Untitled - Shattering Denial

THE INQUISITION 225
Such severity, nay, such cruelty, shown to what we
would call "a crime of opinion/ is hard for men of our
day to understand. "To comprehend it," says Lea,
"we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization
in many respects wholly
unlike our own. Passions were
fiercer, convictions stronger, virtues and vices more ex
aggerated,
than in our colder and self-contained time.
have only
The age, moreover, was a cruel one. . . . We
to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the
Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings
with one another. The wheel, the caldron of boiling oil,
burning alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the
ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought
to deter men from crime by frightful examples which
would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive
l
population."
Contra libellum Calvini in quo ostendere conatur hcereticos jure gladii carcendos
esse, which was not published until 1612, in Holland. We know that the
Calvinists of our day utterly repudiate the theory of Calvin. On November
i, 1903, the city of Geneva erected a statue in the Place de Champel where
Servetus had been burned, with this inscription: A Michel Servet. Fils
respectueux et reconnaissants de Calvin, mais condamnant une erreur qui
fut celle de son siecle, et fermement attaches a la liberte de conscience selon
les vrais principes de la Reformation et de 1 Evangile, nous avons eleve ce
monument expiatoire, le 27 octobre 1903.
1
Lea, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 234, 235. He continues: "An Anglo-Saxon law
punishes a female slave convicted of theft, by making eighty other female slaves
each bring three pieces of wood and burn her to death, while each contributed
a fine besides; and in mediaeval England, burning was the customary penalty
for attempts on the life of the feudal lord. In the customs of Arques, granted
by the Abbey of Saint-Bertin in 1231, there is a provision that if a thief have
a concubine who is his accomplice, she is to be buried alive. . . . Frederic II,
16