t horrible and
loathsome rites Madame de Montespan submitted for the sake of love and
hatred. That was done in the most refined and enlightened court in
Europe, in the best days of the French intellect, in the home of
Bossuet and Racine. It is not difficult to imagine what was believed
and what was attempted in ignorant and criminal classes five centuries
earlier. Now a witch was, by the hypothesis, a worshipper of the
devil, and the dualists fell under the same suspicion of propitiation
by sin. It was impossible to exterminate them too quickly, or to
devise torments worse than they deserved.

That was the situation towards the middle of the twelfth century.
There was a practice which the clergy desired to restrain, and which
they attempted to organise. We see by their writings that they
believed in many horrible imputations. As time went on, it appeared
that much of this was fable. But it also became known that it was not
all fabulous, and that the Albigensian creed culminated in what was
known as the Endura, which was in reality suicide. It was the object
of the Inquisition that such people should not indeed be spared, but
should not perish without a trial and without opportunity of
resipiscence, so that they might save their souls if not their lives.
Its founders could claim to act from motives both of mercy and of
justice against members of a satanic association. And it was not
against error or noncomformity simply, but against criminal error
erected into a system, that the Inquisitors forged their terrific
armoury. In the latter half of the fifteenth century their work was
done and their occupation gone. The dread tribunal lapsed into
obscurity. Therefore, when the Spaniards demanded to have it for the
coercion of the Jews, they asked for what was dormant, but not
abolished. It was a revival rather than a creation. And it was for a
specifically Spanish purpose. At Rome there were no Moors, and they
did not oppress the Jews. Even those who, having passed for
Christians, went back to their own faith, were permitted to do so by
Clement VII. Against such backsliding the Council of Toledo, under
the Gothic kings, had decreed the severest penalties, anticipating
Ferdinand and Isabella, or rather Torquemada and Ximenes, by eight
hundred years. Founded on the ancient lines, the Spanish Inquisition
was modified in the interest of the Crown, and became an important
attribute of absolutism.

When the Holy