In the domain of theological morality the history of the Renaissance affords one of the most painful chapters in European history. This chapter has to do with the establishment of the Inquisition to maintain uniformity of religious belief. It is not an accident that this chapter should form an integral part of the history of the Renaissance. The spread of heresy, which threatened the unity of the medieval Church, was largely the outgrowth of the new intellectual life awakened by the revival of learning.[698] Hence it was inevitable that the age of the Renaissance should be also the age of persecution. It is not a recital of the history of the Holy Office during the period under review which is our concern in this place, but only a consideration of the motives of Christian persecution. That intolerance should ever have been regarded by the followers of the tolerant Nazarene as a virtue and persecution of misbelievers as a pious duty, challenges the attention of the historian of morals and incites earnest inquiry into the causes of such an aberration of the moral sentiment. It cannot be made a matter of reasonable doubt that one of the chief causes of Christian intolerance is the theological doctrine that salvation is dependent upon right belief in religious matters, and that error in belief, even though honest, is a crime that merits and receives eternal punishment.[699] This dogma leads logically and inevitably to intolerance and persecution;[700] for if wrong belief is a crime of so heinous a nature as justly to subject the misbeliever to everlasting and horrible torments, and if the misbeliever is likely to bring others into the same fatal way of thinking, then it follows that heresy should be extirpated, just as the germs of a dreaded contagion are stamped out, by any and every means however seemingly harsh and cruel. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians logically “argued that if the death penalty could be rightly inflicted on thieves and forgers, who rob us only of worldly goods, how much more righteously on those who cheat us out of supernatural goods--out of faith, the sacraments, the life of the soul.”[701] It was this theological teaching that heresy is a fault of unmeasured sinfulness, an “insidious preventable contagion,” which was the main root that fostered Christian intolerance and persecution.[702] The activities of the Holy Office were maintained not by bad men but by good men. “With such men it was not hope of gain, or lust of blood, or pride of opinion, or wanton exercise of power [that moved them], but sense of duty, and they but represented what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.”[703]