Balmez remarks that “the Roman Inquisition has never been known to pronounce the execution of capital punishment ... the facts show the difference between the Popes and the Protestants. The Popes, armed with the tribunal of intolerance, have not spilt a drop of blood; Protestants and philosophers have shed torrents.”[48] The object of this impudent lie is simply to score a point against Protestantism. That Protestants persecuted vigorously when they had the power no one disputes; for a long time they failed to understand their own principles. But they had less power and fewer opportunities than the Church of Rome. The precise degrees of culpability in the two bodies cannot be determined here. No other Church but that of Rome has ever set up an Inquisition. The preceding pages will have shown that the Popes many times officially instituted crusades against Christians who rejected parts of their teaching; that they expressly commanded human beings to be tortured and put to death; that all through the Middle Ages the Church exerted a dominant influence over the State, and, while affecting scruples as to the actual shedding of blood, insisted on the secular power inflicting death in a form infinitely more painful than that of the sword. Thus an educated writer can actually maintain that, because a man does not murder with his own hand, but induces another to murder for him, he has no moral responsibility for the crime. What civil code would recognize such a doctrine? The subterfuge merely adds hypocrisy to cruelty. The admission will be noticed that the Popes were “armed with the tribunal of intolerance.” The “facts” show unmistakably who created that tribunal. They show with equal clearness how it was employed. It will also be observed that in this passage Balmez suppresses the fact that the Inquisition had been actively at work for 300 years before Protestantism was heard of, and that its most frightful excesses were committed against those whose moral sense was outraged by the conduct of the clergy.