrine in its popular form, but it evidently led directly up to the heresy that the validity or benefit of the sacrament depended on the purity of the priest. In his zeal for celibacy Hildebrand fell into this heresy, although a man was burned for it at Cambrai in 1077.[487] Hildebrand also gave civil authorities power over ecclesiastics in order to carry out his reform.[488] In the middle of the twelfth century the "reform" was directed against the women (wives), for fear of the resistance of the men. In Rome the women were enslaved and given to the church of the Lateran. All bishops were ordered to seize the women for the benefit of their churches.[489] In 1095 the sacrament of marriage was declared by the lateran council less potent than the religious vow, although the contrary had been the church doctrine.[490] Thus what came out of the popular mores underwent the growth of formulated dogma and deduction. In the thirteenth century marriage of the clergy ceased, but concubinage continued, concubines being a legitimate but inferior order of wives, whose existence was tolerated on payment of a fee known as cullagium.[491] "Scarcely had the efforts of Nicholas and Gregory put an end to sacerdotal marriage at Rome when the morals of the Roman clergy became a disgrace to Christendom."[492] "Those women [clerical concubines] came to be invested with a quasi-ecclesiastical character, and to enjoy the dearly prized immunities attached to that position."[493] Gerson (1363-1429) paid admiration to virginity and celibacy, but he "saw and appreciated its practical evils, and had no scruple in recommending concubinage as a preventive, which, though scandalous in itself, might serve to prevent greater scandals." In districts it became customary to require a new parish priest to take a concubine.[494] "This was the inversion which the popular opinion had undergone in four centuries."[495] "The principles of the church led irrevocably to the conclusion, paradoxical as it may seem, that he who was guilty of immorality, knowing it to be wrong, was far less criminal than he who married, believing it to be right."[496] At Avignon, when it was the seat of the papacy, sex license and vice became proverbial. A speech of the most shameless cynicism is attributed to Cardinal Hugo, in which he described the effect, in 1251, of the residence of the papal court there for eight years. In the fourteenth century that city became the most wicked, and especially the most licentious, in Christendom.[497] The first case of the presence of women at a feast in the Vatican is said to have been at the marriage of Teodorina, daughter of Innocent VIII, in 1488. Comedies were played before the mixed company.[498]

228. Abelard. A cleric who married flinched from the standard of his calling, in the view of the church. Hildebrand's decrees were like the other crowning acts of great men,—they came at the culmination of a great movement in the mores. They accorded with the will and wish of the masses. In all ages acts are due to mixed motives, but in the Middle Ages the good motives were kept for show and the bad ones controlled. Clerics did not cease to have concubines until after the Council of Trent, and the difference between law and practice (bridged over by pecuniary penalties) called for special ethics and casuistry. The case of Abelard (1079-1142) shows what tragedies were caused. He claimed to be, and to some extent he was, a champion of reason and common sense, and he was a skeptic as to the current philosophy. He was vain, weak, and ambitious. He selected the loveliest woman he knew, and won her love, which he used to persuade her to be his concubine, that she might not hinder him in his career.[499] The treatment accorded to Heloise shows that a woman could be a concubine of an ecclesiastic, but not his wife, without condemnation. That was the allowance for human despair under the ecclesiastical rules.[500] Thus the church first suggested views of life and dogmas of religion, with which the masses combined their mores and returned them to the church as a gift of societal power. The church then formulated the mores and created disciplinary systems to use the power and make it institutional and perpetual. Then the mores revolted against the authority and the religion, and the ethics which it taught. A Roman Catholic writer says that a study of the Middle Ages will produce this result: "We shall have recognized in the church the professional peacemaker between states and factions, as well as between man and man, the equitable mediator between rulers and their subjects, the consistent champion of constitutional liberty, the alleviator of the inequalities of birth, the uninterested and industrious disseminator of letters, the refiner of habits and manners, the well-meaning guardian of the national wealth, health, and intellect, and the fearless censor of public and private morality."[501] These are, indeed, the functions which the church ought to have fulfilled, and about which ecclesiastics said something from time to time. Also, the church did do something for these interests when no great interest of the church was at stake on the other side. No unbiased student of the Middle Ages has been convinced that, in truth and justice, the work of the mediaeval church could be thus summed up. The one consistent effort of the church was to establish papal authority. Its greatest crime was obscurantism, which was war on knowledge and civilization. This nothing can palliate or offset.

229. The English church and the mores. The church, however, from 1000 A.D. on was a machine of societal selection, and it pursued its work, suggesting and administering a work of that kind, grand results of which have come down to us in the civilization we have inherited. Our work largely consists in rational efforts to eliminate the elements which the church introduced. In some respects the history of clerical celibacy in England best illustrates the mores. In the sixteenth century the rule and usage of the church had inculcated, as a deep popular prejudice, the notion that a priest could not be married. Cranmer, in ordering a visitation, directed investigation "whether any do contemn married priests, and for that they be married will not receive the communion or other sacrament at their hands."[502] This prejudice very slowly died out, but it did die out and the popular judgment favored and required clerical marriage. In the nineteenth century popular judgment rose in condemnation of fox-hunting parsons, and also of pluralists, and it has caused reforms and the disappearance of those classes.

230. The selection of sacerdotal celibacy. If it had not been for sacerdotal celibacy, there would have been ecclesiastical feudalization and the ecclesiastical benefices would have become hereditary. The children of priests inherited benefices and intermarried so long as the marriage of priests was allowed. There would have been a priestly caste.[503] The church as an institution would have been greatly modified. The consequences we cannot imagine. If Hildebrand and the other eleventh-century leaders foresaw the effect, it was statesmanship on their part to establish the celibacy of the clergy. That institution has molded the priesthood and the mores of all who have adhered to the mediaeval church. The Latin people of southern Europe are now horrified at the notion of a married priest. The concubine of a priest is a wicked woman, but she is not a social abomination. All protest and resistance seems to have passed away and, since the sixteenth century, sacerdotal celibacy has been accepted as a feature of the Romish Church, which all its members are expected to accept. It is a grand triumph of social selection.

231. How the church operated selection. The church was a great hierarchical organization for social power and control, which inherited part of the intense integration of the Roman empire. Fra Paolo Sarpi said of it, in the seventeenth century: "The interests of Rome demand that there shall be no change by which the power of the pontiff would be diminished, or by which the curia would lose any of the profits which it wins from the states, but the novelties by which the profits of the curia would be increased, or by which the authority of the states would be diminished and that of the curia increased, are not abhorred, but are favored. This we see every day."[504] The church decided all recognition and promotion, and disposed of all rewards of ambition. The monarchical and autocratic tendency in it was the correct process for attaining the purposes by which it was animated. Its legitimacy as an organization for realizing faiths and desires which prevailed in society is beyond question. It drew towards itself all the talent of the age except what was military. It crushed all dissenters and silenced all critics for centuries. Its enginery was all planned for selection. It disposed of the greatest prizes and the most dreadful penalties. All its methods were positive and realistic, and whatever can be accomplished by authority, tyranny, penalty, and repression it accomplished. In modern times political parties offer the nearest parallels. They are organizations for societal control, which distribute rewards and penalties and coerce dissenters. The history of the papacy in the fifteenth century reminds one of the history of Tammany Hall in the nineteenth century. The strength of Tammany is due to the fact that it fits the tastes and needs of a great modern city under democracy. When Tammany won an election it was said that the people had put the city in their hands and that they ought to profit by it. When Leo X was elected pope he said, "God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it."[505]

232. Mores and morals; social code. For every one the mores give the notion of what ought to be. This includes the notion of what ought to be done, for all should cooperate to bring to pass, in the order of life, what ought to be. All notions of propriety, decency, chastity, politeness, order, duty, right, rights, discipline, respect, reverence, cooperation, and fellowship, especially all things in regard to which good and ill depend entirely on the point at which the line is drawn, are in the mores. The mores can make things seem right and good to one group or one age which to another seem antagonistic to every instinct of human nature. The thirteenth century bred in every heart such a sentiment in regard to heretics that inquisitors had no more misgivings in their proceedings than men would have now if they should attempt to exterminate rattlesnakes. The sixteenth century gave to all such notions about witches that witch persecutors thought they were waging war on enemies of God and man. Of course the inquisitors and witch persecutors constantly developed the notions of heretics and witches. They exaggerated the notions and then gave them back again to the mores, in their expanded form, to inflame the hearts of men with terror and hate and to become, in the next stage, so much more fantastic and ferocious motives. Such is the reaction between the mores and the acts of the living generation. The world philosophy of the age is never anything but the reflection on the mental horizon, which is formed out of the mores, of the ruling ideas which are in the mores themselves. It is from a failure to recognize the to and fro in this reaction that the current notion arises that mores are produced by doctrines. The "morals" of an age are never anything but the consonance between what is done and what the mores of the age require. The whole revolves on itself, in the relation of the specific to the general, within the horizon formed by the mores. Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is a delusion. New elements are brought in only by new conquests of nature through science and art. The new conquests change the conditions of life and the interests of the members of the society. Then the mores change by adaptation to new conditions and interests. The philosophy and ethics then follow to account for and justify the changes in the mores; often, also, to claim that they have caused the changes. They never do anything but draw new lines of bearing between the parts of the mores and the horizon of thought within which they are inclosed, and which is a deduction from the mores. The horizon is widened by more knowledge, but for one age it is just as much a generalization from the mores as for another. It is always unreal. It is only a product of thought. The ethical philosophers select points on this horizon from which to take their bearings, and they think that they have won some authority for their systems when they travel back again from the generalization to the specific custom out of which it was deduced. The cases of the inquisitors and witch persecutors who toiled arduously and continually for their chosen ends, for little or no reward, show us the relation between mores on the one side and philosophy, ethics, and religion on the other. (See Chapters IX, XIV, and XV.)

233. Orthodoxy in the mores. Treatment of dissent. Selection by torture. It has been observed above (sec. 100) that the masses always enforce conformity to the mores. Primitive taboos are absolute. There is no right of private judgment. Renegades, apostates, deserters, rebels, traitors, and heretics are but varieties of dissenters who are all subject to disapproval, hatred, banishment, and death. In higher stages of civilization this popular temper becomes a societal force which combines with civil arrangements, religious observances, literature, education, and philosophy. Toleration is no sentiment of the masses for anything which they care about. What they believe they believe, and they want it accepted and respected. Illustrations are furnished by zeal for political parties and for accepted political philosophy. The first punishment for dissent less than death is extrusion from the society. Next come bodily pains and penalties, that is, torture. Torture is also applied in connection with the death penalty, or modes of death are devised which are as painful as they can be made. The motive is to deter any one from the class of acts which is especially abominated. In the cases above cited (sec. 211), under criminal law, it will be observed that death by burning was applied in the case of incest, or other very abominable crime, in the laws of Hammurabi and other ancient codes (sec. 234). Such extreme penalties are first devised to satisfy public temper. The ruler is sure of popularity if he shows rigor and ferocity. His act will be regarded as just. It is now the popular temper, when any one commits a crime which is regarded as very horrible, to think and say what frightful punishment he deserves. It is a primary outpouring of savage vengeance. When precedents have been established for frightful punishments, the rulers apply the same in cases of disobedience against themselves or their authority. Now torture and ferocious penalties have reached another stage. They were invented by the masses, or in order to appeal to the masses. They have now become the means of authority and discipline. The history of torture is a long development of knowledge of pain, and of devices to cause it. Then it becomes a means which is at the disposal of those who have the power. The Dominican Izarn, in a chant of triumph over the Albigenses, represents himself as arguing with one of them to whom he says, "Believe as we do or thou shalt be burned."[506] This is the voice of a victorious party. It is the enforcement of uniformity against dissent. Systematic and legal torture then becomes an engine of uniformity and it acts selectively as it crushes out originality and independent suggestion. It is at the disposal of any party in power. Like every other system of policy it loses its effect on the imagination by familiarity, and that effect can be regained only by intensifying it. Therefore where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

234. Execution by burning. In the ancient world execution by burning was applied only when some religious abomination was included in the crime, or when it seemed politically outrageous. In the laws of Hammurabi an hierodule who opened a dramshop or entered one to get a drink was to be burned.[507] One who committed incest with his mother was to meet the same punishment,[508] also one who married a mother and her daughter at the same time.[509] In Levit. xx. 14 if a man marries a mother and her daughter together, all are to be burned, and in Levit. xxi. 9 the daughter of a priest, if she becomes a harlot, is to be burned. At the end of the seventh century b.c. some priestly families connected with the temple of Amon at Napata, Egypt, by way of reform, introduced the custom of eating the meat of sacrifices uncooked. They were burned for heresy.[510] In the year 5 B.C., upon a rumor of the death of Herod I, some Jews tore down the Roman eagle from the gate of the temple. Herod caused forty-two of them to be burned.[511] Caligula caused an atellan composer to be burned in the arena for a sarcasm on the emperor.[512] Constantine ordered that if a free woman had intercourse with a slave man, the man should be burned.[513] In all the ancient and classical period, burning was reserved as a most painful form of death for the most abominable criminals and the most extravagant and rare crimes. By another law of Constantine it was ordered that if Jews and heaven worshipers should stone those who were converted from their sects to the Catholic faith, they should be burned.[514] In the Theodosian Code, also, any slave who accused his master of any crime except high treason was to be burned alive without investigation.[515] Thus burning became the penalty for criminals of a despised class or race.

235. Burning in North American colonies. In the colonial laws of Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia it was provided that negroes should be executed by burning. Here we have a recrudescence of the idea that great penalties are deterrent. Modern penologists do not believe that that is true. It is, however, the belief of the masses, which they have recently shown in methods of lynching. It might have been believed ten years ago that it would be impossible to get a crowd of Americans to burn a man at the stake, but there have been many cases of it.[516]

236. Solidarity of group in penalty incurred by one. In primitive society any one who departed from the ways of ancestors was supposed to offend their ghosts; furthermore, he was supposed to bring down their avenging wrath on the whole group of which he was a member. This idea has prevailed until modern times. It aroused the sentiment of vengeance against the dissenter, and united all the rest in a common interest against him. Especially, if any misfortune befell the group, they turned against any one who had broken the taboos. Thus goblinism was united to the other reasons for disliking dissenters and gave it definite direction and motive. At Rome, "in the days of the republic, every famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or neglect had caused the divine anger, and two instances are recorded in which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was believed to have provoked a national calamity."[517] In the Roman law is found a proposition which was often quoted in the Middle Ages: "That which is done against divine religion is done to the harm of all."[518] Hale[519] explains the tortures inflicted by the Iroquois, by their desire to mark some kinds of Indian warfare as very abominable, and so to drive them out of use. Torture always flatters vanity. He who inflicts it has power. To reduce, plunder, and torment an enemy is a great luxury. The lust of blood is a frightful demon when once it is aroused. A Hungarian woman of noble birth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, tortured to death thirty or forty of her maidservants. She began by inflicting severe punishments and developed a fiendish passion for the sight of suffering and blood.[520] It is the combinations of the other elements, religion, ambition, sex, vanity, and the lust of blood, with the dislike of dissenters, which has caused the most frightful developments of torture and persecution. This brings us to the case of the mediaeval inquisition. It is not to be expected that a phenomenon of high civilization will be simple and uniform. So the motives of Christian persecution to enforce conformity are numerous and mixed. It was directly against some of the leading principles of Christianity, but there are texts in the New Testament which were used to justify it.[521]

237. Torture in ancient states. The Egyptians used torture in all ordinary investigations to find out the facts.[522] The Greeks had used torture. It was common in the Periclean age in the courts of Athens. The accused gave his slaves to be tortured "to challenge evidence against himself."[523] Plutarch[524] tells of a barber who heard of the defeat of Nicias in Sicily and ran to tell the magistrates. They tortured him as a maker of trouble by disseminating false news, until the story was confirmed. Philotas was charged with planning to kill Alexander. He was tortured and the desired proof was obtained.[525] Eusebius,[526] describing the persecution under Nerva, says that Simeon, Bishop of Jerusalem, being one hundred and twenty years old, was tortured for several days and then crucified. Torture underwent a special development in the Euphrates valley. The Assyrian stones show frightful tortures which kings sometimes inflicted with their own hands. Maiming, flaying, impaling, blinding, and smothering in hot ashes became usual forms in Persia. They passed to the Turks, and the stories of torture and death inflicted in southeastern Europe, or in modern Persia, show knowledge and inventive skill far beyond what the same peoples have otherwise shown. The motives have been religious contempt, hereditary animosity, and vengeance, as well as political and warlike antagonism.

238. Torture in the Roman empire. The Roman emperors lived in a great fear of supernatural attack. There was a very great interest for many people in the question: When will the emperor die? Many, no doubt, made use of any apparatus of astrology or sorcery to find out. To the emperor and his adherents this seemed to prove a desire that he should die, and was interpreted as treasonable. The Christians helped to develop demonism. They regarded all the heathen gods as demons. As they gained power in society this notion spread, and there was a great revival of popular demonism. By the lex Julia de Majestate torture might be applied to persons charged with treason, and the definition of treason was greatly enlarged. Torture was used to great excess under Tiberius and Nero. In the fourth century, after the emperors became Christians, it was feared that persons who hated them would work them ill by sorcery with the aid of the demons, formerly heathen gods. Sorcery and treason were combined and strengthened by a great tide of superstition which overspread the Roman world.[527] The first capital punishment for heresy in the Christian church seems to have been the torture and burning of Priscillian, a Manichaean, at Treves, in 385, with six of his adherents, by the Emperor Maximus. This act caused a sensation of truly Christian horror. Of the two bishops who were responsible, one was expelled from his see; the other resigned.[528] In 579 King Chilperic caused ecclesiastics to be tortured for disloyal behavior. About 580 the same king, having married a servant maid, an act which caused family and political trouble, upon the death of two of her children, caused a woman to be tortured who was charged with murdering the children in the interest of their stepbrother. She confessed, revoked her confession, and was burned. Three years later another child of the queen died, and several women were tortured and burned or broken on the wheel for causing the death by sorcery.[529] Pope Nicholas I, in 866, opposed the use of torture as barbaric, and the pseudo-Isidorian Decretals take the same position in regard to it. Indeed, that was the orthodox Christian view in the dark ages.

239. Such was the course of descent by which torture came to the Middle Ages. It was in connection with the revival of the eleventh century that the Roman law of treason was made to apply to heresy by construing it as treason to God.[530] It is, however, of the first importance to notice that it was the masses which first applied death by burning to heretics. The mob lynched heretics long before the church began to persecute.[531] (See, further, sec. 253.)

240. Jewish and Christian universality. Who persecutes whom? The Jews held that their God was the only real God. The gods of other nations were "vanity," that is, nullity. They held that their religion was the only true one. When about the time of the birth of Christ they stepped before the Greco-Roman world with this claim, it cost them great hatred and abuse. In the history of religion it counts as a great fact of advance in religious conceptions. Christianity inherited the idea and applied it to itself. It has always claimed to be absolutely and alone true as a religious system. Every other religion is an invader of its domain. It was this attitude which gave a definition to heresy. Under paganism "speculation was untrammeled. The notion of there being any necessary guilt in erroneous opinion was unknown."[532] When once this notion found acceptance it produced a great number of deductions and corollaries and gave form to a great number of customs, such as they had never had before. The effect on the selection of articles of faith out of the doctrines of warring sects and philosophies is obvious, also the effect on methods of controversy. The effects are important in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the notion became one of the postulates of all thinking. This is the ultimate reason for the wickedness of heresy and for the abomination of all heretics. Certainly Christianity did not, in this matter, improve on the philosophy of paganism. It was this attitude of Christianity and its neglect of the existing political authority which drew upon it the contempt, derision, and hatred of the heathen. The persecution of Christians was popular. It expressed the popular feeling, which was more constantly expressed in the popular comedy and the improvised popular play.[533] The persecution in Nerva's time was more popular than political.[534] In the following century the Christians denounced heathenism as a worship of demons. "It is not surprising that the populace should have been firmly convinced that every great catastrophe that occurred was due to the presence of the enemies of the gods."[535] "The history of the period of the Antonines continually manifests the desire of the populace to persecute, restrained by the humanity of the rulers."[536] In the third century the Decian persecution was largely due to the "popular fanaticism caused by great calamities, which were ascribed to the anger of the gods at the neglect of their worship."[537] "The most horrible recorded instances of torture were usually inflicted, either by the populace, or in their presence, in the arena."[538] Frightful tortures were inflicted in the attempt to make Christians sacrifice to the heathen gods. This effort was due to the popular apprehension of solidarity in responsibility for the neglect by the Christians of the state gods, to the decline of all social welfare and the implied insult to the state. In the fourth century Christianity became the religion of the state and took up the task of persecuting the heathen. "The only question is: In whose hands is the power to persecute?" That question alone determines who shall persecute whom. Literature was produced which uttered savage hatred against all who were not fully orthodox, and the sects practiced violence and cruelty against each other to the full extent for which they found opportunity. "Never, perhaps, was the infliction of mutilation, and prolonged and agonizing forms of death, more common" than in the seventh and eighth centuries.[539] "Great numbers were deprived of their ears and noses, tortured through several days, and at last burned alive or broken slowly on the wheel."[540] At Byzantium, in the ninth century, a prefect of the palace was burned in the circus for appropriating the property of a widow. It became the custom that capital punishments were executed in the circus.[541] All this course of things was due to popular tastes and desires, and it was a course of popular education of the masses in cruelty, love of bloodshed, and gratification of low hatred and other base passions. All the laws, the exhortations of the clergy, and the public acts of torture and execution held out the suggestion that heresy was a thing deserving the extremest horror and abomination. What was heresy? No one knew unless he was an educated theologian, and such were rare. The vagueness of heresy made it more terrible. "The long-continued teaching of the church, that persistent heresy was the one crime for which there could be no pardon or excuse, seemed to deprive even the wisest and purest of all power of reasoning where it was concerned."[542]