“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, nor all the world, can I renounce my God and religious truth,” answered the prisoner.  Thereupon Titelmann sentenced him to the stake.  He was strangled and then thrown into the flames.

At about the same-time, Thomas Calberg, tapestry weaver, of Tournay, within the jurisdiction of this same inquisitor, was convicted of having copied some hymns from a book printed in Geneva.  He was burned alive.  Another man, whose name has perished, was hacked to death with seven blows of a rusty sword, in presence of his wife, who was so horror-stricken that she died on the spot before her husband.  His crime, to be sure, was anabaptism, the most deadly offence in the calendar.  In the same year, one Walter Kapell was burned at the stake for heretical opinions.  He was a man of some property, and beloved by the poor people of Dixmuyde, in Flanders, where he resided, for his many charities.  A poor idiot, who had been often fed by his bounty, called out to the inquisitor’s subalterns, as they bound his patron to the stake, “ye are bloody murderers; that man has done no wrong; but has given me bread to eat.”  With these words, he cast himself headlong into the flames to perish with his protector, but was with difficulty rescued by the officers.  A day or two afterwards, he made his way to the stake, where the half-burnt skeleton of Walter Kapell still remained, took the body upon his shoulders, and carried it through