friendless assailant it flung the heavy purse of the richest and most corrupt corporation in the world. In its brutal meanness, it brought down an array of wigs and swords and gold chains and purple gowns and forensic skill to crush a poor man who conducted his own defence, eloquently, manfully, till borne down and overwhelmed by the overmastering force of hired and mercenary bigotry doing service for Almighty God because so many guineas were marked upon the brief. God avenges himself: he is on the side of the heaviest cannon. The hirelings of the rotten faith retire victorious, and the keen-brained, clear-voiced herald of the coming day[1] is arrayed in the dress of a felon, fed on bread and water, and caged up like a wild beast. In other way than this Christianity never did answer hostile criticism, and never will. It knows Paley's "Evidences" are moonshine, so it trusts instead to the convincing evidence of tearing away her child from the arms of the unbelieving mother. In its heart it recognises that Whateley's "Evidences" are bagatelle, so it resorts to the irrefragable evidence of the felon's den.
The policy it pursued to the "blasphemers" in prison it pursued for more than five dark and unhappy ceuturies, rendering life in Europe for more than five hundred years a nightmare of horror, a haunt of pale fear and shrieking terror. Never did any influence since civilised man lived upon the earth equal the iron despotism and unspeakable cruelty of the Inquisition. I could set your every hair on end, O reader, with horror at the bare and unvarnished recital of the refinements of cruelty invented by the Council of Cardinals.
If as much ingenuity had been expended in fostering art and pursuing science as was exerted in order that the most devilish agony might be inflicted upon heretics, we should to-day be living in a brighter, a happier, and a nobler world. Pope Innocent III. organised the Inquisition in 1206, and it did not expire till over five hundred years subsequently. In Portugal it was still alive at so recent a date as 1761. The state of things which Dr. Draper describes as happening in the thirteenth
- ↑ G. W. Foote.
