to
posterity as a monster of cruelty_." Neither the spectacle of the
guillotine nor the terrible threat of the Grand Duke could arrest the
progress of the good work. The Bible was sought after, and read in
secret; and the numbers who left the communion of the Romish Church grew
and multiplied daily. In the beginning of 1853, the Protestants, or
Evangelicals as they prefer to call themselves in Tuscany, were
estimated at many thousands. I doubt not that this estimate was correct,
if viewed as including all who had separated their interests from the
Church of Rome; but I just as little doubt that a majority of these, if
brought to the test, rather than suffer would have denied the Gospel.
Many of them knew it only as a political badge, not as a _new life_.
But, on the judgment of those who had the best means of knowing, there
were at least _a thousand_ in Tuscany who had undergone a change of
heart, and were prepared to confess Christ on the scaffold. To hunt out
these peaceful ones, and bring them to punishment, is the grand object
of the priesthood; and in the confessional they have an instrumentality
ready-made for the purpose. Taking advantage of the greater timidity of
the female mind, it has become a leading question with the confessor,
"Does your husband read the Bible? Has he political papers?" Alas!
according to the ancient prophecy, the brother delivers up the brother
to death. I heard of some affecting cases of this sort when I was in
Florence. Of the fifty persons, or thereabouts, who were then in prison
on religious grounds, not a few had been accused by their own relatives,
the accusation being extorted by the threat of withholding absolution.
At the beginning of the English Reformation, with an infernal refinement
of cruelty, children were often compelled to light the faggots which
were to consume their parents; and in Tuscany at this hour, the
trembling wife is compelled, by the threat of eternal damnation, to
disclose the secret which is to consign the husband to a dungeon. The
police are never far from the confessor's box, and wait only the signal
from it, what house to visit, and whom to drag to prison. As with us in
former days, the Bible is secreted in the most unlikely places; it is
read at the dead hour of night; and the prayers and praises that follow
are offered in whispering accents,--for fear of the priests and the
guillotine.

Every subsidiary agency that might further the progress of the trut