With teaching of this sort drilled into an ignorant and obedient people, it is not surprising that the popular prejudice against religious innovations was strong enough to make life in general very unpleasant for any one who had a taste for independent thought. In our own day all Reformed Churches unite in disclaiming the idea of persecution, but the Church of Rome still accepts as its greatest authority St. Thomas Aquinas, whose language on the subject is clear. To him heresy was the greatest of all sins, and its repression was more than defensible--it was a duty. To corrupt the faith is a greater wickedness than to debase the coinage, and if coiners are executed much more should heretics be. In its great charity the Church pardons the repentant heretic once, or perhaps twice; but if he sins again he is not to be released from the penalty of death. This became the settled policy and the unalterable practice of the Church. Even the dead heretic was not allowed Christian burial, and, if he had been favoured with it by mistake, the body was dug up and burned, and the grave remained for ever an accursed spot. In times of ignorance this sort of thing paralyses people with terror, and renders them an easy prey to the most absurd and debasing superstitions. This universal dread of the unseen was ably and thoroughly exploited by the Church of Christ. CHAPTER III THE FOUNDING, CONSTITUTION, AND PRACTICE OF THE INQUISITION It is extremely doubtful whether Dominic actually founded the Inquisition, for as an organization it did not exist till ten years after his death. He was, however, an Inquisitor in all but the possession of full judicial powers. There was, in fact, no formal founding of the Holy Office; it simply grew by degrees out of the social and religious conditions of the early thirteenth century. Nor was it exclusively confided to the Dominican Order, but, as that was the most intolerant and the most zealous in heresy-hunting, its members were, from the outset, more closely associated with that occupation.[22] Commissions were frequently entrusted to the Franciscans also, but most of the early Inquisitors were Dominican monks. The jealousies and quarrels between the two Orders which their holy labours occasioned were so frequent as to be a source of scandals in the Church, which threatened to last for ever.