274 POLITICAL HERESY,— THE STATE. if he had not he would have been imprisoned for life, and Hugues de Peraud, the Visitor of France, declared that it was obligatory on him.* It would be a work of supererogation to pursue this examina- tion further. The same irreconcilable confusion reigns in the evi- dence as to the other charges — the cord of chastity, the obscene kiss, the mutilation of the canon of the mass,f the power of abso- lution assigned to the Grand Master, the license for unnatural crime. It might be argued, as these witnesses had been received into the Order at times varying from fifty to sixty years previous to within a few months, and at places so widely apart as Palestine and England, that these variations are explicable by local usages or by a gradually perfected belief and ritual. An investigation of the confessions shows, however, that no such explanation will suf- fice ; there can be no grouping as to the time or place of the cere- mony. Yet there can be a grouping which is of supreme signifi- cance, a grouping as to the tribunal through which the witness passed. This is often very notable among the two hundred and twenty-five who were sent to the papal commission from various parts of France, and examined in 1310 and 1311. As a rule they manifested extreme anxiety that their present depositions should accord with those which they had made when subject to inquisi- tion by the bishops — doubtless they made them as nearly so as their memories would permit — and it is easy to see how greater or less rigor, or how concert between those confined in the same pris- on, had led to the concoction of stories such as would satisfy their
- Proces, I. 404; II. 260, 281, 284, 295, 299, 338, 354, 356, 363, 389, 3C0, 395,
407.— Bini, pp. 468, 488. It is not easy to appreciate the reasoning of Michelet (Proces, II. vii.-viii.), ■who argues that the uniformity of denial in a series of depositions taken by the Bishop of Elne suggests concert of statement agreed upon in advance, while the variations in those who admitted guilt are an evidence of their veracity. If the Templars were innocent, denials of the charges read to them seriatim would be necessarily identical ; if they were guilty, the confessions would be likewise uni- form. Thus the identity of the one group and the diversity of the other both concur to disprove the accusations. t Incontrovertible evidence that the Templar priests did not mutilate the words of consecration in the mass is furnished in the Cypriote i^roceedings by ecclesiastics who had long dwelt with them in the East. — Processus Cypricus ^Schottmiiller, II. 379, 382, 383).
