[Sidenote: Western Heresies]
Even in western Europe, the Catholic Church had had to encounter
spasmodic opposition from "heretics," as those persons were called who,
although baptized as Christians, refused to accept all the dogmas of
Catholic Christianity. Such were the Arian Christians, who in early
times had been condemned for rejecting the doctrine of the divinity of
Christ, and who had eventually been won back to Catholicism only with
the greatest efforts. Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the
Albigensian heretics in southern France had assailed the sacramental
system and the organization of the Church and had been suppressed only
by armed force. In the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe appeared in
England and John Hus in Bohemia, both preaching that the individual
Christian needs no priestly mediation between himself and God and that
the very sacraments of the Church, however desirable, are not
essentially necessary to salvation. The Lollards, as Wycliffe's English
followers were called, were speedily extirpated by fire and sword,
through the stern orthodoxy of an English king, but the Hussites long
defied the pope and survivals of their heresy were to be found in 1500.
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