Occasional allusions have been made above to the Edicts of Faith, whereby the tribunals obtained knowledge of offences coming within their jurisdiction. This was one of the most efficient methods by which that jurisdiction was exercised and was brought home to the consciences of the people as an ever-present power. It rendered every individual an agent of the Inquisition, bound under fearful penalties spiritual and temporal, to aid it in maintaining the purity of the faith and, at the same time, it made every man conscious that his lightest word or act might subject him to prosecution by that terrible court whose very name inspired dread. No more ingenious device has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect and to reduce it to blind obedience. It elevated delation to the rank of high religious duty, it filled the land with spies and it rendered every man an object of suspicion, not only to his neighbor but to the members of his own family and to the stranger whom he might chance to meet. Continued through generations, this could not fail to leave its impress on the national character. Even Mariana, in enumerating the results of the Inquisition, ventures to allude to the cautious reserve which it rendered habitual among Spaniards.[249] A somewhat crude prototype of the Edict of Faith is found in the old Inquisition, when inquisitors visited their districts and, at each town, summoned an assembly of the people, preached to them and caused to be read an edict calling upon all the inhabitants to come forward within a specified time and reveal anything that might tend to the suspicion that any one was a heretic, under pain of _ipso facto_ excommunication, removable only by them or by the pope.[250] While this was nominally preserved in the Aragonese Inquisition, that institution had become so inert that we may assume that the inquisitors no longer visited their districts or had occasion to issue edicts. In Castile, when the Inquisition was founded, this practice was evidently unknown, for the Instructions of 1484 merely order that when the inquisitors open their tribunal in any town, after the sermon they shall publish a monition with censures against all who resist or contradict them.[251] By 1500, however, the efficacy of what became known as the Edict of Faith had been discovered, and Inquisitor-general Deza, in ordering yearly visitations of the districts, specifies that, on arriving at every town or village, a general edict shall be issued, summoning those who know anything of heresy to come forward and reveal it.[252] The form of this was probably the same as that which, in the same year 1500, the inquisitors of Sicily, Dr. Sgalambro and Montoro Bishop of Cefalù, issued, requiring all cognizant of heresy to denounce it within fifteen days, promising secrecy to the informer and threatening with prosecution, as fautors of heresy, those who failed to do so.[253] In