Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/32

 labouring the point a little and stressing the fact that the Bull of Innocent VIII was only one of a long series of Papal ordinances dealing with the suppression of a monstrous and almost universal evil.

The first Papal Bull directly launched against the black art and its professors was that of Alexander IV, 13 December, 1258, addressed to the Franciscan inquisitors. And it is worth while here to examine precisely what was the earlier connotation of the terms “inquisitor” and “inquisition,” so often misunderstood, as our research, though brief, will throw a flood of light upon the subject of Witchcraft, and, moreover, incidentally will serve to explain how that those writers who assign the beginnings of Witchcraft to the Middle Ages, although most certainly and even demonstrably in error, have at any rate been very subtilely and easily led wrong, since sorcery in the Middle Ages was violently unmasked and the whole horrid craft then first authoritatively exposed in its darkest colours and most abominable manifestations, as had indeed existed from the first, but had been carefully hidden and scrupulously concealed.

By the term Inquisition (inquirere = to look into) is now generally understood a special ecclesiastical institution for combating or suppressing heresy, and the Inquisitors are the officials attached to the said institution, more particularly judges who are appointed to investigate the charges of heresy and to try the persons brought before them on those charges. During the first twelve centuries the Church was loath to deal with heretics save by argument and persuasion; obstinate and avowed heretics were, of course, excluded from her communion, a defection which in the ages of faith, naturally involved them in many and great difficulties. S. Augustine, S. John Chrysostom, S. Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, and a number of other Doctors and Fathers held that for no cause whatsoever should the Church shed blood; but, on the other hand, the imperial successors of Constantine justly considered that they were obliged to have a care for the material welfare of the Church here on earth, and that heresy is always inevitably and inextricably entangled with attempts on the social order, always anarchical, always political. Even the pagan persecutor Diocletian recognized this fact, which heretics, until they obtain the