recollection of it to perish; and, if possible, to destroy the very
susceptibility for its impressions. Country and family, conscience and
honor, the sacred feelings of society and of nature, are ever the first
and immediate ties to which religion attaches itself; from these it
derives while it imparts strength. This connection was now to be
dissolved; the old religion was violently to be dissevered from the holy
feelings of nature, even at the expense of the sanctity itself of these
emotions. Thus arose that Inquisition which, to distinguish it from the
more humane tribunals of the same name, we usually call the Spanish.
Its founder was Cardinal Ximenes, a Dominican monk. Torquemada was the
first who ascended its bloody throne, who established its statutes, and
forever cursed his order with this bequest. Sworn to the degradation of
the understanding and the murder of intellect, the instruments it
employed were terror and infamy. Every evil passion was in its pay; its
snare was set in every joy of life. Solitude itself was not safe from
it; the fear of its omnipresence fettered the freedom of the soul in its
inmost and deepest recesses. It prostrated all the instincts of human
nature before it yielded all the ties which otherwise man held most
sacred. A heretic forfeited all claims upon his race; the most trivial
infidelity to his mother church divested him of the rights of his
nature. A modest doubt in the infallibility of the pope met with the
punishment of parricide and the infamy of sodomy; its sentences
resembled the frightful corruption of the plague, which turns the most
healthy body into rapid putrefaction. Even the inanimate things
belonging to a heretic were accursed. No destiny could snatch the
victim of the Inquisition from its sentence. Its decrees were carried
in force on corpses and on pictures, and the grave itself was no asylum
from its tremendous arm. The presumptuous arrogance of its decrees
could only be surpassed by the inhumanity which executed them. By
coupling the ludicrous with the terrible, and by amusing the eye with