The ingenious Ludovico à Paramo, ever anxious to discover warranty for all that the Inquisition was and did in the Bible, and particularly in the infancy of the human race, discovered the beginnings of the inquisitorial process in the Book of Genesis. Thus God was the first inquisitor; the call, ‘Adam, where art thou?’ was a citation to a heretic; the coats of skins made for Adam and Eve were special garb for heretics, the original of the special garb, the _sanbenitos_, with which the Holy Office clad its culprits; and the deprivation of Adam and Eve of paradise was equivalent to the confiscation of the heretic’s goods.[374] We shall find a more practically helpful explanation of the procedure of the Inquisition if we content ourselves by remembering the origins of the tribunal in the Middle Ages. The fundamental fact, which shaped the whole character of its judicature, giving it its essential distinctiveness apart from other judicatures, was the function of the inquisitor. Originally he had been, not a judge, but a missionary; he never became a judge simply and solely, he never entirely ceased to be a missionary. His primary object was not so much to pronounce a judgment as to guard the faith; his ambition not to condemn a heretic, but to reconcile him to the Church. Every impenitent heretic was in a sense a witness to inquisitorial failure, every penitent was a triumph. The inquisitor, even when sitting in his tribunal, was not solely a judicial functionary; he was still a confessor, a spiritual guide. This fact is the keynote to the procedure of the Inquisition, because it meant that the procedure was not simply and wholly judicial. The Inquisition aimed at being something more than a court. Its ultimate object was not secured by the simple judicial process of deciding the guilt or innocence of the accused; it sought the spiritual end of bringing the accused to a right state of mind and soul.[375]