Cassius, who are all three equally traitors, the first against Christ, the other two against Caesar.
Dante's thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential,
and was hopelessly out of date.
Marsiglio of Padua ( 1270-1342), on the contrary, inaugurated the new form of opposition to the
Pope, in which the Emperor has mainly a role of decorative dignity. He was a close friend of
William of Occam, whose political opinions he influenced. Politically, he is more important than
Occam, He holds that the legislator is the majority of the people, and that the majority has the
right to punish princes. He applies popular sovereignty also to the Church, and he includes the
laity. There are to be local councils of the people, including the laity, who are to elect
representatives to General Councils. The General Council alone should have power to
excommunicate, and to give authoritative interpretations of Scripture. Thus all believers will have
a voice in deciding doctrine. The Church is to have no secular authority; there is to be no
excommunication without civil concurrence; and the Pope is to have no special powers.
Occam did not go quite so far as Marsiglio, but he worked out a completely democratic method of
electing the General Council.
The conciliar movement came to a head in the early fifteenth century, when it was needed to heal
the Great Schism. But having accomplished this task, it subsided. Its standpoint, as may be seen
already in Marsiglio, was different from that afterwards adopted, in theory, by the Protestants. The
Protestants claimed the right of private judgement, and were not willing to submit to a General
Council. They held that religious belief is not a matter to be decided by any governmental
machinery. Marsiglio, on the contrary, still aims at preserving the unity of the Catholic faith, but
wishes this to be done by democratic means, not by the papal absolutism. In practice, most
Protestants, when they acquired the government, merely substituted the King for the Pope, and
thus secured neither liberty of private judgement nor a democratic method of deciding doctrinal
questions. But in their opposition to the Pope they found support in the doctrines of the conciliar
movement. Of all the schoolmen, Occam was the one whom Luther preferred. It must be said that
a considerable section of Protestants held to the doctrine of private judgement even where the
State was Protestant. This was the chief