If you will read this voluminous remonstrance, Gentlemen—­you may find it in the annals of that time by Enguerrand de Monstrelet (liv.  I. c. 99, Tom.  II. p. 307 et seq., ed.  Douet d’Aroy)—­you cannot avoid seeing that, had this memorial been promulgated in our time, e.g., by the University of Berlin, there is scarce an offense enumerated in the code but would have been found in it by the public prosecutor.  Defamation and insult of officials in the execution of their office, contempt and abuse of the government’s regulations and the disposition taken by the officials, lese majeste, incitement of the subjects of the State to hatred and disrespect—­and, indeed, I know not what all would be the offenses which our prosecutors would have discovered in the document.  It is less than a year since, according to the newspapers, a disciplinary inquiry was instituted with respect to a memorial of a very different tenor, wherein one of our universities declined the mandatory suggestions addressed to the university by the ministers in regard to a given appointment.  But, at that earlier day, in the dark ages, such was not the custom.  On the other hand, in compliance with the university’s demands, the treasurer of the crown, Audry Griffart, together with many others of the high officers of finance, was taken into custody, while others avoided a like fate only by escaping into a church vested with the right of asylum.

That was in 1412.  But already eighty years before that date there occurred another, and perhaps even more significant case, which I may touch upon more briefly.  Pope John XXII. promulgated a new construction of the dogma of visio beatifica and had it preached in the churches.  The University of Paris,—­nec pontificis reverentia prohibuit, says the report, quominus veritati insistereat,—­“reverence of the holy father prevented not the university from declaring the truth”—­, although the matter then in question was an article of the faith and lay within a field within which the competence of the pope could not be doubted, still the university, on the 22d of January, 1332, put forth a decree in which this construction of the dogma was classed to be erroneous.

Philip VI. served this decree upon the pope, then resident at Avignon, with the declaration that, unless he recanted as the decree required, he would have him burned as a heretic.  And the pope, in fact, recanted, although he was then on his deathbed.  All of which you may find set forth in Bulas, Historia Universitatis Parisiensis. (Paris, 1668, fol.  Tom.  IV. p. 375 et seq.)

These instances, which might be multiplied at will, may suffice to show how unqualified was the freedom of science even in early days, constrained by no punitive limitation at the hands of pope or king; for, be it remembered, in the Middle Ages, science had, as I have before remarked, only a corporate existence in its bearers, the universities.  So that the view for which I speak has practically been accepted as much as five hundred years back, even in Catholic times and among Latin peoples.