Untitled - Shattering Denial

254
TNE INQUISITION
to their tribunal. They felt it their right and duty to
punish not only crimes against society, but sins against
faith.
The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, there
fore, an institution whose severity and cruelty are ex
plained by the ideas and manners of the age. We will
never understand it, unless we consider it in its environ
ment, and from the view-point of men like St. Thomas
Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by
their genius. Critics to whom the Middle Ages is an
unknown book may feel at liberty to shower insult and
contempt upon a judicial system whose is severity natu
rally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always
imply a reasonable judgment, and to abuse an institu
tion is not necessarily a proof of intelligence.
If we
would judge an epoch intelligently, we must be able to
grasp the view-point of other men, even if they lived
in an age long past.
But even if we grant the good faith and good will of
the founders and judges of the Inquisition we speak
only, be it understood, of those who acted conscientiously
we must still maintain that their idea of justice was
far inferior to ours. Whether taken in itself or compared
with other criminal procedures, the Inquisition was, so
far as the guarantees of equity are concerned, un
doubtedly unjust and inferior. Such judicial
forms as
the secrecy of the trial, the prosecution carried on inde-