the trembling peasants on the head with a
great club, spreading dismay far and wide, dragging suspected persons
from their firesides or their beds, and thrusting them into dungeons,
arresting, torturing, strangling, burning, with hardly the shadow of
warrant, information, or process.

The secular sheriff, familiarly called Red-Rod, from the color of his
wand of office, meeting this inquisitor Titelmann one day upon the high
road, thus wonderingly addressed him--"How can you venture to go about
alone, or at most with an attendant or two, arresting people on every
side, while I dare not attempt to execute my office, except at the head
of a strong force, armed in proof; and then only at the peril of my
life?"

"Ah! Red-Rod," answered Peter, jocosely, "you deal with bad people. I
have nothing to fear, for I seize only the innocent and virtuous, who
make no resistance, and let themselves be taken like lambs."

"Mighty well," said the other; "but if you arrest all the good people and
I all the bad, 'tis difficult to say who in the world is to escape
chastisement." The reply of the inquisitor has not been recorded, but
there is no doubt that he proceeded like a strong man to run his day's
course.

He was the most active of all the agents in the religious persecution at
the epoch of which we are now treating, but he had been inquisitor for
many years. The martyrology of the provinces reeks with his murders. He
burned men for idle words or suspected thoughts; he rarely waited,
according to his frank confession, for deeds. Hearing once that a certain
schoolmaster, named Geleyn de Muler, of Audenarde, "was addicted to
reading the Bible," he summoned the culprit before him and accused him of
heresy. The schoolmaster claimed, if he were guilty of any crime, to be
tried before the judges of his town. "You are my prisoner," said
Titelmann, "and are to answer me and none other." The inquisitor
proceeded accordingly to catechize him, and soon satisfied himself of the
schoolmaster's heresy. He commanded him to make immediate recantation.
The schoolmaster refused. "Do you not love your wife and children?" asked
the demoniac Titelmann. "God knows," answered the heretic, "that if the
whole world were of gold, and my own, I would give it all only to have
them with me, even had I to live on bread and water and in bondage." "You
have then," answered the inquisitor, "only to renounce the error of your
opinions."--"Neither for wife, children