That eminently pious monarch, Phillip the Second of Spain, so loved to hear heretics groan, that he rarely missed Auto da Fes; at one of which several distinguished persons were to be burnt for heresy; among the rest Don John de Cesa, who while passing by him, said,' Sire, how can you permit so many unfortunate persons to suffer? How can you be witness of so horrid a sight without shuddering?' Phillip coolly replied, 'If my son, sir, were suspected of heresy, I should myself hand him over to the Inquisition.' 'My detestation,' continued he, 'of you and your companions is so great, that I would act myself as your executioner, if no other could be found.'
Phillip the Fifth, as may be seen in Coxe's Memoirs of the Kings of Spain, 'presented about the year 1172, three standards taken from 'infidels' to our lady of Atocha; and sent another to the Pope, as the grateful homage of the Catholic King to the head of the Church. He also, for the first time, attended the celebration of an Auto da Fe, at which in the commencement of his reign he had refused with horror to appear, and witnessed the barbarous ceremony of committing twelve Jews and Mohammedans to the flames.' So great during times inclined to religion was inquisitorial power, that monarchs and statesmen of liberal tendencies were constrained to quail before it. It is related that a Jewish girl, entered into her seventeenth year, extremely beautiful, who in a public act of faith, at Madrid, June 30th, 1680, together with twenty others of the same nation of both sexes, being condemned to the stake, turned herself to the Queen of Spain, then present, and prayed, that out of her goodness and clemency she might be delivered from the dreadful punishment of the fire. 'Great Queen,' said she, 'is not your presence able to bring me some comfort under my misery? Consider my youth, and that I am condemned for a religion which I have sucked in with my mother's milk.' The Queen turned away her eyes, declaring, she pitied the miserable creature, but did not dare to intercede for her with a single word.
Not only have Roman Catholic writers defended these inquisitorial abominations, but, with what every Protestant must needs consider daring and blasphemous impiety, laboured to prove that the first Inquisitor was God himself. Luis de Paramo, for instance, in his book 'De Origine et Progressu Officii Sanctoe Inquisitionis, ejusque dignitate et utilitate,' proves God to be the first Inquisitor, and that in the Garden of Eden was the first auto da fe.
Nor do these most pious casuists discover anything in Scripture which forbids the burning of heretics, notwithstanding such texts as 'Whosoever sheddeth man's blood by man shall his blood be shed,' which they contend inquisitors do never violate the true meaning or spirit of, it being evident that to burn men is not to shed their blood—thus eluding the maxim Ecclesia non novit sanguinem. And if their right to burn heretics was questioned they triumphantly cited the text (as given in the 'Beehive' of the Romish Church) 'Whosoever doth not abide in me, shall be cast out of the vineyard as a branch and there wither; and men gather those branches and cast them into the fire and burn them.'
On this text John Andreas, Panormitamis, Hostraensii, Bernardus Leizenburgen, and others of the Roman Catholic casuists built up their proof that heretics, like grape branches, should be cast into the fire and burnt.
The execrable duplicity of these men is by Protestant priests made the theme of unsparing invective, as if the burning of heretics and its justification by Scripture were crimes peculiar to Roman Catholics, when in point of fact both have been shamelessly committed by Christians rejoicing in the name of Protestants. John Calvin burnt Servetus, and Robert Hall, as we have seen, applauded the act. England, to say nothing of other countries, has had its auto da fe, as well since as before the Reformation. Heretics were first made bonfires of in England during the reign of Henry the Fourth, who permitted the abomination in order to please certain bishops he was under obligation to for assisting him to depose Richard the Second and usurp his throne. But that the practice of committing heretics to the flame prevailed in England long after Popery ceased to be the dominant religion is notorious. If heretics were thus sacrificed by Henry the Fourth to please Popish Bishops, they were also sacrificed by Elizabeth with a view to the satisfaction of Protestant Bishops. Cranmer literally compelled her brother, the amiable Edward, to send a half crazed woman named Joan Boacher to the stake. Elizabeth herself caused two Dutch Anabaptists to be burnt in Smithfield, though it is but just to admit that, unlike her sullen sister, she preferred rather to hang than to burn heretics. Lord Brougham has recently done mankind another valuable piece of service by painting the portrait of that Protestant princess in colours at once so lively and faithful that none, save the lovers of vulgar fanaticism and murderous hypocrisy, will gaze on it without horror. [81:1]
'Mary, honoured with the title of "bloody," appears to me a far more estimable character than her ripping-up sister Elizabeth, who, when Mary, on her death-bed, asked her for a real avowal of her religion, "prayed God" that the earth might open and swallow her up if she was not a true Roman Catholic.' She made the same declaration to the Duke of Ferria, the Spanish Ambassador, who was so deceived that he wrote to Philip, stating no change in religious matters would take place on her accession, and soon afterwards began ripping up the bellies of Catholics. That was quite the fashionable punishment in this and the succeeding reign. I have the account, with names, dates, and reference of no less than 101 more Catholics who were burnt, hung, ripped up, &c., by Elizabeth, and on to Charles the Second's end, than there were Protestants in Mary's, and all the reigns which preceded her, letting lying Fox count all he has got. Elizabeth, too, was by law a bastard, and is to this day; and so soon did her intentions appear of changing the religion, that all the bishops but one refused to crown her; and when this was done, it was by the Catholic ritual. However the Act-of-Parliament religion was set up again; the prayer book of Cranmer was set up again, after sundry alterations: it was altered too, in Edward's reign, yet when first made, it was duly declared to come from the 'Holy Ghost;' so it was after its second polishing under Elizabeth. To refuse the Queen's supremacy was death; it was death to continue in that religion, which, at her coronation she had sworn to firmly believe and defend. It was high treason to admit or harbour, or relieve a priest, and hosts of these were ripped up, for, in the piety of their hearts, risking all to afford the consolations of their religion to the Catholics of England. Victim after victim came to the sacrifice, mostly from the college of Douay. It is really horrible to read of these good and faithful champions of their religion being hung, cut down instantaneously, their bellies ripped up, their hearts cut out, their bodies chopped in pieces with every insult and indignity added to injury, all through this reign, and then to be talked to about 'bloody Mary,' and the 'Good Queen-Bess.' Verily, countrymen, you are vilely deceived. Taking into account the rippings, and burnings, and roastings, and hanging; the racks, whips, fines, imprisonments, and other horrors of the reign of this 'Good Bess,' there was a hundred times more human misery inflicted in her reign than in that of' Bloody Mary.' [82:1]
The second Catherine of Russia, though remarkable for rigid and scrupulous adherence to the ceremonial mummeries of her 'true church,' was at the same time as remarkable for liberality of sentiment. It is said, that upon a certain occasion, being strongly advised by her ministers to deal out severe punishment on some heretics of Atheistical tendencies, who had given offence by rather freely expressing their opinions, she laughingly said, 'Oh, fie, gentlemen fie, if these heretics are to be eternally miserable in the other world, we really ought to let them be comfortable in this.'
Few religious persons are liberal as this empress, whose strong good sense seems to have been fully a match for her bad education: that education was Christian. She was taught to loathe the opinions, aye, and the persons, of heretics, under which denomination may be included all dissenters from religious truth as it was in her, or rather in the church of which she was chief member. No other kind of teaching is accounted orthodox in our 'land of Bibles' than that of state paid priests of law established religion. Look at the true Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles. Do they not abound in anathema, and literally teem with the venom of intolerance? Do they not shock the better feelings even of those who believe them divine? The truth is, all priests teach religion which no wit can reconcile with reason, and very many of them make their followers believe, and perhaps believe themselves, that to villify, abuse, and hunt down 'infidels,' are acts acceptable in the sight of God. The idea of compensating poor unbelievers in this world by an extra quantum of comfort for the torments they are doomed to suffer in the next, never enters their head. Indeed, not a few of them gloat with satisfaction over the prospect of 'infidels' gnashing their teeth in that fiery gulph prepared for the devil and his angels. By this odious class of fanatics neither the worm that dieth not, nor the flame never to be extinguished, is deemed sufficient punishment for the wretch whose thoughts concerning religion are not as their thoughts. By them the imagined 'Creator of the Heavens and the earth' is dressed, up in attributes the most frightful. Witness the character of Him implied in the conceit of that popular preacher who declared 'there are children in hell not a span long'—a declaration which could only be made by one whose humanity was extinguished by divinity.
Our pulpits can furnish many such preachers of 'a religion of charity,' while a whole army of Christian warriors might be gathered from metropolitan pulpits alone, who deeming it impious to say their God of mercy would permit the burning of infants not a span long, do nevertheless, firmly believe that 'children of a larger growth' may justly be tormented by the great king of kings; and as ignorantia legis non excusat is a maxim of human law, so, according to them, ignorance of divine law is no excuse whatever, either for breaking or disregarding it.