* Llorente, l. c., t. i., pp. 370, 371. + Id. t. i., pp. 439-440, n. viii.-x. Id. p. 447, n. iii.

SId. p. 448, n. v. vi. And this, notwithstanding that Francis I., when a prisoner at Madrid, had told Charles that tranquillity could never be restored in Spain (and the sequel proved his warning to be well founded) if the Moors and Moriscoes were not expelled.

quisition to save his country from the bloody brood of sectaries that were desolating the rest of Europe, merit for him the name of a wise, well-intentioned, and good Christian prince.

The intellectual licence among the common people, occasioned by the outbreak of Protestantism, led to civil discord in every country where it was introduced. The in-itself natural craving for religious unity, underlying the inconsistent and unreasoning passions of the pseudo-reformers themselves, instigated the numerous sects that sprang into existence to anathematize and exterminate each other; and the strange spectacle was witnessed of rulers, who, within twenty years, in the same land, as Calvinists persecuted Lutherans, and afterwards as Lutherans oppressed Calvinists, with penalties at least equalling any ever inflicted by the Inquisition. Not to speak of the thirty years' war; nor of the bloody annals of the Huguenots in France; nor of the ecclesiastico-political anarchy in England, Scotland, and Germany; nor of the excesses of the Anabaptists, the sanguinary debaucheries of John of Leyden, and the revolting enormities of the peasant war; it is only necessary to remember that Martin Luther cried out to the German princes to shoot down the Suabian peasants who had followed out his own principles, and raised, in the name of the Bible, the standard of revolt in an insurrection he had himself excited.†

Philip had personally witnessed in England the ever-widening torrent of blood, hurrying on to destruction a nation once happily united in religion, and he had good cause to be jealous of the introduction into the peninsula of a principle, whose first-fruits were anything else than submission to the state authority. The instincts of Spaniards, as of Italians, have ever been intrinsically averse to the enthronement of individual judgment in the stead of external spiritual authority, and, with them, Protestantism could never mean religious emancipation, but an overthrow of civil order and social restraint, as repugnant to the more conservative among the Reformers as to

* In 1563, when the Elector Frederic III. became a Calvinist, he compelled his Lutheran subjects, in the Palatinate, to follow his example, and exiled those who refused to accept the Heidelberg Catechism. Thirteen years later, in 1583, his successor forced the nation, under the heaviest penalties, to return again to Lutheranism! Great numbers of similar examples could be cited. + Luther's language, in the original, shows the character of the man:"Ein Aufrührisher ist nicht werth, dass man ichm mit Vernunft antworte-mit der Faust musz man ihm antworten, dass der Schweiss zur Nase Ausgehe. Die Bauren haben nicht hören wollen, darum habe man ihnen die Öhren aŭfkneŭbeln müssen mit Büchsensteinen, dass die Köpf in die Luft gesprungen."

Catholics themselves. The learned Balmes, addressing his countrymen, says of that time:

"The immediate effect of the introduction of Protestantism into Spain would have been, as in other countries, civil war; and this war would have been more fatal to us than to other people, because the circumstances were much more critical for us. The unity of the Spanish monarchy could not have resisted the shocks and disturbances of intestine dissension; the different parts were so heterogeneous among themselves, and were so slightly united, that the least blow would have parted them. The Moors were still in sight of our coast; the Jews had not had time to forget Spain: certainly, both would have availed themselves of the conjuncture to raise themselves by means of our discords. On the policy of Philip depended not only the tranquility, but, perhaps, even the existence of the Spanish monarchy. . . . He is now accused of having been a tyrant; if he had pursued any other course, he would have been taxed with incapacity and weakness."*

The rigor of the Inquisition, practically the mildest and only consistent ecclesiastical court in Christendom, was mitigated in proportion as the danger of Spain's being invaded by Protestantism decreased. At the end of the last century it was only a shadow of what it had been. Under the Emperor Ferdinand VI., in the middle of the eighteenth century, only freemasons, bigamists, blasphemers, sorcerers, and witches, were subjected to its prosecutions,† and, during the long reign of Charles III., from 1759 to 1788, but four individuals were punished by death. Capital punishment was inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition, for the last time, in 1781; just

one year before a witch was burnt in the Protestant canton of Glarus. We are not, of course, implying that the two cases are parallel; but we think it right to mention the fact. The activity of the Spanish Inquisition was, from that time, confined to the censure of political and religious books of a mischievous nature.

Napoleon abolished the Inquisition in Spain in 1808; but it was re-established as a political institution in 1814, upon the restitution of Ferdinand VII. to the throne, and did not finally cease to exist until his death, in 1830.

It may, perhaps, be proper, before closing the subject, to say a word concerning the application of torture, and the terrible autos da fè, by which we have all been scared in our time.

Dreadful (says Hefele) + is the conception we form of an auto da fè (actus fidei), that is, an act of faith, as if it were nought else but a prodigious fire and a colossal spit, round which every quarter of a year the Spaniards sat, like cannibals, to revel in the roasting and broiling of some hundred wretches. But I will take the liberty to assert that, in the first place, an auto da fè did not consist in burning and slaying, but partly in the acquittal of those falsely accused, partly in the reconciliation of those repentant with the church; and that there were many autos da fè, at which nothing, burned but the wax taper, which the penitent, in token of his rekindled light of faith, bore in his hand. Llorente, for example, tells, in proof of the great zeal of the Inquisition, of an auto da fè at Toledo, on the 12th February, 1486, at which not fewer than seven hundred and fifty culprits were punished. Among all these, however, not one was executed, and their penalty was nothing more than a public Church penance. A second great auto da fè again took place at Toledo, on the second of April of the same year, where there were nine hundred victims, and of these nine hundred, not a single individual received capital punishment. A third auto da fè, on the first of May of the same year, comprehended seven hundred and fifty persons; and a fourth, on the first of December following, as many as nine hundred and fifty; yet not a single execution occurred. Altogether, three thousand three hundred persons must, at that time, at Toledo, have done ecclesiastical penance, while twentyseven only were sentenced to death; and Llorente would certainly not misstate the numbers to favour the Inquisition. ‡

Very few processes, recorded by Llorente, resulted in the death of the prisoner; although he, notoriously, sought out the severest cases, and depicted the Holy Office, which he hated, in the blackest possible colours. The Spanish people,

Hefele, bei Wette und Wetser, § 654.

+ Der Cardinal Ximenes, xvii., H. S., 322, 323.-For this extract the translation is used in the DUB LIN REVIEW of October, 1852.

Lorente, t. i,. p. 233, n. v.-vii.

It was the only criminal court in Europe in which the application of torture was limited. Llorente acknowledges (t. i., p. 445, n. x.) that, after the year 1537, it was almost entirely forbidden against the Moriscos; and Hefele proves that the Inquisition was incomparably more merciful in its use than any other tribunal of the age (pp. 306, 307).