But had I really been Vicar of the Holy Office, what would have been my duty in this matter? To receive the accusation of a mother against her own son. An unheard-of enormity! She naturally would have made it in grief and tears, and I should have had to offer her consolation. And since this horrible act of treason has the pretence of religion about it, I should have employed the aid of religion to persuade her that the sacrifice she made was most acceptable to God. Perhaps, to act my part better, I might have alluded to the sacrifice demanded of Abraham, or Jephtha; or cited some apposite texts from Scripture, to calm and silence the remorse of conscience she must have experienced on account of the iniquity of bringing her child before the Inquisition.
Now let us see what is done by the Inquisitors. In what is called the Holy Office, everything is allowable that tends to their own purposes. To gain possession of a secret no means are to be disregarded; not even those against our very nature. For a father and a mother to reveal the thoughts of their own children, so trustingly confided to them,—a revelation which may lead to their death,—is so great a crime that we cannot imagine one more base. And yet the Inquisition not only sanctions, but enjoins it to be done, daily. And this most infamous Inquisition, a hundred times destroyed, and as often renewed, still exists in Rome, as in the barbarous ages; the only difference being, that the same iniquities are at present practised there with a little more secrecy and caution than formerly: and this for the sake of prudence, that the Holy See may not be subjected to the animadversions and censure of the world at large.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] St. Thom. 2d. 9: xi. art. 3.
[17] The bishops swear to observe the laws of the Inquisition.
[18] Father Ancarani, an Inquisitor of forty-five years standing.
[19] This most reverend personage is a man of mild temper, apparently incapable of cruelty. He was at that time one of the Counsellors of the Inquisition.
[20] Bernard of Chiaravalle.
[21] Peter the Hermit.
[22] As the style does not interfere with the sense, it has not been deemed necessary to correct the foreign idioms in this letter.