For the next ten years he was
more or less concerned with the hideous atrocities of the Albigensian
war. During that dark period of his career he was brought every day
face to face with heresy and schism. From infancy he must have heard
those around him talk with a savage intolerance of the Moors of the
South and the stubborn Jews of Toledo nearer home. Now his eyes were
open to the perils that beset the Church from sectaries who from
within were for casting off her divine authority. Wretches who
questioned the very creeds and rejected the Sacraments, yet
perversely insisted that they were Christian men and women, with a
clearer insight into Gospel mysteries than Bishops and Cardinals or
the Holy Father himself. Here was heresy rampant, and immortal souls,
all astray, beguiled by evil men and deceivers, "whose word doth eat
as doth a canker." Dominic "saw that there was no man, and marvelled
that there was no intercessor."
It was not ungodliness that Dominic, in the first instance,
determined to war with, but ignorance and error. _These_ were to
him the monster evils, whose natural fruit was moral corruption. Get
rid of them and the depraved heart might be dealt with by-and-by.
Dominic stood forth as the determined champion of orthodoxy. "Preach
the word in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort"--that was
his panacea.
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