The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors. But what of it? The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of recantation. The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends. And what are a few faked documents between spies? CHAPTER VIII THE CURIOUS ONES Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance of self-interest. The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to human beings. Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape. Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners and habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days. It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new idea into the supposed enemies of mankind. Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.