Page:History of Freedom.djvu/617

 A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION 573

than the t\VO, that an incorrigible misbeliever ought to burn, or that the man who burns him ought to hang. The world as expanded on the liberal and on the hege- monic projection is patent to all men, and the alternatives, that Lacordaire was bad and Conrad good, are clear in all their bearings. They are too gross and palpable for 1\1r. Lea. He steers a subtler course. He does not sentence the heretic, but he will not protect him from his doom. He does not care for the inquisitor, but he will not resist him in the discharge of his duty. To establish a tenable footing on that narrow but needful platform is the epilogue these painful volumes want, that we may not be found with the traveller \vho discovered a precipice to the right of him, another to the left, and nothing between. Their profound and adlnirable erudition leads up, like Helh,.ald's Culturgeschichte, to a great note of interrogation. When \ve find the Carolina and the savage justice of Tudor judges brought to bear on the exquisitely complex psycho- logical revolution that proceeded, after the year 1200, about the Gulf of Lyons and the Tyrrhene Sea, we miss the historic question. When we learn that Priscillian was murdered (i. 2 14), but that Lechler has no business to calI the sentence on John H us " ein wahrer J ustizmord " (ii. 494), and then again that the burning of a heretic is a judicial murder after all (i. 552), we feel bereft of the philosophic answer. Although Mr. Lea gives little heed to Pani and Hefele, Gams and Du Boys, and the others \vho \vrite for the Inquisition without pleading ignorance, he emphasises a Belgian \vho lately \vrote that the Church never em- ployed direct constraint against heretics. People who never heard of the Belgian \vill \vonder that so much is made of this conventional figleaf. N early the same asser- tion may be found, with varieties of caution and of con- fidence, in a catena of divines, from Bergier to N e\vrnan. To appear unfamiliar \vith the defence exposes the writer to the thrust that you cannot know the strength or the weakness of a case until you have heard its advocates. The liberality of Leo XIII., which has yielded a splendid