Then one evening, when the accused shall have gained confidence in this visitor, let the latter remain until he can say that it is too late to return home and that he will spend the night in the prison. Let persons be suitably placed to hear the conversation of the accused and if possible a notary to take down in writing the confessions of the heretic, who should now be drawn by the spy into relating all that he has done.
Upon this subject Pegna moralizes[105] for the benefit of the spy, pointing out how the latter may go about his very turpid task without involving himself in falsehood or besmirching in the least the delicate, sensitive soul that we naturally suppose must animate him.
“Be it noted that the spy, simulating friendship and seeking to draw from the accused a confession of his crime, may very well pretend to be of the sect of the accused, but” [mark the warning] “he must not say so, because in saying so he would at least commit a venial sin, and we know that such must not be committed upon any grounds whatever.”
Thus the scholiast. He makes it perfectly clear that a man may simulate friendship for another for the purpose of betraying that other to his death; that to make that betrayal more certain he may even pretend to hold the same religious convictions; all this may he do and yet commit no sin—not even a venial sin—so long as he does not actually clothe his pretence in words. What a store the casuist sets by words!
It is just such an argument as Caiaphas might have employed with Judas Iscariot one evening in Jerusalem.
It is a cherished thesis with apologists of the Holy Office that in its judicial proceedings it did neither more nor less than what was being done in its day in the civil courts; that if its methods were barbarous—if they shock us now—we are to remember that they were the perfectly ordinary judicial methods of their time.
But there was no secular court in Europe in the fifteenth century—steeped as that century was in dissimulation and bad faith—that would not have scorned to have made such dishonourable and dishonouring methods as these an acknowledged, regular and integral part of its procedure.