Note 190 — Chapter V · THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

[Some Catholic writers would fain excuse St. Dominic from the imputation of having founded the Inquisition. It is true he died some years before the organisation of that tribunal; but he established the principles on which, and the monkish militia by whom, it was administered. The Sicilian Paramo,i traces it up to a much more remote antiquity. According to him, God was the first inquisitor, and his condemnation of Adam and Eve furnished the model of the judicial forms observed in the trials of the Holy Office. The sentence of Adam was the type of the inquisitorial “reconciliation,” his subsequent raiment of the skins of animals was the model of the san-benito, and his expulsion from paradise the precedent for the confiscation of the goods of heretics. This learned personage deduces a succession of inquisitors through the patriarchs, Moses, Nebuchadrezzar, and King David, down to John the Baptist, and even Christ, in whose precepts and conduct he finds abundant authority for the tribunal.m]