Continued from XXXVI. Roman Catholics Who Were Worthy Of All Honor.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the people of Toulouse in France rebelled against the popes to show their obedience to Jesus. The head of the Church was alarmed, and proclaimed a crusade against these servants of God. War, waged by the most ferocious men that ever were enlisted in human slaughter, scourged these early Protestants; but as they would not all come boldly out to be slain, it was necessary to search for them that they might be destroyed, and a new system for this object was adopted, and it was called

This institution was established about A.D. 1215. It began under Innocent III. Dominic, a Spaniard, was its founder. He was a man of fiery zeal, considerable genius, some eloquence, a stubborn will, boundless hatred, a superstitious heart; and of an activity which left nothing possible undone.

His mother, before his birth, dreamt that her offspring should be a whelp, carrying in his mouth a lighted torch; that after he was born he should put the world in an uproar by his fierce barkings; and set it on fire by his torch. His followers interpreted the dream of his doctrine which gave light to the world.

The standard of the inquisition of Goa bears a picture of Dominic, with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other; at his feet are a globe bearing a crucifix, and a dog with the end of a fiery torch in his mouth, pouring its flames upon the globe; and above his head is the motto: “misericordia et justitia,” mercy and justice. Of Dominic’s mercy the world has seen little; of the justice of his inquisition the Omniscient eye never detected one bright ray.

Nowhere in Catholic Christendom did the Holy Office attain such power, or practice such shocking barbarities, as in Spain.

Though it existed in that land before 1478, only in that year was it everywhere established; and placed in a position so commanding, that for centuries it was the great fact in Spanish life and history.

Its professed object was the destruction of heresy, Mohammedanism and Judaism in Spain. But Llorente declares that the true motive for the establishment of the inquisition by Ferdinand V. was to carry on a rigorous system of confiscation against the Jews, so that their wealth might be seized for the royal treasury. Sixtus IV. sanctioned the measure, to gain the point dearest to the court of Rome: an increase of domination. Covetousness, papal ambition, and superstition united their efforts in the erection of the most formidable and WICKED TRIBUNAL that ever terrified mankind,

The Holy Office, with a few restrictions on its modes of procedure, could try any ecclesiastic in Spain, however exalted his rank. The laymen of the nation were entirely at its mercy, from the humblest peasant to the most illustrious noble or prince. Its victims might be boys in their eleventh and girls in their tenth year; even children so young might be tortured and executed with the usual cruelties.

A victim of the Holy Office never saw the accusation preferred against him; was never confronted with the witnesses; nor were their names ever communicated to him directly or indirectly; everything that could give him the slightest clue to his denouncers was artfully concealed. He was invited to confess his sins from his earliest years; to relate anything he had ever said against Holy Mother Church; and any act he had ever performed against religion; and if he would confess nothing under the persuasions of terror and torture, he was then examined in reference to the charges brought against him. The object of this strange procedure was to obtain a knowledge of other offenses than those upon which the accusation was based.

There were advocates in the inquisition who belonged to that dread tribunal. These pleaders were sworn to secrecy; and they were bound to use every effort to make their clients confess. They never saw a prisoner except in the presence of an inquisitor. A notorious heretic was forbidden the services of these lawyers; nor were they permitted to give any advice to a sufferer if they believed he had departed from the faith.

No one outside of its walls could be safely informed about the number or names of the incarcerated; their crimes, their health, or their affairs. Nothing was to be communicated except such matters as the inquisitors themselves saw fit to publish. The unwilling inmates were to be regarded as dead, as far as relatives and friends were concerned. And if by a rare accident they should emerge from their living tomb, no hint must be given of the hidden horrors of St. Dominic’s tribunal.

Juan, né Sotomayer, a native of Murcia in Spain, was condemned to do penance as a suspected Jew by the inquisition; he conversed with several about his confession and trial after his liberation; for this indiscretion he was arrested again, and sentenced to receive two hundred lashes, and to be imprisoned for life.

Weary months may roll past before the coming of an Auto da Fé.

An auto-da-fé was the ritual of public penance, carried out between the 15th and 19th centuries, of condemned heretics and apostates imposed by the Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican Inquisition as punishment and enforced by civil authorities. Its most extreme form was death by burning. – From Wikipedia

He may be tormented by the most dreadful apprehensions, but a hint of his approaching fate never reaches him until he reads it in the figures on his dress, or in his place in the procession as he marches forth in the Act of Faith.

No pains of heart, of racked limbs, or of disease must occasion any disturbance in the silent cells of the Holy Office. It is said that once a poor prisoner coughed, the jailers admonished him to be quiet; they commanded him a second time to desist; and because he could not, they stripped him and beat him very severely; and as he continued to cough they repeated their violence until he died under their hands. There must be no psalms or hymns sung, no prayers offered to God in an audible voice, no conversation between prisoners on any occasion, A jailer, in the exercise of almost unexampled compassion, permitted a mother and her two daughters, who were imprisoned in different cells, to spend half an hour together; for this Peter ab Herara was thrown into prison, and subjected to such cruelties that his mind became disordered; then after a year spent in his own dungeons, he was led out with a halter about his neck as if he had been an odious malefactor; and he was ordered to receive two hundred lashes through the city, and to be sent to the galleys for six years.

Mass is never celebrated for the prisoners of the Holy Office, nor is there any privilege of Catholic worship granted them.

Near relatives have been in the same inquisition for years without knowing it till they met at an Auto da Fé.

Their dearest ones may be dying, or may have yielded to the Last Enemy; revolutions or wasting wars may be filling their country with desolation and carnage, but they can know nothing of what is passing. “Soon after my imprisonment,” says Da Costa, “I heard an alarm of fire, and I asked one of the guards, who was a little more kind than the rest, where it had taken place, and if it had caused much damage? I was told that the prisoners of the inquisition were not to busy themselves with anything that occurred outside.” What a scene of silent horror, even when instruments of bodily torture were not applied, awaited a victim of the inquisition!

If his goods are perishable they are forthwith sold; otherwise the inquisition takes possession of all its prisoners own until their cases are decided; when, if a man is declared innocent, he has to pay the expenses of his support, and prosecution; and if he is condemned, the Holy Office claims his estate.

The husband must inform on the wife, the son on the father, and brothers upon each other. The holiest ties to which affection has given birth, or which nature has joined, are to be rudely disregarded; and loved ones are to hasten before “those despicable scholastic theologians too ignorant and prejudiced to be able to ascertain the truth between the doctrines of Luther and those of Roman Catholicism,” who are called Lords Inquisitors, and give them information which will quickly prompt them to inflict the most atrocious outrages ever suffered out of the abyss.

They will pretend friendship for the accused, and even compassion, and say to them: “You did believe these sort of persons, who taught such and such things, to be good men, you willingly heard them and gave them somewhat of your substance; or received them sometimes into your house because you were a simple man and loved them.” If any prisoner admitted such acts, he was sure to be burned. Fox tells about a lady, who with her two daughters and a niece was apprehended at Seville for heresy; they were tortured without betraying Jesus. When it was over one of the inquisitors sent for the youngest daughter, and pretending great compassion for her in her sufferings, he bound himself with a solemn oath not to betray her if she would disclose all to him; and to secure the release of her mother and sister and cousin and of herself, made confident by his oath, she revealed all the tenets of their faith. When the perjured wretch ordered her to be put to the rack that he might compel her to reveal other matters; but she firmly refused, and they were all burned at the next Auto da Fé.

Ferdinand Valdes, Archbishop of Seville and Inquisitor-General in 1561, among eight-one rules for the Holy Office, issued the following:

“When sufficient proof exists to authorize proceedings against the memory and property of a deceased person, according to the ancient instruction, the accusation of the fiscal shall be signified to the children, the heirs or other interested persons, each of whom shall receive a copy of the notification. If no person presents himself to defend the memory of the accused, or to appeal against the seizure of his goods, the inquisitors shall appoint a defender and pursue the trial, considering him as a party. If any one interested appears, his rights shall be respected. Until the affair is terminated, the sequestration of the property cannot take place, because it has passed into other hands, yet the possessors shall be deprived of it if the deceased is found guilty.”

And, as an illustration of the character of such a plundering law, Eleonora de Vibero, who had been some time dead and buried without any doubt of her piety, was accused of Lutheranism by the fiscal of the inquisition; a manifest slander, as she had received the sacraments and the Eucharist at her death. The fiscal supported his charge by several witnesses, who had been tortured or threatened, and she was condemned. Her body was dug up and burned, with her effigy; her property was confiscated, her house torn down, and a decree was issued forbidding it to be rebuilt; and a monument, with an inscription commemorating the deed of vengeance, was erected upon its site. Truly it was a serious thing to live in the land of these inquisitors, and an awkward business to die in it, if one had property or descendants.

Limborch says: “They never proceed to torture unless there is alack of other proofs; when the prisoner cannot make his innocence appear plainly to the judge, and at the same time he cannot be fully convicted by witnesses or the evidence of the thing.” If there is no testimony to convict a prisoner, and the inquisitor either suspect him or covet his property, then he may tear him on the rack until he terrifies him into some confession, which will justify the dainty conscience of the inquisitor in sending him to the faggots or the galleys and seizing his estate. What room such a law gave to torture the innocent! To rack, plunder, scourge and burn as good Catholics as any of the demon-hearted followers of fierce St. Dominic!

And hosts of the faithful children of Rome did suffer these enormous wrongs prepared for her enemies. Every work on the inquisition describes the story of Maria de Bohorques and her sister Jane, daughters of a gentleman in Seville. Maria was a girl of cultivated mind, of great courage, of unwavering faith in Jesus, the God of the New Testament, which she loved. She was thrown into the inquisition, and then confessed her love for Christ and His Word; she nobly defended her faith against the cunning wild beasts in human shape who were surely dragging her to a death which, had it been worse, they themselves richly deserved. When on the rack they made her say that her sister Jane had not reproved her for the opinions she entertained. As her body was chained to the stake, they bade her recite the Creed, which she did readily, and immediately began to explain it in a Protestant sense, showing a soul sustained by the strength of the Almighty. To stop her, they strangled her and pitched her body into the flames.

Her sister was immediately imprisoned on the flimsy pretext that she had not reproved Maria. As they found she was soon to become a mother, they allowed her to remain in a superior cell until the birth of her child, eight days after which it was removed, and she was forthwith transferred to a low dungeon. On the fifteenth day after her confinement, she appeared before the inquisitors. When charges were made which she could not disprove, which amounted to nothing; and as they had not testimony to convict her, even according to their own barbarous code, they took this young mother and dislocated her joints, gashed her arms and ankles with ropes which cut to the bone; “Passed a cord over her breast thinking to add new pangs, and by an additional outrage of decency as well as humanity, extort some cry that might serve to incriminate husband or friend. But when the tormentor weighed down the bar, her frame gave way, the ribs crushed inwards; blood flowed from her mouth and nostrils; she was carried to her cell, where she lingered for another week, and then the God of pity took her to Himself.” In process of time, the Holy Office declared her innocent. Surely the self-confessed murderers of this young mother deserve the maledictions of the whole human race, and especially of all Catholics, for wickedly killing such a blameless and worthy member of their Church.

This law governed every department of the Church of Rome, even in her most blood-thirsty days. The inquisition tried a prisoner, and handed him over to the secular judge for sentence and execution; and, with a hypocrisy worthy of “the harlot drunken with the blood of saints,” entreated him to deal very tenderly with the erring one, and not to injure him. But if he paid the least attention to this customary and false appeal, he would be the next victim to be dislocated, burned and tortured, till his life would be worth little. This practice is the foundation of a famous and false saying current in some Catholic circles, that “the Church of Rome never persecuted any one.” If the first Napoleon were living and said: “I never fought a battle, I never killed a man; it was cruel soldiers who performed these horrid deeds,” he would tell the truth, as Rome does about the history of her atrocious and countless murders.

The room in which the engines of anguish were used was lined with thick quilting, to cover every crevice and deaden the sound.

Sometimes the prisoner had hard, small ropes placed around each naked arm and leg, in two different parts of each limb; these were suddenly drawn tight with great force by several men, and the poor victim was cut to the bone in eight distinct places. This dreadful infliction was repeated on the same person three or four times in succession, as soon as he was able to bear it.

By a cunning process of twisting the arms behind the back, such a violent contortion was produced as dislocated both shoulders, and resulted in the discharge of a considerable quantity of blood from the mouth. The shoulders were carefully set, and the same torture renewed several times.

And in these violent dislocations and wounds, according to the testimony of the author of the “Book of Martyrs,” the unhappy females who fell into the hands of the inquisitors, had not the least favor shown them on account of the softness of their sex or the prohibitions of decency.

Sometimes the prisoner had a rope passed under his arms, which were tied behind his back, by which he was drawn up into the air with a pulley, and left to swing for a time; then suddenly he is let down near the ground, and by the shock of the jerking fall, all his joints are dislocated.

Tn another torture, the feet were smeared with grease, and the soles placed close to a hot fire, and there are left to burn till the victim would confess.

Dr. Wylie, the author of “The Papacy,” in 1847, was in a dismantled inquisition, nearly surrounded by the waters of Lake Leman, called the Castle of Chillon, describing which he says:

“We entered one apartment which was evidently the hall of torture; for there, with the rust of centuries upon it, stood the gaunt apparatus of the inquisition; the corda, queen of torments, was used there. The person who endured the corda had his arms tied behind his back, then a rope was attached to them; a heavy iron weight was hung at his feet. When all was ready, the executioners suddenly hoisted him up to the ceiling by means of the rope which passed through a pulley in the top of the beam; the arms were painfully wrenched backwards, and the weight of the body, increased by the weight attached to the feet, in most cases sufficed to tear the arms from their sockets. If he refused to confess, he was suddenly let down with a jerk which completed the dislocation. While suspended, the prisoner was sometimes whipped, or had a hot iron thrust into various parts of his body, his tormentors admonishing him all the while to speak the truth. At each of the four corners of the room was a pulley fixed, showing that the apartment had been fitted up for the VEGLI. The veglia resembled a smith’s anvil with a spike on the top, ending in an iron die, Through the pulleys in the four corners of the room ran four ropes; these were tied to the naked arms and legs of the sufferer, and twisted so as to cut to the bone. He was lifted up and set down exactly with his back-bone on the die, which, as the whole weight of the body rested on it, wrought by degrees into the bone. This torture, which was excruciating, was to last eleven hours if the prisoner did not confess.

“In a small adjoining apartment was shown a recess in the wall, with a trap-door below it. In that recess, said the guide, stood an image of the Virgin. The prisoner accused of heresy was brought and made to kneel upon the trap-door, and, in the presence of the Virgin, to abjure heresy. To prevent his apostasy, the moment he made his confession the bolt was drawn, and the man lay a mangled corpse on the rocks below.”

Elizabeth Vasconellos was brought into the hall of torture; her back was stripped, and she was whipped with a scourge of knotted cords for some time. Soon after, with a red hot iron the executioner burned her on the breast in three places, and sent her to prison without any application for the painful sores. A month later she was scourged with the same brutal formalities as on the previous occasion. At a subsequent audience one of her shoes was removed and a red hot iron slipper was placed upon her foot, which burned her to the bone, and made her faint away.

Llorente, formerly secretary of the inquisition, and chancellor of the University of Toledo in Spain, says: “I shall not describe the different modes of torture employed by the inquisition, as that has been done by many historians already; I shall only say that NONE OF THEM CAN BE ACCUSED OF EXAGGERATION.”

Here is a witness with the records of the inquisition before him; with a full knowledge of the horrors ascribed to its torture-chambers by the writers of the world, and he declares that none of these authors can be accused of exaggeration. Little wonder that Spanish mobs would aid the familiars of the inquisition in dragging a prisoner to its cells; or that Spanish parents would not lift a finger to hinder the same officials from hurrying off a manly son or a lovely daughter to their frightful tribunal. The Holy Office had terrified the nation out of its manhood. Neither the Almighty nor the Wicked One was half so much dreaded as the inquisition.

Its mildest penalties were imprisonment, confinement on the galleys, or several hundred lashes administered on the public streets.

This article was prominent in the punishments inflicted by the inquisitors. It was a woollen garment of a yellow color, descending to the knees, with crosses on it. Sometimes a prisoner was released and ordered to wear it for years. And wherever he appeared he was frowned upon, hooted, greeted with oaths, regarded with horror, shunned by all as quickly as his badge of inquisitorial vengeance was recognized. If he laid it aside his doom was appalling, and if he continued to wear it the famishings of hunger, the daggers of hate, and the execrations of a whole community drove him to despair and the grave.

Those condemned to the stake had their likenesses painted on the sanbenito, surrounded by flames, and by devils described in hideous attitudes, The sanbenitos of all who were put to death, and of those who were condemned to wear them for a term of years, as a punishment, with the names of their owners, their crimes and punishments, painted upon them, were hung in the churches in which they once worshipped, that their memories might be held in everlasting detestation, and that eternal infamy might rest upon their relatives and friends.

The children and grand-children of those whom it has condemned are prohibited from following any honorable employment; they must not wear any garment of silk or fine wool, or any ornament of gold, silver, or precious stones. Surely the children might be innocent if the father was worthy of the flames; and the grand-children, in most cases unborn, might have been spared a penalty, which justice never inflicted, and which only INIQUITY in a state of rampant rage could have suggested.

By this law the hosts whose parents and grand-parents had incurred the wrath of the Holy Office were stigmatized; driven from respectable callings; and placed at the mercy of rapacious informers and sacerdotal tyrants.

The flames ended the earthly lives of those condemned to death by the inquisition; unless when, as a special favor, they were strangled, before their bodies were consumed.

The name for such an exhibition is curious, it ought to have been called: The Act of Burning Love. But the nomenclature of the inquisition is peculiar. The Holy Office, for instance, is a remarkable designation for such an institution. Governed by example, it is probable that Satan calls his hottest furnace, The Arctic Freezer; or his temptation to the assassin who commits some murder marked by fiendish barbarity, Benevolent Suggestions. An Auto da Fé was one of the grandest entertainments given in Catholic countries; it was arranged with special magnificence; the court, nobility, foreign ambassadors, and all the dignitaries of the Church were there; the people thronged to behold it in multitudes; and learned in time to be delighted by its barbarities.

The mode of conducting an Auto da Fé in Portugal was atrocious. The prisoners are seized by the secular magistrates in presence of the inquisitors and loaded with chains; they are removed for a short time to a public prison, and there they are taken before the chief justice, who, without making a single inquiry into their crime asks them separately: In what faith they intend to die? If they answer: In the Catholic; they are immediately sentenced to be strangled, and their bodies are commanded to be burned to ashes; if they say they will die in another faith than the Romish, they are condemned to die by the flames. At the place of execution a stake twelve feet high is erected for each sufferer; half a yard from the top a little seat is made for the martyr. A quantity of dry furze surrounds the stake. The negative and relapsed are first strangled and their bodies are given to the flames; afterwards the others go up a ladder between two Jesuits, who exhort them to be reconciled to the Church; failing to heed which the executioner ascending places them upon their seats, and chains them close to the stake. Again the Jesuits admonish them, and if the response is unfavorable they withdraw, giving them the cheering information that, The devil is standing at their elbow to receive them, and carry them with him into hell fire. Upon this a great shout is raised: Let the dogs’ beards be made, which is done by thrusting burning furzes fastened on long poles against their faces. This cruel act is repeated until their faces are frightfully scorched and blackened; and it is always accompanied by jubilant shouts. The furze is then kindled at the bottom of the stake, the flame of which scarcely reaches higher than the seats occupied by the saints of God; and if they are exposed to the wind it seldom ascends to their knees. In a calm day they will be dead in thirty minutes; in boisterous weather their sufferings may extend over two hours.

An eye witness quoted by Limborch, says: “Heytor Dias and Maria Pinteyra were burned alive: the woman expired in half an hour, and the man in twice that time. The king and his brothers were seated in a window so near as to be addressed in very moving terms for a considerable time, by the man as he was burning. But though he only sought a few more faggots, the favor was refused. The wind being fresh, and the man being twelve feet above the ground, six feet higher than the fuel, his back was completely wasted, and as he turned himself his ribs opened before he ceased speaking. All his entreaties could not secure him a larger allowance of wood to shorten his torments and despatch him.”

At an Auto da Fé held in Madrid, June 30th, 1680, in the presence of the king, queen, and court, a young Jewish girl was consigned to the flames. No charge was alleged against her except her race and her religion. She was just entering on her seventeenth year, and she possessed remarkable beauty. At the stake she appealed for mercy to the queen in words which ought to have moved a heart of marble: “Great queen,” she cried, “is not your presence able to bring me some comfort under my misery? Consider my youth, and that I am condemned for a religion which I nursed in with my mother’s milk.” The queen turned away declaring that she pitied the miserable creature, but she did not dare to intercede for her. Any wonder that the blight of heaven should shrivel up the prosperity of a nation that permitted such murders? that it should be stripped of its wealth and greatness, and become the halting cripple, the chattering dotard of earthly states?

Dr. Claudius Buchanan, vice-provost of the college of Fort William, Bengal, visited the inquisition of Goa in the East Indies in 1808, and was the guest of the second inquisitor during his stay. He found the institution in full blast; and his host, in admitting the truthfulness of the narrative of Dellon, a former prisoner of the Holy Office in Goa, confirmed the common reputation of the inquisition as the most dreadful scourge that cursed any people. Though the inquisition was abolished by Napoleon in Spain, it was re-established by Ferdinand VII., July 21st 1814, when for many years it continued to perform its odious work.

When the doors of this diabolical institution were forced in 1849, Father Gavazzi, the well known chaplain general to the Roman army, says that, “He found in one of its prisons a furnace and the remains of a woman’s dress; that everything combined to persuade him that it was used for horrible deaths, and to consume the bodies of victims of inquisitorial hate. He saw between the great hall of judgment and the apartment of the chief jailer a deep trap, a shaft opening into the vaults under the inquisition. As soon as the prisoner confessed his offense, he was sent to the Father Commissary to receive a relaxation of his punishment. With the hope of pardon he approached the apartment of the holy inquisitor, but in the act of setting his foot at the entrance, the trap opened, and the world of the living heard no more of him. He examined some of the matter in the pit below this trap; and he found it to be composed of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell and horrible to the sight of the beholder.

He says popular fury reached its greatest height at the cells of St. Pius V. To reach them you must descend into the vaults by very narrow stairs, and along a corridor, equally cramped, you approach the separate cells, which for smallness and stench, are a hundred times more horrible than the dens of lions and tigers in the Colosseum. Looking around he discovered a cell full of skeletons without skulls, buried in lime. The skulls detached from the bodies, had been collected in a hamper by the visitors. These persons never died a natural death; they were doubtless immersed in a bath of slaked lime gradually filled up to their necks, the lime, by little and little, enclosed the sufferers or walled them up all alive. The torment was extreme but slow. As the lime rose higher and higher, the respiration of the victims became more and more painful, because more difficult. So that with the suffocation of the smoke, and the anguish of a compressed breathing, they died in a manner most horrible and desperate. Sometime after death the heads would naturally separate from their bodies and roll away into the hollows left by the shrinking of the lime.

So great, says he, are the atrocities of the inquisition, that they would more than suffice to arouse the detestation of a thousand worlds. He adds: “The Roman inquisition is under the shadow of the Vatican palace, and its prefect is the pope in person.” Pius IX., lauded for his liberality and fatherly benevolence, kept this accursed institution at work until chased from Rome by his enraged subjects; and he left victims in it when he fled.

Under the liberal sway of Victor Emmanuel, the inquisition is dead in Rome beyond the hope of resurrection. The reign of his son in Spain will render its existence impossible in that country.

We suspect that the destruction of the inquisition arose from jealousy—the jealousy of Satan. He cannot bear the superiority of another. And when he saw that the Holy Office far surpassed him in cunning, malignity, and all the other attributes of devilhood, he was mortified, indignant, and bent on mischief. He first tried to overtake the Holy Office in its career of cunning, cruel wickedness; but thoroughly beaten on his own ground, and in his own business; and convinced of the hopelessness of such efforts, he resolved to destroy the favorite instrument of St. Dominic. Jehovah, who for wise reasons permitted its monstrous birth, for purposes of love ordained its destruction. And Satan was allowed to extinguish his rival; and to stand for the future unequaled in atrocious deeds.

On the 14th of September, 1485, Pedro Arbues, an inquisitor in Spain, went to the cathedral of Saragossa to attend matins (a canonical hour in Christian liturgy, originally sung during the darkness of early morning). He had a steel skullcap under his hat, and a coat of mail beneath his robes; he carried a lantern and a club, the one rendered needful by the darkness, and the other by his ferocious cruelties. As he knelt, he grasped his weapon. Two Spaniards were soon on their knees beside him, and Pedro, not watching, as was his common custom when praying, unexpectedly received a few vigorous blows, which quickly sent him from judging in an earthly tribunal to stand as a crimson offender at the bar of a holy God. The world seldom rejoiced in the death of a more brutal tyrant.

In 1866, Pius IX. canonized this execrable wretch, and thereby elevated him to the highest rank among Catholic saints. Pedro now is a prayer-hearing intercessor, and is doubtless addressed by large numbers in their supplications. And as Pius IX. is infallible, he must know the crimes which this felon committed; the hideous iniquities for which his honest Catholic neighbors slaughtered him as they would have killed a wild beast; and if he is really unerring, he approves of miscreants like Pedro Arbues; and of the bloody deeds by which outraged men have been stirred up to slay them.

In Parma the inhabitants rescued a woman from the stake, dispersed the executioners, sacked the Franciscan convent, and lashed every friar whom they could catch, belonging to the Holy Office. The whole people were shocked at the thought of burning their fellow citizens. “The hatred,” says Llorente, “which the office of an inquisitor everywhere inspired in the first ages of the Holy Office, caused the death of a great number of Dominicans, and some Cordeliers.” The most violent and barbarous laws were made by many princes to sustain the inquisition, but as in after ages, so at the beginning, the inquisitors were generally inhuman, impious, ignorant, fanatical, envious, and rash, and they and their Holy Office were driven from a great number of places by the populace; and their lives sacrificed as if they had been bandits or pirates; and this not commonly the work of Protestants, but of true men of their own faith. It is well to remember that the inquisition was the creation of priests, and though Charles V., Philip II., and Frederic I. gave it all the holy and accursed aid which powerful rulers could render any institution, for a long while the Catholic masses regarded it as a wicked scourge.

You will search in vain among the musty records of the past, over all the lands and all the ages, for another inquisition. The Romish Church stands alone in having a legal tribunal expressly established to torture, and if desirable, to kill her enemies, Mohammedanism has persecuted Christians at times, but never as is done; and at no period had it a tribunal, with a staff of officers, suits of prisons, and codes of laws devoted exclusively to the enemies of their prophet.

The ten persecutions of pagan Rome were very violent, but they were spasmodic, temporary, based in some instances upon falsehoods which persecution exploded; and they could not well have been protracted longer than the period which they cursed. But Nero and Domitian had no holy office, devoted to the work of discovering and destroying heretics. It is doubtful if heathen Rome could have furnished enough men of the kind, out of which inquisitors, familiars, and the other servants of the Holy Office were made, to man an inquisition of the papal order for twenty successive years. It is more than probable that no system of idolatry, and no form of Christianity, could have produced and engineered such a prodigy of wickedness.

While the papal Church has had gifted and noble men in her sacerdotal ranks; among her monks, and sometimes in the list of her pontiffs, she has had a Dominic and a Carraffa (Paul IY.), men who seemed to possess something additional to human nature, and that increase most evidently did not come from heaven. And of this class of extra-ordinary mortals, she had enough to work the Holy Office for centuries. We could wish that the race was extinct.

The inquisition in Spain moved in its operations with unbounded vigor. Every night its armies of familiars scoured the households of the nation, taking large numbers out of their beds, just aroused out of sleep, to the dismal dens of the Holy Office. Every day the inquisitors were engrossed with the audience room, the torture chamber, or an Auto da Fé. Every hour the spies of the inquisition were dogging the steps of those whom they wished to entrap; watching unfortunate Jews, Moors, and their descendants; they were carrying off fans and snuff-boxes, bearing pictures of heathen classic gods, Hebrew Bibles, and Greek Testaments, and literary books deemed heretical, because the inquisition and its menials were commonly too ignorant to distinguish between the sinless creations of genius and wicked works only filled with the sufferings and love of Jesus.

In the six hundred years of its existence, the inquisition in Spain and in other countries sacrificed myriads of lives with the most atrocious cruelties; it has racked many millions more, and the torture was generally applied to the very utmost verge of life, the physician hired by the Holy Office holding the patient by the wrist to discover the exact amount of agony he could bear without destroying existence. It has crippled millions whom it set at liberty, some of whom it declared innocent after planting its pains all over their bodies; it has robbed its victims of property, for the sake of which exclusively prosecutions frequently began, too great to be represented by figures. And when we try to conceive the woes of its lonely victims in their dark cells; the anguished hearts of loved ones who could hear nothing of them; the terror and pain of the hall of tortures; the slavery of the galleys; the whipping through the streets; the infamy of wearing the sanbenito; the penury and insults heaped on the children and grandchildren of victims—the aggregate imperfectly imagined, shocks and horrifies us, and we are astonished that a column of fire from heaven did not burn up each Holy Office and its wicked tyrants the moment persecution was proposed.

The inquisition accomplished some good. Of an irritable man, a certain person said to his enemy: “Do not be too severe with him, he is useful for one thing, he is capital for trying patience and strengthening it, and finding out where there is any.” So the inquisition has exhibited some of the finest specimens of Christian heroism in the annals of earth or the records of heaven. In its court room and torture hall, and at its executions, lights were uncovered that have flashed over Christendom; that shall flood all time; lights which blinded the eyes of inquisitors and executioners, and which have enabled timid Christians to see their Master’s blood, love and power, and read their title clear to mansions in the skies. Thousands, and tens of thousands of the saints of Jesus, like Maria Bohorques, showed the utmost contempt for suffering; the most extraordinary love for the crucified One; the possession of a heaven-given faith which bone-breaking racks could not crush, nor blazing faggots waste. Like the swimming cork, which floats on the brook a few inches deep, and upon the crest of the greatest wave that ever rode in angry majesty over ocean beds, too deep for a created fathoming line; so in the light displayed by the woes of the inquisition, the Christian sees a faith that will float him over the shallow waters of common troubles, and on the highest peak of the mightiest mountain billow of distress that ever rolled in threatening fury over the ocean of life. But in view of its horrors may we not well ask:

Where was thine arm, O vengeance? where the rod
That smote the foes of Zion and of God?
That crushed proud Ammon when his iron car
Was yoked in wrath, and thundered from afar.

(To be continued.)

All chapters of The Papal System by William Cathcart