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      After completing Volumes 1 and 2 of Lea's A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (together over 1000 pages), I chose to read only selected parts of Volume 3. Consequently, I am going to give the major titles of the chapters which I did not read along with the book notes of the couple of chapters which I did read.

      I should also note that each volume contains an appendix of the most important documents - in Latin. When Lea wrote his works, he could reasonably have expected his readers to be able to read Latin. Lea wanted his readers to be able to judge the quality of his work by reading the most important documents for themselves and by comparing Lea's account with his primary source material.

Book III: Special Fields of Inquisitorial Activity

Chapter 1 - The Spiritual Franciscans

      The Church's persecution of the Franciscans who stayed faithful to Francis of Assisi's vows of poverty and service.

Chapter 2 - Guglielma and Dolcino

      The Church's persecution of the small Milanese sect of Guglielmites in about 1260.

Chapter 3 - The Fraticelli

      The Dominican's successful attempt to have the Franciscan's claim that Christ and the Apostles did not hold property declared heretical.

Chapter 4 - Political Heresy Utilized by the Church

      How the church used political dissent to suppress religious dissent.

Chapter 5 - Political Heresy Utilized by the State

      How the state used the inquisition to suppress political dissent.

Chapter 6 - Sorcery and Occult Arts

      The church's persecution of magicians and sorcerers.

Chapter 7 - Witchcraft

Chapter 8 - Intellect and Faith

Chapter 9 - Conclusion

1.       "While, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing development of sorcery in a different direction among the despised peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intelligence of Europe. There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft; they find their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by imperceptible gradations, and yet, historically speaking, the witchcraft with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the commencement cannot be distinctly traced backwards much beyond the fifteenth century. Its practitioners were not learned clerks or shrewd swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenomenon, of which the proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Probably it may be traced to the effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the University of Paris. Thus the innocent devices of wise-women in culling simples, or in muttering charms, came to be regarded as implying demon-worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accordance with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh embellishments to this, until at last there was built up a stupendous mass of facts which demonologists endeavored to reduce to a science for the guidance of the tribunals." p. 492 - 493

2.       "The demonologist argued that the witch was as necessary to the demon as the demon to the witch, and that neither could operate without the other. She was not like the magicians and sorcerers, who merely earned their livelihood by selling their services, sometimes for good purposes and sometimes for bad, but she was a being wholly evil, delighting in the exercise of her powers for the destruction of her neighbors, and constantly exhorted to activity by her master. Those powers, moreover, were sufficient to justify the terror in which she was held by the people." pp. 501-502

3.       "Fortunately on one side there was a limitation upon the otherwise illimitable power of the witch. The contrast was so absurd between the faculties attributed to her and her utter inability to protect herself against those who tortured and burned her with impunity, that some explanation of the inconsistency was required. The demonologists therefore invented the comforting theory that through the goodness of God the witch instantaneously lost her power as soon as the hand of an officer of justice was laid upon her. But for this, indeed, it might have been difficult to find men hardy enough to seize, imprison, try, and execute these delegates of Satan, whose slightest ill-will was so dangerous." p. 509

4.       "In the ecclesiastical tribunals offenders had not the same chance. We have seen in a former chapter how skillfully the inquisitorial process was framed to secure conviction, and when, after a prolonged period of comparative inactivity, the Inquisition was aroused to renew exertion in combating the legions of Satan, it sharpened its rusted weapons to a yet keener edge. The old hesitation about pronouncing a sentence of acquittal was no longer entertained, for though the accused might be dismissed with a verdict of not proven, the inquisitor was formally instructed never to declare him innocent. Yet few there were upon whom even this doubtful clemency was exercised, for all the resources of fraud and force, of guile and torment, were exhausted to secure conviction with even less reserve than of old. Engaged in a personal combat with Satan, the inquisitor was convinced in advance of the guilt of those brought before him as defamed for sorcery, and the ancient expedients were refined upon and improved. Formerly endurance of torture might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to save his servitor, and the duty to defeat him was plain, even though, as Sprenger tells us was frequently the case, the witch would allow herself to be torn to pieces before she would confess. Though, as formerly, torture could not be repeated, it could be "continued" indefinitely, with prolonged periods of intervening imprisonment in dungeons of which the squalor was purposely heightened to exhaust the mental and physical forces of the victim. It is true that confession was not absolutely requisite, for when the evidence was sufficient the accused could be convicted without it, but it was held that common justice required that the criminal should avow his guilt, and therefore the use of torture was universal when confession could not be otherwise secured. Yet in view of the satanic gift of taciturnity it was desirable to avoid recourse to it, and therefore promises of pardon, not indefinitely veiled under a juggle of words as of old, but positive and specifying a moderate penance or exile, were to be freely made. If the fraud was successful, the inquisitor could let the sentence be pronounced by some one else, or allow a decent interval to elapse before himself sending his deluded victim to the stake. All the other devices to entrap or seduce the prisoner to confession which we have seen employed by the older inquisitors were also still recommended. One new and infallible sign was the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. In such a case the inquisitor was instructed to adjure her to weep by the loving tears shed for the world by Christ on the cross, but the more she adjured, we are told, the drier she would become. Still, with the usual logic of the demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not to be reckoned in her favor.

         The most significant change, however, between the old procedure and the new regarded the death-penalty. We have seen that with the heretic the object was held to be the salvation of his soul, and, except in case of relapse, he could always purchase life by recantation, at the expense of lifelong imprisonment, with the prospect that in time submission might win him release. At what period the rule changed with respect to witches is uncertain. When convicted by the secular courts they were invariably burned, and the Inquisition came to adopt the same practice. . . .In 1458 Jaquerius laboriously argues that the witch is not to be treated like other heretics, to be spared if she recants, showing that the change was still a novelty requiring justification. In 1484 Sprenger says positively that while the recanting heretic is to be imprisoned, the sorcerer, even if penitent, is to be put to death, indicating that by this time there was no longer any question on the subject. There was, as usual, a pretense of shifting the responsibility of this upon the secular authorities, for Sprenger adds that the most the ecclesiastical judge can do is to absolve the penitent and converted witch from the ipso facto excommunication under which she lies and let her go, to be apprehended by the lay courts and be burned for the evil which she has wrought." pp. 513-515

5.       "Appeals were always to be refused if possible. Outside of France the only one that could be made was to Rome for refusing counsel, for improper torture, and other unjust proceedings; and then, as we have seen, the inquisitor could either refuse "apostoli" or grant either reverential or negative ones. If conscious of injustice and aware that an appeal was coming, he could elude it by appointing some one to sit in his place. The danger of appeals was small, however, for if the accused insisted on having counsel she was not allowed to select him. The inquisitor appointed him; he was bound not to assume the defense if he knew it to be unjust; he was not allowed to know the names of the witnesses, and his functions were restricted to advising his client either to confess or to disable witnesses. If he made difficulties and delays and interjected appeals he was subject to excommunication as a fautor of heresy, and was worse than the witches themselves -- of all of which he was to be duly warned when accepting the case." pp. 517-518

6.       "In the existing wretchedness of the peasantry throughout the length and breadth of Europe, recklessness as to the present and hopelessness as to the future led thousands to wish that they could, by transferring their allegiance to Satan, find some momentary relief of the Sabbat, where exquisite meats and drink were furnished in abundance, had an irresistible allurement for those who could scantily reckon on a morsel of black bread, or a turnip or a few beans, to keep starvation at bay. Sprenger, as already stated, tells us that the attraction of intercourse with incubi and succubi was a principal cause of luring souls to ruin. The devastating wars, with bands of écorcheurs and condottieri pillaging everywhere with savage cruelty, reduced whole populations to despair, and those who fancied themselves abandoned by God might well turn to Satan for help. According to Sprenger, a prolific source of witches was the seduction of young girls who when refused marriage had nothing more to hope for, and sought to avenge themselves on society by acquiring at least the power of evil. Not only thus was there on the part of many a desire to enter the abhorred sect of Satan-worshippers, which the Church declared to be so numerous and powerful, but doubtless not a few performed the ceremonies to effect it, when perhaps some evil wish chanced to be realized would convince them that Satan had really accepted their allegiance, and granted them the power which they sought. Certain minds might, in moments of high-wrought exaltation, even imagine that they had obtained admission to the foul mysteries whose reality was rapidly becoming an article of orthodox belief. Others again, in weakness and poverty, found that the reputation of possessing the power of evil was a protection and a support, and they encouraged rather than repressed the credulity of their neighbors. To these must be added the multitudes who derived a source of gain from curing the sorcery which the Church was confessedly unable to relieve, and there was ample material in the despised and lower stratum of society for the innumerable army of witches conjured up by the heated imaginations of the demonographers.

         Unfortunately the Church, in its alarm at the development of this new heresy, stimulated it to the utmost in the endeavor to repress it. Every inquisitor whom it commissioned to suppress witchcraft was an active missionary who scattered the seeds of the belief ever more widely." pp. 538-539 (Lea references Du Cange, one of Gage's sources, on this page.)

7.       "Even more potent than the personal activity of Sprenger was the legacy which he left behind him in the work which he proudly entitled the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced. All his vast experience and wide erudition are brought to the task of proving the reality of witchcraft and the extent of its evils, and, further, of instructing the inquisitor how to elude the wiles of Satan and to punish his devotees. He was no vulgar witch-finder, but a man trained in all the learning of the schools. He apparently was not inhumane. In many places he manifests a laudable desire to give the accused the benefit of whatever pleas they might rightfully put forward, but he is so fully convinced of the gigantic character of the evils to be combated, he so thoroughly believed that his tribunal is engaged in a contest with Satan for human soul, that he eagerly justifies every artifice and every cruelty that could be suggested to outwit the adversary, on whom fair play would be thrown away. Like Conrad of Marburg and Capistrano, he was a man of the most dangerous type, an honest fanatic. His work is, moreover, an inexhaustible storehouse of marvels to which successive generation resorted whenever evidence was needed to prove any special manifestation of the power or malignity of the witch. Told as the results of his own experience or that of his colleagues, with the utmost good faith, they carried conviction with them. In fact, but for the delusive character of human testimony in such matters, the evidence would seem to be overwhelming. Statements of disinterested eye-witnesses, complaints of sufferers, confessions of the guilty, even after condemnation, and at the stake, when there was no hope save of pardon of their sins by God, are innumerable, and so detailed and connected together that the most fertile imagination would seen inadequate to their invention." pp. 543-544

8.       "Cornelius Agrippa, whose learned treatises on the occult sciences trench so nearly on forbidden ground, when he held the position of Town Orator and Advocate of Metz, had the hardihood, in 1519, to save from the clutches of the inquisitor, Nicholas Savin, an unfortunate woman accused of witchcraft. The only evidence against her was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Savin quoted the "Malleus Maleficarum" to show that if she were not the offspring of an incubus she must undoubtedly have been devoted to Satan at her birth. In conjunction with the episcopal official, John Leonard, he had her cruelly tortured, and she was then exposed to starvation in her prison. When Agrippa offered to defend her he was turned out of court and threatened with prosecution as a fautor of heresy, and her husband was refused access to the place of trial, lest he should interject an appeal. Leonard chanced to fall mortally sick, and, touched with remorse on his death-bed, he executed an instrument declaring his conviction of her innocence and asked the chapter to set her at liberty; but Savin demanded that she should be further tortured and then burned. Agrippa, however, labored so effectually with Leonard's successor and with the chapter that the woman was discharged; but his disinterested zeal cost him his office, and he was obliged to leave Metz. Relieved of his presence, the inquisitor speedily found another witch, whom he burned after forcing her by torture to confess all the horrors of the Sabbat and customary evil deeds wrought through the power of Satan." p. 545

9.       "In such an epidemic every victim was a new source of infection, and the land was threatened with depopulation." p. 547

10.       "In an age of superstition this utterance of the Council of Ten stands forth as a monument of considerate wisdom and calm common-sense. Had its enlightened spirit been allowed to guide the counsels of popes and princes, Europe would have been spared the most disgraceful page in the annals of civilization. The lesson of cruel fear so sedulously inculcated on the nations was thoroughly learned. Hideous as are the details of the persecution of witchcraft which we have been considering up to the fifteenth century, they were but the prelude to the blind and senseless orgies of destruction which disgraced the next century and a half. Christendom seemed to have grown delirious, and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power in the endless smoke of the holocausts which bore witness to his triumph over the Almighty. Protestant and Catholic rivaled each other in the madness of the hour. Witches were burned on longer in ones or two, but in scores and hundreds. A bishop of Geneva is said to have burned five hundred within three months, a bishop of Bamburg six hundred, a bishop of Wurzburg nine hundred. Eight hundred were condemned, apparently in one body, by the Senate of Savoy. So completely had the intervention of Satan, through the instrumentality of his worshippers, become a part of the unconscious process of thought, that any unusual operation of nature was attributed to them as a matter of course." pp. 548-549

11.       "The only heresies which really troubled the Church were those which obtained currency among the people unassisted by the ingenious quodlibet of dialecticians." p. 550

12.       "Yet to Gerson Averrhoes was still the most insolent adversary of the faith; he was the man who had condemned all religions as bad, but that of the Christians as worst of all, for they daily ate their God; and, in the allegorical paintings of Orcagna, Traini, Taddeo Gaddi, and their successors, Averrhoes commonly figures as the impersonation of rebellious unbelief." p. 565

13.       "Yet debates on the points of Averrhoistic philosophy were the favorite amusement of the semi-pagan philosophers who gathered in Leo's court, and who deemed that all that was necessary to preserve them from the inquisition was to present arguments on both sides, pronounce the questions insolvable to human reason, and conclude with a hypocritical submission to the Church." p. 574

14.       "Had not the Reformation come, the culture of Europe would inevitably have been atheistic, or devoted to sublimated deism, scarce distinguishable from atheism." p. 577

15.       "With the gradual revival of letters books assumed more and more importance as a means of disseminating thought, and this increased rapidly after the invention of printing. It became a recognized rule with the Inquisition that he into whose hands an heretical book might fall and who did not burn it at once or deliver it within eight days to his bishop or inquisitor was held vehemently suspect of heresy. The translation of any part of Scripture into the vernacular was forbidden. It was not, however, until 1501 that any organized censorship of the press seems to have been thought of, and even then Germany was the only land where the issue of dangerous and heretical books was considered to require it. All printers were ordered in future, under pain of excommunication and of fines applicable to the apostolic chamber, to present to the archbishop of the province or to his ordinary all books before publication, and only to issue those for which a license should be granted after examination, the prelates being commanded on their consciences to make no charges for such license. All existing books in stock, moreover, were to be subject to similar inspection, and of such as should be found to contain errors all copies accessible were to be delivered up for burning." p. 613

16.       "From all this it is evident that in its relations with the Greek Church Rome was governed by policy; that it could exercise toleration whenever the occasion demanded, and that the Inquisition was practically quiescent in its dealings with these heretic populations, although their heresy was of a dye so much deeper than that of many sectaries who were ruthlessly exterminated." p. 621

17.       "The abuse [selling of indulgences] continued until it became the proximate cause of the Reformation, after which the Council of Trent abolished the profession of pardoner, avowedly because it was the occasion of great scandal among the faithful, and that all efforts to reform it had proved useless.

          More important was the nonfeasance of the Inquisition with respect to simony. This was the corroding cancer of the Church throughout the whole of the Middle Ages -- the source whence sprang almost all the evils with which she afflicted Christendom. From the highest to the lowest, from the pope to the humblest parish priest, the curse was universal. Those who had only the sacraments to sell made a trade of them. Those whose loftier position gave them command of benefices and preferment, of dispensation and of justice, had no shame in offering their wares in open market, and preferment thus obtained filled the Church with mercenary and rapacious men whose sole object was to swell their purses by extortion and to find enjoyment in ignoble vices." p. 624

18.       "Simony was recognized in the canon law as a heresy, punishable as heresy with perpetual seclusion, and as such was justicable by the Inquisition. With that organization at the command of the Holy See the untiring energy which through so many generations pursued the Cathari and Waldenses could in time have cured this spreading ulcer and purified the Church, but the Inquisition was never instructed to prosecute simoniacs, and there is no trace in its records that it ever volunteered to do so. In fact, had any overzealous official tempted such uncalled-for work he would speedily have been brought to his senses, for simony was not only the direct source of profit to the curia in the sale of preferment, but indirectly so in the sale of dispensations to those who had incurred its disabilities. It seems almost a contradiction in terms to speak of the Holy See issuing dispensations for heresy, and yet this was habitual. Legates and nuncios, when dispatched abroad, were empowered to gather a harvest among the faithful by issuing dispensations for all manner of disabilities and irregularities, and among these simony is conspicuously noted. This ceased when John XXII systematized the sale of absolutions and drew everything to the papal penitentiary, when pardon for simony in a layman could be had for six grossi, in a cleric for seven, and in a monk for eight. It is easy to see why the Inquisition was not used to suppress a heresy so profitable in every aspect. Indeed, while under the canon law it was held to be a heresy, yet it was practically never treated as such. Guillame Durand, in his Speculum Juris, written in 1271, gives formulas for the accusation, by private individuals, of simoniacal bishops and priests and monks, but neither he nor his numerous commentators make the slightest allusion to it as subject to the procedure against heresy.

          It would be impossible to exaggerate the corruption which from this cause interpenetrated every fiber of the Church, filling benefices with ignorant and worldly men, eager to wring from the unfortunates committed to their cure the sums with which they had bought the preferment. Stephen Palecz, in a sermon preached before the Council of Constance, declares that there is scarce a church in Christendom free from the stain of simony, owing to the desperate struggle of all kinds of men to obtain the honors, wealth, and luxury attending an ecclesiastical preferment, and resulting in the promotion of the ignorant, weak, and wicked, who could not find employment as shepherds or swineherds. So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See that dialecticians and jurists of high authority seriously argued that the pope could not commit simony. " p. 625-627

19.       "Under such a system it is easy to conceive the character of the prelates and priests with which the Church was everywhere afflicted. Making some allowance for rhetorical enthusiasm, the invective of Nicholas de Clemangis must be received as true. As for the bishops, he says, as they have to spend all the money they can raise to obtain their sees, they devote themselves exclusively to extortion, neglecting wholly their pastoral duties and the spiritual welfare of their flocks; and if, by chance, one of them happens to pay attention to such subjects, he is despised as unworthy of his order. Preaching is regarded as disgraceful. All preferment and all sacerdotal functions are sold, as well as every episcopal ministration, laying on of hands, confession, absolution, dispensation; and this openly defend, as they say they have not received gratis, and are not bound to give gratis. The only benefices bestowed without payment are to their bastards and jugglers. Their jurisdiction is turned equally to account. The greatest criminals can purchase pardon, while their proctors trump up charges against innocent rustic which have to be compounded. Citations under excommunications, delays and repeated citation, are employed, until the most obstinate is worn out and forced to settle, with enormous charges added to the original trifling fine. Men prefer to live under the most cruel tyrants rather than undergo the judgments of the bishops. Absenteeism is the rule. Many of the bishops never see their dioceses; and these are the more useful than those who reside, for the latter contaminate their people by their evil example. As no examination is made into the lives of aspirants to the priesthood, but only as to their ability to pay the stipulated price, the Church is filled with ignorant and immoral men. Few are able to read. They haunt the taverns and brothels, consuming time and substance in eating, drinking, and gambling; they quarrel, fight, and blaspheme, and hasten to the alter from the embrace of their concubines. Canons are no better; since, for the most part, they have bought exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, they commit all sorts of crimes and scandals with impunity. As for monks, they specially avoid all to which their vows oblige them -- chastity, poverty, and obedience -- and are licentious and undisciplined vagabonds. The Mendicants, who pretend to make amends for the neglect of duty by the secular clergy, are pharisees and wolves in sheep's clothing. With incredible eagerness and infinite deceit they seek everywhere for temporal gain; they abandon themselves beyond all other men to the pleasures of the flesh, feasting and drinking, and polluting all things with their burning lusts. As for the nuns, modesty forbids the description of the nunneries, which are mere brothels, so that to take the veil is equivalent to becoming a public prostitute." pp. 629-631

20.       "Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of Pius II quoted above, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.

          This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offense was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." pp. 641-642

21.       "This was the outcome of the theocracy whose foundation had been laid by Hildebrand in the honest belief that it would realized the reign of Christ on earth. Power such as was claimed and exercised by the Church could only be wielded by superhuman wisdom. Human nature was too imperfect not to convert it into an instrumentality for the gratification of worldly passions and ambition, and its inevitable result was to plunge society deeper and deeper into corruption, as unity of faith was enforced by persecution. In this enforcement, as I have said, faith became the only object of supreme importance, and morals were completely subordinated, tending naturally to the creation of a perfectly artificial and arbitrary standard of conduct. If, to win the favor of Satan, a man trampled on the Eucharist believing it to be the body of Christ, he was not liable to the pains of heresy; but if he did so out of disbelief, he was a heretic. If he took interest for money believing it to be wrong, he was comparatively safe; if believing it to be right, he was condemned. It was not the act, but the mental process, that was of primary importance, and willful wrong-doing was treated more tenderly than ignorant conscientiousness. Thus the divine law on which the Church professed to be founded was superseded by human law administered by those who profited by its abuse. As cardinal d'Ailly tells us, the doctors of civil law regarded the imperial jurisprudence as more binding than the commands of God, while the professors of canon law taught that the papal decretals were of greater weight than Scripture. Such a theocracy, practically deeming itself as superior to its God, when it had overcome all dissidence, could have but one result.

          When we consider, however, the simple earnestness with which such multitudes of humble heretics endured the extremity of outrage and the most cruel of deaths, in the endeavor to ascertain and obey the will of God in the fashioning of their lives, we recognize what material existed for the development of true Christianity, and for the improvement of the race, far down in the obscurer ranks of society. We can see now how greatly advanced might be the condition of humanity had that leaven been allowed to penetrate the whole mass in place of being burned out with fire. Unorganized and unresisting, the heretics were unable to withstand the overwhelming forces arrayed against them. Power and place and wealth were threatened by their practical interpretation of the teachings of Christ. The pride of opinion in the vast and laboriously constructed theories of scholastic theology, the conscientious belief in the exclusive salvation obtainable through the Church alone, the recognized duty of exterminating the infected sheep and preserving the vineyard of the Lord from the raves of heretical foxes, all united to form a conservatism against which even the heroic endurance of the sectaries was unavailing. Yet there are few pages in the history of humanity more touching, few records of self-sacrifice more inspiring, few examples more instructive of the height to which the soul can rise above the weaknesses of the flesh, than those which we may glean from the fragmentary documents of the Inquisition and the scanty references of the chroniclers to the abhorred heretics so industriously tracked and so pitilessly dispatched. Ignorant and toiling men and women -- peasants, mechanics, and the like -- dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong, that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was capable of higher development, if it could but find and follow the Divine Will; striving each in his humble sphere to solve the inscrutable and awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation, and to help his fellows in the arduous task -- these forgotten martyrs of the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martydom. No prizes of ambition lay before them to tempt their departure from the safe and beaten track, no sympathizing crowds surrounded the piles of fagots and strengthened them in the fearful trial; but scorn and hatred and loathing were their portion to the last. Save in cases of relapse, life could always be saved by recantation and return to the bosom of the Church, which was recognized that even from a worldly point of view a converted heretic was more valuable than a martyred one, yet the steadfast resolution, which the orthodox characterized as satanic hardening of the heart, was too common to excite surprise.

          This inestimable material for the elevation of humanity was plucked up as tares and cast into the furnace. Society, so long as it was orthodox and docile, was allowed to wallow in all the wickedness which depravity might suggest. The supreme object of uniformity in faith was practically attained, and the moral condition of mankind was dismissed from consideration as of no importance. Yet the incongruity between the ideal of Christianity and its realization was too unnatural for the situation to be permenant. In the Church as well as out of it there was a leaven working. While St. Brigitta was thundering her revelations in the unwilling ears of Gregory XI, William Langland, the monk of Malvern, sharpened his bitter denunciations of friar and prelate by reminding the common-folk that love and truth were the sole essentials of Christianity --

    "Love is leche of lyf and nexte ownre lorde selve,
    And also the graith gate that goth in-to hevene;
    For-thi I sey as I seide ere by the textis,
    Whan alle tresores been ytryed treuthe is the beste.
    Now have I told the what truethe is, that no tresore is bettere,
    I may no lenger lenge the with, now loke the owre lorde!" (Vision, I 202-7)

    All such warnings, however, were disregarded, and in the hour of its unquestioning supremacy the sacerdotal system, which seemed impregnable to all assaults and to have no assailants, was on the eve of its overthrow. The Inquisition had been too successful. So complete had been the triumph of the Church that the old machinery was allowed to become out of gear and to rust for want of daily use. The Inquisition itself had ceased to inspire its old-time terror. For a century it had little to do save an occasional foray upon the peasants of the Alpine valleys, or an extortion on the Jews of Palermo, or the fomenting of a witchcraft craze. It no longer had the stimulus of active work or the opportunity of impressing the minds of the people with the certainty of its vengeance and the terrors of its holocausts.

          At the same time the Great Schism had inflicted a serious blow upon the veneration entertained for the Holy See by both clergy and laity, which found expression in the great councils of Constance and Basle. Dexterous management, it is true, averted the immediate dangers threatened by these parliaments of Christendom, and the Church remained in theory an autocracy instead of being converted into a constitutional monarchy, but nevertheless the old unquestioning confidence in the vicegerent of God was gone, while the aspirations of Christendom grew stronger under repression. The invention of printing came to stimulate the spread of enlightenment, and a reading public gradually formed itself, reached and influenced by other modes than the pulpit and the lecture-room, which had been the monopoly of the Church. No longer was culture virtually the sole appanage of ecclesiastics. The new Learning spread among a daily increasing class the thirst for knowledge and the critical spirit of inquiry, which insensibly undermined the traditional claims of the Church on the veneration and obedience of mankind.

          Save in Spain where racial divisions furnished peculiar factors to the problem, everything conspired to disarm the Inquisition and render it powerless when it was most sorely needed. Orthodox uniformity had been so successfully enforced that the popes of the fifteenth century, immersed in worldly cares beyond the capacity of the Inquisition to gratify, scarce gave themselves the trouble to keep up its organization; and, save when some madness of witchcraft called for victims, the people and the local clergy made no demand for vindicators of the faith. Scholastic quarrels, for the most part, were settled by the universities, which arrogated to themselves much of the jurisdiction of the Holy Office; and the episcopal ordinaries seemed almost to have forgotten the functions which were theirs by immemorial right.

          Although German orthodoxy had been so uniform that the Inquisition there had always been weak and unorganized, yet Germany was the inevitable seat of the revolt. In England and France the power of a monarchy, backed by a united people, had set some bounds to papal aggression and assumption. In Italy the pope was regarded more as a temporal prince than as the head of the Church, and the Ghibellines had never hesitated to oppose his schemes of political aggrandizement. In Germany, however, the papal policy of disunion and civil strife had proved fatally successful, and since the untimely death of Louis of Bavaria there had been no central power strong enough to defend the people and the local churches from the avarice and ambition of the representatives of St. Peter. Luther came when the public mind was receptive and insubordinate, and when there was no organized instrumentality for his prompt repression. As I have already pointed out, his scholastic discussion as to the power of the keys seemed at first too insignificant to require attention; when the debate enlarged there were no means at hand for its speedy suppression, and, by the time the Church could marshal its unwieldy forces, the people had espoused his cause in a region where, as the Sachsenspiegel shows, there was no hereditary or prescriptive readiness to venerate the canon law. The hour, the place, and the man had met by a happy concurrence, and the era of modern civilization and unfettered thought was opened, in spite of the fact that the reformers were as rigid as the orthodox in setting bounds to dogmatic independence.

          The reviews which we have made of the follies and crimes of our ancestors has revealed to us a scene of almost unrelieved blackness. We have seen how the wayward heart of man, groping in twilight, has under the best of impulses inflicted misery and despair on his fellow-creatures while thinking to serve God, and how the ambitious and unprincipled have traded on those impulses to gratify the lust of avarice and dominion. Yet such a review, rightly estimated, is full of hope and encouragement. In the unrest of modern society, where immediate relief is sought from the mass of evils oppressing mankind, and impatience is eager to overturn all social organization in the hope of founding a new structure where preventable misery shall be unknown, it is well occasionally to take a backward view, to tear away the veil which conceals the passions and the sufferings of bygone generations, and estimate fairly the progress already effected. Human development is slow and irregular; to the observer at a given point it appears stationary or retrogressive, and it is only by comparing periods removed by a considerable interval of time that the movement can be appreciated. Such a retrospect as we have wearily accomplished has shown us how, but a few centuries since, the infliction of gratuitous evil was deemed the highest duty of man, and we learn how much has been gained to the empire of Christian love and charity. We have seen how the administration of law, both spiritual and secular, was little other than organized wrong and injustice; we have seen how low were the moral standards, and how debased the mental condition of the populations of Christendom. We have seen that the Ages of Faith, to which romantic dreamers regretfully look back, were ages of force and fraud, where evil seemed to reign almost unchecked, justifying the current opinion, so constantly reappearing, that the reign of the Antichrist had already begun. Imperfect as are human institutions to-day, a comparison with the past shows how marvelous has been the improvement, and the fact that this gain has been made almost wholly within the last two centuries, and that it is advancing with accelerated momentum, affords to the sociologist the most cheering encouragement. Principles have been established which, if allowed to develop themselves naturally and healthfully, will render the future of mankind very different from aught that the world has yet seen. The greatest danger to modern society lies in the impatient theorists who desire to reform the world at a blow, in place of aiding in the struggle of good with evil under the guidance of eternal laws. Could they be convinced of the advance so swiftly made and of its steady development, they might moderate their ardor and direct their energies to wise construction rather than to heedless destruction.

          A few words will suffice to summarize the career of the medieval Inquisition. It introduced a system of jurisprudence which infected the criminal law of all the lands subjected to its influence, and rendered the administration of penal justice a cruel mockery for centuries. It furnished the Holy See with a powerful weapon in aid of political aggrandizement, it tempted secular sovereigns to imitate the example, and it prostituted the name of religion to the vilest temporal ends. It stimulated the morbid sensitiveness to doctrinal aberrations until the most trifling dissidence was capable of arousing insane fury, and of convulsing Europe from end to end. On the other hand, when atheism became fashionable in high places, its thunders were mute. Energetic only in evil, when its powers might have been used on the side of virtue, it held its hand and gave the people to understand that the only sins demanding repression were doubt as to the accuracy of the Church's knowledge of the unknown, and attendance on the Sabbat. In its long career of blood and fire, the only credit which it can claim is the suppression of the pernicious dogmas of the Cathari, and in this its agency may be regarded as superfluous, for those dogmas carried in themselves the seeds of self-destruction, and higher wisdom might have trusted to their self-extinction. Thus the judgment of impartial history must be that the Inquisition was the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal, utilized by selfish greed and lust of power to smother the higher aspirations of humanity and stimulate its baser appetites." pp. 644-650

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