Notwithstanding the characterization of the offence as heresy, torture was not to be employed in the trial, although confinement in the secret prison and sequestration were permitted.[331] The energy and severity with which it was prosecuted virtually suppressed it in time. In 1623 a writer speaks of it as less common than formerly and, in a list of the cases tried at Toledo, commencing in 1648, the first one of this offence occurs in 1650, the next in 1665 and the third in 1693. Thenceforth it may be said practically to disappear from the tribunals, although as late as 1792, Don Ambrosio Pérez, beneficed priest of Candamas was tried for it in Saragossa and in 1818 there was a case in Valencia.[332] Thus the Inquisition succeeded in suppressing the expression of the opinion though, as it took no action against the sin, its influence on the side of morality was inappreciable. * * * * * [Sidenote: _INTELLECTUAL REPRESSION_] A reference to the cases of propositions tried by the Toledo tribunal between 1575 and 1610 (see Vol. II, p. 552) will indicate the very miscellaneous character of the utterances for which its interposition was invoked. These involved culprits of all classes of society and as, for the most part, they concerned theological questions of more or less obscurity, this method of enforcing purity of faith frequently brought under animadversion the foremost intellects of Spain and rendered the Inquisition the instrument through which rivals or enemies could mar the careers of those in whom lay the only hope of intellectual progress and development. What between its censorship and the minute supervision, which exposed to prosecution every thought or expression in which theological malevolence could detect lurking tendencies to error, the Spanish thinker found his path beset with danger. Safety lay only in the well-beaten track of accepted conventionality and, while Europe, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was passing through a period of evolution, Spanish intellect became atrophied. The splendid promise of the sixteenth century was blasted by the steady repression of all originality and progress, and Spain, from the foremost of the nations, became the last. The minuteness of the captious criticism which exposed the most eminent men to the horrors of inquisitorial prosecution can best be understood by two or three cases. Of these perhaps the most notable is that of the Augustinian Fray Luis de Leon, who was not only one of the most eminent theologians of his day, and who was unsurpassed as a preacher, but who ranks as a Castilian classic in both prose and poetry.[333] It is so suggestive of inquisitorial procedure in such matters that it is worthy of examination in some detail.