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Whatever contradicts the morality of the Gospel is, by them, accounted illegal, and they punish the guilty by spiritual censures, and at last by excommunication. This latter amounts, in fact, to expulsion from the place; for an excommunicated brother or sister finds no one with whom to maintain a correspondence.

From the first beginning of the dispute to the final break and excommunication, in the teeth of his promises, his flatteries, his acknowledgments, Clement had been the partisan of Catherine. When the English agents were collecting the opinions of the Italian universities, they were thwarted by his emissaries.

It was he who established the censure of the press, by which printers were obliged, under pain of excommunication, to submit the books they issued to the control of the Archbishops and their delegates. The Brief of June 1, 1501, which contains this order, may be reasonably said to have retarded civilization, at least in Italy and Spain.

I assured the congregation at the same time that the excommunication will not injure those who are comprehended in the names of the excommunicated, except if they remain obstinate after the excommunication is made known.

They would have risked being driven from the synagogue, which, in a mean and bigoted society, was the greatest degradation. Excommunication, besides, carried with it the confiscation of all possessions. By ceasing to be a Jew, a man did not become a Roman; but remained without protection, in the power of a theocratic legislation of the most atrocious severity.

He was prepared to make any concessions or to undergo any humiliations, if only the ban of excommunication might be removed; nor, cowed as he was by his own superstitious conscience, and by the memory of the opposition he had met with from his German vassals, does he seem to have once thought of meeting force with force, and of returning to his northern kingdom triumphant in the overthrow of Gregory's pride.

"The viceroy immediately sent out his orders commanding the bills of excommunication and cessatio a divinis to be pulled down from the church doors; and to all the superiors of the cloisters to set open their churches, and to celebrate their services and masses as formerly they had done. But they disobeyed the vice-king through blind obedience to their archbishop.

In a quarrel with Charles VIII of France he threatened the king with excommunication, and sought aid from the Turkish Sultan. "However, when Charles appeared in Rome, the Pope went over to his side immediately, and delivered up to him Prince Dschem; but he took care to have him poisoned immediately, that he might not lose the price set upon his head by the Sultan."

All the assembly went to Westminster Abbey, the bishops and abbots carrying tapers, and there the Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced sentence of excommunication against whosoever should infringe these charters. As he spoke, the tapers were dashed at once on the ground, with the words, "May his soul who incurs this sentence be thus extinguished for ever!" while Henry added, "So help me God!

"So I should have done," said Sancho, "if I had not got it by heart when your worship read it to me, so that I repeated it to a sacristan, who copied it out for me from hearing it, so exactly that he said in all the days of his life, though he had read many a letter of excommunication, he had never seen or read so pretty a letter as that."