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THE
INQUISITION.
PART II.
BY
SALADIN.
[reprinted from “the secular review.”]
London:
STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��THE INQUISITION.
PART II.
The leading heretical sects were known respectively as
the Catharists, Waldenses, and Petrobrusians, or Albigensis. In spite of the remorseless persecution of these
by the Papal hierarchy, they continued to increase and to
attract to themselves new factions and sects, all the sects
having, at least, the opinion in common, “that the
public and established religion was a motley system of
errors and superstition, and that the dominion which
the Popes had usurped over Christians and the authority
they exercised in religious matters were unlawful and
tyrannical.” These sectaries, of course, quoted against
the Papacy the ever-convenient Scriptures, which can be
cited in favour of every possible virtue or pravity, from
putting a new seat in the Great White Throne to putting
a new furnace in the Bottomless Pit.
The Waldensian heretics, as also the Protestant heretics
of a later century, had, at least, one powerful advantage
over the Secular heretics of to-day. Many princes, nobles,
and magistrates foresaw, in the triumph of the olden
heresies, a triumph for themselves in the overthrow of
the civil dominance of the sacred order, the restoration
to the civil power of wide tracts of Church territory, and
an immunity from paying the grievous taxes and imposts
necessary to support the stupendous magnificence and
extravagant luxury of the monasteries, abbeys, and cathe
drals. The mighty ones of the earth do not look forward
to any benefits of this nature from the triumph of Secu
larism, and, consequently, on our side, we have no
Raymond and no Frederic, no Louis of Hesse, no Regent
Murray, no Lords of the Congregation. Intellectually
and morally, Europe is now as ripe for Agnostic Secular
ism as ever she was for the Arian, Albigensian, or
�4
THE INQUISITION.
Lutheran heresy. But the moral courage of Europe dare
not follow where the dominating classes might suffer
material loss. The possessions that Secularism might
confiscate from the Church would not be diverted to the
prince, the noble, or the plutocrat; and so these take no
part in helping on the Secular evangel. If we of this
forlorn hope had any prize to offer to the classes who
through all history ever have, and who through all history
ever shall have, the ball of the earth at their foot, Secu
larism would be exalted and Christianity in the dust
before this generation has passed away. The question
between God and no God is a mere drop in the bucket
to the more concrete considerations that determine the
motives and actions of mankind. In the latter end of
last century the French nation had God and no God
time about, without any serious mental and moral incon
venience.
If every angel in heaven were to pull a feather out of
his wing, sharpen it into a pen, and commence to write
for this journal in support of Anti-Theism, the effect
would be almost nil. But were I an astute and able
prime minister of England, who, by a master-stroke of
diplomacy, could throw such a sop to certain interests as
would ensure the passage through the legislature of a
measure essentially Atheistic, I would, by one blow, have
hurled god out of heaven. Properly speaking, even now
we have no god at all. We have only a goddess, and
her name is Grundy. She sits with Jehovah and his
son upon her lap; but let her once cast them thence,
and they are gods no more. Reason and logic have
nothing to do with the matter. Make the want of a god
respectable; and, whatever logic may say, the having of a
god will be low and vulgar. Make it profitable and con
ventional to preach Agnostic Secularism, and the reverse
to preach “ Christ and him crucified,” and ninety-nine
out of a hundred of the men who are at present, at
Oxford and Cambridge, training for holy orders will leave
“ Christ and him crucified ” to take care of itself. Only
the other day I remonstrated with a learned man and
independent thinker whom I met returning from church.
“And this from you,” said I, “after the admissions you
made to me about this Christism ?” “ Aye, this from
�THE INQUISITION.
5
me,” he retorted ; “make your d------d ism respectable,
and I will take to it in preference to Christism.”
But here we stand, hoping against hope. We cry in
the wilderness, scorched by the sun of contumely,
smothered in the sands of neglect. A little band of fanatics
for Truth, we devote to principle the pens that should
bring us fame. Our propaganda is not of this world;
for it is not framed to attract the cupidity of the classes
who could render us adequate support. Far otherwise
was it, as we have pointed out, with the rebels against
Rome; and so they were enabled to write a large and
sanguinous page in the world’s history—with leaders in
trinsically feebler than ours—and, at length, to divide
the spoils of empire with her of the Seven Hills. The
pontiffs were not slow to recognise that, in point of
numbers, as well as in point of social rank, their heretical
enemies were most formidable, and the most exceptional
means were resorted to for their suppression. As early
as the year 1198 Pope Innocent III. had commenced
the persecution of the Waldenses and Albigensis. He
had confiscated their goods, giving one-third to their
accusers, disinherited their children, and denied them
the rites of burial. Early in the next century he des
patched legates extraordinary into Southern France to
stamp out heresy at whatever cost and hazard. The
followers of Dominic and Francis were now zealously
seconded in their inquisitorial work by the Cistertians,
Rainer and Pierre de Castlenau.
Rainer and de Castlenau proved, by their inquisitorial
unscrupulousness and merciless cruelty, to be successful
missionaries of the holy see. Their secret and remorse
less mode of procedure had rendered them and their
accomplices bitterly unpopular on the scene of their
operations, and they, in performance of their task, had
to carry their lives in their hands, owing to retaliatory
outbursts of popular fury. But the Pope and his cardi
nals cared for none of these things. The heretics had
had decidedly the worst of it, and that was enough. A
council was consequently held at Toulouse in 1229,
which placed the Inquisition upon a still broader basis
by appointing in every city a council of Inquisitors, con
sisting of one priest and three laymen. In 1233 Pope
�6
THE INQUISITION.
Gregory IX. superseded the measures passed at the
Council of Toulouse by delegating to the followers of
St. Dominic the duty of discovering heretics and running
them to earth. Shortly afterwards the Bishop of Tournay
set loose upon France Pierre Cellan and Guillaume
Arnaud, perhaps the most devilishly-successful of all the
Inquisitors; and the most diabolical institution that
ever cursed the world set its dungeon and rack right
grimly to their work.
“Not Christianity did this !” cries the Christian apolo
gist ; “ it was the inherent cruelty and depravity of
human nature !” Poor human nature ! Would to heaven
that it could get a proper chance that it could be per
mitted to mind its own proper business and have nothing
in the way of Ormudzes and Ahrimans, gods and devils.
Essentially, man does not dislike his brother man so
bitterly that he could torture him. But he resorts to this
sort of thing when flamens and hierophants drive him
mad with deities and fiends. Once impress upon
man (who is always a fool—-his wickedness arises from
that) that there is a post-mortem existence about which
he must concern himself in this pre-mortem existence,
and you administer to him a draught of a sort of moral
bang, or brandy dashed with gunpowder, which renders
him delirious; and his delirium too frequently finds vent in
the pastime of cutting his neighbour’s throat. The world’s
trillion fools always dance to the tune played by the
world’s dozen knaves, and the knaves know well that the
mad carmagnole is danced best to the notes of the reli
gious psalter. It has been claimed for many of the leaders
in the Inquisition, as, indeed, for many of the prime
movers in all religious persecutions, that they were men
of unimpeachable morals, large human sympathies, and
kindly amiability of disposition. Delude such men into
the faith that thereby they are serving the highest and
immortal interests of themselves and their race, and
there is no river of blood through which they will not
wade, no rack-lever which they will not pull, no
red-hot pincers with which they will not tear off the
writhing flesh of their own wife or child. “ Indeed,”
says Buckle, “that the Inquisitors were remarkable
for an undeviating and incorruptible integrity may
�THE INQUISITION.
7
be proved in a variety of ways, and from different
and independent sources of evidence. Llorente, the
great historian of the Inquisition, and its bitter enemy,
had access to its private papers; and yet, with the fullest
means of information, he does not even insinuate a
charge against the moral character of the inquisitors;
but, while execrating the cruelty of their conduct, he
cannot deny the purity of their intentions. Thirty years
earlier Townsend, a clergyman of the Church of Eng
land, published his valuable work on Spain; and though,
as a Protestant and an Englishman, he had every reason
to be prejudiced against the infamous system which he
describes, he also can bring no charge against those
who upheld it; but, having occasion to mention its
establishment at Barcelona, one of its most important
branches, he makes the remarkable admission that all
its members are men of worth, and that most of them
are of distinguished humanity. These facts, startling as
they are, form a very small part of that vast mass of
evidence which history contains, and which decisively
proves the utter inability of moral feelings to diminish
religious persecution. It is to the diffusion of know
ledge, and to that alone, that we owe the comparative
cessation of what is unquestionably the greatest evil men
have ever inflicted on their own species.”
I cannot follow historically the blood-stained footsteps
of the most hideous Sammael, or Death-angel, that ever,
keeping time to the cry of human suffering, marched
over sweltering hills of human carnage. Half-blinded
by the blood-mists that rise up from the chasm of the
centuries that lie between Then and Now, I dimly
descry the outlines of the slaughter of the million men
who perished in the Albigensian waf alone. Over the
huge holocaust of rotten rags, shreds and strings of
putrid flesh, whitening bones, and rusting swords, I gaze
into the mythic heaven and fabled hell, and ask what in
the one was to be hoped for, what in the other was to
be feared, to warrant this colossal sacrifice on the altar
of Ruin and Death. Huge heap of pestilence, death
glaring eyes, and wriggling worms, whatever heaven what
was immortal of you may have reached, you have left
a hell behind you. All around you for miles the fire-
�8
THE INQUISITION.
burnt and blood-slaked earth is echoing with the cry
of the widow and the fatherless. There the wolf is
tearing the sleeve and flesh from the arm that should
have earned bread for the orphan that is perishing.
There the raven is rending away from the grinning teeth
the lips of the youth that, in the moonlight streaming
through the myrtle, should, to the maid of his choice,
have whispered of love. Freethought is buried under a
mountain of corpses ; incipient Protestantism is drowned
*
in blood. The Albigensians have perished under the
“ Holy Office ” of the Inquisition, and the South of
France is a hideous Gehenna. A million men have
perished on the battle-field and scaffold, and millions of
the unarmed are left to mourn for them and die of
hunger. Southern France was a Paradise; but, from
that baleful hill near Jerusalem, the shadow of the Cross
was flung athwart the welkin, and there was nothing but
the apples of Gomorrah growing among the cinders of
Tophet. The Prince of Peace, who came not to bring
peace, but a sword, had brought the sword and fleshed
it to the hilt. The air was hot with burning cities and
pestilent with the stench of corpses. The unripened
harvest was trampled in the dust, torn out of root by the
feet of men in the death-grapple, and, ever and anon,
wet with a rain redder than the heavens ever gave forth.
In the abomination of desolation the starving mother
with her dying child sought the field where the olive
had grown, and where, from the vine tendrils, the bunches
of the grapes had hung, that, with the juice, she might
moisten the lips of her dying babe. She found vine
and olive uprooted and withered and scorched and
blasted, while among their tangles lay rotting the horse
and his rider; and mother and child sank down beside
them to share with them the commonwealth of death.
And all this for thee, and in thy name, O terrible
Galilean ! Thy Church now proclaimed the land “ puri
fied,” for the heretic was dumb. In that vale of Hinom,
and in the creaking of Torquemada’s racks, I trace thee,
* Sismondi says : “In the exposition made by the Bishop of
Tournay of the errors of the Albigensis we find nearly all the
principles upon which Luther and Calvin founded the Reformation
of the sixteenth century.”
�THE INQUISITION,
9
son of Mary; and yet the fashion of my age and nation
expects me to bless thy name and to recognise in thy
baleful cross the tree “ whose leaves were for the healing
of the nations ” !
Even now we have arrived at a time when it is almost
impossible to believe that the species to which we belong
was ever so mad as to put into force an ordinance by
*
which it was made the duty of all true Catholics to
inform the Inquisition whether they knew of any one
present or absent, living or dead, who entertained, or had
entertained, any doctrinal opinions of which the Church
did not approve ; whether they knew of any one who had
a leaning towards the heresies of Luther, who possessed
a copy of any heretical book of the Koran, or even of the
Bible, in a tongue understood by the people, or who had
protected or in any way favoured heretics. And the
office of “ Familiar ”—that is, spy or informer—was so
honourable and lucrative that it was frequently competed
for by persons of rank and influence.
God help the person, innocent or guilty, against whom
the “ Familiar,” for personal spite or any other reason,
cared to prefer a charge of heresy ! From the moment
the accused entered the Inquisitorial court he was cut off
from the world as effectively as is a toad who lives in the
centre of a granite rock. His place was in a deep vault
of the Holy House, utterly alone and in rayless darkness.
His dungeon had two doors to its only outlet. The inner
door was bound with iron, and had an iron grating through
which the food was pushed as if to a wild beast. No
friend was allowed to visit the entombed one : he had no
books and no light by which to read books, even if he
had had them. If the sound of hymn or soliloquy or
moan arose from the depths of his living grave, the
officer in watch over it had a terrible way of maintaining
the grave’s normal silence. And yet that weird and
eerie death-in-life was in itself happiness to the unutter
able suspense of what his sentence might be in the
court above—a sentence most likely to be succeeded
by excruciating torture.
First, the accused one was called upon to confess his
Such an ordinance was passed in Spain in 1732.
�IO
THE INQUISITION.
guilt. If he did so, he was held to have pronounced his
own sentence, and he was punished accordingly. If he
did not confess, he was subjected to torture to try whether,
as he writhed in mortal agony, when his tongue jabbered
madness and his brain reeled in delirium, he should
make admissions he would not make in his sanity. His
accuser was not before him, and he did not know even
his name. He could employ no counsel, he could call
no witnesses. There were only the two lay inquisitors
and the monk sitting beside the crucifix, skull, and
candle, ominous of death in the most fearful form in
which it can come to man.
Mutilated out of human shape, haggard and swollen
from the torture-room, the condemned heretic is led out
to the auto-da-fe. His eyes, bleared and wild from the
dungeon, blink impotently in the glare of the torch that
is to light the fagots at the stake where he will shortly
shrivel up in the fire, because he entertained, or was
supposed to entertain, some doctrinal opinion a hair
breadth wrong about that irrepressible and terrible Jesus.
It is Sunday, the favourite day for the auto-da-fe. The
morning is only breaking; only one half of the sun’s
red disc is, as yet, above the horizon. The radiance of
the east is lying in faint and partial rays across the
penumbral landscape. The pines nod on the hills, and
the morning light shakes and shimmers on the white
crests of the sea. The sparrows chirm, and the peasant
stalks from his hut in the field, from the thatch roof of
which a wreath of blue smoke is curling up into the air.
From afar there comes the muffled sound of the crowing
of cocks and the barking of dogs ; and the breeze is
redolent of dewy fields and opening rose-buds. Man’s
world is beautiful and suggestive of a holy and elevated
life. But the day dawns, and we find that man’s beautiful
world has been cursed with the nightmare of a Christ,
and that man, in his devout delirium, turns his “ Earthly
Paradise” into hell, and, in god-madness, imbrues his
hands in the blood of his brother.
The entire disc of the sun is now above the horizon.
There is hurry and bustle and pouring crowds, and the
great bell of the cathedral peals out its most deep and
solemn dong to summon the faithful to the auto-da-fe.
�THE INQUISITION.
II
Men of high rank and men of no rank are jostling along
in the street to witness the execution of the heretics—a
duty they owe to the Church, to the State, and to God.
Fair ladies, too, the dower nearest to heaven that earth
possesses, are there in their gilded carriages and on their
ambling palfreys. Against the morning air they wear
their mantles of taffeta welted with cloth of gold. Their
hair streams down on their coronals of gems, and sweetbreathed and young, ardent in affection and plastic to
the touch of love, they yet assemble to see human beings
burned alive. Even they are debased and debauched
by the spell-word of this Jesus, and the purest and
tenderest impulses of their life have been immolated
before the baleful symbol of “ Thus saith the Lord.”
On march barefooted the condemned, with the excep
tion of those whose feet have been crushed to jelly in
the torture-engines, and they are drawn on tumbrils.
Every victim is robed in the awful san-benito, a coarse
yellow tunic, painted all over with flames and devils, but
with the sign of Calvary’s dreadful cross on the breast
and back. The Dominicans marched in front with the
banner of the Inquisition, and again the emblem of
Calvary’s accursed cross (this time a huge wooden one)
was borne by monks immediately in front of those whose
remaining few steps upon earth were upon the edge of
their fiery grave. Behind them were the effigies of
suspected persons who had fled, and black coffins con
taining the bones of those who had been convicted of
heresy subsequently to their death and burial. The
effigies and the coffins were painted all over with flames
and fiends. At the stake the victim was asked, “ In
what faith will you die ?” If he replied, “ The Catholic,”
he was, in mercy, strangled before he was burned. If
he did not reply, “The Catholic,” the loving kindness of
strangulation was denied him, and, in the presence of
priests, roughs, artizans, nobles, ladies, and even kings,
the heretic stood till the fire had burned away, and with
its feet in a heap of hot ashes, a blackened and undistinguishable human cinder stood, lashed up to the stake
by an iron chain. The chain was unloosed, the erect
cinder fell down among the other cinders and ashes,
and the crowd dispersed. Another heretic had been
�12
THE INQUISITION.
despatched to endless torment, another service had been
done for Jesus; at least, through all the sword and
flame of the terrible centuries, Jesus never indicated that
the service was one he did not appreciate ; the voice of
eternal Benevolence was dumb, the hand of everlasting
Omnipotence was unlifted.
Since the hammer of Heresy has broken the teeth of
the Church, the fact that these teeth, when intact, ever
bit so fearfully almost passes the bounds of credence.
The conception is so diabolical, and the details so heart
rending, that the mere printed page of history would
hardly succeed in convincing us that practices so in
human ever prevailed among the human. But we have
more than history’s printed page to tell the ghastly tale.
True, the Inquisitorial pandemonia of Spain are roofless
and in ruins; but, at Nuremberg, in Bavaria, we can
still see a torture-establishment intact, and the inspection
of it may corroborate history and make the world shudder
for centuries to come. In recording his recent visit to
Nuremburg a Christian writer remarks :—“We found
*
ourselves in a rather roomy chamber, it might be about
twelve feet square. This was the Chamber of Question.
Along the side of the apartment ran a low platform.
There sat of old the Inquisitors, three in number—the
first a divine, the second a casuist, and the third a
civilian. The only occupant of that platform was the
crucifix, or image of the Saviour on the cross, which still
remained. The six candles that usually burned before
the ‘holy Fathers’ were, of course, extinguished; but
our lantern supplied their place, and showed us the grim
furnishings of the apartment. In the middle was the
horizontal rack, or bed of torture, on which the victim
was stretched till bone started from bone, and his dislo
cated frame became the seat of agony, which was sus
pended only when it had reached a pitch that threatened
death. Leaning against the wall of the chamber was the
upright rack, which is simpler, but as an instrument of
torture not less effectual, than the horizontal one. There
was the iron chain which wound over a pulley, and hauled
up the victim to the vaulted roof; and there were the
Rev. Dr. A. Wylie.
�THE INQUISITION.
13
two great stone weights which, tied to his feet and the
iron cord let go, brought him down with a jerk that dislo
cated his limbs, while the spiky rollers which he grazed
in his descent cut into and excoriated his back, leaving
his body a bloody, dislocated mass.
“ Here, too, was the cradle of which we have made
mention above, amply garnished within with cruel
knobs, on which the sufferer, tied hand and foot, was
thrown at every movement of the machine, to be bruised
all over, and brought forth discoloured, swollen, bleed
ing, but still living.
“ All round, ready to hand, were hung the minor in
struments of torture. There were screws and thumbkins
for the fingers, spiked collars for the neck, iron boots for
the legs, gags for the mouth, cloths to cover the face and
permit the slow percolation of water, drop by drop, down
the throat of the person undergoing this form of torture.
There were rollers set round with spikes, for bruising the
arms and back; there were iron scourges, pincers and
tongs for tearing out the tongue, slitting the nose and
ears, and otherwise disfiguring and mangling the body
till it was horrible and horrifying to look upon it.
*
*
*
*
There were instruments for compressing the fingers till
the bones should be squeezed to splinters. There were
instruments for probing below the finger nails till an
exquisite pain, like a burning fire, would run along the
nerves. There were instruments for tearing out the
tongue, for scooping out the eyes, for grubbing up the
ears. There were bunches of iron cords, with a spiked
circle at the end of every whip, for tearing the flesh from
the back till bone and sinew were laid bare. There were
iron cases for the legs, which were tightened upon the
limb placed in them by means of a screw, till flesh and
bone were reduced to a jelly. There were cradles set
full of sharp spikes, in which victims were laid and rolled
from side to side, the wretched occupant being pierced
at each movement of the machine with innumerable
sharp points. There were iron ladles with long handles,
for holding molten lead or boiling pitch, to be poured
down the throat of the victim, and convert his body
�14
THE INQUISITION.
into a burning cauldron. There were frames with holes
to admit the hands and feet, so contrived that the person
put into them had his body bent into unnatural and
painful positions, and agony became greater and greater
by moments, and yet the man did not die. There were
chestfuls of small but most ingeniously-constructed in
struments for pinching, probing, or tearing the more
sensitive parts of the body, and continuing the pain up
to the very verge where reason or life gives way. On
the floor and walls of the apartments were other and
larger instruments for the same fearful end—lacerating,
mangling, and agonising living men ; but these we shall
meet in other dungeons we are yet to visit.
“ Here there is a vaulted chamber, entirely dug out of
the living rock, except the roof, which is formed of hewn
stone. It contains an iron image of the Virgin, and
on the opposite wall, suspended by an iron hook, is a
lamp, which, when lighted, shows the goodly proportions
of ‘ Our Lady.’ On the instant of touching a spring
the image flings open its arms, which resemble the doors
of a cupboard, and which are seen to be stuck full on
the inside with poignards, each about a foot in length.
Some of these knives are so placed as to enter the eyes
of those whom the image enfolded in its embrace, others
are set so as to penetrate the ears and brain, others to
pierce the breast, and others again to gore the abdomen.
“The person who had passed through the terrible ordeal
of the Question Chamber, but had made no recantation^
would be led along the tortuous passage by which we
had come and ushered into this vault, where the first
object that would greet his eye, the pale light of the
lamp falling on it, would be the iron Virgin. He would
be bidden to stand right in front of the image. The
spring would be touched by the executioner, the Virgin
would fling open her arms, and the wretched victim would
straightway be forced within them. Another spring was
then touched, the Virgin closed upon her victim ; a
strong wooden beam, fastened at one end of the wall by
a moveable joint, the other against the doors of the iron
image, was worked by a screw, and as the beam was
pushed out the spiky arms of the Virgin slowly but irre
sistibly closed upon the man, cruelly goring him.
�THE INQUISITION.
15
“ When the dreadful business was ended it needed
not that the executioner should put himself to the trouble
of making the Virgin unclasp the mangled carcase of her
victim ; provision had been made for its quick and secret
disposal. At the touching of a third spring the floor of
the image would slide aside, and the body of the victim
drop down the mouth of a perpendicular shaft in the
rock. We look down this pit, and can see at a great
depth the shimmer of the water. A canal had been made
to flow underneath the vault where stood the iron Virgin,
and when she had done her work upon those who were
delivered over to her tender mercies she let them fall,
with quick descent and sudden plunge, into the canal
underneath, where they were floated to the Pegnitz, and
from the Pegnitz to the Rhine, and by the Rhine to the
ocean, there to sleep beside the dust of Huss and
Jerome.”
A name which has been associated more than any
other for the last fifteen centuries with the world’s pain
and misery is still the name that commands the greatest
reverence to-day, such is the infatuation and madness of
mankind. The spaniel whines and licks the foot that
kicks him ; but man makes his own fiend and calls him
a deity—kicks himself with his own foot and blesses the
operation. Some day man may awake to find that
Paradise is at his own fireside, and among the objects of
his daily life. But, as yet, he prays and cries in the
troubled dream of a hectic nightmare. The hero of this
nightmare is this terrible Jesus Christ, who, with his
blood-reddened cross and his crown of thorns, makes the
dream horrent with teleological terrors, and who, with
his grave-clothes and wounded side haunts the dreamer
through all the phantom-lands of Misery. The curse of
man is that he cares less for what concerns him than for
what does not concern him at all. This world is all he
can know—yea, much more than he can ever know—and
yet he cannot be persuaded to stand up manfully in it
and do his part; he must needs, in his folly, lean over
the rim of it to invent Elysiums and heavens in which he
may drink the wine of gladness, and to torment himself
with Niflheims and hells, in which he may drain to the dregs
the chalice of inexpressible pain. When will he learn
�i6
THE INQUISITION.
that his business is with his living neighbour, and not with
the dead Jesus Christ ? When will the truth of the
Gospel dawn upon him, that his own children are cheru
bim, that the mother of these children is more to him
than the Mary of theology, and that her homely cradle
song to her babe is holier than all the music from the
harps of angels ?
Biological Evolution is slow. What aeons may lie
between the anthropoid ape and man as he is ? What
aeons may yet lie between man as he is, diseased and
insane, and man as he will be, healthy and sane?
Surely the time will yet come when man burning man
to death in the name of Jesus, will be a more curious
palaeontological fact than the Neanderthal skull is now.
The Future may, in spite of history, yet deny the fact as
incredible that there was ever such an institution as the
1 Holy Office ” of the Inquisition, and that, in diseased
mentation, man pursued a phantom and exercised his
highest ingenuity to, for God’s sake, augment human
suffering in every mean between the two extremes of
tearing off a fellow creature’s flesh with red-hot pincers
to tickling him to death with a feather ?
Price Twopence.
Every Thursday.
THE
SECULAR
REVIEW:
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EDITED BY SALADIN.
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national secular society
THE
INQUISITION.
PART I.
BY
SALADIN.
[REPRINTED FROM
“ THE SECULAR REVIEW.”]
London:
STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON St., E.C.
��£3° 77
THE INQUISITION.
'The Christian Church, which, in all essentials, was, and
continues to be, the Church of Rome—Protestantism is
a mere accident and temporary phase—has been the best
managed institution that ever existed. Even yet there
is no power in Europe so strong as the Papal power;
and, like a veritable Methusaleh, it stands alone on the
eminence of the Present, unattended by even a solitary
■athlete who started with it in the race. On that emi
nence it poses, deathless and weird as the Wandering JewT,
■and looks down into the valley below filled with the dust
of kings, the skeletons of dynasties, and the ruins of
empires. This Roman hierarchy began before most of
them, more than held its own with the best of them, and
has survived them all. The oldest political dynasty in
Europe, compared with the hierarchical dynasty of the
Vatican, is a thing of yesterday. That Rome has, there
fore, had in her ranks the most commanding talent, the
loftiest genius in Europe for the last ten centuries, goes
without saying.
And yet the “ Infallible Church ” has been guilty of
mistakes of policy which are remarkable as being made
by her, the handmaiden of the Omniscient. She hounded
on the Crusaders to give esprit de corps and solidarity to
her organisation ; and in this she was right as concerned
the immediate, but wrong as regarded the not very remote
future. It turned out that the Crusades had much to
do with the fostering of Christian heresy and apostasy,
and this consequence of pouring countless thousands
against the “ Infidel,” who held the Holy Sepulchre, the
Church evidently did not foresee. Christianity was a
plant that throve well upon the soil (of ignorant isolation,
but which withered somewhat when brought into contact
with the refined, opulent, and mysterious East. In selfsufficient bigotry the legions of Philip, Leopold, and
�THE INQUISITION.
4
Richard dashed their battalia in vain against the Infidel
armies of Saladin, till their intolerance and bigotry had
to be modified; and Europe’s high-handed barbarity, con
trasted with Asia’s chivalrous magnanimity, began to make
the erewhon believers in him of Nazareth wonder
whether if, after all, their little creed had the monopoly
of Truth, and all the other creeds free trade in Error.
Torn away from the routine of the exclusive ideas by
which they had previously been dominated, even the Chris
tian defenders of the Holy Sepulchre itself defended the
sepulchre of a God they mocked at and derided. Having
come in contact with many men and many minds, the
old cloud barriers of national dogma were broken down
before the assault of cosmopolitan liberality and enlighten
ment. I have hardly ever seen a man who has travelled
much and seen much, even if he be no student and a
superficial thinker only, who has any religion worth
speaking of. If you want to be religious, stay at home
and confine your world to one narrow sect and set.
As I have said, the very Templars, whose order was
instituted by Baldwin to defend the Holy Sepulchre,
found the liberalising influences of travel play havoc even
with the very roots of their faith. Such notorious Infidels
did the defenders of the Holy Sepulchre become that
Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V. felt
compelled to adopt means to effect their extermination.
Among the charges brought against them was that, in
being introduced into the order, part of the inaugural
ceremony was to deny Jesus Christ and spit upon a
crucifix ?
*
Before the last of the Crusades the times were gone
by when, in the mysterious awe of learned ignorance,
the monks sat in solemn conclave to investigate the
nature of the light upon Mount Tabor on the occasion
of Christ’s Transfiguration, and laboured to demonstrate
the existence of two eternal principles, a visible and an
invisible God, by the closest inspection, for days and
nights together, of the human navel! The very monks
themselves were now sceptics, and the esoteric theology
that attempted to extract theological hermeneutics from
*
Rapin’s “ History of England,” vol. i., bk. ix., p. 403.
�THE INQUISITION.
5
the navel was now a subject for derision. The literature
and ballads of the Saracens of Spain also contributed
their quota to Christian disintegration, and the hard and
barren asceticism of Christ was melting like snow in the
thaw before the gay songs of the Troubadours and
Trouveres. She of the Seven Hills was on her trial.
Christianity was little more than a thousand years old,
and she was dying. The death-rattle was in her throat;
her feet were cold. Up to this time she had been kept
fairly healthy by being carried on the shoulders of
Ignorance, goaded on by the sword. But Ignorance
had visited the East, and, in spite of Christianity on its
shoulders, had not by any means had things all its own
way ; and now it began to consider whether it should
carry the burden any longer or lay it down. The Church
of Rome saw the critical juncture. She swore she would
put Christianity again on her legs, and, by the living
God, she did!
Christianity was dying ; but St. Dominic, St. Francis,
and Pope Innocent III. poured brandy, or, rather, a river
of blood, down her throat, and she got up from her bed
of pain, some seven hundred and odd years ago, and,
but for a slight illness, a mere touch of measles caught
from Martin Luther and his friends, she has never looked
behind her since. But the remedial dose that was
administered to her was the most drastic and devilish
that the sun ever looked down upon since the day he took
his first whirl upon his axis. The name of the pill that
revived Christianity was The Holy Inquisition. If it
did not give her real life, it gave her the best counterfeit
of it that has ever been seen. Even yet she has Galva
nised energy enough to carry her on for a century or two
longer. All her enemies, except downright Infidelity,
are dying. When, for the last time on earth, the air
vibrates with the prayer of a Christian, that Christian
will be a Roman Catholic.
But I pass to the drastic dose of The Inquisition,
the administration of which raised Christianity from her
death-bed to wade through blood, fire, and torture-room
to a new life prolonged to centuries. To Dominic, born
in 1170, is attributed the hideous glory of having been
the founder of the Inquisition. He, too, like his God
�6
THE INQUISITION.
and Carpenter, came squalling into the world through
the mystic obsterics of an Immaculate Conception. He
had a mother; but, like a certain other mother, she
was a virgin ; so Dominic was never dandled on the
knees of an earthly daddy. His father was one of the
prongs of the three-pronged fork of Deity. It is a curious
fact in generation that no man has yet borne a child to
the Ghost, Mars, or any one else. Let Mr. John Smith
bear a child by one of the daughters of God, and I will
seriously consider the theory of the Immaculate Con
ception. With God all things seem to be possible, except
the bringing about of the accouchement of Mr. John Smith.
Rhea Sylvia, Leda, Danse, Mary, and scores of others
have been honoured with mysterious visitations of deities
of the masculine gender ; but a variation upon this routine
seems to lie outside even the power of Omnipotence.
This Dominic not only dispensed with a terrestrial father
(thereby escaping all paternal spankings), but he did his
best to dispense with a mother, and to pose as the fosterchild of the Virgin Mary. With no father at all, and
with his foster-mother far off in heaven much engaged
in attending to the prayers of devout Catholics, young
Dominic grew up very much as he liked, and nobody
who is permitted to grow up as he likes grows up quite
satisfactorily. He organised a following of monks, friars,
nuns, and tertiaries, and worked miracles with as much
ease as you or I could say “ knife.” One of his miracles
was the exorcising of Satan from three matrons. Satan
fled out of the matrons in the shape of a great black cat,
which ran swearing and spitting up the bell-rope and
vanished, leaving the exdevilised maidens on their knees
praising God and Dominic. A beautiful nun was tired
of being the bride of Christ, and longed to escape from
the convent to become the bride of something less
ethereal. She blew her nose, and it dropped off into her
handkerchief, her maker not having fastened it on over
well. But Dominic prayed a furiously surgical prayer,
and the nose walked off her handkerchief, and replaced
itself on the maiden’s face. This Dominic was, more
over, a great gun at raising the dead ; but he died in
1221, and has not seen fit to raise himself, for which
God be thanked.
�THE INQUISITION.
7
The next luminary in the origination of the Inquisition
was Sir Francis. He, too, had the advantage of a mira
culous birth.
*
His birth was so like that of Christ that
I wonder Christ did not prosecute him for infringing
upon his patent. His advent into the world was pro
phetically foretold. He was born in a stable (but should
have been born in a knacker’s yard or a slaughter-house).
At the hour of his death angels went capering about in
the air, doing aerial waltzes over the stable, waving their
wings and singing, as only celestial poultry can, about
“ peace and goodwill ” and other tarradiddles'. A person,
who answered to the name of Simeon, bore him to his
baptism, and then, no doubt, snivelled out something
about departing in peace, since his optics had been privi
leged to squint at salvation. If I had been Christ, and
the person had imitated so closely my style of getting
born, I should have kicked him to death in order that
he might get “born again” on a new plan.
As St. Francis grew up he became not so painfully like
Christ. He spent his money (or, rather, his father’s money)
with reckless prodigality. Now, Christ did not do this ;
his father, -3 of deity, seems to'have been as poor as a
church mouse, and his father, Joseph, was, quite likely,
on the parish of Bethlehem-Judah, and under the neces
sity of pawning his jack-plane. But St. Francis did
throw the money about among the poor, although to do
so without discrimination and judgment is a folly and a
crime. The father, to whom the money belonged,
objected to it being thrown away upon every rascal and
guberlunzie that liked to apply for it; and he asked the
bishop to be good enough to remonstrate with his spend
thrift son. The bishop remonstrated, whereupon St.
Francis stripped himself stark-naked before the people,
and cried out, in his indecent nudity : “ Peter Bernardini
was my father ; I have now but one father—he that is in
heaven.” And I hope this father in heaven felt proud
of his son standing there so shamelessly in the light of
the open day. This saint died in 1226. He had begun
by imitating Christ, and he ended by imitating him.
About two years before his death the jags of a crown
of thorns were all over his head. From a very tidy gash
in his side blood and water flowed, and the heads of
* In 1182
�8
THE INQUISITION.
crucifixion nails stuck out of his feet and the palms of
his hands. All this was well vouched for, and met with
general belief, It has as strong historic testimony as the
story of the crucifixion, and is, perhaps, quite as true.
To these two saints, St. Dominic and St. Francis, the
former the founder of the Dominicans, the latter of the
Franciscans, Humanity is indebted for the invention of
the Holy Inquisition, hardly second in importance to the
invention of “the leather botelie.”
A real saint is an interesting phenomenon. I have
seen only sinners, not saints; and, on account of my
wicked pen, I am not likely ever to be on speaking terms
with saints, unless they be of the salamander kind that
can live in fire and foot the flame-waltz demoniacally. So
it interests me to reflect on the subject of saints, and to
keep in mind that the saint who rescued Christianity
from death more than 700 years ago could see gods and
fiends in a way that few saints and no sinners can. He
saw Jesus Christ flying with six pairs of wings—a goodly
number for a divine insect. On another occasion he
met Christ and his mother, and had a chat with them;
but it is not on record that he ever met either of Christ’s
two fathers, the Holy Ghost or Joseph the Carpenter.
He had quite a knack for running up against Christ.
One day a disgustingly repulsive-looking leper was sitting
at the wayside begging, and so nauseating was he that
few could venture near enough him to throw at his feet
a coin or a crust of bread. But St. Francis ran up to
the miserable mendicant, and clasped him in his arms ;
and, lo, he turned out to be none other than Jesus Christ!
How the affairs of heaven got along while two-thirds of
deity sat upon the Great White Throne, and one-third of
deity sat at the road-side a leprous beggar, neither sacred
nor profane history saith. If I were privileged to sit
“in glory” at the right-hand of a God with no right
hand, I should think twice before I consented to set
myself down at the road-side as a starving and halfrotten beggar. But there is no accounting for tastes.
I have referred to the two saints, St. Dominic and St.
Francis, and I shall now allude to the two sinners,
Raymond, Count of Toulouse, and Frederic II., Em
peror of Germany, who played a prominent part in
�THE INQUISITION.
9
originating and establishing the Holy Inquisition. Of
course, the saints and sinners did not act on the same
lines in effecting the purpose of “ divine providence,
just as both fire and water are necessary to produce the
thunderous and vaporous hiss which takes place when
the firemen turn their torrents of water upon a fierce
chaos of living flame. Count Raymond and the Emperor
Frederic were the fire, Saints Dominic and Francis were,
the water, and the Holy Inquisition was the hiss of hell.
The new life of mental breadth and intellectual restless
ness which the Crusades had awakened had, as I have be
fore observed, almost ruined Christianity by breaking down
its isolated ignorance. Through the length and breadth
of the land strayed the gay troubadour with his trained
voice and responsive harp. Soul-stirring were his lays
of chivalry and daring ; soft but tremulous with passion
were his songs of love, and caustic and humorous his
lampoons on the clergy and the Church, the shams of
the faith, and the jolly frolics of the monks with women
and wine. All the solidarity that was still left in Chris
tendom looked on the crisis with the gravest apprehen
sion. The troubadours were denounced as blasphemers
and Atheists; but they were popular, and heresy was
spreading like wildfire. The strongest pillar against
which intellectual and moral revolt could at that time
lean was Raymond, Count of Toulouse. So Pope
Innocent III. and his cardinals attempted to deal a
death-blow at the half-thoughtful, half-scoffing heresy of
the age by striking down its most prominent man, Count
Raymond. The Pope excommunicated him on the
charge of protecting heretics and opening offices of
emoluments to Jews. Raymond snapped his fingers at
excommunication, regarding the fulminations of the vicar
of God on earth much as he would regard the swearing
of an exasperated cat.
But was this contumely to be endured? By the
thunders of Sinai and the keys of St. Peter, no! An
army of half a million of men was launched against
Raymond, and his castles and estates were to be divided
among the leaders of the expedition against him. Im
pervious to the slashings of the sword of the spirit, Ray-,
mond was overpowered, and had to yield to the sword
�IO
THE INQUISITION.
of steel. His castles and estates were wrested from him.
Stripped naked to the waist, and with a rope round his
neck, he was led to the altar and whipped like a dog.
The faith that could not be forced into his head by
reason was flogged into his back with a scourge.
The army which had been hurled against this heretical
peer was, for the most part, generalled by prelates and
officered by monks, and, with the charity for which true
Christians are celebrated, it determined not to disband
till, from the plains of France, it had tinged the heavens
with the red reek of human blood. Raymond was over
powered and vanquished ; but this half million of mili
tary fiends, spurred on by bishops and monks of “ the
Prince of Peace,” who came “ not to bring peace, but a
sword,” clamoured madly for blood. They were the
faithful; the land was swarming with heretics, and this
was sufficient excuse for indulgence in the pastime of
murder and the pleasure of plunder. Amid the indis
criminate carnage at the capture of Beziers, some one
ventured to ask how the true Catholic was to be distin
guished from the heretic. “ Kill them all; God will know
his own !” was the fierce response of the Abbot Arnold,
the Papal legate. There was a church dedicated to the re
formed (?) courtesan, Mary Magdalene, and in and around
that church 7,000 human beings were massacred on the
accusation that they had said : “A. Mariam Magdalenam
fuisse concubinam Christi.” If this Christ had taken care
to place Miss Magdalene’s character above suspicion, by
making her Mrs. Emanuel, these 7,000 lives might have
been saved. How dangerous it was to put a natural con
struction upon the conductof a carpenter-god who tramped
the country with a quondam lady of easy virtue ! In the
town 20,000 human beings were slaughtered, and then the
shattered dwellings and the huge carnage heaps were set
fire to, and a hill of blackened stones and cinders of
human corpses remained to mark how “ our Father which
art in heaven ” loves his children, and how his children,
inspired by him and his “ Holy Scriptures,” love one
another. At Lavaur 400 persons were burnt to death in
one huge fire. “ They made,” we are told, “ a wonderful
blaze, and went to burn everlastingly in hell.” These
incidents are only mere drops in the ocean of crime that
�THE INQUISITION.
II
attempted to wash away the heresy of which the standardbearer was Raymond of Toulouse.
Frederic II. of Germany was an even harder heretical
nut to crack than Count Raymond of I oulouse. He
was a man of marked individuality, of determined will,
and possessed of learning, intelligence, and . mental
breadth unusual in his day, and unusual even in ouis,
among either kings or commoners. He had broken
away from the cast-iron dogmas of Christian ignorance
and credulity, and was no stranger to the resouices of
Arab learning and speculation. Learned Mohammedans
and Jews were among the ministers of his court. He
came mediately, if not immediately, under the influence
of the celebrated Averroes of Cordova, the commentator
on the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the translator of
the “Almagest,” a zealous and laborious astronomer, and
said to be the first who observed the transit of Mercury
across the sun. A man is known by the company he
keeps : a strong-minded student and independent thinker
is a dangerous companion for a Christian Emperor or a
Christian crossing-sweeper. Leaden ignorance and mental
asphyxia, not intelligence and mental activity, make the
manure-heap upon which Christianity grows. It thrives
among shrines and holy wells, and not among paintings,
sculptures, and volumes. A Christian monastery, that of
Alsace, contained a spot of the blood of our Saviour, a
piece of the true Cross, a bottle of the milk of the
Virgin Mary, part of the skeleton of John the Baptist,
and the arm of the Apostle James. But the possessors
of these treasures destroyed the following triumphs of
heathen Art and Learning :—The bronze charioteers from
the hippodrome ; the she-wolf suckling Romulus and
Remus; a group of a sphinx, river-horse, and crocodile;
an eagle tearing a serpent; an ass and his driver, origi
nally cast by Augustus, in memory of the battle of Actium ;
Bellerophon and Pegasus; a bronze obelisk ; Paris pre
senting the apple to Venus; a statue of Helen; the
Hercules of Lysippus; and a Juno from the temple of
Samos. The bronzes were melted down to make filthy
lucre, which Christianity could always appreciate, although
she could not appreciate sculpture. She, at the same
time, burnt thousands of parchments and MSS., thereby
�12
THE INQUISITION.
pauperising the intellect of the world, and making straight
the path for the ascendency of her own brutal ignorance.
Several of the writings of the most learned among the
ancients were thus lost forever. Christianity was showing
to great advantage in her particular role, as, with the one
hand, she destroyed the monuments of ancient learning,
while, with the other hand, she grasped the bottle of
milk drawn from the mamma, of “the mother of God.”
To Christianity it was a small matter that she des
troyed for ever portions of the writings of Polybius,
Dio, Diodorus Siculus, and Livy, as long as she retained,
at two different abbeys in France, two different crowns
of thorns, and yet each of them the identical crown of
thorns which encircled the brow of Jesus at the Cruci
fixion ! The parchments of the olden sages, when not
burnt, were washed clean, that missals and Christian
drivel might be copied thereupon. To this pious erasing
of the writing on the ancient parchments, that the monk
might jot down his feeble inanities about a Ghost and
a Virgin, and a Son that was born to them, we owe the
loss of the missing books of Livy. Learning and the
faculty of subtle reasoning were more than a fault in
their possessor; they were a crime. If you had the
very rudiments of a free intellect, you were bound to
reject the Christian faith, which Frederic had charac
terised as “ a mere absurdity ■” and, if you rejected it,
what then? No Christian proper but despised learning
and hated argument. “ A man ought never to dispute
with a misbeliever, except with his sword, which he ought
to drive into the heretic’s entrails as far as he can,” was
the dictum of Christianity’s then and now representative
man, St. Louis. The venue has changed in degree,
but not in kind : instead of the sword in the entrails,
there is now the cell in Holloway Gaol. Christianity
•does not burn the heretic now; but she does her best to
starve him for his honest doubt. There is more learning,
genius, and sincerity in this one journal than there is
in the entire Christian press. Yet out of the profits of
one paper for Christian “ babes and sucklings ” the
editor runs a couple of carriages ; out of the profits of
labour by day and night upon this journal no writer can
afford to run a couple of wheelbarrows. Thus Chris
�THE INQUISITION.
IS
tianity still manages to register her hatred of inquiry as
opposed to credulity, and of doubt as opposed to faith.
And yet, as of old, the heretic stands bravely to his post.
Wealth, preferment, and the most of that which makes
life worth living are on the side of orthodoxy; and yet,
thanks to the inherent honesty and courage in human
nature, from the days of Arius and Donatus to the days
of our own contributors, Heresy has not been without
her heroes and Truth without her witnesses.
The Emperor Frederic had associated with learned
Jews, Saracens, and non-religionists, like Averroes, and,
as a consequence, did not care over much for either
“the mother of God” or her milk. A former Pope,
Honorious III., had made Frederic marry Yolinda de
Lusignan, heiress of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, with a
view to making perfectly certain that he should be a
Christian bulwark against the Infidel. But even the
nuptials with Yolinda could not convince Frederic that
his mission was to surrender the breadth and sweep of
the mental arena in which he moved, and tack himself
on to the coat-tails of the ignorant Galilean and his little
coterie of illiterate fishermen and go out to Palestine to
stand foot-to-foot in the death-jig against a people, in
most respects, superior to his own.
“ Be off to the Crusades,” quoth Pope Gregory IX.
to the husband of Yolinda. But the party thus com
manded threw a hundred difficulties in the way of his
compliance ; his real friends were among the learned
and inquiring Arabs, and not among the superstitious
Christian cut-throats he was expected to lead on to
plunder and carnage. The pressure to paint the cross
upon his shoulder and murder valiantly for Jesu’s sake
at length became irresistible, and off Frederic sailed for
the Holy Land to rescue the sepulchre of a personage
more fabulous than Merlin or King Arthur. In three
days Frederic returned, resolving that who liked might
go and fight for Bethlehem and its manger and Calvary
and its cross-sticks, but that he would not. “Won’t
you ? Then, by the thunders of God, I’ll excommuni
cate you !” hissed the octogenarian Gregory IX. through
his broken and senile teeth, and excommunicate him he
did.
�14
, THE INQUISITION.
Frederic treated the anathema of the Pope as he would
have done the curse of a scolding beldame. All curses
are, in themselves, alike good; but the beldame’s curse
would, most likely, extrinsically, not have been allied
with anything more formidable than ten furious finger
nails ; whereas the curse of his Holiness was, extrinsi
cally, emphasized by huge battalia armed to the teeth.
No wise man, not even an infallible Pope, curses and
then leaves God to carry out the conditions of the curse.
If you cannot both pronounce the curse and see it carried
into effect, you had better leave cursing alone.
Frederic felt that a papal curse was no trifle, and
he levied troops wherever he could, recognising that God
Almighty and his vicegerent on earth combined could
not, practically, curse a heretic who had more and better
steel blades than they, and more and stronger arms
to wield them. The strength of God is Tommy Atkins.
God’s muscles are dollars; God’s bones are bayonets.
Frederic the heretic knew this well. The Pope, in God’s
name, pronounced upon the Emperor a second, and
even more terrible, curse and excommunication ; but
Frederic, warding off the curse with swords, faced both
the Pope and God—hurled the former off the chair ot
St. Peter and expelled him from Rome, and what the
latter thought of the matter is not on record. But the
expelled Pope still hated and cursed Frederic, with his
science, his giving freedom to the slaves, libraries,
universities, and other things detested by the Christian
Church—a Church for bats, and not for men. Bitterly
Christ’s cursing vicar proclaimed, “ Out of the sea
a beast has arisen, whose name is written all over,
‘ Blasphemy.’ ” The Pope had the modesty to declare
as follows :—“We are no mere mortal man: we have
the place of God upon earth.” But, curiously enough,
when the “ no mere mortal man ” came in contact with
the “ beast ” arisen from the sea, the “ beast ” had the
best of it. For thirty years his name who was written
all over “ Blasphemy ” successfully confronted him who
occupied “ the place of God upon earthand when,
at last, Frederic was carried to his tomb his Holiness ex
claimed : “ Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth
be glad !”
�THE INQUISITION.
15
Even during the life of Frederic several of his heretical
sympathisers had had their bodies burned to save their
souls; but, now that he was gone, the jackall of “ the
living God ” ventured out of his lair and yelled for all
the blood in Europe that touched the brain with the
daring of Thought or warmed the vein with the pulse of
Freedom. The tomes of Academia gave way to the
corpses of Aceldama. Meaner heretics had found
strength and courage under the reges of Raymond and
Frederic. They had left their mantle behind them. A
voice from their grave called the serfdom of the world
up to higher levels and more exalted ideals. If this voice
could not be silenced, woe unutterable to Rome. The
gnomon of time threw a shadow athwart the dial of her
doom. She must strike or perish! and she struck.
The incarnation of Authority, the friend of Faith, the
enemy of Reason, she crushed Reason under her heel
and supported Faith with the axe, the dungeon, and the
stake.
“ I came not to send peace, but a sword.”* “ I am
come to send fire on the earth.”! “ If any man hate
not his father and mother, he cannot be my disciple.”!
In the proximate destruction of the universe, and other
vaticinations, he of Nazareth was a false prophet; but
he amply atoned for that by prophesying with diabolical
truth anent his mission to bring “ sword ” and “ fire ”
and “ hate.” Through the length and breadth of Chris
tendom the sword dripped with gore, the air was hot and
stercorous with the fires that consumed human flesh, and
the bonds of society were broken with the rancour of
human hate. Over the graves of Raymond and Frederic
malediction hissed and anathema thundered, and the
orders of Dominic and Francis, the mendicant friars,
proved of inestimable value in furthering the kingdom of
God and blasting the kingdom of Man.
Intellectual revolt must not be combatted with intellec
tual weapons, but must be baptised in fire and drowned
in blood. The Church well knew from what source the
revolt arose, from inquiry as against credulity. The
study of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle, which
* Matt. x. 34.
+ Luke xii. 46.
I Luke xiv. 26.
�i6
THE INQUISITION.
had come to Christendom through an Arabic channel,
was suppressed. The devilishly sinister practice of auri
cular confession was instituted so that the charge of
heresy could be wormed out of the mother against her
own son, from the son against the mother, or from the
wife against the husband of her love. Jesus Christ was
the means of introducing to the earth a new line of in
dustry, a new manufacture. Tall chimneys did notarise,
wheels did not fly round, and spindles birr; but busy
hands were piling the fagots round the stake, the torture
engines creaked and crunched, the thumbscrew, the
scavenger’s daughter, and the iron virgin were in full
play, and the dungeons were filled with the cries of
agony. The Inquisition was now fairly on its feet, and
the hope of Europe was fairly on its back.
Every Thursday.
Price Twopence.
THE * SECULAR
REVIEW:
A JOURNAL OF AGNOSTICISM.
EDITED BY SALADIN.
Order of your Newsagent, or send direct to the Publishers—W.
Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, London, E.C.
RECENT PAMPHLETS.
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London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The inquisition
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 2 v. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the Secular Review. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Stewart & Co.
Date
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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N591
N592
Subject
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Christianity
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The inquisition), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Inquisition
NSS