Thus the Rev. J. Balmez, a Spanish writer who, in his _European Civilization_, defends the Inquisition--on the whole in a fairly judicious and tolerant spirit--alleges that the Inquisitorial “rigour was the result of extraordinary circumstances--the effect of the spirit of the nations and the severity of customs in Europe at that time.”[44] No student of history will deny that there is some truth in this contention, though he would naturally expect the Christian Church to have made far greater efforts than it did to mitigate the “severity of customs.” Its conceptions of social order were incompatible with personal liberty. And it is curious that when in Southern France the majority of the people were heretics they showed no tendency to persecute, though they had the power. All the events, the movements, and the personages of human history are necessarily the consequences of their antecedents; but, unless we are to relieve all human beings from responsibility for their actions, we cannot exonerate the Inquisition from crimes of the greatest magnitude. It may have been established from the best and purest motives; yet, though experience made it fully aware of the terrible evils which resulted from its procedure, it deliberately increased them. All the actions of virtuous men are not good actions, and if, in putting into practice particular theories, they are found to produce mischievous effects, a sacred obligation rests upon the holders to revise their views in the light of the experience gained. Buckle, with justice, maintains that moral feelings alone are not equal to the task of preventing persecution. If the moral feelings are enlisted on the side of what is erroneously believed to be the truth, the sincerity of the persecutor only makes him the more dangerous to society. “That the Inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and incorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways and from different and independent sources of evidence.”[45] In admitting the general truth of this remark, it must be borne in mind that the Inquisitorial system facilitated grave abuses by officials whose integrity was far from “undeviating.” Buckle adds: “The evidence decisively proves the utter inability of the moral feelings to diminish religious persecution.... The great antagonist of intolerance is not humanity, but knowledge. It is to the diffusion of knowledge, and to that alone, that we owe the comparative cessation of what is unquestionably the greatest evil men have ever inflicted on their own species. For that religious persecution is a greater evil than any other is apparent, not so much from the enormous and almost incredible number of its known victims as from the fact that the unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives no account of those who have been spared in the body in order that they might suffer in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors--of