"'Listen, with great attention,' he then exclaimed, addressing me, 'since you have hitherto been deaf to the advice which this holy tribunal has repeatedly given you in their spirit of peace, humanity, and religious charity. Propagator of secret and impious societies, established by the heresies of their members to destroy our holy religion and the august throne of our Catholic sovereign, you have maintained, for the space of a year, an uninterrupted correspondence with more than two hundred sectarians.... This holy tribunal has at last recourse to rigour. It will extort from you the truths, which neither the duty of a religious oath, demanded without violence, nor the mild admonitions which have been so often resorted to, in order to induce you to make the desired declarations, have been able to obtain. This evident pertinacity obliges us to use a salutary severity. We judge the cause of our Divine Redeemer and of our Catholic king, and we shall know to fulfil the high ministry with which the supreme spiritual and temporal authority has invested us. The most rigorous torments will be employed to obtain from you these truths, or you shall expire in the midst of them. All the charges I have just mentioned in a summary manner must be amply explained,—yes! amply explained! justice, God, and the king require that it should be so. This holy tribunal will fulfil their duties—yes!'

"The agitation of the moment permitted me to utter only a few words, which, however, were not listened to, and I was hurried away to the further end of the room, the jailer and his assistants exerting all their strength to secure me. Having succeeded in raising me from the ground, they placed under my arm-pits two high crutches, from which I remained suspended; after which my right arm was tied to the corresponding crutch, whilst the left being kept in a horizontal position, they encased my hand open in a wooden glove extending to the wrist, which shut very tightly, and from which two large iron bars ran as far as the shoulder, keeping the whole in the same position in which it was placed. My waist and legs were similarly bound to the crutches by which I was supported; so that I shortly remained without any other action than that of breathing, though with difficulty.

"Having remained a short time in this painful position, that unmerciful tribunal returned to their former charges. Zorrilla, with a tremulous voice that seemed to evince his thirst for blood and vengeance, repeated the first of those he had just read, namely, whether I did not belong to a society whose object was to overthrow our holy religion, and the august throne of our Catholic sovereign? I replied that it was impossible I should plead guilty to an accusation of that nature. 'Without any subterfuge, say whether it is so,' he added, in an angry tone.

"'It is not, sir,' I replied. The glove which guided my arm, and which seemed to be resting on the edge of a wheel, began now to turn, and, with its movements, I felt by degrees an acute pain, especially from the elbow to the shoulder, a general convulsion throughout my frame, and a cold sweat over-spreading my face. The interrogatory continued, but Zorrilla's question of 'Is it so? is it so?' were the only words that struck my ear amidst the excruciating pain I endured, which became so intense that I fainted away, and heard no more the voices of those cannibals.

"When I recovered my senses, I found myself stretched on the floor of my dungeon, my hands and feet secured with heavy fetters and manacles, fastened by a thick chain, the nails of which my tormentors were still riveting! Left by those wretches stretched in the same place, I could have wished that the doors, which closed after them, should never again open. Eternal sleep was all I desired, and all I asked of Heaven. It was after much difficulty that I dragged myself to my bed. It seemed to me that the noise of my chains would awaken the vigilance of my jailers, whose presence was to me the most fatal of my torments. I spent the whole of the night struggling with the intense pains which were the effects of the torture, and with the workings of my excited mind, which offered but a horrible perspective to my complicated misfortunes. This state of mental agitation, and the burning fever which was every moment increasing, soon threw me into a delirium, during which I scarcely noticed the operation performed by my jailers, of opening the seams of my coat to examine the state of my arm."

Having undergone innumerable sufferings, his enemies being bent on his destruction, Van Halen at length succeeded, on the 30th of January, 1818, in making his escape from the prisons of the Inquisition; upon which he repaired successively to France, England, and Russia, returning to Spain in 1821.

Llorente again, records the following fact, which he says was given by one who was present when the Inquisition was thrown open in 1820, by orders of the Cortes of Madrid. Twenty-one prisoners were found in it, not one of whom knew the name of the city in which he was; some had been confined three years, some a longer period, and not one knew perfectly the nature of the crime of which he was accused. One of these prisoners had been condemned, and was to have suffered on the following day. His punishment was to be death by the pendulum. The method of thus destroying the victim is as follows:—The condemned is fastened in a groove upon a table, on his back; suspended above him is a pendulum, the edge of which is sharp, and it is so constructed as to become longer with every movement. The wretch sees this implement of destruction swinging to and fro above him, and every moment the keen edge approaching nearer and nearer: at length it cuts the skin of his nose, and gradually cuts on, until life is extinct. It may be doubted if the Holy Office, in its mercy, ever invented a more humane and rapid method of exterminating heresy, or ensuring confiscation! This, let it be remembered, was a punishment of the secret tribunal, A. D., 1820!!

How, indeed, is it possible that any amelioration can have taken place in the Inquisition, that great bulwark of Rome, when Popery, and the measures of the Holy See, continue unaltered? Though not bearing directly on the point in hand, yet illustrative of the hatred which the Romish Church bears to Protestants and to their works, and of her determination still to persecute when in her power all who dare to call in question any of her dogmas, the following extracts from a speech delivered before the British Parliament, in May, 1825, by Sir Robert H. Inglis, are submitted to the reader;—"I will tell you," said the Honourable Baronet, "not what the literature of the Church of Rome is, but what it is not. Her tyranny over literature, her proscription at this day of all the great masters of the human mind, can be paralleled only by the tyranny and the proscription which she exercised five centuries ago over the minds and bodies alike. The volume which I hold in my hand—the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—contains a list of the books which are at this time proscribed in the Church of Rome under the penalties of the Inquisition. It was printed at Rome, by authority, in 1819, and I bought it there in 1821. [21] The first book in this great catalogue of works, which are taken from the faithful every where, and are given up to the Inquisition, is 'Bacon de Augmentis Scientiarum.' 'Locke on the Human Understanding,' and 'Cudworth's Intellectual System,' follow in the train. Many other English works are proscribed. One only I will mention, the 'Paradise Lost' of Milton. The reading of the work was interdicted, indeed, nearly a hundred years ago; but the prohibition was renewed in 1819. Is not this enough to prove that the character of the Church of Rome is not so open to a beneficial change as some of my honourable friends are willing to hope and believe it to be? I pass over large classes of books, the very possession of which is forbidden, but I must notice the impartial prohibition of science. Will the House believe it possible, that the celebrated sentence, in 1633, against Galileo—a sentence immortalized by the execration of science in every country where the mind is free—should be renewed and published in 1819? Yet of this fact I hold the proof in my hand, in the volume of the 'Index,' which I have already quoted. The work of Algarotti, on the Newtonian system, shares the same fate: so that every modification of science—in other words, every effort of free inquiry—every attempt to disengage the mind from the trammels of authority, is alike and universally consigned to the Inquisition. Am I not justified in saying that the Church of Rome remains unchanged, the unchangeable enemy to the progress of the human mind? Every other institution is advancing with sails set, and banners streaming, on the high, yet still rising tide of improvement: the Church of Rome alone remains fixed and bound to the bottom of the stream, by a chain which can neither be lengthened nor removed."

FOOTNOTES:

[16] Constantine Ponce de la Fuente, one of the victims, was persecuted with so great a degree of barbarity, that he exclaimed, "My God, were there no Scythians or cannibals into whose hands to deliver me, rather than to let me fall into the power of these barbarians!"—Olmedus, another sufferer at Seville, who died in prison from bad treatment, was once heard to exclaim, "Throw me any where, O my God, so that I may but escape the hands of these wretches."