Page images
PDF
EPUB

The middle action, which produceth such imperfect bodies, is fitly called by some of the ancients inquination, or inconcoction, which is a kind of putrefaction. Id.

An old opinion it was, that the ibis feeding opon serpents, that venomous food so inquinated their oval conceptions, that they sometimes came forth in serpentine shapes. Browne. INQUIRE', v. n. & v. a.) Fr. enquirer; Lat. INQUIRABLE, adj. inquiro, inquisitio. INQUIRER, n. s. To ask about; to Inquiry, n. s. seek out; to call by name: inquirer, one who interrogates or makes search: inquiry, an Jinterrogation;

INQUISITION, n. s.
INQUISITIVE, adj.
INQUISITIVELY, adv.

a

INQUISITIVENESS, n. s. INQUISITOR, n. s. search by question: inquisition, a judicial inquiry; examination or discussion: in law, a manner of proceeding in criminal matters; the court established in some countries subject to the pope for the detection of heresy: inquisitive, curious; busy; active to pry into any thing: inquisitor, one who examines judicially; an officer in the popish court of inquisition. Inquire is used with other words and has several meanings.

To ask questions; to make search; to exert curiosity on any occasion: with of before the person asked.

You have oft heard inquare
After the shepherd that complained of love.

Shakspeare.

We will call the damsel and inquire at her mouth.
Genesis

Herod inquired of them diligently.

Matthew.

They began to inquire among themselves, which of them it was that should do this thing.

Luke xxii. 23.

He sent Hadoram to king David, to inquire of his welfare. 1 Chron. xviii. 10. It is a subject of a very noble inquiry, to inquire of the more subtile perceptions; for it is another key to open nature, as well as the house.

Bacon.

To make examination.

Awful Rhadamanthus rules the state: He hears and judges each committed crime, Inquires into the manner, place, and time.

Dryden. When inquisition was made of the matter, it was found out. Esth. ii. 23. When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble. Psalm ix. 12.

The men which were sent from Cornelius had made inquiry for Simon's house, and stood before the gate.

An husbond shuld not been inquisitif.

Ne

Acts.

Chaucer. Prologue to the Milleres Tale. any then shall after it inquire

Ne any mention shall thereof remaine,

But what this verse, that never shall expire,
Shall to you purchase with her thankless pain.
Spenser. Sonnet.
Canute had his portion from the rest,
The which he called Canutium, for his hire,
Now Cantium, which Kent we commonly inquire.
Spenser,

After his brother. Shakspeare. Comedy of Errours.
My boy at eighteen years became inquisitive
punished the adherents and leaders of the late re-
With much severity and strict inquisition, were
Bacon's Henry VII.

bels.

In these particulars I have played myself the inquisitor, and find nothing contrary to religion or manners, but rather medicinable. Id. Essays. We were willing to make a pattern or precedent of an exact inquisition. Id. Natural History.

chiefs, have been the cause that the Irish were ever
This idleness, together with fear of imminent mis-
the most inquisitive people after news of any nation
in the world.
Davies.

failing, yet you are so far to exercise an inquisition
Though it may be impossible to recollect every
upon yourself, as, by observing lesser particulars,
your nature sways you to.
you may the better discover what the corruption of
Taylor.

And itself offers to the accepting hand.
What's good doth open to the inquirers stand,

Denham. What satisfaction may be obtained from those violent disputers and eager inquirers into what day

It is used with into when something is already of the month the world began? imperfectly known.

The step-dame poison for the son prepares,
The son inquires into his father's years.

Dryden. It may deserve our best skill to inquire into those rules, by which we may guide our judgment.

Sometimes with of.

Browne's Vulgar Errours.
Though he thought Inquisitiveness an uncomely
guest, he could not but ask who she was. Sidney.
His old shaking sire,

Inquisitive of hights, still longs in vain
To find him in the number of the slain.

Dryden.

South.

Then what the Gallick arms will do,
Art anxiously inquisitive to know.
Minos, the strict inquisitor appears,
And lives and crimes with his assessors hears.

Id.

Id.

Under their grateful shade Eneas sat;
His left young Pallas kept, fixed to his side,
And oft of winds inquired, and of the tide.
Dryden's Æneid.
With after when something is lost or missing;
in which case for is likewise used.

Inquire for one Saul of Tarsus.

Acts ix. 11. They are more in danger to go out of the way, who are marching under a guide that will mislead them, than he that is likelier to be prevailed on to quire after the right way. Locke.

With about when fuller intelligence is de

sired.

To those who inquired about me, my lover would answer, that I was an old dependent upon his family. Swift.

who neither affirm nor deny, but examine.
This is a question only of inquirers, not disputers,
Locke.
This exactness is absolutely necessary in inquiries
after philosophical knowledge, and in controversies
about truth.

Id.

Curiosity in children nature has provided, to remove that ignorance they were born with; which, without this busy inquisitiveness, will make them

dull.

Id.

Siam with the particularities of Holland, which he
A Dutch ambassador, entertaining the king of
in cold weather, be so hard that men walked upon
was inquisitive after, told him that the water would,
it.
Judgment or opinion, in a remoter sense, may be

[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]

They cannot bear with the impertinent questions of a young inquisitive and sprightly genius.

Watts on the Mind. The whole neighbourhood grew inquisitive after my name and character. Addison's Spectator.

When, strict inquiring from herself be found She was the same, the daughter of his friend, Of bountiful Acasto; who can speak The mingled passions that surprised his heart, And through his veins in shiv'ring transport ran? Thomson's Autumn.

But if there is any writer whose genius can embellish impropriety, and whose authority can make error venerable, his works are the proper objects of critical inquisition. Johnson's Rambler.

The INQUISITION, called also, by a shocking misnomer, the Holy Office, is an ecclesiastical tribunal which has been established in modern times in several catholic countries and their dependencies, for the discovery and punishment of heretics and infidels, i. e. of all persons supposed to entertain opinions contrary to the decisions of the church of Rome.

The rise of this cruel institution is to be traced to those times when persecution was general throughout the civilised world. Some writers date its origin as early as the council of Verona, which was held in 1184, and in which pope Lucius commissioned the bishops to obtain all possible information of persons suspected of heresy, &c., and described similar degrees of this crime to those which the Holy Office afterwards acted upon. But it is more commonly dated from a persecution of the Waldenses in the beginning of the thirteenth century.

At this period (in 1203) Innocent III. had commissioned Peter de Castelnau, and Ralph, monks of the order of Citeaux, and of the monastery of Fortfroide, in Narbonnese Gaul, to preach against the heresies of that sect, and he shortly after named three pontifical legates; empowering them to call on the French king Philip II. and all princes and nobles to prosecute and banish heretics wherever they were found. Among other ecclesiastical associates whom they selected was Dominic de Guzman, a canon of the order of St. Augustine; a man,' says a Spanish writer, 'to whom we owe two most important blessings, the rosary and the holy office.'

But the Catholic bishops were from the first Jealous of this mission, and several of the great feudal chiefs of Provence and Narbonne refused to obey the orders of the legates. Among the most refractory and most powerful of the latter

was Raymond VI. count of Toulouse, and in his dominions Peter de Castelnau was assassinated, as it is said, by the Albigenses, and beatified in 1208. The able and aspiring pontiff now called on all the neighbouring powers to assist him in pouring forth the vengeance of the church; and to march into the heretical district. All obstinate Montfort, commander of this crusade: the whole heretics were placed at the disposal of Simon de race of the Waldenses and Albigenses were ordered to be pursued with fire and sword; neither sex, age, nor condition was spared; the country became a wilderness, and the towns heaps of smoking ruins. Pardon and remission of sins were promised by the papal buli 'to all those who would take up arms to revenge the said murder; and since we are not to keep faith with those who do not keep it with God,' it added, 'we would have all to understand that every who is bound to the said earl Raymond, person by oath of allegiance or by any other way, is absolved by apostolical authority from such obligations, and it is lawful for any Roman Catholic to persecute the said earl and to seize upon his country, &c.' 'We exhort you,' continued this famous bull, 'to destroy the wicked heresy of the Albigenses, and to do this with more rigor than you would use towards the Saracens themselves: persecute them with a strong hand.' The agents employed were worthy of their vigorous sovereign head, the pontiff. Spare none,' said the abbot of Citeaux to those who required a mark to distinguish the Catholic from the heretic. Spare none; God will be able to distinguish his own among the slain.'

[ocr errors]

Such was the era of the inquisition, and the objects in aid of which it was first established. Dominic was constituted the first inquisitorgeneral. Innocent III. had scarcely given this institution a formal existence before he was summoned to a higher tribunal. Dominic in fact had only proceeded to Thoulouse to decide upon the religious order which he would wish to associate with himself in the institution, when the pope died 16th of July 1216: his choice of the Augustines was approved by Honorius on the 22nd of December of that year.

The emperor Frederic II. gave the constitution of the society the form of civil law at his coronation: and, in 1224, the inquisitors were busy at Padua; but in Narbonne they had not succeeded to the expectation of the pope; and Louis VIII. put himself at the head of an army against the Albigenses to expedite this holy work.

Gregory IX. gave the institution its final form; and in 1233 it was fully established in France by St. Louis, and in the four Christian kingdoms of Spain.

The council held at Thoulouse, in the year 1229, by Romanus, cardinal of St. Angelo, and pope's legate, had already erected in every city a council of inquisitors, consisting of one priest and three laymen.

The operations of a tribunal conducted by such men, and meeting with no effective opposition, were too rapid to last long. The inquisition became useless at Thoulouse for want of heretics to condemn. In its infant essay it had strangled the serpents that surrounded its cradle;

but the hydra of heresy (as the Romanists delight to call it) was growing up for its maturer labors. Its laws, rules, and devices, were laid up therefore as a part of the papal artillery. Pope Innocent IV. supported it as a favorite ally, and established permanent tribunals, on the plan of that of Thoulouse, over almost the whole of Italy except Naples, where it never gained admittance. It was early imported into the Spanish kingdom of Arragou, bordering on the province where it originated. Wherever the inquisitors were sent they created an alarm like that of an invading army; and, notwithstanding the bigotry and prostrate submission of the age, the cruelty, insulting arrogance, and intolerable oppression of these ghostly fathers, excited insurrection and tumult in almost every town which they garrisoned for the faith. The bishops, who saw in these establishments the ruin of their authority in matters of doctrine, remonstrated against their usurpation; and the princes, who claimed the privilege of burning their own heretics, saw with pain an encroachment on their prerogative by the troops of the holy see. The spirit of Christendom was however pretty well subdued for two centuries; and the inquisition had not much on their hands, from the extirpation of the Albigenses to the dawn of the Reformation and the persecution of the Moors and Jews in Spain. Their Catholic majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, now resolved that they would have none but Catholics in their dominions, and that it was necessary, for the glory of God and the prosperity of their reign, to make all their Jewish and Moorish subjects hypocrites, exiles, or martyrs. The respect paid by the queen to the counsels of Torquemada, makes us almost forget the assistance she lent to Columbus: yet on the whole she was certainly unwilling to be his instrument. It was easy by a perfidious and savage edict to drive these unhappy people into the church; but it was not so easy to drive them out of their prejudices and habits. To save their lives, their fortunes, and their families, they made an open profession of a religion which, disgraced and falsified as it was by its ministers, they abhorred; but in secret they cherished their own faith, and practised their own rites. The mass, the cross, and the image, were the objects of their public veneration, but the stolen devotions of the mosque and the synagogue had their hearts and affections. The Moor with his face towards Mecca pronounced the Ave Maria; and the Jew, while he fasted in Lent, was consoled by the consideration that it gave him an interval in which at least he was exempt from attesting his sincerity by devouring pork. It was necessary therefore to establish the inquisition,in order to take cognizance of these dangerous and daring apostates, in those parts of Spain where it did not before exist, and to inspire it with new activity and energy in those provinces whose faith was to be for ever under its protection.

Torquemada, a Dominican friar, and a fit successor of the preaching and persecuting founder of the order, confessor to the queen, the man by whose advice this measure was undertaken, obtained a bull from Sixtus IV., in the year 1483, appointing him inquisitor-general of

all Spain, and confirming the extension of the inquisition to Castile, where it had been established three years before. The inquisitorial regulations still in force are principally those approved of by Torquemada, and a council of his nomination. Sixteen tribunals of the faith were established in the different provinces of Spain, subject to a supreme council at Madrid, in which the inquisitor-general presided; and to these tribunals, beside the regular officers necessary to conduct their processes, were attached, as appeared in a subsequent reign, more than 20,000 constables or familiars, who, as a religious police, watched over the conduct, opinions, and expressions of all ranks of the people, and, together with numerous swarms of monks, priests, and confessors, acted as arms or feelers to these dreadful associations of intolerance. As the headstrong enthusiasm, the callous heart, required in an inquisition, are most consistent with a narrow capacity and limited information, so the grossest ignorance and most absurd fatuity appeared in the cruel and arbitrary proceedings of these ghostly fathers; the opinions and sentiments of mankind were regulated by judges who could form no opinions of their own; and many an orthodox believer suffered torture and death as the penalty of not being understood. The dungeons were soon filled with heretics, who after conversion had apostatised to Moses or Mahomet. Every one was commanded, under the penalty of excommunication, to confess his own errors, or to denounce those of others. No connexions of blood, kindred, or friendship, were allowed to stand in the way of the sacred work; and the merit of the impeachment was measured by the strength of those ties of nature which were broken for its sake. None who displeased the supporters of superstition could escape detection; none who were detected could elude imprisonment; and few who were imprisoned could escape torture or the flames.

The first essay of the inquisition at Seville showed with what a fell swoop' it could act. In the first six months 300 persons, accused of Judaizing after conversion, were burnt, together with the bones and images of many whom death had happily rescued from its dominion. In the space of about forty years from its establishment in Seville there had been burned in that diocese more than 4000 individuals; 5000 houses remained shut as after a pestilence, and consequently so many families had been exterminated: and 100,000 were condemned to wear the sanbenito, or banished, in the single province of Andalusia. I do not wish,' says the chaplain of the inquisitor-general of that time, to write any thing more concerning the mischiefs of this heretical pravity; suffice it to say that since the fire is kindled it shall burn till no more wood can be found, and that it will be necessary for it to blaze till those who have Judaized are spent and dead, and not one remains.' To such an extent did the exterminating spirit against the descendants of Abraham proceed, that it was a common saying with Lacero (inquisitor of Cordova soon after the establishment of the tribunal in that city), Da me un Judeo, dartelo he quemado; hand me a Jew, and I will return him to

you burnt to ashes. Many of this miserable people were condemned to the flames for frequenting the synagogues in borrowed shapes, and being carried to their nightly assemblies by the devil in the form of a he-goat. Witnesses were found to prove, to the satisfaction of the inquisitor, this miraculous mode of Judaizing, and to swear that they themselves were present at the ceremonies. The various tribunals were extremely active, each of them celebrating an auto once or oftener in the year. Extreme youth and hoary age; those who were too old to change their opinions, and those who were too young to form any; were seen burning in the same fire poverty was defenceless, and riches invited plunder. In one day at Toledo sixtyseven females were delivered over to the flames, for relapsing into Jewish practices after conversion; and this was only one of two autos that had been celebrated in the same month. Those that entered the church were liable to be burnt; and the contumacious were plundered and banished.

Thus did the furious zeal of the first inquisitorgeneral of Spain, operating upon the bigotry or terror of two Catholic princes, extirpate or ruin nearly 1,000,000 of their most wealthy, industrious, and enterprising subjects, who, notwithstanding the oppressions under which they labored, and the popular rage to which they were occasionally exposed, multiplied in Spain as in a second land of Egypt, and almost regarded it as a new Palestine. With this idea they looked upon their expulsion as a calamity similar to the dispersion of their tribes, or the final extinction of their political existence. The price which their fathers had paid for the blood of the Saviour, about fifteen centuries before, was now made a reason why no ransom should be received for their own. Torquemada, with the genuine inspiration of fanaticism, rushed into the royal presence, when the queen was deliberating on an offer of money made by the Jews for liberty of conscience, with a crucifix in his hand, and broke off the intended compromise for toleration or protection, by exclaiming, Behold the crucified Redeemer, who was sold formerly to the Jews for thirty pieces of silver by Judas; sell him not again to his enemies for gold or silver like that traitor, or remember the traitor's reward. I shall be no party to the impious bargain; I abdicate my office.' This appeal was successful; the proffered donation was refused; the edict of banishment was confirmed on a whole people; excommunication was denounced against those who should either harbour them, or supply them with the least particle of subsistence, after the period assigned for their expatriation; and the remnant of this miserable race, whose conscience would not allow them to adopt the religion of their persecutors, or who saw no safety within the pale of a church where the prison and the rack were placed below the altar, and where a new Christian had always before him the half-kindled faggots prepared for a heretic, were driven from the place of their birth and early recollections; were stripped, plundered, and tormented with impunity; were reduced to slavery, chased into

solitudes, or pursued over the country. Directing their course into all the surrounding states, many of them were received in Portugal, France, and Italy; many crowded the sea-ports and frontiers of the kingdom, and, having taken shipping for Africa, Naples, or the Levant, perished by storms, pirates, or barbarians; and many of them, after experiencing every extremity of misfortune, were obliged to return to their native land, and to receive the waters of baptism from the overflowing cup of their misery. Those who fled into Portugal found intolerance and fanaticism there before them; and soon after their arrival saw the holy office established under the direction of more uncontrolled power, and a fiercer spirit of persecution, if possible, than in the country they had been obliged to relinquish.

The disciples of Mahomet could expect no better treatment than the adherents of Moses. Decrees of expulsion or conversion accordingly issued against them from the same counsels, and the holy office prepared its prisons for the relapsed and apostate. Not fewer than a million and a half of Moors were driven from Spain, from the conquest of Granada to their final banishment under Philip III., besides those destroyed in wars, massacres, and assassinations, tortured to death by the inquisitors, or delivered over to the hands of the executioner.

Nothing can be conceived more absurdly horrible than the treatment of these miserable men. If they adhered to the faith of their fathers they were robbed, plundered, and exiled as infidels; if they renounced it, and became Christians, they were suspected as hypocrites and punished as heretics. Compelled to enter the church, to escape persecution, they found, when in the church, that their compulsory entrance was made an argument of their apostasy; forced to violate their conscience, by denying a religion which they cherished, they experienced only the penalties of that which they embraced; and, deprived of the glory of martyrdom for the one, they enjoyed none of the security expected in the other. By their conversion they were brought within the reach of the inquisitorial fires; and their baptism was like heathen libations poured on the head of the victim preparatory to the sacrifice.

When carried to the prisons of the holy office, it was equally vain for them to deny or to confess the crimes with which they were charged by bigotry, avarice, or malevolence; if they denied, they were burnt as impenitent; if they confessed, they were burnt as relapsed. Torture was applied to force a declaration of what the inquisitor desired, and again inflicted to learn with what intention the acknowledged act was performed. Whatever became of the person of the heretic, whether condemned to capital punishment, or perpetual imprisonment, whether he came out with the penitential robe or to the stake, his property remained in the treasury of the inquisition; he brought forth with him none of his rights. Fidelity to their new profession, and even zeal in confirming or extending it," never ensured protection or commanded confidence, the character of a new Christian, being

marked with an indelible stain of infamy, exclusion from all offices, distinctions, or dignities; and this character was applied to all who were themselves converted from infidelity, or were descended from parents who had been such at any known period, however remote. No baptismal font could wash out such a disgrace. No antiquity of date could change the appellation: the Jewish blood was sufficient to taint the Christian profession; St. Paul himself, with the title of a new Christian, would have found his preaching vain. There have been instances where a man's pedigree has been traced back eight or nine generations, through all its collateral branches, for the purpose of ascertaining his genealogical guilt. The orthodoxy of his creed was to be estimated like that of an old coin, not by the purity of the metal, but the age of the inscription. While Jewish and Moorish extraction exposed to suspicion, and gave credibility to the slightest proofs of apostasy, it was scarcely possible that these unhappy people, with all their old national prejudices and habits, had they been real converts, should not furnish to the vigilant eye of an enemy, a rival, or an inquisitorial devotee, sufficient grounds for denunciation. The edict of faith was published in every diocese of Spain once every year, whereby the duty of accusing heretics, or those suspected of heresy, was enforced under the most awful sanctions; three years' indulgence was offered to those who should become informers or accusers; and excommunication was thundered against all who should conceal the acts or sayings of a heretic, schismatic, or infidel. The circumstances which all good Catholics were required at this annual visitation to disclose, as indications of heretical pravity, were sufficiently minute and particular to allow little chance of escape to disguised Israelites, or renegade Saracens. We, the inquisitors of heretical pravity, command all to whom this edict shall be made known, to speak and manifest to us if you know, understand, or have seen, or previously found out, that any living man or woman, present or absent, or already dead, had made, published, said or spoken, any or more opinions or words, heretical, suspected, erroneous, rash, ill-sounding, savouring of scandal, or any heretical blasphemy against God, his Catholic faith, and against that which our holy mother the Church of Rome embraces, teaches, preaches, and holds.' Then follows an enumeration of the heresies of the different enemies of the Catholic faith, and an injunction to declare and denounce them. Among these, as symptoms of Jewish apostasy, the faithful are enjoined to make known to the holy office the cases of any individuals of the Hebrew race who shall be detected in wearing a clean shirt, in using a clean tablecloth, or putting on clean sheets on the Sabbath; or who, in honor of that day, shall use handsomer or holiday clothes, who shall steep their meat in water to suck and draw out the blood, who shall sing the psalms of David without the Gloria Patri, who shall eat lettuce or parsley during the time of the paschal,' or be guilty of similar offences against the faith. The Saracens are to be denounced as suspected of MahomVOL. XII.

medan abominations, if they abstain from drinking wine or eating swine's flesh, if they bathe at particular times, if they sing Arabian songs at their marriages, or play upon their native musical instruments. Abstinence from pork is not advanced in the edict as a charge of heresy against the Jews, though it is against the Moors, probably from a recollection of the peculiar difficulty that the ancestors of this people felt in swallowing this article of faith, when in a written engagement to be good Catholics, under the sanction of the most solemn oaths, and after a complete enumeration of the points they were required to abjure or embrace, they swore, by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is one in Trinity, and the true God, that whosoever of us shall be found a transgressor of all or any one of these things, he shall perish with flames or stones;' but 'as to swine's flesh we promise to observe, if we cannot eat it possibly through custom, yet we will without contempt or horror take and eat things that are dressed with it.'

In other countries, however, and even in Spain itself, the inquisition which was established for the extirpation of two hated tribes, had soon to contend with more formidable heresies. The new opinions and principles of the Reformation, beginning in Germany, spread from state to state, as by the blaze of signal posts, and every where appeared the beacons of war against ecclesiastical corruptions aud abuses. Mankind looked about with amazement and indignation at the gulf of clerical oppression into which they had been plunged, and at the emblems of craft, deceit, and cruelty, with which they were surrounded. The Reformation spread into Spain, which, although it had been for ages the strong hold of superstition, contained at that time the most active and enterprising people of Europe; but the dangerous light was received and buried in the dungeons of the inquisition, and, before it had enlightened any considerable portion of the nation, expired like a lamp in a sepulchre.

Charles V., after having fought against the protestants in Germany, and endeavoured, without success, to establish the inquisition against them in the Netherlands, employed preachers and zealous Catholics to convert those in whom his arms could not work conviction; but his apostles themselves returned infected with the contagion they were commissioned to eradicate. Among those who had imbibed the reformed doctrines were men of great learning and in eminent situations. Cazalla the emperor's preacher, Constantine Ponce Fuente, canon of the cathedral of Seville, and the emperor's chaplain, don Juan Ponce de Leon, son of the count of Baylen, and several others. Heresy, to use an illustration of a Spanish author, was spreading like the yellow fever, when its progress was arrested by the holy office. Seville and Valladolid, the former the most commercial city of the Spanish monarchy and the latter the capital of Castile, were the places where it broke out, and where in the course of two years it was entirely suppressed. In Seville 800 persons were apprehended, imprisoned, and laid up for tortures or autos-de-fe in the year 1557. Many of them were burnt in successive executions of fifteen or

E

« PreviousContinue »