soul, and despite all calumnies and mis-representations on the part of
later writers, that remained to the end the main motive of the rack
and of the stake. Personally I find it hard to suppose that some such
consideration in any way lightened the last hours of the victim, but
at least it enlightens our judgment of the inquisitor. Heresy was to
him, quite honestly, a form of lunacy. Public opinion agreed with him.
It was a species of moral and mental hydrophobia, and the mass of men
no more desired to be converted to heresy than we desire to be bitten
by mad dogs. In their simple souls they abhorred and feared the thing.
They attended an auto-da-fé as an act of faith, piety, and rejoicing.
They might have been a Paris crowd watching the last hours of such a
social pest and terror as Landru, except that it probably occurred to
few of the Parisian sightseers to pray for that murderer's soul.

But the modern Inquisition, the neo-censorship, is out, not to save my
soul, but the souls of my contemporaries. It does not imagine that I
am preaching a hideous thing from which all men will revolt; it
imagines that I am offering them something which they will gladly and
readily accept. It does not judge me and my sayings and doings from
the standpoint of an accredited representative of society, but from
the standpoint of a non-accredited governor of society. It silences me
for fear that I may be followed, not lest I should be damned. It does
not censor me for speaking or acting against an established order in
which everyone believes, but for speaking or acting against an order
in which practically everyone has ceased to believe. "Burn him," cried
Torquemada; "he has spoken what no one thinks." "Bury him," cries your
modern censor; "he has thought what no one speaks."

Thus, today, the point is that you may not think. All the energies of
the censorship are bent towards the prohibition of thought. For one