Lord which I am about to take. Let it be to me this day a test of my innocence, and may the
Omnipotent God this day by his judgment absolve me of the accusations if I am innocent, or let
me perish by sudden death, if guilty." Then the pope calmly took the wafer, and called upon the
trembling emperor to do the same, but Henry evaded it on the ground of the absence of both his
friends and his enemies, and promised instead to submit to a trial by the imperial diet.
The purgatorial oath, when administered by wonder-working relics, was also a kind of
ordeal of ecclesiastical origin. A false oath on the black cross in the convent of Abington, made
from the nails of the crucifixion, and derived from the Emperor Constantine, was fatal to the
malefactor. In many cases these relics were the means of eliciting confessions which could not
have been obtained by legal devices.
The genuine spirit of Christianity, however, urged towards an abolition rather than
improvement of all these ordeals. Occasionally such voices of protest were raised, though for a
long time without effect. Avitus, bishop of Vienne, in the beginning of the sixth century, remonstrated
with Gundobald for giving prominence to the battle-ordeal in the Burgundian code. St. Agobard,
archbishop of Lyons, before the middle of the ninth century (he died about 840) attacked the duel
and the ordeal in two special treatises, which breathe the gospel spirit of humanity, fraternity and
peace in advance of his age.^363 He says that the ordeals are falsely called judgments of God; for
God never prescribed them, never approved them, never willed them; but on the contrary, he
commands us, in the law and the gospel, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and has appointed judges
for the settlement of controversies among men. He warns against a presumptuous interpretation of
providence whose counsels are secret and not to be revealed by water and fire. Several popes, Leo
IV. (847–855), Nicolas I. (858–867), Stephen VI. (885–891), Sylvester II. (999–1003), Alexander
II. (1061–1073), Alexander III. (1159–1181), Coelestin III. (1191–1198), Honorius III. (1222), and
the fourth Lateran Council (1215), condemned more or less clearly the superstitious and frivolous
provocation of miracles.^364 It was by their influence, aided by secular legislation, that these
God-tempting ordeals gradually disappeared during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the
underlying idea survived in the torture which for a long time took the place of the ordeal.
§ 80. The Torture.(^363) Liber adversus Legem Gundobadi (i.e. Leg. Burgundionum) et impia certarmina quae per eam geruntur; and Liber
Contra Judicium Dei. See his Opera ed. Baluzius, Paris 1666, T. I. 107 sqq., 300 sqq., and in Migne’s Patrologia, Tom. CIV.
f 113-126, and f. 250-258 (with the notes of Baluzius).
(^364) "At length, when the Papal authority reached its culminating point, a vigorous and sustained effort to abolish the
whole system was made by the Popes who occupied the pontifical throne from 1159-1227. Nothing can be more peremptory
than the prohibition uttered by Alexander III. In 1181, Lucius III. pronounced null and void the acquittal of a priest charged
with homicide, who had undergone the water-ordeal, and ordered him to prove his innocence with compurgators, and the blow
was followed up by his successors. Under Innocent III., the Fourth Council of Lateran, in 1215, formally forbade the employment
of any ecclesiastical ceremonies in such trials; and as the moral influence of the ordeal depended entirely upon its religious
associations, a strict observance of this canon must speedily have swept the whole system into oblivion. Yet at this very time
the inquisitor Conrad of Marburg was employing in Germany the red-hot iron as a means of condemning his unfortunate victims
by wholesale, and the chronicler relates that, whether innocent or guilty, few escaped the test. The canon of Lateran, however,
was actively followed up by the Papal legates, and the effect was soon discernible." Lea, p. 272.