jected. The corruptions, the errors, the evils of the Church of Rome, have all sprung from her subjection to the Papacy.

In detailing the Story of the Inquisition, it would be a strange omission to leave unnoticed its decay and final dissolution. It was impossible, even in the deep darkness and ignorance prevailing in Italy and Spain and Portugal, the three countries where the Holy Office so long existed and sacrificed its hecatombs of victims to the Moloch of persecution,-it was impossible to exclude altogether the progress of light and knowledge, and the march of those new and enlightened ideas of both civil and religious rights, that characterize the present century. The war with France, and consequent invasion of Spain by the French people, traversing the whole peninsula of Spain and Portugal, and disseminating the new opinions, could not pass away without leaving some permanent results on the mind of the nation: the armies of England, that freed those countries from the armies of France, with their clear views of civil and religious liberty, were certain to leave some traces of free thought behind them: while the gradual progress of commerce and civilization and knowledge amongst the people themselves, performed their part in revolutionizing the minds of Spain and Portugal on the subject of the Inquisition. The circumstances that led to its final extinction are soon told.

It was after the progress of commerce and civilization had begun to act on the morals of the nations of the Peninsula, and the general opinion of Europe was exerting its certain though slow influence, that the more free and enlightened among both the Spaniards and Portuguese took courage and boldly expressed themselves as to the character of the Inquisition. The exposure of the hideous immorality of the three Inquisitors at Saragossa, using their power of arresting females for the most nefarious of all purposes, was as an electric shock through the civilized and Christianized world. The details of the injustice and wrong, -of the cruelty and savagery,-the blood and fires of the Holy Office, and more than all, the records written by competent and able men, indignantly yet sorrowfully exposing the whole system of the principles and procedure of the Inquisition, exerted an amazing influence on the minds and hearts of all that were wise and good in every Church and in every land. A

The armies of revolutionized and infidelized France poured as a mighty torrent through the valleys and gorges and passes of the Pyrenees. That wonderful general, the war-meteor of this century, led the armies of France in their countless thousands into the very heart of Spain, and no conqueror was ever better served by his followers than was Napoleon Buonaparte by his generals and soldiers. The whole of the Peninsula was prostrate before him, and the collapse of all native power was for the moment complete. The ancient courage, the military prowess, the national pride, seemed to have

passed away. for ever. A moral paralysis ap

peared to have stricken the whole land, and patriotism and public spirit seemed as though they had never been. There was no authority, no organization, no enthusiasm, no union, no anything that was necessary for the uprising of a free and courageous people against the armies of the invader. The very heart of the people seemed to have been eaten out of them. The reign of the priesthood, the prevalence of monkery, had done their work in breaking the heart of the nation, tearing out of it all true sense of civil or religious freedom; the whole people were become the terror-stricken slaves of the Inquisition, and had lost all memory of their former greatness; and their long-continued dread of mutual confidences being betrayed to the Holy Office had generated such a mutual distrust and such an habitual abstinence from confidence that they knew not how to combine and trust each other, even for the defence of their homes and their hearths. The result was that the armies of France were enabled to overrun the whole country for a time; the whole nation, brought to a state of degeneracy through superstitious bigotry and subjection that might well be called slavery to the priestly power, and abject submission to the civil rulers, was paralysed, and fell without a struggle. The curse of the Inquisition was on the land.

The French soldiery were of all men the least likely to render much deference to the powers claimed by the priesthood. The spirit of infidelity and revolution had done its own evil work amongst them, and although members of the Church of Rome in name, they seemed to take every opportunity of showing their contempt for the weaknesses, the superstitions, and the bigotry of the people. France in her later years had never allowed the Inquisition a place within her borders; and her soldiery, naturally indifferent to every institution that had the name of religion, and entertaining a special contempt for everything in the shape of monkery, were little disposed either to respect or approve the Inquisition, which all thoughtful minds among the intelligent and the enlightened were now beginning to regard as an incubus and an injury to religion. When the whole country was overrun by such a soldiery, there could be little expectation that the Inquisition could escape.

There is still existing an official report of the destruction of the Palace of the Inquisition at Madrid. It is the military report by Colonel Lymanoir, of the 9th Regiment of Polish Lancers, made in the year 1809. A translation of this report reveals the whole.

"Having been ordered by Marshal Soult, the Governor of Madrid, to destroy the buildings of the Inquisition, conformably to the decree of the Emperor, I observed to him that the 9th Lancers was a force insufficient for that purpose. The Marshal then added two regiments of infantry, one of which regiments, the 117th, was under the orders of Colonel Delille. With these troops I marched to the Inquisition. buildings were surrounded with strong walls, and were guarded by 400 soldiers.

The

"On my arrival I summoned the fathers to open the gates. A sentinel on one of the bastions appeared to converse for a moment with some one in the interior, and then, turning, he fired upon us and shot one of my men. This was a signal for the attack. I ordered the troops to fire upon every one who appeared upon the walls. It soon became evident that the combat was unequal, and I changed the mode of attack. Some trees were cut down and made into battering rams; and two of these machines being well-directed, under a shower of bullets, a breach was made, and the Imperial troops rushed into the Inquisition.

“Here we had an illustration of Jesuitical

effrontery. The Inquisitor General and the father confessors issued forth solemnly from their retreats. They were clothed in their sacred robes, and with their arms crossed upon their breasts; they came, as if unconscious of what had passed, to learn what was the matter. They reproved their soldiers, saying, 'Why do you oppose the French? They are our friends.' They seemed anxious to make us believe that they had given no orders to their men to make any resistance; and, no doubt, they hoped to effect their own escape during the confusion when all was given up to pillage. They deceived themselves. I gave strict orders that they should be kept in view, while all their guards were made prisoners.

"We then began our examination of the prison of hell. We visited chamber after chamber. There were altars, crucifixes, wax tapers in abundance. Riches and splendour were to be seen everywhere. The floors and walls were highly polished, and the marble mosaics were inlaid with exquisite taste. But where were the instruments of torture of which we had been told? and where were the dungeons in which it was said that human beings were entombed alive? We sought for them in vain. The Holy Fathers assured us that in this they were the victims of calumny, and that already we had seen everything they had within their walls.

"I was about to abandon my researches, persuaded that these Inquisitors were different men from those of whom we had heard; but Colonel Delille would not abandon his researches so easily. He said that we ought to examine the floors again, to pour water upon them, and to observe whether it passed through any part. The flags were marble, large and smooth. After we had poured the water, to the great displeasure of the Inquisitors, we examined all the interstices to see if any passed through. Very soon Colonel Delille cried out that he had found what he had been searching for. In the joinings of a slab of marble the water was disappearing rapidly, as if there was a vacant space beneath.

"Officers and men at once set to work to raise this flag, while the priests cried out against the desecration of their beautiful and holy house. A soldier just then struck a spring with the butt-end of his musket, and there was disclosed a flight of steps. I took a lighted taper, four feet long, which was on the table, in order to explore our discovery, but I was stopped by

one of the Inquisitors, who placed his hand gently on my arm, and said with a devout air, 'My son, you ought not to touch that taper, for it is a holy one.' 'Well,' I replied, 'I require a holy light to fathom iniquity.'

"I descended the steps, which were under the ceiling without any opening except the trapdoor. Arrived at the bottom we entered into a vast square room called the Hall of Judgment. In the centre was a block of stone, upon which a chair was fixed for the accused. On one side of this chamber was another seat more elevated, called the throne of judgment, and here and there were lower seats for the fathers. From this chamber we passed to the right, and there we found small cells, extending the whole length of the edifice. But what a spectacle presented itself to our eyes! How the beneficent religion of the Saviour had been outraged by its professors! These cells were used as dungeons where the victims of the Inquisition were incarcerated until death relieved them from their sufferings. Their bodies had been left there to decompose; and that the pestilential smells might not incommode the Inquisitors, there were ventilators made to carry them off. In some of these cells we found the remains of some who had died recently, while in others we found only skeletons chained to the floor. In other cells we found victims still living. They were of all ages and of both sexes, young men and young women, and old men up to seventy years of age, and all of them as naked as the day on which they were born! Our soldiers first busied themselves to free these prisoners from their chains, and then took off part of their own clothes to cover them.

"After we had visited all the cells, and opened the prison doors of those who were yet alive, we went to examine another chamber on the left. There we found all the instruments of torture that the genius of men or demons could invent. At the sight of these the fury of our soldiers could no longer be restrained: they shouted out that every one of these Inquisitors and monks, and their guards should themselves be subjected to these tortures. We did not attempt to restrain them. They at once began the work upon the persons of the Inquisitors. I saw them employ four of the modes of torture, and then I withdrew from the frightful scene, which lasted as long as there was one individual on whom they could wreak their vengeance.

"When all these vaults were thrown open, there was discovered an image of the Virgin Mary; this on examination was found to be an instrument of torture. She had beneath her robes a metal breastplate thickly studded with needles, and spikes or lancets. The familiar who was present was ordered to work the machine; and on his doing so, the image raised her arms, as if to embrace you. A knapsack was thrown into her arms, and then inclosing it on her breast it was pierced through in a hundred places. To a living victim it would have proved instantly the embrace of death.

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'When the victims of the Inquisition could be brought, without danger, from their prison into the light of day, the news of their delivery spread abroad; and those persons from whom the Holy Office had torn their relatives or friends, came to see if there was

any hope to find them alive. About one hundred persons were rescued from those living tombs, and restored to their families. Many found a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister. Some found none.

"A large quantity of gunpowder was then placed in the subterranean passages of the building, and the massive walls and towers were blown up into the air; and the Inquisition of Madrid ceased to exist."

Such was the fate of the most unhallowed institution this world has ever witnessed. In the hour of the deepest humiliation and degradation of Spain, when she was stricken down a captive by the arms of invading France, and lay bleeding and helpless, the act of ketributive justice upon the Inquisition was the act of her conqueror and her enemy. Spain, so long debased by superstition, and degraded by bigotry, and enslaved by ignorance, had not herself the honour of suppressing the Holy Office, but remains indebted to the soldiery of her conqueror for this great service to humanity, to religion, and to liberty. The terrible excesses of the soldiers in executing this just retribution-their torturing those monks who had themselves tortured so many-may have seemed a sort of natural justice to their maddened and infuriated passions at the moment; but it was rather an imitation of the accursed spirit of the Inquisitors than of the humane and gentle spirit of Christianity.

This occurred in the year 1809. Henceforward the Inquisition was doomed. Throughout Europe the event was welcomed as a sacrifice

to the honour of human nature as well as to the principles of religion. It was regarded universally as a triumph of civilization; while through all the distant colonies of Spain and of Portugal, where the Inquisition had been established-especially in Mexico, in South America, and in the East Indies-the shock was felt as the signal for the exhibition of a publie feeling that anticipated the immediate decay and ultimate downfall of the whole system. When Ferdinand, after the fall of Joseph, was placed on the throne of Spain, he, weak as water, and enslaved to his confessor, was induced by his crafty advisers to issue several decrees for the restoration of the Holy Office. Nothing less could be expected from one who when the offer of the crown reached him, was embroidering a petticoat for the Virgin Mary. These decrees were issued in the year 1814, and were based on the necessity of checking the erroneous and heretical opinions circulated in the country by the French soldiery during their possession of the kingdom, and also by the English soldiery during their noble and triumphant successes in freeing the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal from the power of their invaders. These decrees however could never make head against the progress of public opinion. A love of liberty was spreading among the people. These decrees could not restrain it. They were weak attempts to build up this unmerciful institution on more merciful principles. The result showed that in any form it could be used for purposes of repression, whether in religion or in politics. The inveterate habits of the priesthood could not be easily eradicated; and it soon appeared to have been used by them for political as well as for ecclesiastical purposes. But as the spirit of liberty grew and extended itself among the people, the existence of such an institution was impossible. The Revolution of 1820 annihilated it. It was in that year the cortes finally suppressed it.

The Pope, indeed, made a bold step towards its continuance. He proposed to exhibit it in a more merciful and gentler form, taking away, at least in appearance, all that had rendered it most unpopular. He issued his bull abolishing for ever the penalty of death for the crime of heresy. This would at once sweep away all the revolting horrors of the Auto da fé, which had caused such fiery hatred and outspoken hostility to the Holy Office. It was thought by ecclesiastics that this concession to popular

opinion would bring it more within the range of modern feeling. But it was all in vain. The concession came too late. The world had awakened to the power of the people, as contrasted with the power of the ruler. This papal decree was issued in 1814. It was regarded as a sign of weakness in the Papacy, and it had no effect, unless to precipitate the inevitable fate of the Inquisition. As we have said, in 1820 it was abolished by a decree of the cortes. When once the people had a voice in the legislature, the people as distinct from the priesthood, the Inquisition was inevitably doomed. No power on earth could galvanize its putrid carcass into life.

The word seemed to go forth like wildfire through the world. In every place, in both hemispheres, where the Inquisition had been established, it was now abolished; and the joyous shouts of the people accompanied its abolition. The States of Rome presented the only exception. It lingered there for a time, as loath to die in that congenial atmosphere; but, at last, the hour of its doom was come, and it fell before the progress of public opinion. The Revolution in the Papal States sealed its inevitable fate in 1849.

The buildings were thrown open, and were entered by the people. Among them was an Englishman, who has left on record what, as an eye-witness, he had seen on that occasion. He thus expresses himself:

"I was struck with the outward appearance of civilization and comfort displayed in the building, which owes its erection to Pius V., the author of the last Creed; but, on entering, the real character of the concern was no longer dissimulated. A range of strongly-barred prisons formed the ground-floor of a quadrangular court; and these dark and damp receptacles, I found, were only the preliminary stage of probation, intended for new-comers, as yet uninitiated into the Eleusinian mysteries of this establishment. Entering a passage to the left, you arrive at a smaller courtyard, where a triple row of small barred dungeons rises from the soil upwards, somewhat after the outward look of a three-decker, accommodating about sixty prisoners. These barred cages must have been often fully manned, for there is a supplementary row constructed at the back of the quadrangle on the ground-floor, which faces a large garden. All these cellular contrivances have strong iron rings let into the masonry, and in some there

is a large stone firmly embedded in the centre, with a similar massive ring. Numerous inscriptions, dated centuries back, are dimly legible on the admission of light-their general tenor being assertions of innocence.

"The officer in charge led me down to where the men were digging in the vaults below. They had cleared a downward flight of steps, which was choked up with old rubbish, and they had come to a series of dungeons under the vaults deeper still, and which immediately brought to my mind the prisons of the Doge under the Canal of the Bridge of Sighs at Venice; only that here there was a surpassing horror. I saw, embedded in old masonry, unsymmetrically arranged, five skeletons in various recesses; and the clearance had only just begun. The period of their insertion in this spot must have been more than a century and a half. From another vault, full of skulls and of scattered human remains, there was a shaft, about four feet square, ascending perpendicularly to the first-floor of the building, and ending in a passage off the hall of the Chancery, where a trap-door lay between the tribunal and

the way into a suite of rooms destined for one of the officials. The object of this shaft could admit of but one surmise. The ground of the vault was made up of decayed animal matter, a lump of which held embedded in it a long silken lock of hair, as I found by personal examination, as it was shovelled up from below. But that was not all. There are two large subterranean lime-kilns-if I may so call them-shaped like a beehive, in masonry, filled with layers of calcined bones, forming the substratum of two other chambers on the groundfloor, in the immediate vicinity of the very mysterious shaft above mentioned."

Such were the revelations at Rome in this nineteenth century! The final suppression of the Inquisition, less than a quarter of a century ago, revealed these horrors to the world.

and is in the form of a long square or oblong. There is a garden in the centre. The building is three stories in height, with several vaulted galleries. Along these galleries there is a series of dungeons, varying from six to nine feet square. There are no windows in the dungeons on the ground story, or in that above it; so that, when the gate is closed, there is excluded all air and all light. The dungeons on the next story have a sort of tall chimney, which serves as a means for admission of air, and through which it is possible to receive a ray of light. These upper chambers were believed to have been assigned to such prisoners as might be supposed to be more favourable cases. In the vaulted wall of every dungeon there was an opening, of about an inch in superficies, and these openings communicated with a secret passage, extending to all the dungeons; so that the Familiars of the Holy Office, without being themselves seen, could watch the conduct of every prisoner, and hear their conversations whenever two of them were confined in one cell. In several of these dungeons were found the skulls and bones of human victims. On the walls there are written the names of unhappy victims imprisoned there. Some of the dungeons were still closed, as not having been used for some years; and these the populace forced open. In almost all, they found human bones, and in one they found, among the melancholy scenes, the girdle and some remnants of a monk's dress. They found the chimney-like holes of some dungeons walled up: a sign that the prisoner was there left to die. He was forced into the passage, and then the opening was walled up, and he was left to perish. Quick-lime was thrown on him from above, that destroyed body and life alike."

These narratives of the scenes exhibited in the Palaces of the Holy Office in Madrid, and in Rome, and in Lisbon, on their being thrown open to the eyes of the populace, must conclude this Story of the Inquisition. It were easy to add more of such painful and harrowing details; but our purpose is sufficiently accomplished—at least as far as we contem

ness:

"The Palace of the Inquisition was opened to the view of the populace, October 8th, 1821. The crowds who collected to see it, made it a matter of some difficulty, and even danger, to attempt an entrance. The structure is extensive,

worst suspicions entertained as to the interior life of the Inquisition, were realized at the sight of halls filled with instruments of torture, and dungeons filled with the bones of human beings, and the very floors themselves composed in part of what on examination proved