It was very natural that the energetic champion of the ideas of the past should, towards the close of his career, make a special effort to clear the reputation of the great, misunderstood, misjudged Inquisition. This he did in his _Letters to a Russian Nobleman on the Subject of the Spanish Inquisition_. In these letters De Maistre says everything that can be said in vindication and in honour of the Inquisition; yet in reading them we are irresistibly reminded of the remark of the old tiger in the _Hitopadesa_: "Nevertheless," says the tiger, "nevertheless, it is difficult to prove the falsehood of the report that tigers eat men." De Maistre shows that many of the assertions made of the Inquisition are incorrect; he proves, for instance, that it was a secular, not an ecclesiastical court of justice. But the only part of the book that has any attraction for us is that in which he defends its proceedings. He says: "In Spain and Portugal, as elsewhere, every man who lives quietly is unmolested; as to the rash person who attempts to teach others what to believe, or who disturbs public order, he has only himself to blame.... The modern propagator of heretical doctrine, haranguing at his ease in his own room, is quite untroubled by the knowledge that Luther's line of argument produced the Thirty Years' War; but the old legislators, who knew the price men might have to pay for these fatal doctrines, most justly punished with death a crime which was capable of shaking society to its foundations and bathing it in blood.... It is thanks to the Inquisition that for the last three hundred years there has been more happiness and peace in Spain than anywhere else in Europe."
To the _Letters_ De Maistre has prefixed a quotation, which is to the effect that all great men have been intolerant, and that it is right to be so. "Let him who comes across a well-intentioned sovereign," says Grimm, the Encyclopedist, "preach tolerance in matters of faith to him, so that he may fall into the snare, and, by his toleration, give the persecuted party time to recover and prepare itself, when its turn of power comes, to crush its opponent. Voltaire's discourse, with its babble of tolerance, is a discourse only for simpletons and those who allow themselves to be fooled, or for people who have no interest in the matter."