On the score of the second question propounded by the scholiast--“If the inquisitor enters into such a promise is he not obliged to keep it?”--he answers it by telling us that many theologians do not consider there is any such obligation on the part of the inquisitor. This attitude they explain by urging that such a fraud is salutary and for the public good; and, further, that if it is licit to extract the truth by torture, it is surely much more so to accomplish it by dissimulation--_verbis fictis_. This is the general but by no means the universal opinion, we gather. There are some writers who are opposed to it. And now the scholiast becomes more extraordinary still. Hear him: “These two divergent opinions may be reconciled by considering that whatever promises the inquisitors make, they are not to be understood to apply to anything beyond the penalties whose rigour the Inquisition has the right to lessen--namely, canonical penances, and not those by law prescribed.” * * * * * He writes this knowing that these promises are understood by the prisoner to mean something very different--that the prisoner is desired so to understand them, made so to understand them. The honesty of Pegna’s reasoning is not to be suspected. He is not an apologist of the Holy Office writing for the world in general, and employing bad arguments perforce because he must make the best of the only ones available, even though he should lapse into suspicion of bad faith. He is writing, as a preceptor, for the private eye of the inquisitor. Therefore we can only conclude that these learned casuists who plunge into such profundities of thought and pursue such labyrinthine courses of reasoning had utterly failed to grasp the elementary moral fact that falsehood does not lie in the word uttered, but in the idea conveyed. “However little,” he continues, in the course of polishing this gem of casuistry, “may be the remission granted by the inquisitor, it will always be sufficient to fulfil his promise.” You see what a stickler he is for the letter of the law. You shall see a good deal more of the same sort of thing before we have gone much further. But here the scholiast begins to labour. His conscience is stirring; possibly a ray of doubt penetrates his gloomy confidence that right is wrong and wrong is right. And so, we fancy, to quiet these uneasy stirrings comes the last paragraph on this subject: “However, for greater safety of conscience, inquisitors should make no promises save in very general terms, and never promise more than they can fulfil.”[104] * * * * * There is one more of Eymeric’s ruses for combating the guile of stubborn heretics: