It is not easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity,
profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a
so-called court of justice in England as a state paper--a bill of
indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order
that for two hundred years had been the right arm of the Church and the
defender of Christianity against its most dangerous and ruthless
enemies. No writer of fiction would have ventured on inventing such a
trial, and no one unacquainted with mediaeval history would credit the
record that grave prelates and learned judges drew up such a document,
and then set themselves to prove the truth of its monstrous allegations
by the use of torture.

Students of the Middle Ages know well that such things were done in
those days. They remember Savonarola and Beatrice Cenci in Italy, Jeanne
d'Arc in France, Abbot Whiting and others in England. They call to mind
the cruelties and exactions practised so often upon the Jews in every
country in Europe; and with the contemporary records in their hands,
they do not hesitate to accept as undoubted historical fact what would
otherwise be rejected as a slander upon humanity and an outrage upon
common-sense.

If the Templars had been accused of the crimes vulgarly supposed to
attach themselves to religious orders; if they had been charged with
falling into the sins to which poor human nature by its frailty is
liable; if erring members had been denounced, men who had entered the
order through disappointment, or from some other unworthy motive, men
such as Sir Walter Scott depicts in his imaginary Templar, Brian de
Bois Guilbert, in his novel, _Ivanhoe_, we might well believe that some
at least of the accusations against them were true.

It is singular that no such charges are alleged against the Templars,
though they were freely brought, two hundred years later, against the
regular monks by the commissioners of Henry VIII. This fact has been
noticed by most thoughtful historians, and has been considered to tell
strongly in the tribunal of equity in favor of the Templars. Instead of
these probable or possible crimes, we find nothing but monstrous charges
of sorcery, idolatry, apostasy, and such like, instances of which we
know are to be found in those strange times; but which it seems
altogether unlikely would infect a large body whose fundamental
principle was close adherence to Christianity; a body which was spread
al