ese painful volumes want, that we may not be
found with the traveller who discovered a precipice to the right of him,
another to the left, and nothing between. Their profound and admirable
erudition leads up, like Hellwald's _Culturgeschichte_, to a great note
of interrogation. When we find the Carolina and the savage justice of
Tudor judges brought to bear on the exquisitely complex psychological
revolution that proceeded, after the year 1200, about the Gulf of Lyons
and the Tyrrhene Sea, we miss the historic question. When we learn that
Priscillian was murdered (i. 214), but that Lechler has no business to
call the sentence on John Hus "ein wahrer Justizmord" (ii. 494), and
then again that the burning of a heretic is a judicial murder after all
(i. 552), we feel bereft of the philosophic answer.

Although Mr. Lea gives little heed to Pani and Hefele, Gams and Du Boys,
and the others who write for the Inquisition without pleading ignorance,
he emphasises a Belgian who lately wrote that the Church never employed
direct constraint against heretics. People who never heard of the
Belgian will wonder that so much is made of this conventional figleaf.
Nearly the same assertion may be found, with varieties of caution and of
confidence, in a catena of divines, from Bergier to Newman. To appear
unfamiliar with the defence exposes the writer to the thrust that you
cannot know the strength or the weakness of a case until you have heard
its advocates. The liberality of Leo XIII., which has yielded a
splendid and impartial harvest to Ehrle, and Schottmueller, and the
Ecole Francaise, raises the question whether the Abbe Duchesne or Father
Denifle supplied with all the resources of the archives which are no
longer secret would produce a very different or more complete account.
As a philosophy of religious persecution the book is inadequate. The
derivation of sects, though resting always upon good supports, stands
out from an indistinct background of dogmatic history. The intruding
maxims, darkened by shadows of earth, fail to ensure at all times the
objective and delicate handling of mediaeval theory. But the vital parts
are protected by a panoply of mail. From the Albigensian crusade to the
fall of the Templars and to that Franciscan movement wherein the key to
Dante lies, the design and organisation, the activity and decline of the
Inquisition constitute a sound and solid structure that will survive the
censure of all critics. Apar