, cap. xii,
in Martene, _Thesaurus Anecdotorum_, vol. v. col. 1741.

The casuists of the Inquisition, however, came to the rescue, and
tried to defend the Church by another subterfuge. They denounced in
so many words the death penalty and other similar punishments, while
at the same time they insisted upon the State's enforcing them. The
formula by which they dismissed an impenitent or a relapsed heretic
was thus worded: "We dismiss you from our ecclesiastical forum, and
abandon you to the secular arm. But we strongly beseech the secular
court to mitigate its sentence in such a way as to avoid bloodshed or
danger of death."[1] We regret to state, however, that the civil
judges were not supposed to take these words literally. If they were
at all inclined to do so, they would have been quickly called to a
sense of their duty by being excommunicated. The clause inserted by
the canonists was a mere legal fiction, which did not change matters
a particle.

[1] Eymeric, _Directorium Inquisitorum_, 3a pars, p. 515, col. 2.

It is hard to understand why such a formula was used at all. Probably
it was first used in other criminal cases in which abandonment to the
secular arm did not imply the death penalty, and the Inquisition kept
using it merely out of respect to tradition. It seemed to palliate
the too flagrant contradiction which existed between ecclesiastical
justice and the teaching of Christ, and it gave at least an external
homage to the teaching of St. Augustine, and the first Fathers of the
Church. Moreover, as it furnished a specious means of evading by the
merest form of prohibition against clerics taking part in sentences
involving the effusion of blood and death, aud the irregularity
resulting therefrom, the Inquisitors used it to reassure their
conscience.

Finally, however, some Inquisitors, realizing the emptiness of this
formula, dispensed with it altogether, and boldly assumed the full
responsibility for their sentences. They deemed the role of the State
so unimportant in the execration of heretics, that they did not even
mention it. The Inquisition is the real judge; it lights the fires.
"All whom we cause to be burned," says the famous Dominican Sprenger
in his _Malleus Maleficarum_.[1] Although not intended as an accurate
statement of fact,[2] it indicates pretty well the current idea
regarding the share of the ecclesiastical tribunals in the punishment
of heretics.

[1] _Malleus maleficarum maleficas