Page:History of Freedom.djvu/613

 A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION 569

This is not the protest of \vounded humanity. The righteous resolve to beware of doctrine has not been strictly kept. In the private judgment of the writer, the thinking of the Middle Ages was sophistry and their belief superstition. For the erring and suffering mass of mankind he has an enlightened sympathy; for the intri- cacies of speculation he has none. He cherishes a dis- belief, theological or inductive it matters not, in sinners rescued by repentance and in blessings obtained by prayer. Between remitted guilt and remitted punishment he draws a vanishing line that makes it doubtful \vhether Luther started from the limits of purgatory or the limits of hell. He finds that it was a universal precept to break faith with heretics, that it was no arbitrary or artificial innovation to destroy them, but the faithful outcome of the traditional spirit of the Church. He hints that the horror of sensu- ality may be easily carried too far, and that Saint Francis of Assisi was in truth not very much removed from a worshipper of the devil. Prescott, I think, conceived a resemblance between the god of Montezuma and the god of Torquemada; but he saw and suspected less than his more learned countryman. If any life was left in the Strappado and the Samarra, no book would deserve better than this description of their vicissitudes to go the way of its author, and to fare \vith the flagrant volume, snatched from the burning at Cham pel, which is still exhibited to Unitarian pilgrims in the Rue de Richelieu. In other characteristic places \ve are taught to observe the agency of human passion, ambition, avarice, and pride; and wade through oceans of unvaried evil with that sense of dejection which comes from Digby's Mores CatholÙ:i or the Ori'gz.nes de la France COlltellzþoraz'ne, books which affect the mind by the pressure of repeated instances. The In- quisition is not merely" the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal," but it is "utilised by selfish greed and lust of po\ver." N a piling of secondary motives will confront us \vith the true cause. Some of those who fleshed their swords with preliminary bloodshed on their way to the holy \var may have owed their victims money; some who in 1348 shared