Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter, but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched, and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul. Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed. “We are far from American lynch law here,”[33] as M. Huysmans remarks in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case, to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious cruelty involved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery. Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition. Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing treason.