In all this, however, there is no evidence of the revival of torture as a means of legal investigation. The community was satisfied with the old barbaric forms of trial, and the Church, still true to its humanizing instincts, lost no opportunity of placing the seal of its disapprobation on the whole theory of extorting confessions. At an early period, it had even been a matter of dispute whether a Christian magistrate, after baptism, was at liberty to inflict torment and pronounce sentence of death. The Synod of Rome in 384 had declared that no Christian could exercise secular power without sin, because he was obliged to contravene the teachings of the Church by ordering the application of torture in judicial pleadings;[1530] and if Innocent I., in 405, had decided that such proceedings were lawful, it was only on the ground that the Church had no right to resist the laws or to oppose the powers ordained of God.[1531] About the same time St. Augustin had exposed the cruel absurdity of torture with a cogent terseness that has rarely been excelled, and had stamped it with the infamy which it deserved.[1532] The great name of Gregory I. was on record in the sixth century, denouncing as worthless a confession extorted by incarceration and hunger.[1533] When Nicholas I., who did so much to build up ecclesiastical power and influence, addressed, in 866, his well-known epistle to the Bulgarians to aid and direct them in their conversion to orthodoxy, he recites that he is told that, in cases of suspected theft, their courts endeavor to extort confession by stripes, and by pricking with a pointed iron. This he pronounces to be contrary to all law, human and divine, for confessions to be valid should be spontaneous; and he argues at some length on the uncertainty of the system of torture, and the injustice to which it leads, concluding with a peremptory prohibition of its continuance.[1534]