If any, upon being denounced and convicted of the sin of heresy, shall deny and persist in his denial until sentence is passed, and the said crime shall have been proved against him, although the accused should confess the Catholic Faith and assert that he has always been and is a Christian, the inquisitors must declare him a heretic and so sentence him, for juridically the crime is proved, and by refusing to confess his error the convict does not permit the Church to absolve him and use him mercifully. But in such cases the inquisitors should proceed with great care in their examination of the witnesses, closely cross-questioning them, gathering information on the score of their characters, and ascertaining whether there exist motives why they should depone out of hatred or ill-will towards the prisoner. ARTICLE XV If the said crime of heresy or apostasy is half-proven (_semiplenamente provado_) the inquisitors may deliberate upon putting the accused to the torture, and if under torture he should confess his sin, he must ratify his confession on one of the following three days. If he does so ratify he shall be punished as convicted of heresy; if he does not ratify, but revokes his confession as the crime is neither fully proved nor yet disproved, the inquisitors must order, on account of the infamy and presumption of guilt of the accused, that he should publicly abjure his error; or the inquisitors may repeat the torture. There is nothing in this article that may be considered as a departure from or an enlargement upon any of the rules laid down by Eymeric in his “Directorium,” as we shall see when we come to deal with this gruesome subject of torture. It is urged by apologists that, when all is said, the torture to which the inquisitors had recourse, and, similarly, the punishment of death by fire, were not peculiarly ecclesiastical institutions; that they were the ordinary civil methods of dealing with offenders, and that in adopting them the Church had simply conformed, as was her custom, with that which was by law prescribed. It is quite true that originally these were the methods by which the secular tribunals proceeded against those who sinned against the Faith. But it must also be borne in mind that if the civil authorities so proceeded they implicitly obeyed the bull “ad extirpanda” of Sixtus IV, which imposed this duty upon them under pain of excommunication.