This is a severe, but perhaps not unjust, verdict. Some allowance, however, must be made for the customs of an intolerant and semi-barbarous epoch. Catholic apologists are justified in claiming that the Inquisition should be judged in relation to the times in which it flourished. But this does not explain how it was that many men, both in the Church and out of it, were so much in advance of the Inquisition as to disapprove of people being put to death for their religious opinions. If Thomas Aquinas advocated the death penalty for heresy, several eminent Fathers of the Church deprecated it, holding persuasion to be the better method. Why was not the milder and more ancient view adopted? It is suicidal to admit that the Church held back from torture and death for centuries on the ground that they were inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. The assertion clearly implies a recognition of the incompatibility of the spirit of Christianity with calculated cruelty, and if this recognition was confined to a few superior minds so much the worse for the Church which paid no heed to them. There is obvious insincerity in the plea that the Church adopted only with reluctance the fatal policy of persecution. It insisted on that policy, often against the remonstrances of the State. It claimed to be superior to the spirit of the age, yet, on its own admission, yielded to the inferior influence. In reality it did more; it actively and spontaneously made persecution a fine art, and coerced the State to carry out its behests. When the Church excuses its cruelty by pointing to the equal cruelty of the medieval State it omits to mention that the State did not persecute opinion as such. The Christian Church did.