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His unorthodox view of the Catholic religion is shown by the fact that in 1797 he endeavoured to get Pius VI. to suppress the Inquisition throughout Europe. The Pope, in his reply, addressing the General as his "very dear son," urges him to abandon the idea and assures him that the charges made against the Holy Office are false.
In idle curiosity and with the simplicity of perfectly bad manners, he took up the poet's papers and letters and perused them. As there were scraps of verse amid the mass, Pinchas let him read on unrebuked. 'You will talk to him, Kloot, he pleaded at last. 'You will save Ophelia? The big-nosed youth looked up from his impertinent inquisition. 'Rely on me, if I have to play her myself.
Then, casting one more glance of respect and sorrow at that still lovely countenance before him, he hastened from the cell, drawing his hat over his brow to conceal his agitation; then wrapping his cloak around him, he took his way through the narrow passages which led to the vaults, guided by one of the familiars of the Inquisition, till he reached the door of an apartment, at which his guide stopped and knocked.
"There are two kinds of inquisition: the see of Rome lays claim to one, the other has, from time immemorial, been exercised by the bishops. The force of prejudice and of custom has made the latter light and supportable to us. It will find little opposition in the Netherlands, and the augmented numbers of the bishops will make it effective.
However that might be, as though her brain had grown dizzy, she destroyed with her own hands, not her skilfully raised political edifice, but the structure of her individual fortunes. Her first imprudence was to attack the Spanish Inquisition. Spain was not then ripe for that reform accomplished only a century later.
To such hidden mourners the formation of Anti-Slavery Societies was as life from the dead, the first beams of hope which gleamed through the dark clouds of despondency and grief. Prints were made use of to effect the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain, and Clarkson employed them when he was laboring to break up the Slave trade, and English Abolitionists used them just as we are now doing.
Notwithstanding that he was inexorable on the most important point, and the very one on which the nation most particularly insisted the convocation of the states, notwithstanding that his limited and ambiguous pardon was as good as none, and depended too much on arbitrary will to calm the public mind; notwithstanding, in fine, that he rejected, as too lenient, the proposed "moderation," but which, on the part of the people, was complained of as too severe; still he had this time made an unwonted step in the favor of the nation; he had sacrificed to it the papal Inquisition and left only the episcopal, to which it was accustomed.
Whether hunting out the remnants of the unhappy Moriscos from the fastnesses of their native hills, or torturing the Jews in the dungeons of his Inquisition, or with lust and murder filling to the brim the cup of horror and misery for the captive cities of Holland, or exterminating, in the pitiless labor of the mines, the peaceful aborigines of San Domingo, or with Cortés putting to slaughter a whole city on mere suspicion, everywhere the Spaniard has recorded great deeds with a pen of iron dipped in blood.
But while they were yet all inmates of that stronghold, this same bandit, whose name is Venturo, overheard the marquis inform Stephano Verrina that he intended to remain in Florence to obtain the liberation of a Jew who was imprisoned in the dungeons of the inquisition: and this Jew, Venturo also learnt by subsequent inquiry from Verrina, is a certain Isaachar ben Solomon."
The new world had not been discovered, the ancient world reconquered, the printing-press perfected, only that the inquisition might reign undisturbed over the fairest portions of the earth, and chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands.
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