He is not opposed to penalties against heretics, but he would have them pronounced only by civil tribunals.
When this devout maiden began to denounce the ungodly cardinal who was allied with heretics, her confessor - in Richelieu's service - succeeded in inducing her to become a nun.
While Constantine at the beginning of his reign (313) declared complete religious liberty, and kept on the whole to this declaration, yet he confined his favours to the orthodox hierarchical church, and even by an edict of the year 326 formally asserted the exclusion from these of heretics and schismatics.
Civil war was raging in France, and Clement became an ardent partisan of the League; his mind appears to have become unhinged by religious fanaticism, and he talked of exterminating the heretics, and formed a plan to kill Henry III.
Here, too, he published, in 1531, his most important work, the Chronica, Zeitbuch and Geschichtsbibel, largely a compilation on the basis of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), and in its treatment of social and religious questions connected with the Reformation, exhibiting a strong sympathy with heretics, and an unexampled fairness to all kinds of freedom in opinion.
