Lea remarks that “the matter-of-course way in which rules destructive of every principle of justice are laid down by men presumably correct in the ordinary affairs of life affords a wholesome lesson as to the power of fanaticism to warp the intellect of the most acute.”[25] Such rules as there were for the protection of accused persons were systematically set aside, and the lives of even devout Catholics hung on the merest trifles and technicalities. A new crime termed “suspicion of heresy” was invented, and of this three degrees were formulated--light suspicion, vehement suspicion, and violent suspicion, all of which offered ample scope to inquisitorial ingenuity. A merchant found it a dangerous civility to bow to acquaintances who, unknown to him, were heretics. Two witnesses were required to prove heresy, but at a pinch one was made to suffice, and if the one witness revoked testimony in favour of the accused his revocation annulled the evidence, while if the original testimony was adverse to the defence it was the revocation that became void! The minimum age of witnesses was also liable to fluctuation. By the Italian civil law it was twenty years, but the Holy Office was not particular to a year or two, and a case is recorded in which the evidence of a boy of ten was accepted against his own family and sixty-six other people who had listened to a heretical sermon a year before. Wives, children, and servants could not testify in favour of an accused; against him their evidence was readily accepted. The only thing that disabled a witness was proof that he was actuated by mortal enmity against the accused; but, as the accused was kept in ignorance of the witness’s identity, proof of this sort was made practically impossible. Witnesses seldom refused to testify. If they did, the torture chamber generally induced them to reconsider the matter; in fact, an unlucky witness ran as great a risk as the defendant of an acquaintance with the rack or the pulleys. Nor was the secrecy of the confessional of much avail, for all priests were instructed to use every means in their power to induce confessions of heresy, and the results were conveyed to the tribunals in a judiciously indirect manner.