Carl Mirbt

Carl Theodor Mirbt (July 21, 1860 in Gnadenfrei, Province of Silesia – September 27, 1929 in Göttingen) was a German Protestant church historian.

[1] In 1888, he became a member of the Theological Faculty of the University of Göttingen with a doctoral dissertation on "The Position of Augustine in the Gregorian Church Dispute".

Kirby Page writes in Jesus or Christianity, A Study in Contrasts (1929): In 1895 Carl Mirbt, a prelate of the Papal household, eulogized the Inquisition in these words: "O blessed flame of those pyres by which a very few crafty and insignificant persons were taken away that hundreds of hundreds of phalanxes of souls should be saved from the jaws of error and eternal damnation!

"[3] Note that Kirby Page's statement is a misinterpretation of the following excerpt from Preserved Smith's The Age of the Reformation, where Smith cites p. 390 of Mirbt's 1911 edition of Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums (Sources for the History of the Papacy, a collection of original Papal documents through history), as the 1895 (coincidentally publication year of the first edition of Quellen) Papal Latin source text of an unknown prelate, which Smith translates (in quotes) as follows: A prelate of the papal household published in 1895 the following words in the Annales ecclesiastici: "Some sons of darkness nowadays with dilated nostrils and wild eyes inveigh against the intolerance of the Middle Ages.

But let not us blinded by that liberalism that bewitches under the guise of wisdom seek for silly little reasons to defend the Inquisition.