yone should have freedom of
conscience [Sidenote: Freedom of conscience] was "madness flowing from
the most foul fountain of indifference." [1] Augustine believed that
the church should "compel men to enter in" to the kingdom, by force.
Aquinas argued that faith is a virtue, infidelity of those who have
heard the truth a sin, and that "heretics deserve not only to be
excommunicated but to be put to death." One of Luther's propositions
condemned by the bull _Exsurge Domine_ was that it is against the will
of the Holy Ghost to put heretics to death. When Erasmus wrote: "Who
ever heard orthodox bishops incite kings to slaughter heretics who were
nothing else than heretics?" the proposition was condemned, by the
Sorbonne, as repugnant to the laws of nature, of God and of man. The
power of the pope to depose and punish heretical princes was asserted
in the bull of February 15, 1559.

The theory of the Catholic church was put into instant practice; the
duty of persecution was carried out by the Holy Office, of which Lord
Acton, though himself a Catholic, has said:[2]

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly
the work of the popes. It stands out from all those things
in which they co-operated, followed or assented, as the
distinctive feature of papal Rome. . . . It is the
principal thing with which the papacy is identified and by
which it must be judged. The principle of the Inquisition
is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is
regulated and determined by his opinion about religious
assassination.

But Acton's judgment, just, as it is severe, is not the judgment of the
church. A prelate of the papal {643} household published in 1895, the
following words in the _Annales ecclesiastici_:[3]

Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils
and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle
Ages. But let not us, blinded by that liberalism that
bewitches under the guise of wisdom, seek for silly little
reasons to defend the Inquisition! Let no one speak of
the condition of the times and intemperate zeal, as if the
church needed excuses. O blessed flames of those pyres
by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons
were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes
of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and
eternal damnation! O noble and venerable memory of
Torquemada!

[Sidenote: Protestants]

So much for the