It is not necessary at present to enter into particulars of the dread ceremonial, the ghastly, almost theatrical, solemnities that went to compose the greatest horror that has sprung from the womb of Christianity: the Auto de Fé.
“An Asiatic,” says Voltaire, “arriving in Madrid on the day of an Auto de Fé, would doubt whether here was a festival, a religious celebration, a sacrifice, or a massacre. It is all of these. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to God. What would he have said had he witnessed an Auto de Fé?”[124]
Occasion to enter into these details will occur later. We are more concerned at the moment with the words of the inquisitors than with their acts, and it is necessary on the subject of the laws that governed the Auto de Fé to touch upon quite the most extraordinary of all the quibbles by means of which the Holy Office avoided—in the letter—committing an irregularity.
Nothing in the whole of its jurisprudence savours more rankly of hypocrisy than this matter of abandoning a heretic to the secular arm. It is the very last word in that science which it is the fashion to call “Jesuitism,” but which we think might quite as aptly and justly be termed “Dominicanism.” Yet it would be very rash to say that these men were prompted by conscious hypocrisy. Such is certainly not the inference to be drawn from their jurisprudence. Stupidity—the stupidity of the man of one idea, of the man who is able to perceive but one thing at a time—was, rather than hypocrisy, responsible for what they did.
They were imbued with a passion for formality, for procedure that should be scrupulously correct, scrupulously in accordance with the letter of the law; and they justified their circumvention, their perversion of its spirit, with crazy arguments that must at least have been convincing to themselves, obfuscated as they were by the fanaticism that bubbled through their extraordinary intelligences.
We say that these arguments must have been convincing to themselves, because we find them in books that were never intended to be perused by any but inquisitors and ecclesiastics. Since these books were never meant to be placed before the world, no suspicion can attach to them of having deliberately and hypocritically resorted to sophistries for the purpose of hoodwinking the lay mind.
It was themselves they hoodwinked—by the arguments they themselves conceived—and although it is undeniable that they practised a deception which must provoke the scorn of every thoughtful man, yet it must be remembered that this deception was the self-deception that lies in wait for every fanatic, whatever the subject of his fanaticism. By staring too long and too intently at one object, that object itself becomes blurred and indistinct.
“Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine.”
That was the principle that governed them. Conceive it!
The tenet that a Christian must not be guilty of shedding blood or causing the death of a fellow-creature has been touched upon more than once in these pages. It has been seen how in the very dawn of Christianity the Christian’s refusal to bear arms in the service of the State gave rise to friction with the Roman authorities, and, being construed into insubordination, was one of the causes of the persecutions to which Christians were subjected in the first and second centuries. As time went on, under stress of the necessities of this world, the Christian was forced to abandon that fine and loftily humanitarian ideal. Soon he had not only abandoned it under pressure of expediency, but he had forgotten it altogether; so that he donned the cross of the crusader, and went forth sword in hand, exultantly, to shed the blood of the infidel in the name of that tender Founder Whose disciple had brought to Rome the great Message of Forbearance.