THE INQUISITION
In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high
honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as
Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.
He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran
Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An
honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever,
full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he
could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone
but of the entire world.”
He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial
governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of
the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by
excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor
prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew
entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.
He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight
of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number
of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and
generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show
himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as
an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these
proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable
minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a
practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed
a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this
clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman
jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian
Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her
eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.
In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished
and tactful person.
The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last
begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between
a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public
blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France
and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs
according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily
reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to
comply with the papal wishes.
Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people
were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV
(known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just
conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of
Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was
obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman
tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of
Trondhjem.
And so it went.
The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of
war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who
therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep
interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly
asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England,
certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master
were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it
had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for
having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.
From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person
who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers
and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.
And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing
as we shall now see.
The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.
Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for
publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain
their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy
prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to
be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence
we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we
are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles
as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the
express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly
faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against
doing likewise.
As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired
individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in
the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food
but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who
keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about
the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their
worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable
neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.
Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of
themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves
too seriously.
Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal
for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell
pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by
their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.
But let us give them credit for their courage and their honesty.
They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.
As a rule, they lost it.
Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized. Eventually
even those who believe in no organization at all must form a Society
for the Promotion of Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish
anything. And the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and
wallowed in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct
of self-preservation made them flock together and their feeling of
insecurity forced them to surround their sacred doctrines by a double
barrier of mystic rites and esoteric ceremonials.
But of course the masses of the people, who remained faithful to the
Church, were unable to make any distinction between these different
groups and sects. And they bunched them all together and called them
dirty Manichaeans or some other unflattering name and felt that that
solved the problem.
In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle
Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in
a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established
itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a
vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all
their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent
down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor.
A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable
person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges,
he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable
advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure
followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a
lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders.
What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor
Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian
by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and
charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first
quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father,
Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.
He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years
of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as
godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of
our own day. Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of
east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that
visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to
all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy
of his own which was a _mixtum-compositum_ of Buddhism, Christianity,
Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old
Babylonian superstitions.
Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his followers
sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated that Mani merely
revived the old Persian myth of the Good God and the Evil God who are
eternally fighting for the soul of man and that he associated the ancient
God of Evil with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became his
Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that Heavenly Father whom we
find revealed within the pages of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that
is where Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that the
body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing; that all people
should try to rid themselves of their worldly ambitions by the constant
mortification of the flesh and should obey the strictest rules of diet
and behavior lest they fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil)
and burn in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos about
things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed for his followers a
menu composed exclusively of cold water, dried vegetables and dead fish.
This latter ordinance may surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea,
being cold-blooded animals, have always been regarded as less harmful to
man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren of the dry land,
and the self-same people who would rather suffer death than eat a veal
chop cheerfully consume quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of
conscience.
Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade
his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human
race.
As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the
Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani
regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water,
his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.
At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his
ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was
fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his
creed to his own neighbors.
But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much
secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against
him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the
protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded
by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions,
Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls
of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed
his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel
inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.
By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church
itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so
many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of
Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc
among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had
examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.
Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.
Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube.
Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany
and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the
Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and
so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word
“Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”
But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious
denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean
ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would
have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the
Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so
difficult of detection.
It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose a disease
caused by microbes of such gigantic structure that their presence can be
detected by the microscope of a provincial board-of-health.
But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who can maintain their
incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet illumination, for they shall
inherit the earth.
Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was therefore the most
dangerous expression of all social epidemics and it filled the higher
authorities of that organization with a terror not felt before the more
common varieties of spiritual afflictions.
It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of the staunchest
supporters of the early Christian faith had shown unmistakable symptoms
of the disease. Yea, great Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and
indefatigable warrior of the Cross, who had done more than any one else
to destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have been at
heart considerable of a Manichaean.
Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the stake in the year
385 and who gained the distinction of being the first victim of the law
against heretics, was accused of Manichaean tendencies.
Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have fallen under the
spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.
They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament
and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by
which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not
to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence
were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform,
causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish
a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly
earned him the title of the Buddha of the West.
But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility
of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment
when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor
and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross
and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of
territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were
rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and
enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a
staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that
they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very
unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did.
Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state
of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old
Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization
had never been quite absorbed by barbarism.
You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of
a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the
Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is
its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns
and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an
abundance of sunshine and rain.
While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds
of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had
already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give
birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations
of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and
Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications
in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the
northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.
In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to
make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.
But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be
construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages
certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as
simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh,
memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to
war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the
Gospels for themselves; who let it be known that they did not approve
of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which
six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as
part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused
to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.
Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical
authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion,
they were discreetly put out of the way.
But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to
call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss
what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and
highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their
debates until the year 1056.
By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of
punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results.
The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted
whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of
Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and
if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with
the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the
place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen
fresh candidates for holiness.
Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal
delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local
nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects)
refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence
only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the voice of
reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.
And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh
impetus from the north.
In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone,
there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man,
a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his
eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that
it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of
Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when
he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He
divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused
to accumulate fresh wealth.
John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”
Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and had carefully
stipulated under what conditions it might perhaps be desirable for the
laity to study the holy books directly and without the assistance of a
priest.
Peter Waldo did not see it that way.
John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”
Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.
And when he discovered that the things he found did not tally with the
conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated the New Testament into his own
language and spread copies of his manuscript throughout the good land of
Provence.
At first his activities did not attract much attention. His enthusiasm
for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most likely he could be persuaded to
found some new and very ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those
who wished to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the
existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.
Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets for those
people whose excess of faith might make them troublesome.
But all things must be done according to rule and precedent. And in that
respect the “pure men” of the Provence and the “poor men” of Lyons were
terrible failures. Not only did they neglect to inform their bishops
of what they were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed
the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good Christian
without the assistance of a professional member of the priesthood and
that the Bishop of Rome had no more right to tell people outside of
his jurisdiction what to do and what to believe than the Grand Duke of
Tartary or the Caliph of Bagdad.
The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and truth compels me
to state that she waited a long time before she finally decided to
exterminate this heresy by force.
But an organization based upon the principle that there is only one
right way of thinking and living and that all other ways are infamous
and damnable is bound to take drastic measures whenever its authority is
being openly questioned.
If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive and this
consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite action and devise
a series of punishments that should put terror into the hearts of all
future dissenters.
The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of Albi which was
a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the Waldenses (who bore the name of
their founder, Peter Waldo) living in countries without great political
value and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected as
the first of her victims.
The murder of a papal delegate who for several years had ruled the
Provence as if it were so much conquered territory, gave Innocent III an
excuse to interfere.
He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses and the
Waldenses.
Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition against
the heretics would be excused from paying interest on their debts; they
would be absolved from all past and future sins and for the time being
they would be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of
law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the people of
northern Europe.
Why should they bother about going all the way to Palestine when a
campaign against the rich cities of the Provence offered the same
spiritual and economic rewards as a trip to the Orient and when a man
could gain an equal amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term
of service?
For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and the worst elements
among the nobility and gentry of northern France and southern England,
of Austria, Saxony and Poland came rushing southward to escape the local
sheriff and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense of
the prosperous Provençals.
The number of men, women and children hanged, burned, drowned,
decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders is variously given.
I have not any idea how many thousands perished. Here and there, whenever
a formal execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete
figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty thousand,
according to the size of each town.
After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a
quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed
their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort
of spiritual adviser.
“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The
Lord will know his own people.”
But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of
the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty
and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services,
he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had
just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.
As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more
inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their
own until the days of the Reformation.
The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and
hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition.
But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines
were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin
Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly
which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.
All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As
far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle
of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous
command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished
to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall
and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his
servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once
more been fulfilled.
“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.
The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was
not solved until many years later.
Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special
courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the
Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of
Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they
came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the
mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have
visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of
rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow
hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an
endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.
Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth
century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of
sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the
phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant
prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those
who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should
never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.
Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight
ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages,
and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the
most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space.
For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an
International Court of Arbitration.
There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and
created for all sorts of purposes.
The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy
Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the
heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.
The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc
in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the
southern.
It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.
After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted
heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do
with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death
penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and
might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support
at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped
this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only
increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest
of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.
As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane
in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts
of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found
guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.
It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be
hopelessly biased.
It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds of
thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight
lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious
neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy
cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and
qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the
nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were
not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against
them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives
or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence,
they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken;
that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to
if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally
that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to
the cause of their terrible fate.
It seems even more incredible that men and women who had been buried for
fifty or sixty years could be dug out of their graves, could be found
guilty “in absentia” and that the heirs of people who were condemned
in this fashion could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a
century after the death of the offending parties.
But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended for their
maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods that were confiscated,
absurdities of this sort were by no means an uncommon occurrence
and frequently the grandchildren were driven to beggary on account
of something which their grandfather was supposed to have done two
generations before.
Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago when Czarist
Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember the agent provocateur. As
a rule the agent provocateur was a former burglar or a retired gambler
with a winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly known
that his sorrow had made him join the revolution and in this way he often
gained the confidence of those who were genuinely opposed to the imperial
government. But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new friends,
he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward and went to the next
city, there to repeat his vile practices.
During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, southern and
western Europe was overrun by this nefarious tribe of private spies.
They made a living denouncing those who were supposed to have criticized
the Church or who had expressed doubts upon certain points of doctrine.
If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the business of
such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.
As he could rest assured that torture would make his victims confess, no
matter how innocent they might be, he ran no risks and could continue his
trade ad infinitum.
In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced by this
system of allowing anonymous people to denounce those whom they suspected
of spiritual deficiencies. At last, no one dared trust his nearest and
dearest friends. Members of the same family were forced to be on their
guard against each other.
The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the inquisitorial work
made excellent use of the panic which their methods created and for
almost two centuries they lived on the fat of the land.
Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying causes of the
Reformation was the disgust which a large number of people felt for those
arrogant beggars who under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the
homes of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable beds,
who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they be treated as
honored guests and who were able to maintain themselves in comfort by the
mere threat that they would denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition
if ever they were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had come
to regard as their just due.
The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely
acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent
contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the
leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could
not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few
people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and
were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors.
But what of it?
The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate
criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of
recantation.
The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends.
And what are a few faked documents between spies?