Title: The Inquisition. Author: Hoffman Nickerson. This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account. It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been thrust into an epilogue.
My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out to forward your work. Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful suggestions.
Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have [Pg iv] me frank with my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.
January, Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past. The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when the wholesome reaction began.
In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition. Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and aristocratic institutions.
