Let it be admitted that the Inquisitors--at least originally--were well-intentioned men, who sought to promote religion as they understood it. The question arises, Did they understand religion rightly? To them religion was a complete and final revelation of a Divine will; the true faith could be one only as God was one; all who sought to disturb that faith, however good their intentions might be, were guilty of a sin worse than temporal rebellion. Have we nothing to learn from their awful error? If we may judge from the _Catholic Encyclopædia_, the Church of Rome has not learned much. The attitude of the Inquisitors is not in the least surprising when in the twentieth century we find persecution defended as a religious duty. Another of its writers, Father Guiraud, echoes De Maistre’s contention that the Church of Rome alone possesses the truth, and therefore has a right to be intolerant.[61] The spirit of orthodox clericalism unmistakably appears in the tendency common to all these Romanist apologists to gloss over with a few smooth and casuistical phrases the most appalling deeds of cold-blooded cruelty which the world has ever seen. The commonwealth, says Father Guiraud, “can no more recognize the maxim of unlimited and unbridled religious freedom than it can adopt the suicidal principle of irreligion.”[62] This implies that there is no _via media_ between the rejection of all religion and a blind acceptance of dogmatic authority, and involves a claim practically identical with that of the Inquisition. If religious persecution is excusable when the spirit of the age permits it, what are we to think of those who justify persecution in an age which deems it a blunder and a crime? BIBLIOGRAPHY