It had been considered long ago from this standpoint by an original Italian thinker, Marsilius of Padua (thirteenth century), who had maintained that the Church had no power to employ physical coercion, and that if the lay authority punished heretics, the punishment was inflicted for the violation not of divine ordinances but of the law of the State, which excluded heretics from its territory.

Mountjoy and St. Denis!" Gan made a speech, "like a Demosthenes," to King Marsilius in public; but he made him another in private, like nobody but himself.