At last the great day of the Act of Faith approached, and Dellon heard on every side the agonised cries of both men and women. During the night the alcaide and warders came into his cell with lights bringing a suit of clothes, linen, best trousers, black striped with white. He was marched to join a couple of hundred other penitents squatted on the floor along the sides of a spacious gallery, all motionless but in an agony of apprehension, for none knew his doom. A large company of women were collected in a neighbouring chamber and a third lot in sanbenitos, among whom the priests moved seeking confessions and if made the boon of strangulation was conceded before "tasting the fire."
Shortly before sunrise the great bell of the Cathedral tolled and roused the city into life. People filled the chief streets, lined the thoroughfares and crowded into places whence they might best see the procession. With daylight Dellon saw from the faces of his companions that they were mostly Indians with but a dozen white men among them. M. Dellon went barefoot with the rest over the loose flints of the badly paved streets, and, at length, cut and bleeding, entered the church of St. Francisco, for the ceremony could not be performed under the fierce sky of this torrid climate. Dellon's punishment was confiscation of all his property, and banishment from India, with five years' service in the galleys of Portugal.
The rest of his sad adventures may be told briefly. He was brought back to Lisbon and worked at the oar with other convicts for some years, when at the intercession of friends in France the Portuguese government consented to release him. There is no record that the French authorities made any claim or reclamation for the ill-usage of a French subject.
It was otherwise with their neighbours, the English, who even before their power in India was established, would not suffer the Portuguese authorities in Goa to ill-treat a person who could claim British protection. A French Capuchin, named Father Ephrem, had visited Madras when on his way to join the Catholic mission in Pegu. He was invited to remain in Madras and was promised entire liberty with respect to his religion, and permitted to minister to the Catholics already settled in the factory. In the course of his preaching he laid down a dogma offensive, as it was asserted, to the Mother of God, and information thereof was laid with the inquisitors at Goa, who made their plans to kidnap Father Ephrem and carry him off to Goa, some six hundred miles distant from Madras. The plot succeeded and the French Capuchin was lodged in the prison of the Holy Office at Goa. This was not to be brooked by the English in Madras. An English ship forthwith proceeded to Goa and a party of ten determined men, well-armed, landed and appeared at the gates of the Inquisition and demanded admittance. Leaving a couple of men on guard at the gate, the rest entered the gaol and insisted at the point of the sword that Father Ephrem should be forthwith surrendered to them. An order thus enforced was irresistible, and the prisoner was released, taken down to the ship's boat, reëmbarked and carried back in safety to Madras.
The aims of the Inquisition are no longer those of modern communities. So widely has the idea of toleration extended, that we often forget how recent it is. The relations of Church and State are so changed in the last two centuries, that it is difficult to understand the times of the Spanish Inquisition. Then it was universally believed that orthodoxy in faith was intimately connected with loyalty to the state. As a matter of fact, nearly all the earlier heretical movements were also social or political revolts. It is, therefore, easy to see how heresy and high treason came to appear identical.
Some of the inquisitors were corrupt, others were naturally cruel, others, drunk with power, were more zealous in exerting that power than they were in deciding between guilt and innocence. On the other hand many were zealous because of their honesty. If a man believes that he knows the only hope of salvation, it is perfectly logical to compel another by force, if necessary, to follow that hope. Any physical punishment is slight compared with the great reward which reconciliation brings. On the other hand, if he is firm in his heresy, he is as dangerous as a wild beast. We are more tolerant now, less certain, perhaps, of our ground, but three or four hundred years ago these points were a stern reality.
That many inquisitors were more concerned with the Church as an institution than as a means of salvation is also true. They punished disrespect to an officer or to a law more severely than they did a doctrinal error, but that was, perhaps, inevitable. The Spanish Inquisition, which, as has been said, was to some extent a state affair, punished many for what we might call trifling offences, or, indeed, no offence at all, but it was an intolerant age, in and out of Spain.
The number punished has been grossly exaggerated, but it was enough to injure Spain permanently, to crush out freedom of thought and action to an unwarrantable extent. The historian must attribute much of Spain's decadence to the work of the mistaken advocate of absolute uniformity.