Even if to-day she were to denounce the Inquisition, she would not thereby compromise her divine authority. Her office on earth is to transmit to generation after generation the deposit of revealed truths necessary for man's salvation. That to safeguard this treasure she uses means in one age which a later age denounces, merely proves that she follows the customs and ideas in vogue around her. But she takes good care not to have men consider her attitude the infallible and eternal rule of absolute justice. She readily admits that she may sometimes be deceived in the choice of means of government. The system of defence and protection that she adopted in the Middle Ages succeeded, at least to some extent. We cannot maintain that it was absolutely unjust and absolutely immoral. Undoubtedly we have to-day a much higher ideal of justice. But though we deplore the fact that the Church did not then perceive, preach or apply it, we need not be surprised. In social questions she ordinarily progresses with the march of civilization, of which she is ever one of the prime movers. But perhaps men may blame her for leaving abandoned and betrayed the cause of toleration, which she so ably defended in the beginning. Do not let us exaggerate. There was, undoubtedly, a period in which she did not deduce, from the principle she was the first to teach, all its logical consequences. The laws she enforced against heretics prove this. But it is false to say that, while in the beginning she insisted strongly on the rights of conscience, she afterwards totally disregarded them. In fact, she exercised constraint only over her own stray children. But while she acted so cruelly toward them, she never ceased to respect the consciences of those outside her fold. She always interpreted the _compelle intrare_ to imply with regard to unbelievers moral constraint, and the means of gentleness and persuasion. If respect for human liberty is to-day dominant in the thinking world, it is due chiefly to her. In the matter of tolerance, the Church has only to study her own history. If, during several centuries, she treated her rebellious children with greater severity than those alien to her fold, it was not from a want of consistency. And if to-day she manifests to every one signs of her maternal kindness, and lays abide for ever all physical constraint, she is not following the example of non-Catholics, but merely taking up again the interrupted tradition of her early Fathers. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inquisition, by E. Vacandard