It might be presupposed that, in dealing with spiritual offences, and professing that its main object was the salvation of souls, the Inquisition would incline rather to spiritual exercises than to pecuniary and corporal punishments--that it would seek to instruct and elevate the spirit rather than to afflict the body. Religious persecution, however, has always preferred the harshness of coercion, and has held that the surest way to bring conviction to the soul was to torment the flesh. We need therefore not be surprised to see how insignificant a place spiritual penances held in the sentences of the Holy Office, and it would scarce be worth while to consider them except to note how little was the importance attributed to them by the tribunals.
Except in trifling cases, which merited no real punishment, such spiritual penances as we occasionally meet with are conjoined with material penalties. A man sentenced to imprisonment may perhaps be required to fast on Fridays for six months or a year, and to recite on those days a prescribed number of Ave Marias and Paternosters or other prayers. Pilgrimages to shrines as distant as St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. James of Compostela, so frequently prescribed in the medieval Inquisition, were unknown. It is true that the formula of sentence on the reconciled, condemning them to prison, requires them on Saturdays to make a pilgrimage to some designated shrine in the vicinity, where on their knees they must repeat with devotion five Paters, Ave Marias, Credos and Salve Reginas, but this was not often used in practice.[350] Clerical offenders, sentenced to reclusion in convents, frequently had spiritual exercises included among numerous other inflictions. While this moderation was the rule, occasionally of course the unlimited discretion of the tribunals made exceptions, as in a singularly ill-judged penance imposed at Toledo, in 1653, on Gerónima Mendes, a child ten years of age, convicted of Judaism, who was sentenced to a month's instruction in the faith and the daily recitation of the rosary for a year. Seeing that the rosary consists of seventeen Paternosters, sixteen Gloria Patris, a hundred and fifty-three Ave Marias and the Apostles' Creed, one can estimate the burden imposed on a child of such tender years and how little it would conduce to training the youthful penitent in a love for the faith.[351] Such an infliction however was exceptional, and it frequently happens, in the reports of the tribunals, after detailing the material portions of a sentence, that there is a mere general allusion to "some spiritual penances," which suggests how slender was the consideration bestowed on them. There is one type of better promise, not infrequent in the later period, such as a sentence pronounced at Toledo, in 1777, on Antonio Rubio and Diego González, condemned for heretical acts and blasphemy, the former to five years' labor in the arsenal of Cartagena and the latter to three years in the presidio of Ceuta, both of whom were required, before leaving prison, to perform fifteen days of spiritual exercises under a director who would instruct them.[352]