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Updated: June 25, 2025
Then there were jovial spirits who must have their jest, even though the sensitive subject of it was tortured thereby men who enjoyed quizzing Haldane before sending him on, as much as the old inquisitors relished a little recreation with hot pincers and thumb-screws.
Inquisitors are appointed to search into and examine all their books; all Rabbinic works are forbidden them, the Old Testament in Hebrew only being allowed to them; and any Jew having any forbidden book in his possession is liable to the confiscation of his property. Nor is he permitted to converse on the subject of religion with a Christian.
The Papacy rose from its debasement; rose more intolerant and insolent than before; intolerant and insolent as in the days of Hildebrand; intolerant and insolent to a degree which dismayed and disappointed those who had fondly cherished the hope that the spirit which had animated the Crusaders and the Inquisitors had been mitigated by the lapse of years and by the progress of knowledge.
To take a man from his house and burn him, after a brief preliminary examination, was clearly not to follow the letter and spirit of the Brabantine habeas corpus, by which inviolability of domicile and regular trials were secured and sworn to by the monarch; yet such had been the uniform practice of inquisitors throughout the country.
They were set under the keenest vigilance of the inquisitors, without being able even to counterfeit any attachment to the Church, whose most grievous yoke they had put on, but which in heart they hated. Now the Church gloried over the declension of Judaism.
The torture of that short period was the refinement of cruelty, but never for one moment did he waver from his fixed determination to face his inquisitors like a man and a son of his fatherland.
I read tales of the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges, before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were converted, and I became a great religious leader.
This was called 'spectral evidence'; and the Mathers, during the fanatical outbreaks at Salem, admit that this 'spectral evidence, unsupported, is of no legal value. Indeed, taken literally, Cotton Mather's cautions on the subject of evidence may almost be called sane and sensible. But the Protestant inquisitors always discovered evidence confirmatory.
The system pursued by the inquisitors was too generally known to allow them a ray of hope that they would escape without the most fearful torture, or the alternative of giving evidence to condemn those nearest and dearest to them. Antonio Herezuelo and his wife Leonor knelt in prayer after their friend had left them. On rising from their knees, they decided not to make the attempt to escape.
And the other women, of a more circuitous method or a more sensitive touch, would listen and, Esther felt sure, discuss afterward what the inquisitors had found out: with an amused horror of the inquisitors and a grateful relish of the result.
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