called invention as when a judge or a physician makes an exact inqiry into any cause. Grew. Providence, delivering great conclusions to us, designed to excite our curiosity and inquisitiveness after the methods by which things were brought to pass. Burnet.

It can be no duty to write his heart upon his forehead, and to give all the inquisitive and malicious world a survey of those thoughts which it is the pre1ogative of God only to know. South.

Heights that scorn our prospect, and depths in which reason will never touch the bottom, yet surely the pleasure arising from thence is great and noble ; for as much as they afford perpetual matter to the inquisitiveness of human reason, and so are large enough for it to take its full scope and range in.

The INQUISITION, called also, by a shocking misnomer, the Holy Office, is an ecclesiastical tribunal which has been established in modern times in several catholic countries and their dependencies, for the discovery and punishment of heretics and infidels, i. e. of all persons supposed to entertain opinions contrary to the decisions of the church of Rome.

The rise of this cruel institution is to be traced to those times when persecution was general throughout the civilised world. Some writers date its origin as early as the council of Verona, which was held in 1184, and in which pope Lucius commissioned the bishops to obtain all possible information of persons suspected of heresy, &c., and described similar degrees of this crime to those which the Holy Office afterwards acted upon. But it is more commonly dated from a persecution of the Waldenses in the beginning of the thirteenth century.

At this period (in 1203) Innocent III. had commissioned Peter de Castelnau, and Ralph, monks of the order of Citeaux, and of the monastery of Fortfroide, in Narbonnese Gaul, to preach against the heresies of that sect, and he shortly after named three pontifical legates; empowering them to call on the French king Philip II. and all princes and nobles to prosecute and banish heretics wherever they were found. Among other ecclesiastical associates whom they selected was Dominic de Guzman, a canon of the order of St. Augustine; 'a man,' says a Spanish writer, 'to whom we owe two most important blessings, the rosary and the holy office.'

But the Catholic bishops were from the first jealous of this mission, and several of the great feudal chiefs of Provence and Narbonne refused to obey the orders of the legates. Among the most refractory and most powerful of the latter

was Raymond VI. count of Toulouse, and in his dominions Peter de Castelnau was assassinated, as it is said, by the Albigenses, and beatified in 1208. The able and aspiring pontiff now called on all the neighbouring powers to assist him in pouring forth the vengeance of the church; and to march into the heretical district. All obstinate heretics were placed at the disposal of Simon de Montfort, commander of this crusade: the whole race of the Waldenses and Albigenses were ordered to be pursued with fire and sword; neither sex, age, nor condition was spared; the country became a wilderness, and the towns heaps of smoking ruins. Pardon and remission of sins were promised by the papal buli 'to all those who would take up arms to revenge the said murder; and since we are not to keep faith with those who do not keep it with God,' it added, 'we would have all to understand that every person who is bound to the said earl Raymond, by oath of allegiance or by any other way, is absolved by apostolical authority from such obligations, and it is lawful for any Roman Catholic to persecute the said earl and to seize upon his country, &c.' 'We exhort you,' continued this famous bull, to destroy the wicked heresy of the Albigenses, and to do this with more rigor than you would use towards the Saracens themselves: persecute them with a strong hand.' The agents employed were worthy of their vigorous sovereign head, the pontiff. Spare none,' said the abbot of Citeaux to those who required a mark to distinguish the Catholic from the heretic. Spare none; God will be able to distinguish his own among the slain.'

Such was the era of the inquisition, and the objects in aid of which it was first established. Dominic was constituted the first inquisitorgeneral. Innocent III. had scarcely given this institution a formal existence before he was summoned to a higher tribunal. Dominic in fact had only proceeded to Thoulouse to decide upon the religious order which he would wish to associate with himself in the institution, when the pope died 16th of July 1216: his choice of the Augustines was approved by Honorius on the 22nd of December of that year.

The emperor Frederic II. gave the constitution of the society the form of civil law at his coronation: and, in 1224, the inquisitors were busy at Padua; but in Narbonne they had not succeeded to the expectation of the pope; and Louis VIII. put himself at the head of an army against the Albigenses to expedite this holy work.

Gregory IX. gave the institution its final form; and in 1233 it was fully established in France by St. Louis, and in the four Christian kingdoms of Spain.

The council held at Thoulouse, in the year 1229, by Romanus, cardinal of St. Angelo, and pope's legate, had already erected in every city a council of inquisitors, consisting of one priest and three laymen.

The operations of a tribunal conducted by such men, and meeting with no effective opposition, were too rapid to last long. The inquisition became useless at Thoulouse for want of heretics to condemn. In its infant essay it had strangled the serpents that surrounded its cradle;

but the hydra of heresy (as the Romanists delight to call it) was growing up for its maturer labors. Its laws, rules, and devices, were laid up therefore as a part of the papal artillery. Pope Innocent IV. supported it as a favorite ally, and established permanent tribunals, on the plan of that of Thoulouse, over almost the whole of Italy except Naples, where it never gained admittance. It was early imported into the Spanish kingdom of Arragon, bordering on the province where it originated. Wherever the inquisitors were sent they created an alarm like that of an invading army; and, notwithstanding the bigotry and prostrate submission of the age, the cruelty, insulting arrogance, and intolerable oppression of these ghostly fathers, excited insurrection and tumult in almost every town which they garrisoned for the faith. The bishops, who saw in these establishments the ruin of their authority in matters of doctrine, remonstrated against their usurpation; and the princes, who claimed the privilege of burning their own heretics, saw with pain an encroachment on their prerogative by the troops of the holy see. The spirit of Christendom was however pretty well subdued for two centuries; and the inquisition had not much on their hands, from the extirpation of the Albigenses to the dawn of the Reformation and the persecution of the Moors and Jews in Spain.

Their Catholic majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, now resolved that they would have none but Catholics in their dominions, and that it was necessary, for the glory of God and the prosperity of their reign, to make all their Jewish and Moorish subjects hypocrites, exiles, or martyrs. The respect paid by the queen to the counsels of Torquemada, makes us almost forget the assistance she lent to Columbus: yet on the whole she was certainly unwilling to be his instrument. It was easy by a perfidious and savage edict to drive these unhappy people into the church; but it was not so easy to drive them out of their prejudices and habits. To save their lives, their fortunes, and their families, they made an open profession of a religion which, disgraced and falsified as it was by its ministers, they abhorred; but in secret they cherished their own faith, and practised their own rites. The mass, the cross, and the image, were the objects of their public veneration, but the stolen devotions of the mosque and the synagogue had their hearts and affections. The Moor with his face towards Mecca pronounced the Ave Maria; and the Jew, while he fasted in Lent, was consoled by the consideration that it gave him an interval in which at least he was exempt from attesting his sincerity by devouring pork. It was necessary therefore to establish the inquisition,in order to take cognizance of these dangerous and daring apostates, in those parts of Spain where it did not before exist, and to inspire it with new activity and energy in those provinces whose faith was to be for ever under its protection.

Torquemada, a Dominican friar, and a fit successor of the preaching and persecuting founder of the order, confessor to the queen, the man by whose advice this measure was undertaken, obtained a bull from Sixtus IV., in the year 1483, appointing him inquisitor-general of

all Spain, and confirming the extension of the inquisition to Castile, where it had been established three years before. The inquisitorial regulations still in force are principally those approved of by Torquemada, and a council of his nomination. Sixteen tribunals of the faith were established in the different provinces of Spain, subject to a supreme council at Madrid, in which the inquisitor-general presided; and to these tribunals, beside the regular officers necessary to conduct their processes, were attached, as appeared in a subsequent reign, more than 20,000 constables or familiars, who, as a religious police, watched over the conduct, opinions, and expressions of all ranks of the people, and, together with numerous swarms of monks, priests, and confessors, acted as arms or feelers to these dreadful associations of intolerance. As the headstrong enthusiasm, the callous heart, required in an inquisition, are most consistent with a narrow capacity and limited information, so the grossest ignorance and most absurd fatuity appeared in the cruel and arbitrary proceelings of these ghostly fathers; the opinions and sentiments of mankind were regulated by judges who could form no opinions of their own; and many an orthodox believer suffered torture and death as the penalty of not being understood. The dungeons were soon filled with heretics, who after conversion had apostatised to Moses or Mahomet. Every one was commanded, under the penalty of excommunication, to confess his own errors, or to denounce those of others. No connexions of blood, kindred, or friendship, were allowed to stand in the way of the sacred work; and the merit of the impeachment was measured by the strength of those ties of nature which were broken for its sake. None who displeased the supporters of superstition could escape detection; none who were detected could elude imprisonment; and few who were imprisoned could escape torture or the flames.

The first essay of the inquisition at Seville showed with what a fell swoop' it could act. In the first six months 300 persons, accused of Judaizing after conversion, were burnt, together with the bones and images of many whom death had happily rescued from its dominion. In the space of about forty years from its establishment in Seville there had been burned in that diocese more than 4000 individuals; 5000 houses remained shut as after a pestilence, and consequently so many families had been exterminated: and 100,000 were condemned to wear the sanbenito, or banished, in the single province of Andalusia. I do not wish,' says the chaplain of the inquisitor-general of that time, 'to write any thing more concerning the mischiefs of this heretical pravity; suffice it to say that since the fire is kindled it shall burn till no more wood can be found, and that it will be necessary for it to blaze till those who have Judaized are spent and dead, and not one remains.' To such an extent did the exterminating spirit against the descendants of Abraham proceed, that it was a common saying with Lacero (inquisitor of Cordova scon after the establishment of the tribunal in that city), Da me un Judeo, dartelo he quemado; hand me a Jew, and I will return him to

you burnt to ashes. Many of this miserable people were condemned to the flames for frequenting the synagogues in borrowed shapes, and being carried to their nightly assemblies by the devil in the form of a he-goat. Witnesses were found to prove, to the satisfaction of the inquisitor, this miraculous mode of Judaizing, and to swear that they themselves were present at the ceremonies. The various tribunals were extremely active, each of them celebrating an auto once or oftener in the year. Extreme youth and hoary age; those who were too old to change their opinions, and those who were too young to form any; were seen burning in the same fire poverty was defenceless, and riches invited plunder. In one day at Toledo sixtyseven females were delivered over to the flames, for relapsing into Jewish practices after conversion; and this was only one of two autos that had been celebrated in the same month. Those that entered the church were liable to be burnt; and the contumacious were plundered and banished.

Thus did the furious zeal of the first inquisitorgeneral of Spain, operating upon the bigotry or terror of two Catholic princes, extirpate or ruin nearly 1,000,000 of their most wealthy, industrious, and enterprising subjects, who, notwithstanding the oppressions under which they labored, and the popular rage to which they were occasionally exposed, multiplied in Spain as in a second land of Egypt, and almost regarded it as a new Palestine. With this idea they looked upon their expulsion as a calamity similar to the dispersion of their tribes, or the final extinction of their political existence. The price which their fathers had paid for the blood of the Saviour, about fifteen centuries before, was now made a reason why no ransom should be received for their own. Torquemada, with the genuine inspiration of fanaticism, rushed into the royal presence, when the queen was deliberating on an offer of money made by the Jews for liberty of conscience, with a crucifix in his hand, and broke off the intended compromise for toleration or protection, by exclaiming, Behold the crucified Redeemer, who was sold formerly to the Jews for thirty pieces of silver by Judas; sell him not again to his enemies for gold or silver like that traitor, or remember the traitor's reward. I shall be no party to the impious bargain; I abdicate my office.' This appeal was successful; the proffered donation was refused; the edict of banishment was confirmed on a whole people; excommunication was denounced against those who should either harbour them, or supply them with the least particle of subsistence, after the period assigned for their expatriation; and the remnant of this miserable race, whose conscience would not allow them to adopt the religion of their persecutors, or who saw no safety within the pale of a church where the prison and the rack were placed below the altar, and where a new Christian had always before him the half-kindled faggots prepared for a heretic, were driven from the place of their birth and early recollections; were stripped, plundered, and tormented with impunity; were reduced to slavery, chased into

solitudes, or pursued over the country. Directing their course into all the surrounding states, many of them were received in Portugal, France, and Italy; many crowded the sea-ports and frontiers of the kingdom, and, having taken shipping for Africa, Naples, or the Levant, perished by storms, pirates, or barbarians; and many of them, after experiencing every extremity of misfortune, were obliged to return to their native land, and to receive the waters of baptism from the overflowing cup of their misery. Those who fled into Portugal found intolerance and fanaticism there before them; and soon after their arrival saw the holy office established under the direction of more uncontrolled power, and a fiercer spirit of persecution, if possible, than in the country they had been obliged to relinquish.

The disciples of Mahomet could expect no better treatment than the adherents of Moses. Decrees of expulsion or conversion accordingly issued against them from the same counsels, and the holy office prepared its prisons for the relapsed and apostate. Not fewer than a million and a half of Moors were driven from Spain, from the conquest of Granada to their final banishment under Philip III., besides those destroyed in wars, massacres, and assassinations, tortured to death by the inquisitors, or delivered over to the hands of the executioner.

Nothing can be conceived more absurdly horrible than the treatment of these miserable men. If they adhered to the faith of their fathers they were robbed, plundered, and exiled as infidels; if they renounced it, and became Christians, they were suspected as hypocrites and punished as heretics. Compelled to enter the church, to escape persecution, they found, when in the church, that their compulsory entrance was made an argument of their apostasy; forced to violate their conscience, by denying a religion which they cherished, they experienced only the penalties of that which they embraced; and, deprived of the glory of martyrdom for the one, they enjoyed none of the security expected in the other. By their conversion they were brought within the reach of the inquisitorial fires; and their baptism was like heathen libations poured on the heal of the victim preparatory to the sacrifice.

When carried to the prisons of the holy office, it was equally vain for them to deny or to confess the crimes with which they were charged by bigotry, avarice, or malevolence; if they denied, they were burnt as impenitent; if they confessed, they were burnt as relapsed. Torture was applied to force a declaration of what the inquisitor desired, and again inflicted to learn with what intention the acknowledged act was performed. Whatever became of the person of the heretic, whether condemned to capital punishment, or perpetual imprisonment, whether he came out with the penitential robe or to the stake, his property remained in the treasury of the inquisition; he brought forth with him none of his rights.. Fidelity to their new profession, and even zeal in confirming or extending it, never ensured protection or commanded confidence, the character of a new Christian, being