In the first half of the same century, the manufacturers of the False Decretals had attributed to Alexander I. an epistle designed to protect the Church from pillage and oppression, in which that pontiff is made to threaten with infamy and excommunication those who extort confessions or other writings from ecclesiastics by force or fear, and to lay down the general rule that confessions must be voluntary and not compulsory.[1535] On the authority of this, Ivo of Chartres, at the commencement of the twelfth century, declares that men in holy orders cannot be forced to confess;[1536] and half a century later, Gratian lays down the more general as well as more explicit rule that no confession is to be extorted by the instrumentality of torture.[1537] This position was consistently maintained until the revival of the Roman law familiarized the minds of men with the procedures of the imperial jurisprudence, when the policy of the Church altered, and it yielded to the temptation of obtaining so useful a means of reaching and proving the otherwise impalpable crime of heresy. CHAPTER VI. REAPPEARANCE OF TORTURE. The latter half of the twelfth century saw the study of the civil law prosecuted with intense ardor, and, in the beginning of the thirteenth, Innocent III. struck a fatal blow at the barbaric systems of the ordeal and sacramental compurgation by forbidding the rites of the Church to the one and altering the form of oath customary to the other. The unreasoning faith which had reposed confidence in the boiling caldron, or the burning ploughshare, or the trained champion as the special vehicle of Divine judgment, was fading before the Aristotelian logic of the schools, and dialectical skill could not but note the absurdity of acquitting a culprit because he could beg or buy two, or five, or eleven men to swear to their belief in his oath or denial.