In the second place, the duel was unequal because the inquisitor considered it perfectly legitimate to disconcert his adversary by means of disingenuous subtleties and subterfuges. It is only fair to add that the inquisitor adopted such devices because he believed that the heretic was apt to indulge in them and might save himself by clever equivocations unless dealt with astutely; and the inquisitor had a lively sense of the extreme undesirability of permitting a heretic to get the better of him in a duel of wits. Such a thing would be ignominious for the inquisitor; a blow to the Church and the truth. We are told of some of the artifices practised by Waldenses. In answer to the question: ‘What is Holy Church?’ they will say, ‘What you consider to be such’ or assert that they are simple illiterate men standing in need of instruction, and must leave it to the judge to express their beliefs in words. That the inquisitors may have found the rejoinders even of illiterate men at times disconcerting is likely.[382] But it is certain that they practised their subtleties on many who had not the wits to cope with them: and, in any case, the inquisitor, being both examiner and judge, had an enormous initial advantage. As a rule, the inquisitor or his vicar was extremely well equipped to conduct the interrogatory skilfully and successfully, even against the most redoubtable antagonists. They possessed, moreover, a rich repository of ready-made devices in the treatises written by the great masters of the inquisitorial art. The difficulty of escaping from the tentacles of the inquisitorial process inspired Bernard Délicieux to say that even the orthodoxy of St. Peter and St. Paul would not have been sufficient to satisfy the tribunal.[383] It was held to be legitimate to surprise and confuse the defendant by a multiplicity of questions, which would involve him in contradictions.[384]