INQUISITION 187
ual roots from which that cosmos arose. Principtis obsta! Not evil deeds merely but false, erroneous ideas also, must be punished. It was not merely the public heretic who must be punished: the con- cealed unorthodox must be ferreted out and turned over to the courts; and those who persisted in their errors must be handed over to the secular arm to be exterminated.
Lucius III, Innocent III, and Gregory IX, the friend of that Saint who bought lambs to save them from slaughter and who reverenced every drop of water as being an image of the divine purity, step by step became the instigators of the Inquisition. Innocent IV broad- ened ks scope and perfected it with the fateful introduction of the torture. More brutal by far than any persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, the Inquisition became the scandal of the Papacy and of its spiritual and temporal aids. It is true that few great men were among the victims; and it is also correct to see in the spiritual self-defense of society a great good, and in the test of martyrdom a proof of permanently significant ideas. Yet what evil does not con- tain a good when it is viewed from a distance? Measured by the mission of the Church and the laws of its Founder, the irreligiousness of the Inquisition lies in human failure to rely confidently in the spirit which He, the Proclaimer of the Eight Beatitudes, had be- queathed to His foundation when He promised that He would be with it all days. There is not an iota of His law which affords an excuse for the barbarities of five long centuries, however true it may be that principles and acts of violence sponsored by the Reformers, such as the burning of Servetus by order of Calvin, were equally deplorable.
The Papacy and the Empire alike were striving for the fullness of power, and each was the boundary beyond which the other could not go. The war in which they destroyed each other proved the matrix of new situations in Western Europe. The two powers verified the ancient truth of Greek thought, that one who strives toward great ends must also suffer greatly. The Hohenstaufens approached the close of their reign; and the forces which the Papacy set in motion against them were in turn to prove baneful to the Popes,
During the great German interregnum (1245-1273) every count
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