Conducted after this fashion it is easy to understand why compurgation should be characterized as blind and perilous. The accused had to make his selection blindly, and the qualifications required of conjurators almost insured their unfavorable opinion, at a time when the operations of the Inquisition had caused every man to look upon his neighbor with suspicion, especially when that neighbor was one whom the tribunal required to undergo compurgation. Yet, although the Inquisition thus risked little in subjecting doubtful cases to it, there was ample reason for allowing it to fall into desuetude. Secrecy had become a cardinal principle in all inquisitorial proceedings and it was violated by calling in a dozen laymen to see the prisoner, to hear the charges against him and to participate in the judgement to be passed upon him. Besides, it was an acknowledgement that there were cases in which the assumed omniscience and infallibility of the Holy Office were at fault, and had to be supplemented by the random opinions of a few men selected by the accused. As practised for centuries in the ecclesiastical courts, it had been an easy method for the guilty to escape merited chastisement; as modified by the Inquisition, it became a pitfall for the innocent; it was wholly at variance with the inquisitorial process as developed in Spain and, while its place in the canon law prevented its formal abolition, the tribunals had exclusive discretion as to its employment, and that discretion was used to render it obsolete. Still, it maintained its place as a legal form of procedure. Even as late as 1645, among the interrogatories provided for a visitation, the question was still retained as to whether the forms of the Instructions were observed in canonical compurgation, although a writer of the same period tells us that it is not to be employed because, if the accused overcomes sufficient torture, he is to be discharged.[317] In the Roman Inquisition we find compurgation ordered as late as 1590, in the case of a priest of Piacenza, accused of certain heretical propositions; the compurgators were to be five beneficed priests of good character and acquainted with the life of the accused. If the purgation was successful he was to be proclaimed of good repute as to the faith, and was to perform salutary penance for the imprudence of his utterances.[318] By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, Carena tells us that it had been virtually disused by the Congregation, as most perilous, fallacious and uncertain.[319] * * * * *