The Inquisition is often judged according to standards of the 19th instead of the 15th and 16th centuries, and hence it is judged incorrectly. Whereas during the past hundred years it has been the tendency to regard wrong believers and unbelievers of all kinds as the most educated and the noblest citizens, the Inquisition on the contrary was based on the mediæval view that erring in religion was high treason and that only the advocate of the state religion could be a safe and trustworthy citizen. It is natural that the upholder of one standpoint cannot possibly judge impartially, events which have arisen from the other, unless in giving his judgment he is able to transport himself from his own time into the other and into its views.
This is done by every true historian. But the Inquisition is a subject which has been most discussed and described by those who give mere phrases instead of investigations, mere arbitrary statements instead of critical examinations, mere romantic descriptions instead of objective judgments, and who try to replace a lack of knowledge by so called liberally-minded phrases. People of this sort do not remember that the principle, cujus est regio, illius et religio,[206] on which the whole Inquisition rests, was universally recognised in olden times, and was so little questioned that Protestants especially upheld it and put it into execution.
For example in the palatinate, when the Kurfürst Frederick III, who had been a Lutheran until then, went over to Calvinism in 1563, he compelled all congregations in his land to take the same step, and exiled everyone who would not accept the Heidelberg catechism. Thirteen years later, in 1576, his son Ludwig restored the orthodox Lutheranism, drove out the Calvinistic preachers and teachers, and forced his dependents to become Lutheran again. The Religious Peace of the year 1555 gave every government the power of giving its dependents the alternative of accepting the religion of the sovereign or of emigrating, upon paying a certain sum, just as was done in Spain with the Jews and Moors; and it is a well-known fact that the Reformation owed its spread in Germany in large measure to this lenient Spanish alternative.
Furthermore, in judging the Inquisition it is often forgotten that the penal code of that time was much more severe and sanguinary than that of the 19th century. Many a trespass which is now atoned for by a slight penalty had at that time to be paid for with blood; and the criminal code of Charles V of the year 1532 is a most speaking witness for the severe criminal justice of the period out of which the Spanish Inquisition grew. Also the Carolina, for example, inflicts punishments on body, life, and limb for blasphemy of God and of the Blessed Virgin (§CVI); and witches are punished with death (§CXVI).
It must also not be overlooked, in judging the Inquisition, that the death penalty for heresy was not peculiar to it alone, but was common at that time to all lands and confessions. The reformer Buzer said of Michael Servetus, in the public pulpit at Strassburg, that he deserved the most humiliating death on account of his article against the Trinity. And that this was not merely a strong figure of speech of the Reformers is shown two decades later by Calvin, when on October 27th, 1553, he had that very “heretic” slowly burned to death at Geneva. That there may remain no doubt that the Protestants of that time wished to punish heresy with death, the “gentle” Melanchthon wrote on this subject to Calvin,
“I have read thy article, wherein thou hast refuted in detail the terrible blasphemies of Servetus and therefore I thank the Son of God who has given thee the victory in this thy struggle. The church is greatly indebted to thee for it, now and in all future time. I wholly agree with thy opinion and claim that your highness (eure Obrigkeit) has acted wholly in accordance with justice in executing a blasphemous person after a regular examination.”
In addition I will note that Theodore Beza also wrote an article De hereticis a magistrau civili puniendis and that many others besides Servetus, as Valentine Gentilis, Bolsec, Carlstadt, Grüet, Castellio, the councillor Ameaur, and others, could convince themselves through imprisonment, banishment, and death that in the Protestant church there was no milder an inquisition than in Spain. This is acknowledged even by many Protestants, as for example by Prescott[m] in his history of Ferdinand and Isabella.
But we do not need to go back to the 16th century or even to consider the terrible mistreatment of the Catholics in England,[207] in order to discover counterparts to the Spanish Inquisition among the Protestants. A remarkable case of this kind from the eighteenth century is related by Pfeilschifter: In the year 1724 at Rendsburg a young soldier, because he had wished to make a compact with the devil, as an act of royal favour was merely beheaded. Even more recently, e.g. in the year 1844, on the third of April the painter J. O. Nilson in Sweden was banished on account of “apostasy from the Lutheran faith and of going over to a mistaken religion” (the Catholic) and was declared to have forfeited all civil rights and rights of inheritance; this decision was confirmed by the highest court of the land in the year 1845. The unfortunate Nilson died in February 1847 at Copenhagen, in poverty.
I say all this not in reproach but only to show that the Protestants also have recognised the sanguinary rule: “Deviation from the state religion is to be punished with death.” If any one had any doubts as to the justice of this principle in the 16th and 17th centuries, it seems to me that these doubts should first have arisen in the minds of the Protestants, because their own apostasy from the church should have taught them to think more leniently of other apostates.
Among the victims of the Inquisition the so-called witches and sorcerers held a considerable place, and it would be superfluous to expend many words in proving that these unfortunates were just as severely persecuted in Germany as in Spain and in just as sanguinary a fashion by Protestants as by Catholics. Not only a Torquemada, but also a Benedict Carpzov two hundred years later, erected a stake for burning witches. Even the reformer Beza reproached the French parliament for being too lax in seeking out witches, and Walter Scott acknowledges that the stronger Calvinism grew in England the more numerous were the processes against witches. The Jesuit Frederick Spee of Langenfeld overthrew the belief in witches among the Catholics seventy years earlier than the Protestant Thomasius, and even in the year 1713 the legal faculty of Tübingen condemned a witch to death; indeed just a year later than in Spain, was the last witch burned in the canton of Glarus by a reformed court, in 1782.[208] On the whole, a comparison of the German processes against witches with the workings of the Spanish Inquisition, could hardly be made to appear to the advantage of the former.