rns "a scene of almost unrelieved blackness." He avers that "the
deliberate burning alive of a human being simply for difference of
belief, is an atrocity," and speaks of a "fiendish legislation," "an
infernal curiosity," a "seemingly causeless ferocity which appears to
persecute for the mere pleasure of persecuting." The Inquisition is
"energetic only in evil"; it is "a standing mockery of justice, perhaps
the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever
devised."

This is not the protest of wounded humanity. The righteous resolve to
beware of doctrine has not been strictly kept. In the private judgment
of the writer, the thinking of the Middle Ages was sophistry and their
belief superstition. For the erring and suffering mass of mankind he has
an enlightened sympathy; for the intricacies of speculation he has none.
He cherishes a disbelief, theological or inductive it matters not, in
sinners rescued by repentance and in blessings obtained by prayer.
Between remitted guilt and remitted punishment he draws a vanishing line
that makes it doubtful whether Luther started from the limits of
purgatory or the limits of hell. He finds that it was a universal
precept to break faith with heretics, that it was no arbitrary or
artificial innovation to destroy them, but the faithful outcome of the
traditional spirit of the Church. He hints that the horror of sensuality
may be easily carried too far, and that Saint Francis of Assisi was in
truth not very much removed from a worshipper of the devil. Prescott, I
think, conceived a resemblance between the god of Montezuma and the god
of Torquemada; but he saw and suspected less than his more learned
countryman. If any life was left in the Strappado and the Samarra, no
book would deserve better than this description of their vicissitudes to
go the way of its author, and to fare with the flagrant volume, snatched
from the burning at Champel, which is still exhibited to Unitarian
pilgrims in the Rue de Richelieu.

In other characteristic places we are taught to observe the agency of
human passion, ambition, avarice, and pride; and wade through oceans of
unvaried evil with that sense of dejection which comes from Digby's
_Mores Catholici_ or the _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, books
which affect the mind by the pressure of repeated instances. The
Inquisition is not merely "the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal,"
but it is "utilised by selfish greed and lust of powe