Rafael Sabatini

“ Each will find in his own history more than enough to answer for at the bar of Humanity. And when achievement is measured by opportunity, each will discover that he is entitled to fling at the others no reproaches which the others are not entitled to fling at him.
If the Spanish Inquisition is here shown as a ruthless engine of destruction whose wheels drip the blood of mangled generations, yet it is very far from being implied that religious persecution is an offence peculiar to the Church of Rome. ”

“ Francesco Pegna recommends inquisitors to be careful not to omit the intercession on the prisoner’s behalf, lest they should render themselves guilty of an irregularity. At the same time he raises the interesting question whether an inquisitor can reconcile this intercession with his conscience—not, as you might suppose, upon the score of the dissimulation it entails; but purely on the ground that it is most strictly forbidden to intercede on behalf of heretics; to do so, indeed, is to incur suspicion of being a befriender of heretics—an offence as punishable as heresy itself. ”

“ Spain was the motherland of these Jews. For centuries it had been the home of their ancestors, and they held it in the affection implanted in the heart of each of us for the country which is his own. They must depart out of it, into exile in some foreign land, and the only terms upon which they could obtain immunity from that harsh decree was by the sacrifice of something dearer still, something as dear to them as honour itself. They must be false to the faith of their fathers and forswear the God of Israel. ”

“ Fanatical, horribly narrow, cruelly bigoted as was the spirit of the Inquisition, yet the inquisitors confined their prosecutions to apostates, to the adulterers of a faith whose purity and incorruptibility they had made it their mission to maintain.
If the Church repressed liberty of conscience, if she stifled rationalism and crushed independence of thought, she did so only where her own children were concerned—those who had been born into the Catholic Faith or who had embraced it in conversion. With those born into any other independent religion she had no concern. ”

“ Now, the tribunal of the Inquisition laid itself peculiarly open to this mistrust in consequence of the secrecy of its proceedings—a secrecy, as we know, greatly increased by the enactments of Torquemada. Its trials were not conducted in open court; the examination of witnesses took place in secret and under the veil of anonymity, so that the world had no assurance of the honesty of the proceedings. When it happened that a man was arrested, the world, as a rule, knew him no more until he came forth, candle in hand, arrayed in a sanbenito to play his tragic part in an Auto. ”

“ And clericalism in the Iberian Peninsula, pervaded by the spirit of Torquemada, converted that institution into an instrument far more dreadful and oppressive than was its character in Italy, or France, or any other Roman Catholic country of the world in which the Holy Office held jurisdiction.
In Spain it had set up in the evening of the fifteenth century an absolute reign of terror, depriving men of all liberty of conscience and of speech and spreading a network of espionage over the face of the land. ”

“ It is remembered then, to his disadvantage, that under his cassock the cleric is a man, and so subject to all the faults that are man’s heritage. But it happens that in addition to these he is subject to other failings that are peculiarly of the cassock, failings which the world has never been slow to discern in him. The worst of these is the ecclesiastical arrogance, the sacerdotal pride which has been manifested by priests of all cults, but which in none is so intolerable as in the Christian, who expounds a gospel of humility and self-abnegation. ”

“ Was burning the proper death for heretics? He answered the question out of the very mouth of Christ, as you shall see. Should a heretic’s property be confiscated? Eymeric and Paramo point to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden as a consequence of their disobedience—the first of all heresies—and ask you what was that but confiscation. Is it proper to impose a garment of shame upon those convicted of lesser heresies, or upon penitents who are reconciled? ”

“ The net which Torquemada cast was of the very widest; the meshes of that net were of the closest, so that no man, however humble, could account himself safe; its threads were of the strongest, so that no man, however powerful, could be sure of breaking through were he once brought within its scope.
What, then, but terror could Torquemada and his grim machinery inspire? It is not difficult to believe the sometime secretary of the Inquisition when he assures us that the Holy Office was not favourably viewed in Spain. ”

“ It will, of course, be obvious that since no good or useful purpose could be served by instituting proceedings against the dead, nothing but cupidity can have inspired so barbarous a decree as this. The avowed object of the Inquisition—and very loudly and insistently avowed—was the uprooting of heresies to prevent their spread, and the inquisitors maintained that it was a painful necessity thrust upon them by their duty to God to destroy those who persisted in heresy, lest these, by their teaching and example, should contaminate and imperil the souls of others. ”

“ It would seem that only when a faith has been diluted by certain general elements of doubt, that only when a certain degree of indifference has crept into the observance of a prevailing cult, does it become possible for the members of that cult to bear themselves complacently towards the members of another. Until this comes to pass, intolerance is the very breath of 18 religion, and—when the power is present—this intolerance never fails to express itself in persecution. ”

“ It would be unjust to suppose that there is a man to be found to-day in the Church of Rome, of which the Spanish Inquisition was a deplorable and integral part, who can turn with us in other than regret to consider this black shadow that lies across one of the brightest pages of history. ”

“ The very rumour of their approach had filled the New-Christians with anxiety, and a glimpse of the gloomy funereal pageant—the white-robed, black-hooded inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars, the procession headed by a Dominican carrying the white cross—on its way to the Convent of St. Paul, where they took up their quarters, was enough to put to flight some thousands of those who had cause to fear that they might become the objects of the attention of that fearful court. ”

“ It is impossible to deny that at almost any time in the history of Christianity the enlightened pagan of the second century would have been justified of his stinging gibe—“Behold how these Christians love one another!” ”

“ Harsh as were the decrees of the Inquisition in all things, in nothing were they so harsh as in the enactments concerning the children of heretics. However innocent themselves of the heresy for which their parents or grandparents might have suffered, not only must they go destitute, but further they must be prevented from ever extricating themselves appreciably from that condition, being inhibited—to the second generation—from holding any office under the Crown, or any ecclesiastical benefice, and from following any honourable or lucrative profession. ”

“ Indeed, Spain, he urged, never could be united, never could deserve the blessing of Heaven, until all men in that land were the children of God, true believers in the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Faith. God had greatly favoured Ferdinand and Isabella, the friar continued. He had collected the various elements of the peninsula into one mighty kingdom, which He had subjected to their sceptre. Let them fuse those elements into a solid whole, rejecting all those who resist this fusion—and this for the honour and glory of God and of their own kingdom. ”

“ Largely the Jews were themselves to blame. Deluded by the religious liberty that was conceded them, by the dignities to which men of their faith had climbed, and by the prosperity which they had attained, they failed to perceive that their accumulated wealth was in itself a menace to their safety. ”

“ There is no difficulty in believing Llorente’s statement—based upon extracts from contemporary chronicles—to the effect that the Inquisition was not looked upon with favour in Castile. It was impossible that a civilized and enlightened people should view with equanimity the institution of a tribunal whose methods, however based fundamentally upon those of the civil courts, were in the details of their practice so opposed to all conceptions of equity.
In no Catholic country does the cherishing of a fervent faith, in itself, imply respect for the clergy. ”

“ On every road that led out of the country—on those that went southwards to the sea, or westwards to Portugal, or eastwards to Navarre—these straggling human droves were to be met, and they presented a spectacle so desolate that there was no Christian who did not pity them. ”

“ There is no denying that many of those who had been baptized against their will, as the only means of saving their lives when the fury of the Christian mob was unleashed against them, had remained Jews at heart, had continued in secret to practise the Jewish rites, and were exerting themselves to bring back to the fold of Israel their apostate brethren. Others, however, upon receiving baptism may have determined to keep the law to which they now pledged themselves and to persevere honestly in Christianity. ”

“ It was sincere, dreadfully, tragically, ardently sincere, with the most hopeless, intolerable, and stupid of all sincerity—the sincerity of fanaticism, which destroys all sense of proportion, and distorts man’s intellectual vision until with an easy conscience he makes of guile and craft and falsehood the principles that shall enable him to do what he conceives to be his duty by his fellow-man. ”

“ The most proper effect of the Divine Mercy, none doubts, is the salvation of souls, and who can doubt that what in this court of the Inquisition appears to be rigour of Justice is really medicine prescribed by Mercy for the good of the delinquents? ”

“ The nobility, as may be conceived—and, indeed, as Pulgar clearly indicates—were not only tainted with the general lawlessness, but were themselves the chief offenders, each man a law unto himself, a tyrannical, extortionate ruler of his vassals, lord of life and death, unscrupulously abusing his power, little better than a highway robber, caring nothing for the monarchy so long as the monarchy left him undisturbed, ready to rebel against it should it attempt to curtail his brigandage. ”

“ She consented that steps should be taken not only to check the Judaizing of the New-Christians, but also to effect conversions among the Jews themselves; and she entrusted the difficult task of enforcing the observance of the Christian faith and the Catholic dogmas to the Cardinal of Spain—than whom, from a Christian and humanitarian point of view, no man of his day could have been more desirable, which is as much as to say that from the point of view of his Catholic contemporaries no man could have been less so. ”

“ These protests of the unfortunate Judaizers, who by their own action had achieved—as they now realized—no more than self-betrayal, were met by the priestly answer that their sins had been absolved in the tribunal of conscience only, and that it still remained for them to seek temporal absolution in the tribunal of the Holy Office. This temporal absolution would accord them, as we know—and as they knew—the right to live in perpetual imprisonment after the confiscation of their property and the destitution and infamy of their children. ”

“ Where an advocate was granted to conduct the defence of an accused, we have seen in Art. XVI of Torquemada’s “Instructions” that he was under the obligation to relinquish such defence the moment he realized the guilt of his client, since by canon law an advocate was forbidden to plead for a heretic in any court, civil or ecclesiastical, or in any cause whatsoever—whether connected with heresy or any other matter. ”

“ It was themselves they hoodwinked—by the arguments they themselves conceived—and although it is undeniable that they practised a deception which must provoke the scorn of every thoughtful man, yet it must be remembered that this deception was the self-deception that lies in wait for every fanatic, whatever the subject of his fanaticism. By staring too long and too intently at one object, that object itself becomes blurred and indistinct. ”

“ There is no more lamentable lesson to be culled from history than that contained in her inability to furnish a single instance of a religion accepted with unquestioning sincerity and fervour which did not, out of those very qualities, beget intolerance. ”