igious duties, and a part of the worship due to the Divine Being!
Fanaticism naturally engenders that sacrilegious alliance, and man, under
its irresistible influence, becomes more frightful in his hatred, more
cruel in his hostilities, than the beasts of the forest.

The Inquisition inaugurated, in Spain, a sanguinary fanaticism which
consecrated, as religious virtues, the blackest crimes that man can
commit against his fellow-creatures; and although it must be admitted
that many thousands of human beings perished in the flames for their
religious opinions under the reign of Isabella, yet the natural suavity
of her mind, influenced as it was by the tender and passionate,
repressed, to a considerable degree, those intolerant impulses with which
Torquemada was wont to impose upon the good sense of Spaniards. Isabella
was liberal, even in the sense which that word conveys according to the
language of modern politics. {22} She, doubtless, consented to the
formation of the bloody tribunal; and hence the annals of even her reign
are stained with some of those hecatombs which were more frequent in a
subsequent era, and banished from the Spanish peninsula those mental
energies which, at that time, were enabling human reason to recover her
rights, and Spain once more to occupy that eminent position assigned her,
by Providence, in the scale of creation.

History cannot accuse the Emperor Charles V. with having lent himself, as
a docile instrument, to the intolerant devices of the clergy. Charles
was never the sincere friend of the court of Rome. On the contrary, no
Christian monarch ever treated that court with greater contumely, or in a
manner more hostile and effectively prejudicial to its prosperity and
influence. The war which he made against the Pope, and which terminated
by the invasion of Rome itself, involved that court in all the ills of a
destructive conquest. The pillage and burning of the public temples and
of private houses, the violation of the nuns, the massacre of the
citizens, were not enough to satisfy the fury of his soldiers. Released
suddenly from that respect which, from childhood, they had been
accustomed to show towards the practices and ministers of religion, they
now openly ridiculed them in the streets of Rome, representing mock
processions, dressing themselves up in the splendid and ornamental attire
of cardinals and bishops. Their spirit of profanation and impiety
arrived at the extreme pitch