Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/291

 THE TEMPLARS. 275 judges. Thus the confessions obtained by the Ordinary of Poi- tiers have a character distinct from those extorted by the Bishop of Clermont, and we can classify the penitents of the Bishop of Le Mans, the Archbishop of Sens, the Archbishop of Tours, the Bishops of Amiens, Rodez, Macon, in fact of nearly all the prelates who took part in the terrible drama.* Another feature indicating the untrustworthy character of the evidence is that large numbers of the witnesses swore that they had confessed the sacrilege committed to priests and friars of all kinds, to bishops, and even to papal penitentiaries, and had received absolution by the imposition of penance, usually of a trifling char- acter, such as fasting on Fridays for a few months or a year.f No ordinary confessor could absolve for heresy ; it was a sin reserved for the inquisitor, papal or episcopal. The most that the con- fessor could have done would have been to send the penitent to some one competent to grant absolution, which would only have been administered under the heaviest penance, including denunci- ation of the Order. To suppose, in fact, that thousands of men, during a period of fifty or a hundred years, could have been en- trapped into such a heresy without its becoming matter of noto- riety, is in itself so violent an assumption as to deprive the whole story of all claims upon belief. Thus the more closely the enormous aggregate of testimony is examined the more utterly worthless it appears, and this is con- firmed by the fact that nowhere could compromising evidence be obtained without the use of inquisitorial methods. Had thousands of men been unwillingly forced to abjure their faith and been ter- rorized into keeping the dread secret, as soon as the pressure was removed by the seizure there would have been a universal eager- ness to unburden the conscience and seek reconciliation with the Church. JSTo torture would have been requisite to obtain all the evidence required. In view, therefore, of the extreme improba- 56-85, 91-114, 122-52, 154-77, 184-91, 234-56, 263-7. t Proces, I. 298, 305, 319, 336, 372, 401, 405, 427, 436, etc. It is not easy to understand the prescription of Friday fasting as a penance for a Templar, for the ascetic rules of the Order already required, the most rigid fasting. Meat was only allowed three days in the week, and a second Lent was kept from the Sunday before Martinmas until Christmas (Regie, §§ 15, 57).
 * Proces, I. 230-1, 264-74, 296-307, 331-67, 477-93, 602-19, 621-41 ; II. 1-3,