Readers who have thus far followed this brief account of the Inquisition will have little difficulty in forming an opinion about it. Is it the kind of institution they would like to see restored? Grant the extravagant supposition that all the Inquisitors were men of probity, kind, well-meaning, and conscientious--what we are chiefly concerned with are the effects produced by the system of repression which they so rigidly enforced. We have to judge whether it did or did not make for human happiness and the advance of civilization. Intellectual freedom is no less essential to progress than purity of morals. The Inquisition at least temporarily destroyed the one, and certainly did not promote the other. Knowledge grows by being shared; one idea leads, by association, to others; one gleam of truth broadens into clearer light as the dawn ushers in the day; one discovery affords a clue to another. For ever to suppress truth is beyond the wit of man, but attempts to suppress it have cumulative effects in prolonging the reign of ignorance. It is not from the ignorant that intellectual greatness may be expected, and in its effect upon public morals sheer ignorance is the mother of more crime than some persons are willing to admit. Perhaps the Inquisitors did not realize the evil of stifling thought for centuries; perhaps they did not know that the assassination of ideas is a crime. But their twentieth-century apologists cannot plead this ignorance. They enjoy the blessings of liberty, and defend the persecutor! They profit by the heroism of those thousands of unknown faithful men and women who died for religious freedom, and they would hand the world back to intellectual slavery!