While in studying the origins of the Inquisition we are bound to examine, and to seek to understand, the point of view of those who were responsible for its inception, in estimating its character and results we need not, nay we _ought_ not, to judge by any other criterion than that dictated by the highest conceptions of right and justice. The common, the accepted, standard of to-day both as regards justice and humanity is, happily, greatly higher than that of the Middle Ages. Much that has been written of the Inquisition has been vitiated by an attempt to read into the mind and conduct of men of mediæval times a humanitarianism which is the peculiar product of the modern world, and which they could not even have understood. Even more vitiated would be any thesis which, not satisfied with justifying the originators of the Inquisition, sought to justify the institution itself. Certainly the motive for such an attempt could not be impartiality. Only moral obliquity can be blind to the transparent abominations of inquisitorial procedure. If its character as a tribunal was essentially evil, evil also were some of the Inquisition’s results. Secular princes discerned its remarkable potential utility to themselves and regarded it with envy and admiration. Its methods had a satisfactory efficiency found in no other court. By such methods conviction could be practically assured. The charge of heresy could therefore be preferred against political enemies with the happiest prospects of advantage. The destruction for purely political ends was achieved by the use of inquisitorial methods of the Templars, Jeanne d’Arc, Savonarola.[497] Those are the most notorious, but there are other instances of this abuse of the sacred tribunal for purely secular, and sometimes base and immoral, purposes.