Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/636

626 Reviews of Books however, that even with the Spanish Inquisition torture was rare or hght; and strong must be the nerves of the reader who can follow Mr. Lea through his recital of its horrors. In general, sums up the historian (p. 36), "the procedure of the Inquisition was directed to procuring conviction rather than justice." " It was the business of the tribunal, while preserving outward forms of justice, to bring about either confession or conviction; the defence was limited and embarrassed in every way and, when the outcome of all this was doubt, it was settled in the torture^chamber, always with the reservation that, if suspicion remained, that in itself was a crime de- serving due punishment." As to its punishments Mr. Lea points out (p. 93) an important dif- ference from the secular courts. " The Inquisition had full discretion and was bound by no rules. It was the only tribunal known to the civilized world which prescribed penalties and modified them at its will." For stubborn and impenitent heresy, of course, the penalty was the stake and confiscation ; but these were penalties prescribed by the state, to which the heretic must be turned over for condemnation and execution. " This shifting of responsibility to the civil power ", Mr. Lea finds it wise again to remind us (p. 184), "was not through any sense that the laws punishing heresy with burning were cruel or unjust." On the contrary, " the Church taught this to be an act so eminently pious that it accorded an indulgence to any one who would contribute wood to the pile ", and " the secular power had no choice as to what it should do with heretics delivered to it; its act was purely ministerial, and if it listened to the hypocritical plea for mercy, it was liable to prosecution as a fautor of heresy and to deprivation of its functions." Indeed, " in the hurried informality of the early period, it seems to have been indifferent whether the magistrate pronounced a sentence or not " ; and, in general, " the Inquisition regarded the sentence of the magis- trate as a mere perfunctory formality." In the extermination of heresy Mr. Lea finds the methods of the Spanish Inquisition more merciless than those of its medieval prede- cessor. Not only the frankly impenitent heretic and the penitent who relapsed into his heresy must be sent to the stake, but the ncgativo, who denied a heresy which the Inquisition deemed proved against him, and the diminuto, who confessed to less than the evidence seemed to demand. As these, were they really heretics, could have no object in persisting in denial after the sentence had once been pronounced, and as this persistence robbed them both of the final consolations of religion and of the merciful strangulation which might else have preceded their burn- ing, it is impossible, as Mr. Lea points out (p. 198), not to recognize in them martyrs of orthodoxy; but such little incidents were far better than the escape of a possible heretic. Indeed, when the advent of Protestantism deepened the fear and hatred of heresy, yet sharper measures were demanded. Not even recantation could longer save the disseminator of heresy from the stake, and relapse need not be waited