The impenitence is by no means obvious. It is possible, after all, that the accused might deny because he was innocent and a good Catholic. And whilst, as we shall see, this possibility is not altogether ignored, yet it is given very secondary consideration. It was the inquisitor’s business to assume the guilt of any one brought before him. It is true, however, that Eymeric urges the inquisitors to proceed very carefully in the examination of the witnesses against such a man; he recommends them to give the accused time in which to resolve himself to confess, and to employ every possible means to obtain such confession. He counsels them to confine the prisoner in an uncomfortable dungeon, fettered hand and foot; there to visit him frequently and exhort him to confess. Should he ultimately do so, he is to be treated as a penitent heretic[117]--in other words he is to escape the fire but suffer perpetual imprisonment. The term perpetual imprisonment, or perpetual immuration, is not to be accepted too literally. It lay at the discretion of the inquisitors to modify and commute part of such sentences, and this discretion they exercised so far as the imprisonment was concerned. But the confiscation of the prisoner’s property and the infamy attaching to himself, his children, and his grandchildren--by far the heavier part of the punishment--could not in any way be commuted. However tardily confession might come from the _negativo_, the inquisitors must accept and recognize it. Even if he were already bound to the stake, and, at last, being taken with the fear of death, he turned to the friar who never left him until the faggots were blazing, admitted his guilt and offered to abjure his heresy, his life would be spared. And this for all that they recognized that a confession in such extremes was wrung from him by “the fear of death rather than any love of truth.” It must naturally occur to any one that, conducted in secret as were the examinations of the witnesses, and no opportunity being afforded the accused of demolishing the evidence offered against him, since he was rarely informed of its extent, many a good Catholic, or, at least, many a man innocent of all heretical practices, must have gone to his death as a _negativo_. For the methods of the Holy Office opened the door extraordinarily wide to malevolence; and human nature being such as it is--and such as it was in the fifteenth century--it is not to be supposed that malevolence never seized the chance, that it never slunk in through that gaping door to vent itself in such close and sheltered secrecy--to strike in the back, in the dark, with almost perfect immunity to itself, at the man who was hated, or envied, or whom it was desired to supplant.