Page:History of Freedom.djvu/599

 A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION 555

with necessary literature. It is one of his characteristics to be suspicious of the Histoire IntÍ1ne as the seat of fable and proper domain of those problems in psychology against which the certitude of history is always going to pieces. Where motives are obscure, he prefers to contemplate causes in their effects, and to look abroad over his vast horizon of unquestioned reality. The difference between outward and interior history will be felt by anyone who compares the story of Dolcino here given with the account in Neander. Mr. Lea knows more about him and has better materials than the ponderous professor of pectoral theology. But he has not all Neander's patience and power to read significance and sense in the musings of a reckless erratic mind. He believes that Pope Gregory IX. is the intellectual originator, as well as the legislative imponent, of the terrific system which ripened gradually and experimenta1Jy in his pontificate. It does not appear whether he has read, or knows through Havet the investigations which conducted Ficker to a different hypothesis. The transition of 123 I from the saving of life to the taking of life by fire was nearly the sharpest that men can conceive, and in pur- suance of it the subsequent legal forms are mere detail. The spirit and practice of centuries were renounced for the opposite extreme; and between the mercy of I 230 and the severity of 123 I there was no intervening stage of graduated rigour. Therefore it is probable that the new idea of duty, foreign to Italian and specifically to Roman ways, was conveyed by a new man, that a new influence just then got possession of the Pope. Professor Ficker signals Guala as the real contriver of the régÙlle of terror, and the man who acquired the influence imported the idea and directed the policy. Guala was a Dominican prior whom the Pope trusted in emergencies. In the year 1230 he negotiated the treaty of San Germano bet\veen Frederic II. and the Church, and was made Bishop of Brescia. In that year Brescia, first among Italian cities, inserted in its statutes the emperor's Lombard la\v of I 224, which sent the heretic to the stake. The inference