Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

KEIGN OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS. 245
and to realise the helplessness of the Crown, against the
turbulent vassals, Whatever they may do now, they are
so strong I must bear their outrage and villanies, but please
God they shall become weak, and I shall grow strong and
powerful, and then, in my turn, I shall take vengeance
upon them. His whole life was devoted to making that
promise good. While Henry II. lived he could not accomplish
much. John gave him the longed-for opportunity. He was
his vassal for the French provinces. On the murder of
Arthur he summoned him before his Court as his lord,
condemned him, and took possession of his lands ; recovering
in the end by legal process, which was not strictly legal
but had a show of justice about it, almost the whole of
the lands which the divorce and the re-marriage of Eleanor
had transferred to the English Crown.
One other grand acquisition was made before St. Louis
began to reign. Into the moral aspect of the Crusade
against
the heretics in the south of France we must not
enter. From our point of view it was simply horrible.
But it is
important to understand why
it did not seem
horrible from theirs.
Politically, the Crusade was a com
plete success. Free thought and spiritual
life were for the
time quenched in blood. A vigorous young literature, the
first-born of modern Europe, was destroyed. But a great
province whicli had been almost as independent as a separate
kingdom, was brought into vital relation with the French
monarchy, and this gave Louis IX. the mastery of the whole
realm from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea.
It was a fearfully blood-stained legacy. St. Louis was one
of the most merciful of men but he had no
;
shadow of
scruple about the sharp punishment
of heretics. He was
emphatically a man of his time ;
and in the judgment of
his time heresy was not an intellectual aberration, far less,
as we see that it often is, a nascent, truth ;
it was a moral