The condemnation of a human being to a death by fire, as the penalty of spiritual error, is so abhorrent to the moral sense and so oppugnant to the teachings of Christ, that modern apologists have naturally sought to relieve the Church from responsibility for such atrocity. On the surface a tolerably plausible argument can be made. The ministers of religion, the spiritual courts, the Inquisition itself rendered no judgements of blood. Any ecclesiastic who might be concerned in them incurred "irregularity" requiring a dispensation before he could validly perform his functions or obtain preferment. The execution of heretics was a matter purely of secular law and burning them alive is not prescribed in canon or decretal. The earliest recorded example of concremation is that administered by Robert the Pious of France to the Cathari of Orleans in 1017, and its embodiment in positive law has not been found earlier than in the decrees against Waldenses by Pedro II of Aragon in the Council of Gerona in 1197. In 1231 Frederic II included it in the Sicilian Constitutions and, in 1238, by his Cremona decree, extended it throughout the empire, while Alfonso the Wise of Castile, in 1255, adopted it for Christians who turned Jews or Moors.[528] It thus became part of the public law of Christendom, not so much from the initiative of rulers, as from a recognition of what had become a custom through the spontaneous ferocity of popular fanaticism. The Inquisition, through whose agency heretics were consigned to the stake, did not itself condemn them to it, but merely pronounced them to be heretics of whose conversion no hope was entertained; it cut them off from the Church, which had nothing further to do with them, and abandoned or "relaxed" them to the secular arm for due punishment. It assumed that it condemned the crime and the civil judge the criminal and, in relaxing him, it adjured the judge to spare his life and not to spill his blood. This latter was a device invented by Innocent III, before the Inquisition existed, to preserve from irregularity the spiritual courts in degrading clerics guilty of forgery and handing them over to the secular authorities for execution.[529] [Sidenote: _RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCH_]