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unbeliever, but "thrust his sword into the man's belly as far as it will go."2 In a time of burgeoning ideas about spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared "that anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity."3 Before the Inquisition was fully underway, the Church welcomed heretics back to its fold under terms it considered reasonable. The following is an example of such terms: On three Sundays the penitent is to be stripped to the waist and scourged by the priest from the entrance of the town... to the church door. He is to abstain forever from meat and eggs and cheese, except on Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas, when he is to eat of them as sign of his abnegation of his Manichaean errors. For twoscore days, twice a year, he is to forgo the use of fish, and for three days in each week that of fish, wine, and oil, fasting, if his health and labors will permit. He is to wear monastic vestments, with a small cross sewed on each breast. If possible, he is to hear mass daily and on feast-days to attend church at vespers. Seven times a day he is to recite the canonical hours, and, in addition the Paternoster ten times each day and twenty times each night. He is to observe the strictest chastity. Every month he is to show this paper to the priest, who is to watch its observance closely, and this mode of life is to be maintained until the legate shall see fit to alter it, while for infraction of the penance he is to be held as a perjurer and a heretic, and to be segregated from the society of the faithful.4 Few heretics returned to the Church of their own accord.