PREFACE.

POPULAR RELIGION AT THE PRESENT day is based largely upon an axiom that nothing can be absolutely known as true. Certain ethical dogmas, certain probabilities, certain guesses—these are granted generally, or inclined towards, or tolerated; but that a creed should be held with the same degree of certitude (though not perhaps of the same kind), as are the canons of art, or scientific statements, is reckoned as unworthy of the modern man with any claim to a large view of life. To some extent this tone of thought is to be found amongst dogmatic Christians, and has affected even certain temperaments among Catholics. It is not uncommon to hear even a devout Christian speaking of his religion as true and imperative to himself, and adding that since it is not true to his neighbour it is also not imperative to him. Of course certain social advantages result from this liberal position: for example, it is thought to be almost as intolerable for a Protestant to interfere with a Catholic’s faith, as for a Catholic to trouble or coerce a Protestant—almost, but not quite; since a Catholic is bound to be somewhat intolerant from the objective nature of his faith; and intolerance never can claim for itself full and universal toleration. However, liberty to believe as one likes has become inevitably the fruit of the popular axiom that no religion can be known as absolutely true, with the result that the penal laws have disappeared, religious tests for officials (except in the case of the King of England and the chief officials of Catholic Ireland) have vanished from amongst us, and the public and royal blasphemy against Transubstantiation has at last been abolished.

Punishment, therefore, for religious beliefs, is thought to be the one evidently and undeniably unchristian act—so evidently as to need no demonstration; since Christianity is thought to consist not essentially in a code of articles of belief, but in a tolerant attitude towards one’s neighbour; and the world would simply refuse to argue at all with a man who was so far lost towards fundamental Christian feeling as to maintain that punishment for religious beliefs may, under certain circumstances, be not only permissible, but an actual duty for Christian rulers. And if the modern world does not extend the same indignant fury (but rather contempt) towards such methods of government as those of the Index and of Excommunication, it is not because these are regarded with any less hostility, but because spiritual and moral penalties are considered, from the very nature of the case, as less serious in their effects than are physical. A Protestant laughs contemptuously at Excommunication because he does not believe that Peter can bind or loose; he actually welcomes the putting of his books upon the Index, because such action sends up their sales and his profits; but the rack and chains are quite another matter. He is certain that no one can fetter or injure his soul; but he is exceedingly certain that his body is not so happily exempt.

To the modern mind, therefore, Pius V is a brilliant instance of all that a Christian ruler should not be: he is the reductio ad absurdum of the Catholic claim that the Catholic religion is certainly true, not only to those who have a taste for it, but in itself eternally and absolutely—of the Catholic claim, in fact, that the Catholic religion is the Revelation of God, divinely safeguarded through the centuries, and not the result of human ratiocination working upon a few doubtful premisses. For Pius V was, first, an Inquisitor, and, next, he excommunicated Queen Elizabeth.

Now Pius V did many things besides these: he was a Religious and a Saint; he imitated the Doctor of the Gentiles himself, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness, he was in perils from robbers, in perils from false brethren; he rose from step to step in his Order, from dignity to dignity in the Church, until at last there came upon him indeed, in a larger sense than even upon St. Paul, the care of all the Churches. Further, an Inquisitor is not wholly occupied with torturing heretics; and England does not loom so large in the history of the Christian world as in her own opinion; yet, for the average Englishman all else is as nothing before these two facts: Michael Ghislieri, otherwise “St. Pius V,” was an Inquisitor; and he dared to excommunicate the Virgin Queen. It is worth while therefore to deal in the preface with these two undoubted facts; for the rest, the book itself will speak eloquently and exhaustively.

Two great facts—the second the corollary of the first—must be remembered if one seriously wishes to understand the existence of the Inquisition as it was in the sixteenth century. First, the whole civilized Western world was far more unanimous upon the objective truth of the Catholic religion, than is the modern Western world unanimous upon any not absolutely demonstrated fact in our own days; and, secondly, the stability of every government of Europe rested upon that assumption.

First, then, the Inquisition was an attempt to safeguard a universally accepted truth upon which the spiritual prosperity of the world was thought wholly to depend; and, next, the penalties that followed, from the civil side (since it was the State and not the Church that, in extreme instances, punished heresy with death) were inflicted in order to safeguard that Society which actually did depend upon the religious sanction. It was no more thought intolerant then to silence an heresiarch, to imprison him, and even in the case of deliberate and repeated spiritual crime, to put him to death, than it is thought intolerant in our own days to punish inflammatory oratory, to destroy seditious pamphlets, or to execute an Anarchist whose bomb has killed a child. In fact it is not an exaggeration to say that the two cases are almost exactly parallel; since in both cases it is Society which punishes with various degrees of severity, up to death itself, those enemies of hers who threaten her very existence. And it is no more and no less intolerant for an Inquisitor to suppress purely theoretical pamphlets against faith, than it is intolerant for a magistrate to suppress picture postcards that are thought injurious to morals. And it is no more and no less intolerant for an Inquisitor to strive to arrive at the truth by means of physical torture, than it is intolerant for a Counsel for the Crown to strive to arrive at the truth—(or rather at evidence which suits his case)—by means of the mental torture of the witness-box; or for an American detective to aim at the same end by means of the agony of the “Third degree”;—unless, indeed, modern persons are right who believe the body to be more sacred and inviolable than the mind and soul.

Such, then, is the position. If our modern methods of government are right, on our modern premisses that Society must be protected even to the pain of the individual, sixteenth century methods are also right, on the same premisses. It is rather in that the mind and the soul were once thought sacred, and the body comparatively secondary; and that now men think of themselves as animal rather than spiritual, that modern “progress,” and hence modern “thought,” exist It was as an administrator of a system approved by the entire conscience of Christendom of that date—a system, too, which, so long as Society considers itself justified in defending its existence against intolerant and destructive individualism, must always be fundamentally present under varying terms and based on varying premisses—it was as a careful and conscientious administrator of this system that Michael Ghislieri held the office of Inquisitor.

The second charge against him—that he excommunicated Queen Elizabeth—must be analysed into two or three of its aspects, if it is to be understood, vindicated and explained.

First, it is plain that to those minds which conceive of all excommunication as unjust, minds, that is, who are capable of imagining a Society—and a Divine Society at that—which has no rules that are really imperative or enforceable, it is, of course, impossible to justify the Pope’s action at all But for those more thoughtful minds who, perceiving that every corporation, whether human or divine, must be bound by limitations beyond which transgression must be met by expulsion, grant that excommunication itself is a necessary penalty in certain cases, the question resolves itself into two points—first, did Elizabeth transgress those limitations? and secondly, if so, was Pius V right or wrong in launching his bull? Should he perhaps have waited a little longer, in the hopes of recalling his strayed sheep, before formally declaring her to be no longer of his flock?

As to the first point, it is difficult to know what more Elizabeth could have done to show her complete and final severance, by her own deliberate and repeated acts, from the Holy See. She had given the most solemn pledges to her sister and predecessor that she would be faithful to the Catholic religion; she was crowned with Catholic rites; and, almost before the oil was dry on her forehead and hands, she began to repudiate every promise which she had given. One of her first public acts was to forbid the elevation of the Host in her presence—that supreme ceremony which was the central symbol of the central act of Catholic worship. In 1559 she caused the old Act of Supremacy of 1535—the Act which was the occasion of the martyrdom of such men as Blessed John Fisher and Blessed Thomas More—to be re-enacted with a few trifling...