You judge the whole question of persecution more rigorously than I do. Society is an organism, and its laws are an expression of the conditions which… - Mandell Creighton

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You judge the whole question of persecution more rigorously than I do. Society is an organism, and its laws are an expression of the conditions which it considers necessary for its own preservation. When men were hanged in England for sheep stealing, it was because people thought that sheep stealing was a crime, and ought to be severely put down. We still think it a crime, but we think it can be checked more effectually by less stringent punishments. Nowadays people are not agreed about what heresy is: they do not think it a menace to society, hence they do not ask for its punishment; but the men who conscientiously thought heresy a crime may be accused of an intellectual mistake, not necessarily of a moral crime. The immediate results of the Reformation were not to favour free thought; and the error of Calvin, who knew that ecclesiastical unity was abolished, was a far greater one than that of Innocent III., who struggled to maintain it. I am hopelessly tempted to admit degrees of criminality, otherwise history becomes a dreary record of wickedness. I go so far with you that it supplies me with few heroes, and records few good actions; but the actors were men like myself, sorely tempted by the possession of power, trammelled by holding a representative position (none more trammelled than popes), and in the sixteenth century especially, looking at everything in a very abstract way. I suppose statesmen rarely regard questions in the concrete. I can rarely follow the actions of contemporary statesmen with much moral satisfaction. In the past I find myself regarding them with pity: who am I that I should condemn them? Surely they knew not what they did.