That was established, renewed, and supervised at every turn by the Papacy. De Maistre’s second contention is that the Inquisition did not pass sentences of death, but that if it virtually did so it merely followed the practice of all other tribunals, which necessarily have the power to inflict death for serious crime. “All tribunals condemn to death,” he says, adding: “The Church so abhors blood that a priest cannot be a surgeon, lest his consecrated hand should shed the blood of the patient” (p. 11). It is sheer superstition to argue that a tribunal notoriously prone to inflict excessive punishment is relieved of moral responsibility by omitting a particular form of words, while taking every possible precaution to ensure the punishment being mercilessly inflicted. The argument is a dishonest shift, which “strains at a gnat and swallows a camel.” The “consecrated hand” was too holy to practise the art of saving life, but not too holy to employ an unconsecrated hand to destroy it. In this connection De Maistre enlarges on the lenity of Rome, which frequently protested against the severity of the laws against heresy. That mildness was occasionally shown is true, but it is forgotten that Rome itself--as the Papal Bulls ordering torture prove--was very largely responsible for the severity. That the tenderness was not due to an excess of humane feeling we may infer from the savage rigour which in the thirteenth century became a feature of the canon law. Had that law been a model of gentleness and love, ecclesiastics would have found no difficulty in making it an engine of cruelty and persecution, on the plea that concern for the heretic’s soul made it necessary and wholesome to punish his body. As it was, injunctions to deal mercifully with him were so systematically set at naught that very little importance can be attached to their face value. Inquisitors were seldom reproved for being zealous persecutors. De Maistre’s verdict that the Inquisition was “mild, tolerant, charitable, the bearer of consolation in every country of the world,” sounds like irony, but was probably his sincere conviction. Polemical writers sometimes empty words of all intelligible meaning. In his third main argument De Maistre shows the cloven hoof. He maintains that people are rightly punished if they “strike deadly blows at the religion of their nation,” that “the propagator of heresy ought to be classed among the greatest criminals,” and that it is positively wicked to protest against the punishments of the Inquisition (p. 44). If these contentions are sound, it is a waste of time to argue that the Inquisition did not punish the expression of heretical opinions in religion. It was established for that very purpose.