The following specimen of De Maistre’s reasoning will probably be sufficient: “God has spoken; it is for us to believe. The religion which he established is one, even as He is Himself. Truth being essentially intolerant, to profess religious toleration is to profess scepticism; in other words, to exclude faith. Woe, a thousand times woe, to the stupid imprudence which accuses us of damning men. It is only God who damns; He alone has said to His messengers: _Go, teach all nations! He that believeth shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned_” (p. 72). This passage is reproduced merely as a curious example of the religious reasoning of a century ago. Fortunately for human happiness, the world has condemned this point of view by abandoning it. The day has gone by for arguments which seek to justify religious persecution, and for appeals to supernatural authority in support of irrational dogmas. In our own time the Inquisition has found a far more reasonable and fair-minded apologist in the person of Monseigneur Celestin Douais, Bishop of Beauvais, who published in 1906 a scholarly examination of the Holy Office. The first sentence of this work is that “The Inquisition was established by the Papacy, which alone was qualified to do so,” and that “this fact is universally known and recognized.” The Bishop adds that the Inquisitor Eymerich expressly lays it down that an Inquisitor is not a secular judge, but a delegate appointed by the Pope. If, in his calm and restrained historical exposition, he nowhere condemns the organized barbarity of the system, he freely exposes its defects, and only incidentally defends its proceedings. He is a historian rather than an apologist. The few considerations he urges are of quite minor importance; if they extenuate the guilt of the Inquisitorial practice, they by no means disprove the enormous mischief it produced. Thus he asserts, on the authority of Eymerich, that the names of witnesses were suppressed because, if mortal enmity to the accused could be proved against them, they were required to withdraw from the case. In practice the accused gained no advantage from this provision, for he could only guess at his possible enemy, and the Inquisitors were ingenious enough, if they so desired, to prove his guesses wrong. The handicap to the prisoner remained, and it is possible to assume that one reason for the extreme secrecy was the determination to render the concession useless.