the sufferers green, to the discomfiture of their descendants. Many individuals, moved by zeal or by malignity, from these and other sources, with greater or less exactness, and including much that was mere idle hearsay, compiled books which were circulated under the name of _Libros verde_ or _del Becerro_. No one of the upper or middle class, except in the remote mountainous districts of the North and East, could feel secure that investigation might not reveal some unfortunate _mésalliance_ of a distant ancestor. In fact, only those could feel safe whose obscurity precluded any prolonged research into their ancestry. As a writer remarks, in 1629, if it were not for limpieza the Inquisition could select the best men for familiars, in place of appointing the low-born whose ignorance enables them to pass the examinations successfully.[874] The second source of impurity--descent from one penanced by the Inquisition--originally applied only to those who had incurred the heavier penalties of relaxation or reconciliation, but there was nothing to check the scrupulosity of the examiners, who worked in secret, and they came to regard any penance inflicted by the Holy Office as affixing an indelible stigma on the descendants. The results of this are forcibly described in a memorial presented, in 1631, to Philip IV by Doctor Diego de Sylva, a member of the Suprema. After alluding to the greatly increased rigor of investigation, dating from the later years of Philip II, he proceeds to state a further source of wrong only appreciable by one who has handled the records of the Inquisition, and not to be openly mentioned. In contrast to the exquisite justice and benignity which he ascribes to the existing tribunals, the proceedings in the earlier period were hurried and violent; many to save their lives made confessions which may have been groundless; whole districts were reconciled rather as a spiritual than a judicial process; in that dangerous period careless words and propositions created suspicion, and people were tried and dismissed with some trivial penance--a few masses, some almsgiving or a light fast--for offences belonging really to the exterior forum. Yet all these were sentences and, as there has since grown up the rule requiring immemorial limpieza, whole families are branded with infamy.[875] As, in fact, since the Reformation, the Inquisition had grown more and more exacting and had inflicted on Old Christians innumerable penances for careless words, it is easy to conceive how this rigorous definition of limpieza spread infection throughout the land, even outside of those who had a drop of Jewish or Moorish blood.