Author: Henry Charles Lea

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-03-21

Total Pages: 596

ISBN-13: 9780365176275

Excerpt from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Vol. 2 of 3 The terror which Pelisson boasts that these proceedings spread through the land was probably owing not only to the evidence they afforded of an organized system of persecution, but also to their introduction of a much more effective method of prosecution than had heretofore been known. The heretic, so called, was the perfected teacher who disdained to deny his faith, and his burning was accepted by all as a matter of course, as also was that of the credens, or believer, who was defiantly contumacious and persisted in admitting and adhering to his creed. Hitherto, how ever, the believer who professed orthodoxy seems generally to have escaped, in the imperfection of the judicial means of proving his guilt. The friars, trained in the subtleties of disputation and learned in both civil and canon law, were specially fitted for the detection of this particularly dangerous secret misbelief, and their persistence in worrying their victims to the death was well calcu lated to spread alarm, not only among the guilty, but among the innocent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.