Charles T. Gorham

“ Grant the extravagant supposition that all the Inquisitors were men of probity, kind, well-meaning, and conscientious—what we are chiefly concerned with are the effects produced by the system of repression which they so rigidly enforced. We have to judge whether it did or did not make for human happiness and the advance of civilization. Intellectual freedom is no less essential to progress than purity of morals. The Inquisition at least temporarily destroyed the one, and certainly did not promote the other. Knowledge grows by being shared; one idea leads, by association, to others ”

“ What, then, was the moral condition during the Middle Ages of the organization which made these extravagant claims to supremacy? To us who live in the twentieth century it may appear very plain that priestly domination could not be favourable to improvement in morals or in knowledge. Prevent people from thinking, and you prevent them from improving. They lose the desire to improve; they become incapable of improvement; they neither know nor care for the pleasures of knowledge; they relapse into a state resembling that of animals. Can it be supposed that this has no effect upon their morals? ”

“ We hear much of martyrs and confessors—of those who were slain by the sword or consumed in the fire; but we know little of that still larger number who, by the mere threat of persecution, have been driven into an outward abandonment of their real opinions, and who, thus forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have passed the remainder of their lives in the practice of a constant and humiliating hypocrisy. It is this which is the real curse of religious persecution. ”

“ THE GENTLE ART OF WHITEWASHING If the Inquisition really was the beneficent institution which some of its apologists represent, it is singular that their defences should be so weak and their admissions so damaging. The line taken is, in the main, that heresy is a crime against social order, that the Holy Office embodied the tendencies of the age, that its methods were no worse than those of the secular powers—were, indeed, an improvement upon them, and that no special reproach can be directed against the Church on the score of inhumanity. ”

“ The Inquisition codified and collated the various enactments into a logical system, which, having behind it the united authority of Church and State, became an irresistible engine of terrorism and tyranny. [20] The suppression of heresy was, indeed, the paramount duty of every Christian to the full extent of his power. No matter who was the guilty party—father, son, husband, wife, or sister—each must be denounced for concealing heresy; there could be no excuse. “It was an absolute rule that faith was not to be kept with heretics. ”

“ A religion which imagined that it was the repository of a full and final revelation, that it possessed the keys of the invisible world, and which regarded every doubt as a heresy born of the devil, naturally became in practice a vast machine for persecution. When mental activity was thus a crime, and any attempt to increase knowledge an act of rebellion against God, it was clear that human progress was brought to a standstill. No one can tell what progress would have been made had the Inquisition not existed ”

“ The general ignorance was so great that a premature abandonment of the orthodox faith might have been made the occasion of even more flagrant moral licence than actually existed, and so have strengthened the hands of the persecutors. A system which held all religions to be untrue, especially the religion of the Christians, who daily ate their God, would naturally enough be thought to emanate from the bottomless pit, and it is an astonishing circumstance that for a long time the Inquisition left Averrhoism alone. ”

“ Whatever were the causes of this appalling state of things, it is difficult to reconcile it with the claim that the Christian Church is a Divine institution. Yet it would not be true to say that no virtue existed. Even in the Church there were good and sincere men who strove earnestly to check the tide of iniquity. And those whom the Church hounded to death far surpassed it in purity of life. The poor persecuted heretics were noted for their blameless conduct, their singular industry, their self-sacrifice and endurance, which formed a lesson to the orthodox. ”

“ Let it be admitted that the Inquisitors—at least originally—were well-intentioned men, who sought to promote religion as they understood it. The question arises, Did they understand religion rightly? To them religion was a complete and final revelation of a Divine will; the true faith could be one only as God was one; all who sought to disturb that faith, however good their intentions might be, were guilty of a sin worse than temporal rebellion. Have we nothing to learn from their awful error? If we may judge from the Catholic Encyclopædia, the Church of Rome has not learned much. ”

“ But this does not explain how it was that many men, both in the Church and out of it, were so much in advance of the Inquisition as to disapprove of people being put to death for their religious opinions. If Thomas Aquinas advocated the death penalty for heresy, several eminent Fathers of the Church deprecated it, holding persuasion to be the better method. Why was not the milder and more ancient view adopted? It is suicidal to admit that the Church held back from torture and death for centuries on the ground that they were inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. ”

“ Avaricious men were enabled by an incredibly bad system to make religion a public danger. Priests who led women astray on the plea that intercourse with holy men was not sinful, a depraved laity, religion severed from morals—these made up a state of society in which apprehensions existed that the wickedness of the clergy would provoke the people to rise against them, or perhaps even bring on the world the final visitation of Divine wrath. Good men asked why God did not intervene to save his Church from ruin. ”

“ The tenacious memory and sleepless vigilance of the Inquisition hunted out persons who years before had said a kind word to a heretic, or sent a copper to a sick person under suspicion. Public confidence was destroyed by the general dread that a careless word might ruin a man; that stories might, unknown to him, be circulated about him and come to the Inquisitors’ ears; that an enemy might secretly and safely gratify an old grudge, until at last poor wretches would inform against others rather than be themselves betrayed. ”

“ Catharism was little known in Germany, and the heretics were mainly Waldenses. A body allied to them, known as the Ortlibenses, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, founded by one Ortlieb, of Strassburg, held that God was the essence of all creatures, and invisible except through them. From this it followed, or was believed to follow, that man, being an embodiment of the spirit of God, was incapable of sin. This doctrine swept away, not merely the entire apparatus of theology, but the whole system of observances which constituted the religion of the Church and the source of its wealth. ”

“ The attitude of the Inquisitors is not in the least surprising when in the twentieth century we find persecution defended as a religious duty. Another of its writers, Father Guiraud, echoes De Maistre’s contention that the Church of Rome alone possesses the truth, and therefore has a right to be intolerant. [61] The spirit of orthodox clericalism unmistakably appears in the tendency common to all these Romanist apologists to gloss over with a few smooth and casuistical phrases the most appalling deeds of cold-blooded cruelty which the world has ever seen. ”

“ Buckle, with justice, maintains that moral feelings alone are not equal to the task of preventing persecution. If the moral feelings are enlisted on the side of what is erroneously believed to be the truth, the sincerity of the persecutor only makes him the more dangerous to society. “That the Inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and incorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways and from different and independent sources of evidence.” ”

“ It was confiscation that kept alive religious persecution, because the heretics were ingeniously made to furnish the means for their own destruction, and when{47} all the heretics had been disposed of the languishing state of the Holy Office began to arouse real concern on the part of those who made good livings out of it. Confiscation of property for an assumed crime was one of the most effectual agencies for the destruction of civilization, and it is strange that Rome did not see the error of its ways when countries that had no Inquisition were increasing in prosperity and happiness. ”

“ Not only were the Church’s thunders ineffective because the higher clergy could escape them, but the reasons for them failed, even in the Middle Ages, to command universal assent. Sin was condemned rather because it violated an ordinance than because it broke a Divine law, or because it injured society. Some canons of 1476 protested against crimes, not because of their wickedness, but because they might deprive the clergy of the privilege of exemption from the Bishops’ jurisdiction. ”

“ Every victim relinquished by the Holy Office was a ticket-of-leave man, liable at any moment to utter ruin. He could never feel sure that something might not be discovered, perhaps a youthful indiscretion of his grandfather’s, which would require his appearance before the dread Tribunal, or that for some unguarded act or expression he might not bring himself under the most effective of all excommunications—that of the Holy Inquisition. ”

“ For ever to suppress truth is beyond the wit of man, but attempts to suppress it have cumulative effects in prolonging the reign of ignorance. It is not from the ignorant that intellectual greatness may be expected, and in its effect upon public morals sheer ignorance is the mother of more crime than some persons are willing to admit. Perhaps the Inquisitors did not realize the evil of stifling thought for centuries; perhaps{118} they did not know that the assassination of ideas is a crime. But their twentieth-century apologists cannot plead this ignorance. ”

“ If the administration of justice is promoted by torture, when in the extremity of pain people will confess anything, the correctness of the assertion must be admitted. If to burn men and women alive is the way to increase human happiness, the apologist is not audacious. Evidently the Church has not yet repented of or profited by its own lurid past. It would not be ashamed to persecute in the twentieth century if it had the power. ”

“ Throughout the country those Reformers who were unable to effect their escape betook themselves to their old lurking-places. The new religion was banished from the cities, every conventicle was broken up by armed men, the preachers and leading men were hanged, their disciples beaten with rods, reduced to beggary, or imprisoned, even if they sometimes escaped the scaffold. An incredible number, however, were executed for religious causes. Hardly a village so small, says the Antwerp chronicler, but that it could furnish one, two, or three hundred victims to the executioner. ”

“ The underlying passions are the same, but the forces evoking them vary so greatly that sometimes, as in considering the history of the Middle Ages, we seem to be concerned with beings from another planet. One of the most powerful of these forces is religion; and, though religion in the abstract is assumed to bring out all that is best in human nature, it has in the past only too frequently appealed to and stimulated its baser elements. The evil is due partly to erroneous religious teaching, but probably still more to the obstinate imperfection of the material on which religion has to work. ”

“ And it is curious that when in Southern France the majority of the people were heretics they showed no tendency to persecute, though they had the power. All the events, the movements, and the personages of human history are necessarily the consequences of their antecedents; but, unless we are to relieve all human beings from responsibility for their actions, we cannot exonerate the Inquisition from crimes of the greatest magnitude. ”

“ This was one of the reasons why the lives of heretics were generally purer than the lives of their oppressors. The mighty of this world persecuted the heretic; the secular courts were severe, the ecclesiastical tribunals were severer still; the main stream of public opinion ran strongly against all innovation in religion. It is not, therefore, to be supposed that the heretic became a voluntary outcast from a love of danger, or for the sake of enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. ”

“ When the Prince of Orange, who had earnestly defended the cause of freedom, left the Netherlands for Germany in 1567, the country, says Motley, “was absolutely helpless, the popular heart cold with apprehension. All persons at all implicated in the late troubles, or suspected of heresy, fled from their homes. Fugitive soldiers were hunted into rivers, cut to pieces in the fields, hanged, burned, or drowned, like dogs, without quarter and without remorse. The most industrious and valuable part of the population left the land in droves. ”