ossible at all is a
melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute
inferior imitations for genuine morality.

[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of
moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des
Papst-tums_[3], 1911, pp. 447 ff.

SECTION 5. THE INQUISITION AND INDEX

Not only by propaganda appealing to the mind and heart did the Catholic
church roll back the tides of Reformation and Renaissance, but by
coercion also. In this the church was not alone; the Protestants also
persecuted and they also censored the press with the object of
preventing their adherents from reading the arguments of their
opponents. But the Catholic {412} church was not only more consistent
in the application of her intolerant theories but she almost always
assumed the direction of the coercive measures directly instead of
applying them through the agency of the state. Divided as they were,
dependent on the support of the civil government and hampered, at least
to some slight extent, by their more liberal tendencies, the
Protestants never had instrumentalities half as efficient or one-tenth
as terrible as the Inquisition and the Index.

The Inquisition was a child of the Middle Ages. For centuries before
Luther the Holy Office had cauterized the heretical growths on the body
of Mother Church. The old form was utilized but was given a new lease
of life by the work it was called upon to perform against the
Protestants. Outside of the Netherlands the two forms of the
Inquisition which played the largest part in the battles of the
sixteenth century were the Spanish and the Roman.

[Sidenote: Spanish Inquisition]

The Inquisition was licensed in Spain by a bull of Sixtus IV of 1478,
and actually established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Castile in 1480,
and soon afterwards in their other dominions. It has sometimes been
said that the Spanish Inquisition was really a political rather than an
ecclesiastical instrument, but the latest historian of the subject,
whose deep study makes his verdict final, has disposed of this theory.
Though occasionally called upon to interfere in political matters, this
was exceptional. Far more often it asserted an authority and an
independence that embarrassed not a little the royal government. On
the other hand it soon grew so great and powerful that it was able to
ignore the commands of the popes. On account of its irresponsibl