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USE OF THE INQUISITION.

when he consented to conduct them to the room formerly used as the hall of justice, or rather of judgment. They saw nothing but a long gloomy room, without one article of furniture; but it required little exercise of imagination to see, in fancy, the inquisitors and their satellites, the trembling victims and the instruments of torture. It appears incredible, that any others than those to whom its existence would bring power or wealth, should desire the re-establishment of the Inquisition.

"Yet I believe," said Mr. Delville, "that a large number of the Spaniards would look upon it with complacency."

"Papa," said Frank, "I do not quite understand what the Inquisition was, or how it proceeded, or why it is so much abused. While we are sitting in the shade of the botanical garden will you tell me ?"

"I have no objection. Edward has made me the same request; and I think it is a subject that would not please either your mother or Ellen. Pope Innocent III., alarmed by the first dawn of those opinions which afterwards ushered in the full light of the Reformation, appointed a commission for the prosecution and punishment of heretics in the provinces of Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, and Savoy. This was followed by the establishment of an Inquisition in those countries, in 1208. In every corporation permanent inquisito

PROGRESS.

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It

rial commissioners were established, composed of the parish priest and three lay assistants. They were invested with unlimited powers for the discovery of heresy, in the bosom of private families, and the silent recesses of the heart. By degrees, however, these important powers were withdrawn from the bishops and secular assistants, and committed, without participation or reservation, to the newly-established order of mendicant friars, founded by St. Dominic. It was necessary,' observes the learned Abbé Marsollier, to confide this charge to persons in a perfect dependence on the court of Rome, and devoted to her interests. was requisite to have leisure and be undisturbed by other employments, and be without parentage, alliances, or ties, that they might have neither connexion nor interest with any one. They were required to be hard-hearted, inflexible, without pity and without remorse; because they were to establish a tribunal the most severe that the world ever saw. Finally, they were to be zealous for religion, moderately or not at all clever, but interested by particular and personal views in the ruin of heretics.' All these requisites were united in the mendicant order of St. Dominic, and in their hands alone this terrible tribunal was placed. Every portion of that institution, its form, intention, and execution was the offspring of the evil

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RESISTED AT FIRST.

spirit: it partook of his character, and created all the misery and wretchedness that properly belong to him.

"It was under the pontificate of Gregory IX., and in the year 1232, that Spain received the same benefit which had been conferred on the south of France. It is remarkable that Spain, a country over which it has for more than three centuries exercised an unrelenting despotism, was that in which its first establishment was most firmly resisted, and where it was the slowest in taking root. Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon-all successively rose up in arms against it. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the form of procedure against the accused was different from what it afterwards became; but it was not till the reign of Ferdinand V. and Isabella, that the Inquisition assumed the peculiar form and character, which it afterwards maintained, even down to the period of its abolition, under Joseph Buonaparte. You will be sorry to hear that Diego Deza, the Dominican friar who so warmly espoused the cause of Columbus, in the Dominican convent at Salamanca, was himself Inquisitor at Cordova; and such were the cruelties he practised, and the abuses of his authority, that the people rose up against him. He was tried; and though the favourite of Ferdinand, having once been his confessor, yet the

DENUNCIATION AND ACCUSATION.

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crimes laid to his charge were so clearly proved, that he was deposed. Such is the imperfect state

of human virtue."

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And Columbus, sir," said Edward, “ was he a partizan in those actions ?"

"We must not enquire too curiously into the opinions of that great man on that point. He lived in an age when all religion consisted in a very strong feeling of bigotry; and since he was never called upon to declare them, we may give him the benefit of that silence."

"What were the forms used, sir ?"

"Denunciation and secret impeachment. This is the most usual mode of proceeding in the Inquisition in preference to that of accusation. Anonymous denunciations are received with the same avidity, and acted upon precisely in the same manner as those given under the sanction of a name; and though by the constitution of the holy office, an information upon oath subjects the informer, if his charge prove calumny, to the same punishment which would have been inflicted upon the denounced, had he been condemned, yet the inquisitors have in no instance awarded this punishment. Their policy being to encourage denunciations, they soon found it expedient to dispense with a law which would have rendered the holy office nearly idle. Denunciation was never more frequent than at the approach of the

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DESCENDS INTO PRIVATE LIFE.

Easter communion, when the confessors imposed it as a sacred duty upon their penitents, to disclose all they had seen, heard, or learned, which either was, or appeared to be contrary to the Catholic faith, or to the rights of the Inquisition. This abuse of what the Catholics call the sacrament of confession, for the purpose of encouraging the basest tendencies of the human heart, was solemnly authorized, by the public reading, in all the churches, during two Sundays in Lent, of an ordinance to that effect, issued by the Inquisition, in which they denounced on those who did not act up to this injunction, the most horrible canonical censures; a proceeding, as it has been justly observed, as unbecoming the place in which it was promulgated, as it was opposed to the spirit of the gospel. The consequence was, that many persons, recollecting certain loose or unguarded speeches, to which at the time they had attached no evil import, became uneasy at not having revealed them, made their confessors the confidant of these scruples, and they lost no time in transmitting them to the Inquisition. The nearest relations were not exempt from this horrible treachery. The husband and the wife, the father and the child, were mutually denounced; for on these conditions alone absolution was procured."

"O father, how horrible!" said Edward.

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Horrible indeed, my son; and this fact alone