Why hast thou troubled us? the Lord shall trouble thee this
day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them
with fire, after they had stoned him with stones.

We have no means of knowing what was the character of the unfortunate
inhabitants of the city of Jericho, nor of the Hittites and the
Girgashites and the Amorites and all the rest of the victims of
Jehovah. To be sure, we are told by the Hebrew priests that they
sacrificed their children to their gods; but then, consider what we
should believe about the Hebrew religion, if we took the word of rival
priestly castes! Consider, for example, that in this twentieth century
we saw an orthodox Jew tried in a Russian court of law for having made
a sacrifice of Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews
represent a considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of
Russia. We know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture
and all of the scientific knowledge of Spain, that the Huguenots had
most of the conscience and industry of France; and we know that they
were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes of the
Middle Ages.

#The Holy Inquisition#

Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval times, so
that we may know what we ourselves have escaped. In the fifteenth
century there was established in Europe the cult of a three-headed
god, whose priests had won lordship over a continent. They were
enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt; they sold to the
rich the license to commit every possible crime, and they held
the poor in ignorance and degradation. Among the comparatively
intelligent and freedom-loving people of Bohemia there arose a