mples of
this development. Men have found justification by good
works as well as faith.

INTOLERANCE AND INQUISITION. The influence of religious
tradition over the minds of its followers has had, among many
noble and beautiful consequences, the dark fruits of intolerance,
persecution, inquisition, and torture. Part of the bitter
narrow-mindedness which has characterized the history of
ecclesiastical institutions is not to be attributed specifically
to religion. It is rather to be explained by the general uneasiness
which the gregarious human creature feels at any
deviation from the accustomed. In addition men have felt
frequently that any divergence from the divinely ordained
would bring destruction upon the whole group. In the Christian
tradition there was an additional reason for intolerance:
the heretic was willfully losing his own soul, and it was only
humane to compel him to come "into the fold, to rescue him
from the pains he would otherwise suffer in Hell."

The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its
doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological
error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to
persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine,
seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors
from spreading. Heretics were more than ordinary criminals, and
the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the
tortures awaiting them in hell.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bury: _History of Freedom of Thought_, pp. 52-53.]

In fevered zeal for the Faith began that long hunting and
punishment of heresy, which has done so much to darken the
history of religion in Western Europe. There were, as in the
Albigensian Crusade, wholesale burnings and hangings of men,
women, and children.[1] Heresy was hunted out in secret retreats.
"It was the foulest of crimes; to prevail against it
was to prevail against the legions of Hell." The culmination
of intolerance was, of course, the Inquisition. One need not
pause to recall its espionage system, its search for the spreaders
of false doctrine, its use of any and every witness against the
suspect, its granting of indulgences to any one who should
bear witness against him, its "relaxing of the criminal to the
secular arm," which unfailingly punished him with death. It
must be pointed out that in the instance of the Inquisition,
just as in the case of all religious persecution,