"Inquisition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Leghorn and Genoa; and there are four thousand of them at Rome. In speaking of the religion of the Jews, it is not necessary to particularize those who assumed the mask of Christianity under terror of the Inquisition, although much has been said of their wealth and numbers, and of the high offices they have filled in Spain, and especially in Portugal. But it is curious to see, in a very distant quarter, a like simulation produced amongst them by like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... you must acquire, or rather you must pretend to have acquired, infallible skill in the noble art of physiognomy; immediately the thoughts as well as the words of your subjects are exposed to your inquisition. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... his consulship, Cato stood for the office of censor, which was indeed the summit of all honor, and in a manner the highest step in civil affairs; for besides all other power, it had also that of an inquisition into everyone's life and manners. For the Romans thought that no marriage, or rearing of children, nay, no feast or drinking-bout ought to be permitted according to everyone's appetite or fancy, without being ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... shape, calling itself a father, seizing some helpless cherub by the hair, and, while drowning its pathetic wails for mercy beneath roars of demon laughter, proceeding to bind about its tender bones some ancient curiosity dug from the dungeons of the Inquisition. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... not returned. Of what passed at their examinations, Ivan could only guess. But his imagination being now on fire, he felt that the crossing of that threshold would be little less awful than that of a doomed heretic into the torture-chamber of the Spanish Inquisition. Of the memories, realizations, and foreboding of those sixty minutes, it is difficult to speak, clearly. From the stunned calm of the first moment of shock, Ivan had drifted gradually into a fever of acutest feeling. To him, now, his situation assumed monstrous and distorted ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... reaped for the glory of God. Right through the "sacred volume" runs the scarlet river, staining every page; when its record closes, the Church takes it up, and the river rolls on down the centuries; let the Inquisition tell over its victims; let Spain reckon her murdered ones, 31,912 burnt alive in that one land alone; let the Netherlands speak of their slain sons and daughters; let France and Italy swell the tale; nor let England and Scotland be forgotten, nor the blood-roll of Ireland be missed; ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... whole population became converts under the pressure of these edicts, and it is thus seen that Christianity owed much of its success in Kyushu to methods which recall Islam and the Inquisition. Another illustration of this is furnished by the Arima fief, which adjoined that of Omura where Sumitada ruled. The heads of these two fiefs were brothers, and thus when Sumitada embraced Christianity the Jesuits received an invitation to visit Arima at the ports of Kuchinotsu and Shimabara, where ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of Benjamin Disraeli. He traced his ancestry in a record that looks like a chapter from the Book of Numbers. His forebears had known every persecution, every contumely, slight and disgrace. Driven from Spain by the Inquisition, barely escaping with life, when Jewish blood actually fertilized the fields about Granada, his direct ancestor became one of the builders of Venice. The Jews practically controlled the trade of the world in the sun-kissed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... blessed termination of their course, than the spoiling of their goods and martyrdom." In consequence of a passage in my work upon the Arian History, a Northern dignitary wrote to accuse me of wishing to re-establish the blood and torture of the Inquisition. Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs, I had said, "The latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter, and, so far forth as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... out with haughty righteousness; they regarded themselves as deputies of the Omnipotent. They determined in solemn conclave that the man against whom they had waged war for twenty years, and who was only now beaten by a combination of circumstances, should be put through the ordeal of an inquisition. If he held out long, well and good, but should he succumb to their benign treatment, their faith would be steadfast in their own blamelessness. They were quite unconscious of being an unspeakable brood of ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... his lovely Louisa, were living on a small farm in the vicinity of Rochelle. As he walked one afternoon in the main street of that city, he was very rudely accosted by a couple of officers of the holy inquisition, whose looks and dress were as dark ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... prosperity. In the history of Spain during the Saracenic supremacy any distinction of religion or race is no longer traced. And so it came to pass that when at the end of the fourteenth century, after the fell triumph of the Dominicans over the Albigenses, the holy inquisition was introduced into Spain, it was reported to Torquemada that two-thirds of the nobility of Arragon, that is to say of the proprietors of the land, ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... by order of King Henry VI of England, Jeanne was placed in the hands of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had already moved to have her delivered up to the Inquisition of France, as demanded by the University of Paris. The Bishop proceeded to form at Rouen a "court of justice" for her trial, and on February 21st the Maid was brought before her judges—"Norman priests ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... "absolute rot. There has never been a good deed done in His name; just the Inquisition and the what-do-you-call-'ems in Russia. Oh, yes, pogroms—and wars and robbing people. Christianity is just a name; there isn't any such thing. And most of the professional Christians that I've seen are damn fools. I tell you, George, it's all ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... is clear that there were in existence certain obscure bodies which clung to communism. The published records of the Inquisition refer incessantly to preachers of this kind who denied private property, asserted that no rich man could get to heaven, and attacked the practice of ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... made familiar by novelists and poets, by which the ancient and sinister republic made more fearful the vengeance of government. As the unfortunate youth passed through a labyrinth of gloomy corridors, he recognized the haunts of the ancient Inquisition; the atmosphere was clogged with damp; moisture dripped from the stones. A dungeon, lighted only by a lamp suspended from the vault, and narrow, humid, and unfurnished, except with a pile of straw and a rude table, proved the dreary goal of their heavy steps. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... purpose, and he went right at his mark like a bullet from a rifle. Once that evening he went on deck and tried to peer through the wall of trembling darkness that surrounded him; the view made him feel like the victim in Poe's awful Inquisition story—the walls seemed to be closing in. Faintly the starboard light shone, so that the snowflakes crossed its path like dropping emeralds that shone a little in glory and then fell dark; on the other side a fitful stream of rubies seemed to be pouring; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... thy magic cell? Ev'n Fox himself can't boast so many martyrs, As yearly fall within thy wretched quarters. Money I've none, and debts I cannot pay, Unless my vermin, will those debts defray. Not scolding wife, nor inquisition's worse; Thou'rt ev'ry mischief crammed into ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... desired to cause annoyance to the First President (so it is said), to whom Vanini was granted considerable access, teaching his children philosophy, if indeed he was not altogether in the service of that magistrate, the inquisition was carried through rigorously. Vanini, seeing that there was no chance of pardon, declared himself, when at the point of death, for what he was, an atheist; and there was nothing very extraordinary in that. But ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Vanslyperken should go forward on the lower deck of the vessel, which he never did, Smallbones had only to retreat into the eyes of her, and it was there so dark that he could not be seen. They therefore regulated their conduct much in the same way as the members of the inquisition used to do in former days; they allowed their patient to recover, that he might be subjected ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the sacred writer, first raised into independent theses, and then brought together to produce or sanction some new credendum for which neither separately could have furnished a pretence! By this strange mosaic, Scripture texts have been worked up into passable likenesses of purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition, and other monstrous abuses. But would you have a Protestant instance of the superstitious use of Scripture arising out of this dogma? Passing by the Cabbala of the Hutchinsonian School as the dotage of a few ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Toledo, and others—which has exercised a very strong influence on the Spanish national drama. It has great literary merit, admirable style, and well-drawn pictures of human nature; and it attained so extensive and continual popularity that even the Inquisition did not place Celestina in the Index until 1793, notwithstanding its grossness of thought and language. (Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, i, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... roads by the conjectures of 17th-century antiquarianism, Gale being their special identifier. The names themselves (except in the case of the Via Devana) are old, and three of them, the Ermine Street, the Icknield Street, and the Fosse Way, figure in the inquisition of 1070 as being, together with the Watling Street, those of the Four Royal Roads (quatuor chimini) of England, the King's Highways, exempt from local jurisdiction and under the special guard of the King's Peace. Two are said to cross the length of the land, two its ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... state at once, those are the colours generally casing the throats from whence their sweet sounds issue; these ties are garnished with union pins, whose strong mosaic tendency would, in the Catholic days of Spain (had they been residents), have consigned them to the lowest dungeons of the Inquisition, and favoured them with an exit from this breathing world, amid all the uncomfortable pomp ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... turn for military inquisition. I presented all my credentials, which were scanned from end to end, turned over, and even held up to the light, lest there should be something interwoven with the watermark. I followed the operations with a quiet amusement, confident in my security, but could ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... in the prophets and apostles; and they did no more but utter what the Spirit conceived. The Holy Ghost inspired the matter and the words, and they were but tongues and pens to speak and write it unto the people; there needed no debate, no search in their own minds for the truth, no inquisition for light; but light shined upon their souls so brightly, so convincingly, that it put it beyond all question that it was the mind and voice of God. You need not ask, How they did know that their dreams or visions were indeed from the Lord, and that they did not ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... of this committee that "the worst spirit of the Inquisition characterized their doings." The Antietam and Fredericksburg (Campaigns of Civil ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... a chapter, not numbered, "Of the internal and profound errors and superstitions in the nature of the mind, and of the four sorts of Idols or fictions which offer themselves to the understanding in the inquisition of knowledge." ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... others called him by name, with laughing epithets that rang more friendly, or at least more jocular; but all bent toward him eagerly, and flung down question after question, like a little band of kobolds holding an inquisition. At some sharper cry than the rest, the fellow rose to his knees and faced them boldly. A haggard Christian, he was being fairly given ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... and deep attachments, my fearful and nightmare-like experience on the burning ship, the level raft, with the green wares curling above it, the rescue, the snare into which I had inevitably fallen, the Inquisition-walls closing around me—all were there in one vivid ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... an uneasy side-glance of inquisition at his daughters, to mark how they bore this unaccustomed language, and haply intercede between the unworthy woman and their judgement of her. But the ladies merely smiled. Placidly triumphant in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was a church of God and gold, and as a matter of course it preached that it was the supreme arbiter of life and death in matters of faith, and extended its authority into every relation of life. It brought from the lands of the Inquisition the idea of priestly power, and there was none to dispute it in Latin America, as there was in the colonies of our own country. It gave the people little instruction, and no responsibility or freedom. It ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... had on many occasions robbed gold and silver idols, and had murdered a few brethren of the Holy Inquisition, who, in their turn, were well known for the wicked deeds they had committed, such as burning Christian men and women who did not, and could not, profess the popish faith. But in course of time the Jesuits, for so they were ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... of the reason why I was being taken there. It was mystery and curiosity that sustained me. I undoubtedly looked like an amused interrogation-mark, for the moment I was introduced into the presence of the grand interrogator of that inquisition, upon whose desk lay my passport and "that serviette," he smiled and remarked in French, "It is very evident, mademoiselle, that you have nothing to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Gentleman of that name, so well known, and so amply provided for, by the late and present King of Spain. She was very civil, and seemed sensible. Her husband, the Governor, soon after came in, and the whole family smiled upon me. I then began to think I should escape both goal and inquisition. Mrs. O'Reilly visited my family. Mr. O'Reilly borrowed a house for me, and a charming one too; I say borrowed it, for no Spaniard letts his house; I was only to make him some recompense for his politeness and generosity. The Intendant ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... region: If I assume the gross and substantial, she plays the real ghost with me, and vanishes in a moment. I had hopes in the hypocrisy of the sex; but perseverance makes it as bad as a fixed aversion. I desire your opinion, Whether I may not lawfully play the inquisition upon her, make use of a little force, and put her to the rack and the torture, only to convince her, she has really fine limbs, without spoiling or distorting them. I expect your directions, ere I proceed to dwindle and fall away with despair; which at present I don't think ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... was bored to death because I forgot to bring my knitting. They are stiff enough for fat business men who never do anything more exciting than to fall over the lawn mower in the cellar once a year; but, compared with a genuine, eighteen-donkey-power college frat initiation with a Spanish Inquisition attachment, the little degree teams, made up of grandfathers, feel like a slap on the wrist delivered by a young lady ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into private life which is to be made by the rulers. The magistrate is always watching and waylaying the citizens. He is constantly to receive information against improprieties of life. Plato does not seem to be aware that espionage can only have a negative effect. ...
— Laws • Plato
... quarrels, frauds, forgeries. Councils, and Excommunications, and an endless detail of Battle and Murder, the irruptions and devastations of the Goths Huns and Vandals, the rise and establishment of "these venerable institutions," the Popedom and the Inquisition, the persecutions and wars excited by St. Dominic, the wars of Charlemagne, and the Teutonic Knights upon the Germans, giving them no alternative but the Gospel or the Sword, the Crusades, the pious exploits of Cortez ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it. But with this fatuous notion that one can deliberately establish the Inquisition or the Terror, and then faintly trust the larger hope, I shall have to deal more seriously in a subsequent chapter. It is enough to say here that the best thing the honest Endeavourer could do would be to make an honest attempt to know what he is ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... convinced of Christian truth not to take part with his own people in the final struggle. Still, however, the inbred abhorrence of idolatry had influenced his manner of worship, and when, after half a life-time, Granada had fallen, and the Inquisition had begun to take cognisance of new Christians from among the Moors as well as the Jews, there were not lacking spies to report the absence of all sacred images or symbols from the house of the wealthy merchant, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... he assured himself that it was natural, that it was best, that it was right, that this peerless woman should wed a man of Beaumont's position and culture, still that gentleman's assured deliberate advance was like the slow and torturing contraction of the walls of that terrible chamber in the Inquisition which, by an imperceptible movement, closed in upon and crushed the prisoner. For a time he felt that he could not endure the pain, and he grew haggard ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the thirteenth century. 'Imagination', he cries, 'staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours.' His condemnation of the life and influence of the Church re-echoes in somewhat shrill tones the verdict of Henry Charles Lea, whose massive treatise on the Inquisition was rightly described by Lord Acton as the most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of the old, and whose volumes on Sacerdotal Celibacy constitute a formidable indictment ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... and, assuming a degree of courage hereupon, I observed to my brother that we ought not to remain there without knowing for what reason we were detained, as if we were in the Inquisition; and that to treat us in such a manner was to consider us as persons of no account. I then begged M. de l'Oste to entreat the King, in our name, if the Queen our mother was not permitted to come to us, to send some one to acquaint us ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale, clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers over the bodies of their fellow-citizens as neither king, pope, nor parliament dare ever have claimed. The Inquisition itself was a Liberal institution compared to ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... The inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's vicious eyes burning in frustration, ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... defeated by the contrast! On the one side, half-brutish, half-timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. They are made to stand with Pilate, and Gesler, and the Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech and action! and what a void their silence! They are but helpless tools in this great work. It was no human power that ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... du Pape, commencerent a instruire leur proces comme a des heretiques, et comme s'ils eussent ete en pays d'inquisition; mais la procedure etant trop longue pour des gens qui etoient deja condamnes, Christierne, dans la crainte qu'il ne se fit quelque revolte en leur faveur, leur envoya des bourreaux sans autre formalite, pour leur annoncer ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... helmet the moonbeams played fitfully. The darkness, the silence, the suggestion of mystery, the ancient buildings with their leaded windows and their carved facades, the steel-capped soldier, all made me feel that I had stepped back five hundred years and was in the Furnes of Inquisition times. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... attempt at a light laugh. But there was one motive not yet confessed—a motive which could hardly be called a motive, for it lay dim and half-formed within his brain. He had never, in his moments of self-inquisition, acknowledged its existence to himself. How could he, then, venture to disclose it to another? It was the suppression of this immature motive, that brought back that look of deceit and guilt to Marcus ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... say, 'Thou shalt be cured thereby, or not be cured at all,' is an insult to the intelligence of the Fathers of our liberties, and a crime upon a people striving for the light. It smacks of the Holy Inquisition: You accept our creed, or you shall go to hell—after we have broken you on the rack! Why, the thought of subjecting this people to years of further dosing and experimentation along the materialistic lines of the 'regular' ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Life or Work has escaped the Search-Light of the benevolent Inquisition which has ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... is that I see history; I can see nothing else in history. The tyranny of kings and nobles, the tyranny of the mass and the inquisition, the tyranny of battle and murder and crime—how was a man to live ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Italian hood, And Silks of Civil: And the poorest Snake, That feeds on Lemons, Pilchers, and near heated His pallet with sweet flesh, will bear a case More fat and gallant than his starved face. Pride, the Inquisition, and this belly evil, Are, in my ...
— Cromwell • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... Earl of Dorset Questions put to the Magistrates Their Answers; Failure of the King's Plans List of Sheriffs Character of the Roman Catholic Country Gentlemen Feeling of the Dissenters; Regulation of Corporations Inquisition in all the Public Departments Dismission of Sawyer Williams Solicitor General Second Declaration of Indulgence; the Clergy ordered to read it They hesitate; Patriotism of the Protestant Nonconformists of London Consultation of the London Clergy Consultation at Lambeth Palace Petition of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... right—and they were right—in punishing the King of Benin for murdering his subjects to propitiate his idols, we are right to punish these revivers of the Inquisition for starving women and children ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... melancholy aspect of the apartment, and the figure of the venerable prelate seen in such darkening gloom and solitude, was the crowning completion of an expressive and pathetic picture of patient desolation. So might a martyr of the Inquisition have looked while the flames were getting ready to burn him for the love of the gentle Saviour; and something of the temper of such a possible predecessor was in the physically frail old man, who just now was concentrating all the energies of his mind on the consideration of a difficult question ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... course, ask it of the individual taxpayer. That would be an impossible inquisition. But the House of Commons asks itself when it has to choose between taxes on various forms of wealth, "By what process ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Spain, considers the past domination of the Moors a scourge inflicted on the Spanish nation for its iniquities, but the conquest of Granada the reward of Heaven for its great act of propitiation in establishing the glorious tribunal of the Inquisition! No sooner (says the worthy father) was this holy office opened in Spain than there shone forth a resplendent light. Then it was that, through divine favor, the nation increased in power, and became competent to overthrow and trample ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... twelve of her offspring by a three-headed monster, Gereones (the personification of Philip the Second of Spain, the ruler of three realms). This monster invariably delivers his captives into the hands of the Inquisition, by which they are sorely persecuted. Hearing this report, Arthur steps forward, offering to defend the widow and her children. Mercilla granting his request without demur, Arthur hurries away, only to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... true philanthropist, who had risen above the antipathies of nationality; but he was evidently partial to the Spanish character, which, however, it is not, I fear, possible to acquit of cruelty. Witness the Netherlands, the Inquisition, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... fold and seal a letter adroitly is not the least of accomplishments. She was a handy girl. She could turn her hand to anything, of which I will give you two memorable instances. Was there ever a girl in this world but herself that cheated and snapped her fingers at that awful Inquisition, which brooded over the convents of Spain, that did this without collusion from outside, trusting to nobody, but to herself, and what? to one needle, two hanks of thread, and a very inferior pair of scissors? For, that the scissors were ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of the court and his unending literary labors commenced to tell upon the poet in 1575, when his health began to fail and he grew irritable and restless, became subject to delusions, fancied that he had been denounced by the Inquisition, and was in daily terror of being poisoned. Then it was said that the poet was mad, and there are some who have whispered that it was his unrequited love for the Princess Leonora which brought about this ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... impartial. I received the same pulping as the rest. And this was merely the beginning, the preliminary to the examination each man was to undergo alone in the presence of the paid brutes of the state. It was the forecast to each man of what each man might expect in inquisition hall. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... exhibition by showing us a curious set of great books in the counting house, where the foreman of each department records his answer daily to a list of printed questions, stating his figures, his ideas, reports, suggestions and complaints. This diurnal inquisition, which morally gives ventilation to the whole establishment, and relieves difficulties at their start, seems to be another indication of an enviable relationship, keeping up an excellent, old-fashioned sympathy between employers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... gathered, with several others, had been given to Anna to post by Mrs. Piblington, and as no reply to the one containing money was received, Anna was closely questioned. Naturally nervous and highly strung, the inquisition confused her terribly, and her embarrassment being construed into guilt, she was threatened with prosecution. "As a proof of my innocence," she scribbled on a piece of paper, which was produced at the subsequent ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... about as cheerful a one in Grandcourt as an appointment made by the Court of the Inquisition would have been, once upon a time, in Spain, Railsford ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... spread themselves into various Roman catholic countries, and treated the protestants with the utmost severity. In process of time, the pope, not finding these roving inquisitors so useful as he had imagined, resolved upon the establishment of fixed and regular courts of inquisition. After the order for these regular courts, the first office of inquisition was established in the city of Thoulouse, and Dominic became the first regular inquisitor, as he had before been the first ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... pointing to heaven." The Wandering Jew may be gone, but the theater of that appalling prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean—will echo, in short, wherever warm blood has jumped in the veins ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... "Resolved, that the Commander in Chief be instructed to call, in the most pointed terms, on the British commander at New York, to fulfil his engagement contained in his letter of the 13th day of August last, 'to make further inquisition into the murder of Captain Huddy, and to pursue it with all the effect, which a due ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... guidance of her imperial mind, hoping to obtain some dignity by the renown which her measures might reflect upon him. Catharine advised him very wisely. She caused seventeen thousand exiles to be recalled from Siberia, and abolished the odious secret court of chancery—that court of political inquisition which, for years, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... trifles by the side of the cylinder, but still each of them formidable masses of metal heavy enough to crush a horse; the cutting machines might have served to illustrate the French Revolution, and the perforating machine the Holy Inquisition. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... illustrious confrere, Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see yonder that stout gentleman with stuff on his shirt? the eloquent Dr. McGuffog, of Edinburgh, talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my dear ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... talent to great account; there is nobody of his own standard but thinks him a great genius. The Chutes and I deal extremely together; but they abuse me, and tell me I am grown so English! lack-a-day! so I am; as folks that have been in the Inquisition, and did not choose to broil, come ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... fill which we cheerfully contributed to Dearsley Sahib three-sevenths of our monthly wage. Why does the white man look upon us with the eye of disfavour? Before God, there was a palanquin, and now there is no palanquin; and if they send the police here to make inquisition, we can only say that there never has been any palanquin. Why should a palanquin be near these works? We are poor men, and ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... of Shaw's energetic attack; and it is not to be denied that there was exaggeration in it, and what is so much worse, omission. The argument might easily be carried too far; it might end with a scene of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a corrective to the too amiable view of a clergyman in The Private Secretary. But the controversy is definitely worth recording, if only as an excellent example of the author's aggressive attitude and his love of turning the tables in ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... in knowledge and civilization, this sort of crime continued to furnish the greater proportion of victims and the most cruel punishments. Torture of the most fiendish sort was evoked to catch offenders and extort confessions. Difference of religious opinions was the worst crime. The inquisition became an established thing. Sometimes a nation was almost wiped out that heretics should be killed and heresies destroyed. The heretic was the one who did not accept the prevailing faith. The list of victims of punishment ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... Musee, a quiet, gray corner of this old town, was an ancient Gothic house containing a really priceless collection of medals and instruments of torture used during the terrible days of the Spanish Inquisition. I spent long hours in these old musty rooms alone, and I might have stolen away whatever took my fancy had I been so minded, for the custode left me quite alone to wander at will, and the cases containing the seals, parchments, ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... The brief inquisition that followed, changing the entire current of Ben Darby's life, occurred in the private office of McNamara, the Governor. McNamara himself stood up to greet them when they entered, the guard and the convict. Ezra Melville and Forest, the alienist from Seattle, were already ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... commentary has corresponded with the plain language of the text. Look at Spain, and at Greece. If men may not resist the Spanish Inquisition, and the Turkish cimeter, what is there to which humanity must not submit? Stronger cases can never arise. Is it not proper for us, at all times, is it not our duty, at this time, to come forth, and deny, and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... correspondent with those which he had given against the original inquiry. He says, "Though it may in some little degree save the Governor-General from personal insult, where there is no judicial power lodged, that of inquisition can never answer any good purpose." This is doctrine of a most extraordinary nature and tendency, and, as your Committee conceive, contrary to every sound principle to be observed in the constitution of judicatures and inquisitions. The ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Having executed a statue in Spain for a grandee, he was very much outraged by receiving only thirty scudi as his reward, and accordingly smashed the statue to pieces with a sledge-hammer. In revenge, the Spaniard accused him of heresy, so that the unlucky artist was condemned to the flames by the Inquisition, and only escaped that horrible death by starving himself in prison before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... medical profession, and the repeal of the edicts against machines. Space forbids me to give his picture of the horrible tortures that future generations would be put to by medical men, if these were not duly kept in check by the influence of the Musical Banks; the horrors of the inquisition in the middle ages are nothing to what he depicted as certain to ensue if medical men were ever to have much money at their command. The only people in whose hands money might be trusted safely were those who presided over ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... faith, the purity of which the next establishment they visited was to maintain. According to Cardinal Grandison, there never was a body the character of which had been so wilfully and so malignantly misrepresented as that of the Roman Inquisition. Its true object is reformation not punishment and therefore pardon was sure to follow the admission of error. True it was there were revolting stories afloat, for which there was undoubtedly some foundation, though ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... 14. The Inquisition of the Sheriffs. 1170.—It was not long before Henry discovered another way of diminishing the power of the barons. In the early part of his reign the sheriffs of the counties were still selected from the great landowners, and the sheriff was not merely the collector of the king's ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... experience in my new position satisfied me that Doctor Dulcifer preserved himself from betrayal by a system of surveillance worthy of the very worst days of the Holy Inquisition itself. ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... which there will have been little or no profit to the sellers. To cap the climax of vexation, these persons will very probably come in, after not many days, and propose to cash their notes at double interest off. Only an official of the Inquisition could turn the thumb-screw so ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... opinion of Roman Catholicism:—the story of the Spanish conquests in America, and the extermination of the West Indian races; the story of the persecutions in the Netherlands, and of the work of the Inquisition elsewhere; the story of the attempt of Philip II to conquer England, and of the loss of the two great [313] Armadas. The edict was issued in 1614, and Iyeyasu had found opportunity to inform himself about some of these matters as early as 1600. In that ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... acres had been gradually acquired through as many as ten grants. This land had formed part of six other holdings, and much of the rest of the land belonging to these holdings had also been alienated.[92] The Inquisition of 1517 reported numerous cases of engrossing, and Professor Gay notes some of the entries in the returns of the Inquisition of 1607 which are also interesting in this connection: W. S. separated six yardlands from a manor house and put a widow ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... Mr Hannay points out, "is by far his nearest approach to an acceptable heroine." Her romantic and curiously superstitious disposition is admirably restrained by strength of will and true courage. The scenes of the Inquisition by which she meets her death are forcibly described. Philip Vanderdecken is a very respectable hero; daring, impetuous, and moody, without being too improbably capable. The hand of destiny lends him a dignity of which he is by no means unworthy. Krantz, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the press. When I came to frame the second part thereof, having formerly collected out of many manuscripts, and exchanged rules with the most able professors I had acquaintance with, in transcribing those papers for impression, I found, upon a strict inquisition, those rules were, for the most part, defective; so that once more I had now a difficult labour to correct their deficiency, to new rectify them according to art; and lastly, considering the multiplicity of daily questions propounded unto me, it was as hard a labour as ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... away in a flood of new emotion; she tried once or twice to be discreetly angry with herself for admitting so unreservedly the pleasure she felt in Pierre's admiration; she placed her soul on a rack of self-questioning torture, and every inquisition she made of her heart returned the self-same answer: she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... prophetic of what might be awaiting his own future, dwarfed by the shifty expedient he had adopted to check its development. If punishment counted for anything, he was, to be sure, receiving his full portion right here on earth. The realization of what he was leaving was an inquisition of the most exquisite order. But would this be the end? His consciousness, as he sat there, refused to allow the hope,—refused even to allow the hope to ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... on the route? When I left Valladolid, nobody had any more thought of an insurrection than of a new deluge. All I know of it is what I have heard from public rumour—that is, so much as could be divulged without fear of the Holy Inquisition. If, moreover, we are to believe the mandate of the Lord Bishop of Oajaca, the insurrection will not find many supporters in ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... of it, Brother Nicolas," said the Abbot; "and I will now dismiss you, my brethren, holding your meeting upon this our inquisition concerning the danger of our reverend Sub-Prior, instead of the attendance on the lauds this evening—Yet let the bells be duly rung for the edification of the laymen without, and also that the novices may give due reverence.—And ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, {151} mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets. His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... dim passage to a little room where there was a piano with some music on it. Standing beside the piano was a small dark man, rubbing his hands and bowing politely as we entered. It reminded me of one of the torture chambers of the Inquisition. What were they ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... be paid or accepted for the issue of a writ of inquisition of life or limbs. It shall be given gratis, and ...
— The Magna Carta
... the law and practice respecting books among the Greeks, the Romans, and the early and mediaeval Christians, Milton arrives at the conclusion that the system of Censorship and Licensing was an invention of the worst age of the Papacy, perfected by the Spanish Inquisition. He gives one or two specimens of the elaborate imprimaturs prefixed to old Italian books, and makes much fun of them. The Papal invention, he continues, had passed on into Prelatic England. "These are the pretty responsories, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... is to fail, to be hollow, to be exhausted. In tracing customs, it is easy to see the bias unknowingly received from natural significations, significations which take their rise in the spiritual world. The San Benito or auto-da-fe dress of the Spanish Inquisition was yellow, blazoned with a flaming cross; and, as a mark of contempt for the race, the Jews of Catholic Spain were condemned to wear a yellow cap. Distinguishing colors in dress have ever been one of the most common methods of expressing distinction of class and differences of faith, until ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... most mean and dishonourable inquisition into the character and popular repute of Miss Hazeldean, Signor Riccabocca seemed as much cheered up and elated as if he had committed some very noble action; and he walked forth in the direction of the Hall with a far lighter and livelier step than that with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... grilles, and at intervals uniformed and gigantic officials wandered about with impassive, haughty faces—faces that indicated a sublime confidence in the safety of the multifarious riches committed to their care. You might have guessed yourself in the fell grip of the Inquisition. As a fact, you were in something far more fell. You were in a vast chamber of steel, and that chamber was itself enclosed on all sides by three feet of solid concrete. No thief could tunnel or mine you without first getting ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... obvious reasons. The Methodist Church has no St. Bartholomew's Day, with its rivers of blood staining her garments: she never indiscriminately slaughtered the Albigenses, or Waldenses, or Huguenots: she never established an infernal Inquisition: she never lit up the fires of Smithfield: never burned the Holy Bible, and prohibited, upon pain of eternal death, the printing and circulating of God's word; and last, but not least, she has not sought to keep the people in ignorance. Wherever ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... Vaudois, Waldenses, "poor men of Lyons," they must not be for a moment confounded. Their creed remains to us only in the calumnies of their enemies. The confessions in the archives of the Tolosan Inquisition, as elicited either under torture or fear of torture, deserve no confidence whatsoever. And as for the licentiousness of their poetry—which has been alleged as proof of their profligacy—I can ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... as "a god among gods," meaning that all believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in the early ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... can you be sure that the path you show is the true path? Is this not the same kind of despotism that lay at the bottom of the Inquisition, all persecutions, and the great revolution? They, too, knew the one true way, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... foundation of this story, which is in all respects worthy of the high reputation which the author of the 'Crescent and the Cross' had already made for himself. The early history of the Merchant Prince introduces the reader to the condition of Spain under the Inquisition; the portraitures of Scottish life which occupy a prominent place in the narrative, are full of spirit; the scenes in America exhibit the state of the natives of the new world at that period; the daring deeds of the Buccaneers supply a most romantic element in the story; and an additional ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... heaven, and hell; and they distorted the beauty of the Christian morality by introducing an other-worldliness, to which the ancients had been strangers. From this came the despotism of the Church based on the everlasting burnings and the keys, and something of the spirit of St. Dominic and the Inquisition can be traced, he thinks, even to the earliest period of Christianity. The Gospel sermons do not always realise the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... attesting the splendor it enjoyed, when for thirty years the Papal Court was held there, and the gray, weather-beaten, irregular building, resembling a pile of precipitous rocks, echoed with the revels of licentious prelates. We could not enter to learn the terrible secrets of the Inquisition, here unveiled, but we looked up at the tower, from which the captive Rienzi was liberated at ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... neighbor as before some lurking traitor. Hypocrisy became an instinct of self-preservation; every one carefully avoided speaking of those things of which the heart was full, and Berlin afforded an insight into the mental condition of the people of Spain during the most flourishing period of the Inquisition, or of Venice in the days when anonymous denunciations poured into the yawning jaws of the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... to know whether the tribunal of the Inquisition was ever established elsewhere in France than at Toulouse. Can any of your correspondents enlighten me on the point, and ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... S. Henley (see Vathek, 1893, p. 236). According to Pococke (Porta Mosis, 1654, Notae Miscellaneae, p. 241), the angels Moncar and Nacir are black, ghastly, and of fearsome aspect. Their function is to hold inquisition on the corpse. If his replies are orthodox (de Mohammede), he is bidden to sleep sweetly and soundly in his tomb, but if his views are lax and unsound, he is cudgelled between the ears with iron rods. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... artificial fecundation, afterwards published independently. In 1883, the Bordeaux legal tribunal declared that artificial fecundation was illegitimate, and a social danger. In 1897, the Holy See also pronounced that the practice is unlawful ("Artificial Fecundation before the Inquisition," British Medical Journal, March 5, 1898). Apart, altogether, from this attitude of medicine, law, and Church, it would certainly seem that those who desire offspring would do well, as a rule, to adopt the natural method, which is also the best, or else to abandon ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the East said delayed menstruation due to a devil was its cause; the thrashing-out of the devil its cure. Chinese legends describe it, and its symptoms were ascribed by the Inquisition to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap, shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of the Inquisition—or as readily have participated in visiting Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin—or what it ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... The dusk faded into night. Here and there about the post lights began to twinkle. We stood about in the ante-room, silent under the vigilant eye of the guard. After an uncertain period of waiting, the orderly called "Gordon MacRae," and the inquisition began. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... name of the Old Religion, adjudged the saints and fathers of the Christian Church to death, in all its most dreadful forms; and which afterwards, in the name of the New Religion, enforced the tortures of the Inquisition, amidst the shrieks and agonies of its victims, while it compelled Galileo to declare, in solemn denial of the great truth he had disclosed, that the earth did ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... highest room backwards. I conjured him "to conceal from all persons what I had told him of the Houyhnhnms; because the least hint of such a story would not only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition." The captain persuaded me to accept a suit of clothes newly made; but I would not suffer the tailor to take my measure; however, Don Pedro being almost of my size, they fitted me well enough. He accoutred me with other necessaries, all new, which I aired for twenty-four ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift |
