The Inquisition rested on the double basis of ecclesiastical fanaticism and protected delation.  The court was prima facie hostile to the accused; and the accused could never hope to confront the detectives upon whose testimony he was arraigned before it.  Lives and reputations lay thus at the mercy of professional informers, private enemies, malicious calumniators.  The denunciation was sometimes anonymous, sometimes signed, with names of two corroborative witnesses.  These witnesses were examined, under a strict seal of secrecy, by the Inquisitors, who drew up a form of accusation, which they submitted to theologians called Qualificators.  The qualificators were not informed of the names of the accused, the delator, or the witnesses.  It was their business to qualify the case of heresy as light, grave, or violent.  Having placed it in one of these categories, they returned it to the Inquisitors, who now arrested the accused and flung him into the secret prisons of the Holy Office.  After some lapse of time he was summoned for a preliminary examination.  Having first been cautioned to tell the truth, he had to recite the Paternoster, Credo, Ten Commandments, and a kind of catechism.  His pedigree was also investigated, in the expectation that some traces of Jewish or Moorish descent might serve to incriminate him.  If he failed in repeating the Christian shibboleths, or if he was discovered to have infidel ancestry, there existed already a good case to proceed upon.  Finally, he was questioned upon the several heads of accusation condensed from the first delation and the deposition of the witnesses.  If needful at this point, he was put to the torture, again and yet again.[84] He never heard the names of his accusers, nor was he furnished with a full bill of the charges against him in writing.  At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and bringing him to abject submission.  For his defence he might select one advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this advocate in no case saw the original documents of the impeachment.  It rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused person was acquitted altogether.  If he escaped burning or perpetual incarceration, he was almost certainly exposed to the public ceremony of penitence, with its attendant infamy, fines, civil disabilities, and future discipline.  Sentence was not passed upon condemned persons until they appeared, dressed up in a San Benito, at the place of punishment.  This costume was a sort of sack, travestying a monk’s frock, made of coarse yellow stuff, and worked over with crosses, flames, and devils, in glaring red.  It differed in details according to the destination of the victim:  for some ornaments symbolized eternal hell, and others the milder fires of purgatory.  If sufficiently versed in the infernal heraldry of the Holy Office, a condemned man might