Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that, in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even of a juror, transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.” It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones, and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as Inquisitors.