Worse still—and possibly this is the worst aspect of the whole story of the Inquisition—its pernicious methods of procedure were borrowed by the admiring secular princes for their courts, which did not pretend to have the double nature which was the explanation, if not the excuse, for the Inquisition’s adoption of its system. Thus civil courts in Europe came to be tarnished by the system of _inquisitio_, the secret enquiry, the heaping up of disabilities for the defence, the application of torture—all these abuses having the august sanction of ecclesiastical use. The lay authority could triumphantly vindicate such innovations, whereby justice became an unequal contest between authority, combining the two characters of prosecutor and judge, and the unhappy prisoner, by pointing to the example of the Church, the repository of the sublime truths of divine justice and Christian charity. To the fortunate fact that the Inquisition never secured a footing in the British Islands is largely due their maintenance, in contradistinction to Continental states, of the open trial and of the great maxim that no one is presumed to be guilty, that the onus of proof lies with the prosecution. It was not the fault of the Church that the secular power admired and imitated the methods of the Holy Office; but it is surely a calamity that it should have been able to find in an ecclesiastical tribunal a system which must seem to every fair-minded man to-day so abhorrent to the whole spirit and tenor of the Christian gospel.