Monseigneur Douais states that ecclesiastical law was in general milder than secular law, and that torture was interdicted by the canons until 1252. This may be so, but it was a Pope who in that year insisted on the employment of torture, and it was again expressly authorized by Innocent IV, Urban IV, and other Popes. In this, as in other matters, it is useless to rely on provisions which were habitually set at naught. The contention that torture was seldom used is perhaps the result of too implicit a trust in formulas. According to M. Langlois, torture became so much a part of the ordinary process that it was purposely left unrecorded.[53] The great thing was to extract confession; it was easy to preserve a discreet silence as to the means. In the civil records the same peculiarity is observable.[54] No institution has ever exhibited greater discrepancies between theory and practice than has the Inquisition. That provision was made for the mitigation and even remission of penalties need not be doubted. But this was done in few and exceptional cases only; the decision being customarily left to the Inquisitors’ discretion, it became the practice to ignore everything that tended in favour of the persons accused. That the co-operation of the Bishop of the diocese was necessary to give validity to the Inquisitorial sentence is assumed by Monseigneur Douais to have relieved the Inquisitors of some portion of their responsibility. Probably it did sometimes make the trial a little less serious for the accused, for the Bishops did not always share the inflexibility of the Holy Office. But the argument merely lifts a part of the responsibility from one department of the Church and places it on another. Undeniably the Inquisition was set up by the Church of Rome. The arrangement was, of course, no guarantee that justice would be done, nor does it disprove the charge that the Inquisition was a serious menace to civilization.