e of truth and liberty would
have been still more desperate. Nevertheless they were directed and
controlled, under Providence, by humbler, but more powerful agencies than
their own. The nobles were but the gilded hands on the outside of the
dial--the hour to strike was determined by the obscure but weighty
movements within.

Nor is it, perhaps, always better to rely upon abstract phraseology, to
produce a necessary impression. Upon some minds, declamation concerning
liberty of conscience and religious tyranny makes but a vague impression,
while an effect may be produced upon them, for example by a dry,
concrete, cynical entry in an account book, such as the following, taken
at hazard from the register of municipal expenses at Tournay, during the
years with which we are now occupied:

"To Mr. Jacques Barra, executioner, for having tortured, twice, Jean
de Lannoy, ten sous.

"To the same, for having executed, by fire, said Lannoy, sixty sous.
For having thrown his cinders into the river, eight sous."

This was the treatment to which thousands, and tens of thousands, had
been subjected in the provinces. Men, women, and children were burned,
and their "cinders" thrown away, for idle words against Rome, spoken
years before, for praying alone in their closets, for not kneeling to a
wafer when they met it in the streets, for thoughts to which they had
never given utterance, but which, on inquiry, they were too honest to
deny. Certainly with this work going on year after year in every city in
the Netherlands, and now set into renewed and vigorous action by a man
who wore a crown only that he might the better torture his
fellow-creatures, it was time that the very stones in the streets should
be moved to mutiny.

Thus it may be seen of how much value were the protestations of Philip
and of Granvelle, on which much stress has latterly been laid, that it
was not their intention to introduce the Spanish inquisition. With the
edicts and the Netherland inquisition, such as we have described them,
the step was hardly necessary.

In fact, the main difference between the two institutions consisted in
the greater efficiency of the Spanish in discovering such of its victims
as were disposed to deny their faith. Devised originally for more
timorous and less conscientious infidels who were often disposed to skulk
in obscure places and to renounce without really abandoning their errors,
it was provided with a set of venomo