In the original establishment of the inquisition in 1198, it had raged against the Vaudois and their converts. But the victims were exhausted; or not worth the pursuit of a tribunal which looked to the wealth as keenly as to the faith of the persecuted. Opulence and heresy were at length to be found only to Spain, and there the inquisition turned with a gigantic step. In the early disturbances of the Peninsula, the Jews, by those habits of trade, and mutual communion, which still make them the lords of commerce, had acquired the chief wealth of the country. The close of the Moorish war in the 15th century had left the Spanish monarch at leisure for extortion; and he grasped at the Jewish gains in the spirit of a robber, as he pursued his plunder with the cruelty of a barbarian. The inquisition was the great machine, the comprehensive torturer, ready to squeeze out alike the heart and the gold. In 1481, an edict was issued against the Jews; before the end of the year, in the single diocess of Cadiz, two thousand Jews were burnt alive! The fall of the kingdom of Grenada, in 1492, threw the whole of the Spanish Moors into the hands of the king. They were cast into the same furnace of plunder and torture. Desperate rebellions followed; they were defeated and, in 1609, were finally exiled. "In the space of one hundred and twenty nine years, the inquisition deprived Spain of three millions of inhabitants."
On the death of Leo X. in 1521, Adrian, the inquisitor general was elected pope. He had laid the foundation of his papal celebrity in Spain. "It appears, according to the most moderate calculation, that during the five years of the ministry of Adrian, 24,025 persons were condemned by the inquisition, of whom one thousand six hundred and twenty were burned alive."
It is the constant sophism of those who would cast christianity bound hand and foot at the mercy of her enemies, that the pope desires to exercise no interference in the internal concerns of kingdoms; that, if he had the desire, he has not the power; and that, if he possessed the power, he would be resisted by the whole body of the national clergy. For the exposure of this traitorous delusion, we are to look to the times, when it was the will of popery to put forth its strength; not to the present, when it is its will to lull us into a belief of its consistency with the constitution, in defiance of common sense, common experience, the spirit of British law, and the loud warnings of insulted and hazarded religion.
Of the multitudes who perished by the inquisition throughout the world, no authentic record is now discoverable. But wherever popery had power, there was the tribunal. It had been planted even in the east, and the Portuguese inquisition of Goa was, till within these few years, fed with many an agony. South America was partitioned into provinces of the inquisition; and with a ghastly mimickry of the crimes of the mother state, the arrivals of viceroys, and the other popular celebrations were thought imperfect without an auto de fe. The Netherlands were one scene of slaughter from the time of the decree which planted the inquisition among them. In Spain the calculation is more attainable. Each of the _seventeen_ tribunals during a long period burned annually on an average ten miserable beings! We are to recollect that this number was in a country where persecution had for ages abolished all religious differences, and where the difficulty was not to find the stake, but the offering. Yet, even in Spain, thus gleaned of all heresy, the inquisition could still swell its list of murders to thirty-two thousand! The numbers burned in effigy, or condemned to penance, punishments generally equivalent to exile, confiscation, and taint of blood, to all ruin but the mere loss of worthless life amounted to three hundred and nine thousand. But the crowds who perished in dungeons, of the torture, of confinement, and of broken hearts, the millions of dependent lives made utterly helpless, or hurried to the grave by the death of the victims, are beyond all register; or recorded only before HIM, who has sworn that "He who leadeth into captivity, shall go into captivity: and he that killeth with the sword shall be killed by the sword."