Wealth & Money Quote by John Foxe

Justice, Foxe suggests, isn’t merely absent in the Inquisition; it’s been reverse-engineered into a machine that turns process itself into punishment. The line lands like a procedural footnote, but it’s really an indictment of a legal culture where “defence” functions as theater. If suspicion is enough to condemn, then the usual safeguards of law exist only to decorate a verdict already decided. Foxe’s blunt phrasing makes the cruelty feel bureaucratic: no flames, no racks, just the chilling administrative logic of inevitability.

The subtext is political as much as moral. Writing in post-Reformation England, Foxe is not a neutral observer; he is building a Protestant narrative of Catholic tyranny, most famously through Acts and Monuments (the “Book of Martyrs”). His target is an institution, but his real aim is public imagination: to teach readers that Rome’s power is not simply doctrinal error, it is an engine of arbitrary coercion. The quote recruits fear and outrage to cement confessional identity.

Then comes the sharper twist: “the greater his wealth the greater his danger.” Foxe frames persecution as opportunism, a pious gloss on asset seizure. It’s a move that widens the charge from spiritual fanaticism to systemic corruption: a court that profits from guilt will always find guilt. The sentence doesn’t just accuse the Inquisition of intolerance; it calls it a racket, aligning religious authority with predatory state power. In that framing, innocence isn’t defensible because innocence isn’t the point.