assassins."

The historian then will not be surprised to find that by far the larger
number of Fatal Books deal with these subjects of Theology and Religion,
and many of them belong to the stormy period of the Reformation. They met
with severe critics in the merciless Inquisition, and sad was the fate of
a luckless author who found himself opposed to the opinions of that dread
tribunal. There was no appeal from its decisions, and if a taint of
heresy, or of what it was pleased to call heresy, was detected in any
book, the doom of its author was sealed, and the ingenuity of the age was
well-nigh exhausted in devising methods for administering the largest
amount of torture before death ended his woes.

_Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum._

Liberty of conscience was a thing unknown in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; and while we prize that liberty as a priceless possession, we
can but admire the constancy and courage of those who lived in less happy
days. We are not concerned now in condemning or defending their opinions
or their beliefs, but we may at least praise their boldness and mourn
their fate.

The first author we record whose works proved fatal to him was Michael
Molinos, a Spanish theologian born in 1627, a pious and devout man who
resided at Rome and acted as confessor. He published in 1675 _The
Spiritual Manual_, which was translated from Italian into Latin, and
together with a treatise on _The Daily Communion_ was printed with this
title: _A Spiritual Manual, releasing the soul and leading it along the
interior way to the acquiring the perfection of contemplation and the rich
treasure of internal peace_. In the preface Molinos writes: "Mystical