o the third grade. After three quarters of an hour on the
"Bock" she fell dead. The verdict was that she had cleared
herself, by enduring the torture, of the "evidence" against her,
and would have been freed if she had lived. She was to have
Christian burial, and a document attesting this finding was to be
given to her husband and children. Some jurists of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries were led to doubt about torture, but
they almost all agreed that it was necessary "in some cases."
These were the reformers who were careful not to be extremists.
We are told that Peter of Ravenna, in 1511, urged the abolition
of torture, and that Louis Vivez, a Spaniard, took the same
position a little later. Neither won any attention.[596] In the
Carolina, Charles V's law book of 1532, which was in general
savage in its penalties, torture was to be applied only in cases
punishable by death or life imprisonment, and only on strong
prima facie evidence of guilt. Confession under torture was to
have no weight unless confirmed after an interval. These
restrictions were not observed in practice.[597] There are very
many cases on record in which it was afterwards proved that many
persons had suffered torture and cruel execution, upon
confession, who were innocent of all crime.[598]

+263. The selection accomplished.+ Thus the apparatus and devices for
putting down dissent and enforcing submission to such authority as the
great number were willing to recognize had attained a superficial
success. Opposition was silenced. Dissent was made so dangerous that no
one dared express it, except here and there a hero, and outward
conformity to church discipline was almost universal. The mores also
underwent influence from a societal power which was great and pervading.
The external and artificial character of the conformity was so well
known that a name was given to it,--_implicita fides_,--and this was
discussed as to its nature and value. The mores are gravely affected by
_implicita fides_ when it is held by a great number of persons.[599] The
selection which had destroyed honest thinkers and sincere churchmen had
cultivated a class of smooth hypocrites and submissive cowards. In the
fifteenth century the whole of Christendom had accepted the church
system with its concepts of welfare and its dictates of duty, and had
adopted the ritual means of holiness and salvation which it presc