This severity was greatly enhanced by the elastic definition given to relapse. The reconciled penitent had to walk warily, for any unconscious return to ancestral habits was sufficient to convict him. About 1500 the Suprema decreed that penitents communicating with unreconciled heretics were to be held as relapsed, and all evidence coming before the tribunals was to be scrutinized for proof that would justify prosecution--evidently of those who might chance to be incidentally named in it--and then, if this proved insufficient for conviction, any admission of the accused, not contained in his former confession, could be used to condemn him as a fictitious convert.[596] How this was construed in practice, we learn from Simancas, who says that he is considered a relapsed who, after abjuring heresy, talks with heretics, or visits them, or makes presents to them, or favors and communicates with them, so that he cannot but be held to do it as a consequence of his heresy.[597] The man who had been reconciled thus lived in unceasing danger that, at any moment, some acquaintance might be tried and convicted and his name might occur in the evidence as being on good terms with him. Safety, indeed, could only be secured by resolutely isolating himself from his family and his race. It was the same with those who had only abjured for vehement suspicion. The Instructions of 1561 declare absolutely that, if they confess or are convicted, they must be relaxed, for the inquisitors have no power to reconcile them, although they are not truly but only fictitiously relapsed.[598] Still, there were some exceptions. Self-denunciation for relapse, it was admitted, required relaxation under the law, but it was argued that such second confession was not really a conviction, for it showed that the penitent was not incorrigible and should be admitted to mercy.[599] Such cases must have been exceedingly rare, but we have seen one in that of Ursule de la Croix (Vol. II, p. 572) where, it will be remembered, a third self-denunciation was visited with the stake.