A little silence fell on the conversation. Suddenly: "What about the Inquisition?" he queried.
"You read h-history?" the priest asked, a trifle sharply.
Paul nodded.
"Then you ought to know that the Spanish Inquisition was political and national, not Catholic. You ought to know that some of the most disreputable Popes protected such people as the Jews from the fury of fanatics. You ought to know that the long-suffering of the average Bishop in heresy trials was amazing. Read Gairdner. But waive all that. See here, would you hang a murderer?"
"Of course."
"Then if you honestly b-believed that the teaching of heresy was the murdering of innocent souls, and if you had the power, what would you do to heretics?"
Paul's silence was sufficient answer to the old dilemma.
"As to actual penalties, the age did not see or feel as ours does. Torture was English law, remember, and boiling alive or pressing to death or breaking on the wheel ordinary legal p-punishments."
"Perhaps," said Paul, "but such things were the punishments of crime. Mary burnt Protestants for religion."
"Elizabeth r-racked and hung and disembowelled more Catholics than Mary Protestants," retorted Father Vassall. "Besides, ten times, no, thirty times as many suffered for Catholicism under Henry VIII. and Edward VI. than for Protestantism all the way through English history."