It is scarce worth while to continue this pitiful detail. Four days were allowed to elapse, for experience showed that an interval, by stiffening the limbs, rendered repetition more painful. She was again brought to the torture-chamber but she broke down when stripped and piteously begged to have her nakedness covered. The interrogatory went on, when her replies under torture were more rambling and incoherent than before, but her limit of endurance was reached and the inquisitors finally had the satisfaction of eliciting a confession of Judaism and a prayer for mercy and penance.[71] [Sidenote: _RATIFICATION OF CONFESSION_] It is impossible to read these melancholy records without amazement that the incoherent and contradictory admissions through which the victim, in his increasing agonies, sought to devise some statement in satisfaction of the monotonous command to tell the truth, should have been regarded by statesmen and lawgivers as possessed of intrinsic value. The result was a test of endurance and not of veracity. In one case we find a man of such fibres and nerves that all the efforts of the torturer fail to elicit aught but denial--the cords may rasp through the flesh to the bone and limbs be wrenched to the breaking without affecting his constancy. In another, when a few turns of the garrote have twisted a single cord into his arm--or even at the mere aspect of the torture-chamber, with its grimly suggestive machinery--he will yield and confess all that is wanted as to himself and all the comrades whose names he can recall in the dizziness of his suffering. Yet, with full knowledge of this, for centuries the secular and ecclesiastical courts of the greater part of Christendom persisted in the use of a system which, in the name of justice, perpetrated an infinite series of atrocities. * * * * *