It is true that he made use of a formula,[452] expressing a desire that lenience might be shown to the victim; and that some apologists have based upon this the contention that the ecclesiastical tribunal was in no way responsible for the death penalty; urging, on the one hand, that the desire that the relaxed heretic might not suffer either death or mutilation was perfectly genuine, on the other that the lay authority was entirely independent in the matter, pronouncing and executing its own sentence, based on a decision of its own, not the Inquisition’s relaxation; and that, should it decide to spare the life of the heretic, the Church would make no complaint, but quite the contrary.[453] The theory cannot be accepted. The attitude of Gregory IX and Innocent IV towards Frederick II’s Constitutions, and the bulls, _Cum adversus haereticam_ and _Ad extirpanda_, are really decisive in the matter.[454] But there is additional clear proof that the formula of leniency was an empty formula, intended merely to preserve technical conformity with the Canon.[455] In the first place, what appropriate punishment for the contumacious, the impenitent, the relapsed could there be short of death? Even the contrite heretic, received back into the fold, may have to undergo so severe a penance as perpetual imprisonment. If the Church metes out to the contrite punishment as severe as the impenitent has to face, she is putting a premium upon impenitence. The simple fact that perpetual imprisonment is numbered among the penances inflicted by the Inquisition is proof positive that the Inquisition desired and anticipated from the secular arm the death penalty for those relaxed to it. For careless as to the ultimate fate of the impenitent the Church cannot possibly be. She cannot be willing that he should go free to rejoice in the triumph of his obduracy among confederates and to spread contagion among the faithful. Shall he be banished by the secular authority? To what end? Banishment only means the spread of infection. Shall he, then, be imprisoned by the secular authority? Again, to what end? The Inquisition can imprison as well as the State. It is a strange obtuseness that does not see that the whole attitude of the Inquisition to the heretic points logically, and indeed inevitably, to death as the fate of the obdurate. The tribunal had been created, and it existed, to the end that heresy might be exterminated. To have failed to secure that those who to the last resisted all its most strenuous efforts to obtain confession and reconciliation must expect a worse fate than those who proved compliant would have stultified its very existence.