As everyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Inquisition was a marked man thereafter, and was liable to the suspicion that he had incurred disabilities--a suspicion apt to grow stronger with time and to affect his descendants--it became important for those who were not thus affected to have some evidence of the fact. In the earlier time the Inquisition was chary about affording this relief, but did not absolutely refuse it when the sufferer applied to the Suprema. It was not everyone however who could obtain the intervention of the Suprema; popular prejudice was strong, and no one knew what took place within the precincts of the tribunals. Blighted careers were thus numerous. Escobar, in his work on Limpieza, tells us that, at the origin of the Inquisition it punished the lightest offences with extreme severity and this, after the lapse of a century and a half, was still disastrously affecting the descendants; it was inhuman that a word inadvertently spoken through levity, or anger, or in jest should bring infamy on the delinquent and his posterity without limitation of time.[512] The memorial of 1623, by a member of the Suprema, discusses the same evil. The writer says that the Inquisition is surrounded by enemies who are daily multiplied through those afflicted by the tribunals. It is not merely those who are relaxed or reconciled or compelled to abjure _de vehementi_, but there are many well-affected Old Christians, punished with lighter penalties who, if they remain defamed and their posterity disabled from honors, must necessarily add to the number of enemies and it is pitiable thus to afflict them for trivial causes.[513]