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Business indeed has almost become our religion; it is defended by the civil government even as the later Roman emperors and the mediaeval princes protected the Church against attack. Socialists and communists are the Waldensians and Albigensians of our day, heretics to be cast out, suppressed, and deported to Russia, if not directly to hell as of old.
There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody? Marduk had three moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock.
A Petty war or a sullen strife between the Kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, certain rigorous measures against certain districts in travail of local liberties, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign.
Louis himself demanded of Pope Alexander IV. leave for the Dominicans and Franciscans to exercise, throughout the whole kingdom, the inquisition already established, on account of the Albigensians, in the old domains of the Counts of Toulouse.
From this time forth the war in Southern France changed character, or, rather, it assumed a double character; with the war of religion was openly joined a war of conquest; it was no longer merely against the Albigensians and their heresies, it was against the native princes of Southern France and their domains that the crusade was prosecuted.
It was by virtue of these two principles, at that time dominant, but not without some opposition, in Christendom, that Innocent III., in 1208, summoned the King of France, the great lords and the knights, and the clergy, secular and regular, of the kingdom to assume the cross and go forth to extirpate from Southern France the Albigensians, "worse than the Saracens;" and that he promised to the chiefs of the crusaders the sovereignty of such domains as they should win by conquest from the princes who were heretics or protectors of heretics.
The Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade" an expedition, largely, of looters and cut-throats against them from all parts of France.
Paulicians, Petrobrusians, Albigensians, and kindred sects, all started from the principle of dualism, and even at the time were openly accused of Manicheistic ideas. They all involved more or less immoral principles, and rejected, or at least strove to weaken, the commonly-received ideas upon which society, civil and religious, is founded.
After my death," he had said, "the clergy will use all their efforts to entangle my son Louis in the matters of the Albigensians; but he is in weak and shattered health; he will be unable to bear the fatigue; he will soon die, and then the kingdom will be left in the hands of a woman and children; and so there will be no lack of dangers." The prediction was realized.
At this juncture, as well as in the crusade against the Albigensians, Philip Augustus behaved towards the pope with a wisdom and ability hard of attainment at any time, and very rare in his own: he constantly humored the papacy without being subservient to it, and he testified towards it his respect, and at the same time his independence.
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