"This was
to punish a fanaticism," says Hallam, "ten thousand times more innocent
than their own, and errors which, according to the worst imputations,
left the laws of humanity and the peace of social life unimpaired."
Peace was concluded in 1229, but the persecution of heretics went on.

What part Dominic personally had in these bloody proceedings is
litigated history. His admirers strive to rescue his memory from the
charge that he was "a cruel and bloody man." It is argued that while the
pope and temporal princes carried on the sanguinary war against the
heretics, Dominic confined himself to pleading with them in a spirit of
true Christian love. He was a minister of mercy, not an avenging angel,
sword in hand. It has to be conceded that the constant tradition of the
Dominican order that Dominic was the first Inquisitor, whether he bore
the title or not, rests upon good authority. But what was the nature of
the office as held by the saint? As far as Dominic was concerned, it is
argued by his friends that the office "was limited to the
_reconciliation_ of heretics and had nothing to do with their
_punishment_." It is also claimed that while Dominic did impose
penances, in some cases public flagellation, no evidence can be produced
showing that he ever delivered one heretic to the flames. Those who were
burned were condemned by secular courts, and on the ground that they
were not only heretics but enemies of the public peace and perpetrators
of enormous crimes.

But while it may not be proved that Dominic himself passed the sentence
of death or applied the torch to the faggots with his own hand, he is by
no means absolved from all complicity in those frightful slaughters, or
from all responsibility for the subsequent establishment of the Holy
Inquisition. The principles governing the Inquisition were practically
those upon which Dominic proceeded; the germs of the later atrocities
are to be found in his aims and methods. By what a narrow margin does
Dominic escape the charge of cruelty when it is boasted "that he
resolutely insisted on no sentence being carried out until all means had
been tried by which the conversion of a prisoner could be effected."
Another statement also contains an inkling of a significant fact,
namely, that secular judges and princes were constantly under the
influence of the monks and other ecclesiastical persons, who incited
them to wage war, and to massacre, in the Albigensian war as in other