One more active and mighty cause of the dreadful faith and fear
with which the Middle Age contemplated the future life was the
innumerable and frightful woes, crimes, tyrannies, instruments of
torture, engines of persecution, insane superstitions, which then
existed, making its actual life a hell. The wretchedness and
cruelty of the present world were enough to generate frightful
beliefs and cast appalling shadows over the future. If the earth
was full of devils and phantoms, surely hell must swarm worse with
them. The Inquisition sat shrouded and enthroned in supernatural
obscurity of cunning and awfulness of power, and thrust its
invisible daggers everywhere. The facts men knew here around them
gave credibility to the imagery in which the hereafter was
depicted. The flaming stakes of an Auto da Fe around which the
victims of ecclesiastical hatred writhed were but faint emblems of
what awaited their souls in the realm of demons whereto the tender
mercies of the Church consigned them. Indeed, the fate of myriads
of heretics and traitors could not fail to project the lurid
vision of hell with all its paraphernalia into the imaginations of
the people of the Dark Age. The glowing lava of purgatory heated
the soil they trod, and a smell of its sulphur surcharged the air.
A stupendous revelation of terror, bearing whole volumes of
direful meaning, is given in the single fact that it was a common
belief of that period that the holy Inquisitors would sit with
Christ in the judgment at the last day.48 If king or noble took
offence at some uneasy retainer or bold serf, he ordered him to be
secretly buried in the cell of some secluded fortress, and he was
never heard of more. So, if pope or priest hated or feared some
stubborn thinker, he straightway, "Would banish him to wear a
burning chain In the great dungeons of the unforgiven, Beneath
the space deep castle walls of heaven."

It was an age of cruelty, never to be restored, when the world was
boiling in tempest and men rode on the crests of fear.

47 Recently edited by Halliwell and published by the Shakspeare
Society.

48 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 205.

Researches made within the last century among the remains of
famous mediaval edifices, both ecclesiastic and state, have
brought to light the dismal records of forgotten horrors. In many
a royal palace, priestly building, and baronial castle, there were
secret chambers full of infernal machinery contrived f