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Therefore it must do its duty without let or hindrance upon all members of the whole body, to punish or urge, as guilt may deserve, or need may require, without respect of Pope, bishops, or priests, let them threaten or excommunicate as they will.
Here reigns a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated, ay, and much stranger too, self-believing! a pope whom, if you cannot obey him, I would advise you to disobey as silently as possible; a pope hitherto afraid of no Luther; a pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skilful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing; one who can excommunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men's charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!"
The Archbishop, Cardinal Pignatelli, was highly indignant, and threatened to excommunicate and lay the whole city under interdict. All the inferior clergy, animated by the esprit du corps, took up the question, and so worked upon the superstitious and bigoted people, that they were ready to rise in a mass to storm the palace of the Viceroy and rescue the prisoner.
Sixtus, calling himself Pope, had foully and maliciously lied in calling the King of Navarre a heretic. This Henry offered to prove before any free council legitimately chosen. If the Pope refused to submit to such decision, he was himself no better than excommunicate and Antichrist, and the King of Navarre thereby declared mortal and perpetual war upon him.
The form was this: "I, being a minister of Jesus Christ, and having authority from Him, do, in His name, and by His Spirit, excommunicate, cast out of the true Church, and deliver up to Satan, Charles II., upon these grounds: His mocking of God; His great perjury; His rescinding all laws for establishing the Reformation; His commanding armies to destroy the Lord's people; His being an enemy to true Protestants; His granting remission and pardon to murderers; His adulteries."
In the presence of a large congregation at Torwood he went so far as to excommunicate Charles the Second; the Dukes of York, Lauderdale, and Rothes; Sir Cú McKenzie and Dalziel of Binns.
If we say that it preaches asceticism and the subjection of the flesh, we may be confronted with the Vallabhâcâryas who inculcate self-indulgence; if we say that it teaches reincarnation and successive lives, we may be told that the Lingâyats do not hold that doctrine. And though we might logically maintain that these sects are unorthodox, yet it does not appear that Hindus excommunicate them.
In the same name, and by the same authority, I excommunicate and cast out of the true Church, and deliver up unto Satan, James, Duke of Monmouth, for coming unto Scotland at his father's unjust command, and leading armies against the Lord's people, who were constrained to rise, being killed in and for the worshipping of the true God, and for refusing, that morning, a cessation of arms at Bothwell Bridge, for hearing and redressing their injuries, wrongs and oppressions.
"I suppose any authority can excommunicate those below him, in the Church visible," said Bruno, calmly: "in the invisible Jerusalem above, which is the mother of us all, none excommunicates but God. `Every branch in Me, not fruit-bearing, He taketh it away. My daughters, it would do us more good to bear that in mind, than to blame either the Pope or the Archbishop."
He rebuked them for their action against him already in the court, forbade them to sit in judgment on him again, himself appealing to the pope, and ordered them, if any secular person should lay hands on him in punishment, to excommunicate him at once. Against this order Gilbert Foliot immediately appealed.
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