[701] Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition.”
[702] Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and predisposed men to inflict suffering” (Rationalism in Europe, new ed. (1890), vol. i, p. 347).
[703] Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, p. 234. “The representatives of the Church were children of their own age.... Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest, stood by the code of their day and sought to explain and justify it” (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition”).
[704] “It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began.”—Gerald Stanley Lee, “Business, Goodness, and Imagination,” Hibbert Journal for April, 1912, p. 651.
[705] On Machiavellism see The Prince, and introductions to different editions by Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Henry Morley; Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), pp. 81–107; John Morley, Machiavelli (Romanes Lecture for 1897).
[706] It should be borne in mind that in Machiavelli’s age politics had been secularized, that is, divorced from theology, and this with the approval of most men. Machiavelli would now go farther and separate politics and morality. This is Lord Morley’s interpretation of The Prince. He thinks we shall best understand Machiavelli, yet without for a moment approving his teaching, “if we take him as following up the divorce of politics from theology, by a divorce from ethics also. He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art; the end of that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the fundamental principle from which he silently started, without shadow of doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application of moral standards to this business is as little to the point as it would be in the navigation of a ship. The effect was fatal even for his own purpose, for what he put aside, whether for the sake of argument or because he thought them in substance irrelevant, were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong” (Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture for 1897).
[707] “Catherine de Medici, Philip II, Alva, Des Adrets, Tilly, Wallenstein were simply incarnations of the Machiavellian theories which ruled this period.”—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 86 f.
[708] Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1903), p. 22.
[709] Ibid. p. 25.
[710] Special emphasis was laid upon this virtue of courtesy in the ideal of courtliness. And rightly so, for, as has been well said, “To be courteous is just as much a duty as to be honest, for rudeness rouses more hatred and bitterness than good honest cheating.”