But the inevitable day came at length.  Assertions and doctrines based upon such preposterous evidence were involved in the discredit that fell upon the evidence itself.  As the thirteenth century is approached, we find unbelief in all directions setting in.  First, it is plainly seen among the monastic orders, then it spreads rapidly among the common people.  Books, such as “The Everlasting Gospel,” appear among the former; sects, such as the Catharists, Waldenses, Petrobrussians, arise among the latter.  They agreed in this, “that the public and established religion was a motley system of errors and superstitions, and that the dominion which the pope had usurped over Christians was unlawful and tyrannical; that the claim put forth by Rome, that the Bishop of Rome is the supreme lord of the universe, and that neither princes nor bishops, civil governors nor ecclesiastical rulers, have any lawful power in church or state but what they receive from him, is utterly without foundation, and a usurpation of the rights of man.”

To withstand this flood of impiety, the papal government established two institutions:  1.  The Inquisition; 2.  Auricular confession—­the latter as a means of detection, the former as a tribunal for punishment.

In general terms, the commission of the Inquisition was, to extirpate religious dissent by terrorism, and surround heresy with the most horrible associations; this necessarily implied the power of determining what constitutes heresy.  The criterion of truth was thus in possession of this tribunal, which was charged “to discover and bring to judgment heretics lurking in towns, houses, cellars, woods, caves, and fields.”  With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the interests of religion, that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three hundred and forty thousand persons, and of these nearly thirty-two thousand had been burnt!  In its earlier days, when public opinion could find no means of protesting against its atrocities, “it often put to death, without appeal, on the very day that they were accused, nobles, clerks, monks, hermits, and lay persons of every rank.”  In whatever direction thoughtful men looked, the air was full of fearful shadows.  No one could indulge in freedom of thought without expecting punishment.  So dreadful were the proceedings of the Inquisition, that the exclamation of Pagliarici was the exclamation of thousands:  “It is hardly possible for a man to be a Christian, and die in his bed.”

The Inquisition destroyed the sectaries of Southern France in the thirteenth century.  Its unscrupulous atrocities extirpated Protestantism in Italy and Spain.  Nor did it confine itself to religious affairs; it engaged in the suppression of political discontent.  Nicolas Eymeric, who was inquisitor-general of the kingdom of Aragon for nearly fifty years, and who died in 1399, has left a frightful statement of its conduct and appalling cruelties in his “Directorium Inquisitorum.”