Welcome to the Jesuits by James Wiley. We're continuing to read at page 43 for this reading. This Reformation MP3 audio resource is a production of Stillwaters Revival Books Many free Puritan and Reformed resources, as well as our complete online catalog containing classic and contemporary Reformation books, digital downloads, MP3s, videos, DVDs, CDs, and the Puritan hard drive at great discounts, are on the web at puritandownloads.com. Also, please consider, pray and act upon, the important truths found in the following quotation by Charles Spurgeon, quote, as the apostle says to Timothy, so also he says to everyone, give yourself to reading. He who will not use the thoughts of other men's brains proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers and expositions of the Bible. 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But we only authorize this as long as the full contents of the message, including the header and trailer, is not altered in any way. and as long as the audio file is given away for free. And now to SWRB's reading of The Jesuits by James Wiley, which we hope you find to be a great blessing, in which we pray draws you nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ. For he is the way, the truth, and the life. And no man comes to the Father but by him, John 14, 6. Well, as we said, we're on page 43 of this work. Chapter 9, Commercial Enterprises and Banishments. Of the entrance of the Jesuits into England, the arts they employed, the disguises they wore, the seditions they sewed, the snares they laid for the life of the sovereign, and the plots they concocted for the overthrow of the Protestant Church. We shall have an opportunity of speaking when we come to narrate the history of Protestantism in Great Britain. we consider their career in Poland. Cardinal Hosius opened the gates of this country to the Jesuits. Till then, Poland was a flourishing country, united at home, powerful abroad. Its literature and science during the half-century preceding had risen to an eminence that placed Poland on a par with the most enlightened countries of Christendom. It enjoyed a measure of toleration which was then unknown to most of the nations of Europe. Foreign Protestants fled to it as a refuge from the persecution to which they were exposed in their native land, bringing to their adopted country their skill, their wealth, and their energy. Its trade increased, and its towns grew in population and riches. Italian, German, French, and Scottish Protestant congregations existed at Krakow, Vilna, and Postenia. Such was Poland before the fruit of the Jesuits and the foot of the Jesuit had touched its soil. But from the hour that the disciples of Loyola entered the country, Poland began to decline. The Jesuits became supreme at court. The monarch, Sigismund III, gave himself entirely up to their guidance. No one could hope to rise in the state who did not pay court to them. The education of youth was wholly in their hands. The effects became speedily visible. in the decay of literature, and the growing decrepitude of the national mind. At home, the popular liberties were attacked in the persons of the Protestants, and abroad the nation was humiliated by a foreign policy inspired by the Jesuits, which drew upon the country the contempt and hostility of neighboring powers. These evil courses of intrigue and faction within the country, and impotent and arrogant policy outside of it, persisted in, till the natural issue was reached in the partition of Poland. It is at the door of the Jesuits that the fall of that once enlightened, prosperous, and powerful nation is to be laid. It concerns us less to follow the Jesuits into those countries which lie beyond the boundaries of Christendom, unless in so far as their doings in these regions may help to throw light on their principles and tactics, In following their steps among heathen nations and savage races, it's alike impossible to withhold our admiration of their burning zeal and intrepid courage, or our wonder at their prodigiously rapid success. No sooner had the Jesuit missionary set foot on a new shore, or preached, by an interpreter it might be, his first sermon in a heathen city, than his converts were to be counted in tens of thousands. Speaking of their missions in India, Sakinas, their historian, says that 10,000 men were baptized in the space of one year. When the Jesuit mission to the East Indies was set on foot in 1559, Torres procured royal letters to the Portuguese viceroys and governors, empowering them to lend their assistance to the missionaries for the conversion of the Indians. This shortened the process wonderfully. All that had to be done was to ascertain the place where the natives were assembled for some religious festival and surround them with a troop of soldiers who, with leveled muskets, offered them the alternative of baptism. The rite followed immediately upon the acceptance of the alternative. Next day, the baptized were taught the sign of the cross. In this excellent and summary way was the evangelization of the island of Goa effected. By similar methods do they attempt to plant the Popish faith and establish their own dominion in Abyssinian and also at Mozambique 1560 on the opposite coast of Africa. One of the pioneers, Ovido, who had entered Ethiopia, wrote thus to the Pope, quote, he must be permitted to inform his holiness that with the assistance of 500 or 600 Portuguese soldiers, He could at any time reduce the empire of Abyssinia to the obedience of the pontificate. And when he considered that it was a country surrounded with territories abounding with the finest gold and promising a rich harvest of souls to the church, he trusted His Holiness would give the matter further consideration." The emperor of Ethiopia was gained by flatteries and miracles. A terrible persecution was raised against the native Christians. Thousands were massacred. But at last, the king, having detected the authors of these barbarities, plotting against his own life and throne, they were ignominiously expelled the country. Having secured the territory of Paraguay, a Portuguese possession in South America, The Jesuits founded a kingdom there and became its sovereigns. They treated the natives at first with kindness and taught them several useful arts, but by and by they changed their policy, and reducing them to slavery compelled them to labor for their benefit. Dealing out to the Paraguayan peasant from the produce of his own toil, And as much as would suffice to feed and clothe him, the fathers laid up the rest in large storehouses which they had erected for the purpose. They kept carefully concealed from the knowledge of Europe this seemingly exhaustless source of wealth that no one else might share its sweets. They continued all the while to draw from it those vast sums wherewith they carried on their business in the old world. With the gold wrung from the Paraguayan peasants' toil, they hired spies, bribed courtiers, opened new missions, and maintained that pomp and splendor of their establishments by which the populace were dazzled. Their establishments in Brazil formed the basis of a great and enriching trade of which Santa Fe and Buenos Aires were the chief depots. But the most noted episode of this kind in their history is that of Father Lavalette, 1756. He was visitor general and apostolic prefect of their missions in the West Indies. He organized offices in San Domingo, Granada, San Lucia, San Vincente, and other islands, and drew bills of exchange on Paris, London, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon, Cadiz, Leghorn, and Amsterdam. His vessels loaded with riches comprising, besides colonial produce, black slaves and crossed the sea continually. Trading on credit, they professed to give the property of the society as security. Their methods of business were abnormal. Treaties obeyed by other merchants they disregarded. Neutrality laws were nothing to them. They hired ships which were used as traders or privateers, as suited them, and sailed under whatever flag was convenient. At last, however, came trouble to these fathers who were making, as the phrase is, the best of both worlds. The brothers Leonci and Geoffrey of Marseille had accepted their bills for a million and a half of livres, to cover which two vessels had been dispatched for Martinique with merchandise to the value of two millions. Unfortunately for the fathers, the ships were captured at sea by the English. The House of Leonci and Jouffry asked the superior of the Jesuits in Marseille for 4,000 livres as past and part payment of their debt to save them from bankruptcy. The father replied that the society was not answerable. but he offered the brothers Leonce and Jerphy the aid of their prayers, fortified by the masses which they were about to say for them. The masses would not fill the coffers which the Jesuits had emptied, and accordingly the merchants appealed to Parliament, craving a decree for payment of the debt. The appeal was allowed, and the Jesuits were condemned to honor the bills drawn by their agent. At this critical moment, the general of the society died. delay was inevitable. The new general sent all the funds he could raise, but before these supplies could reach Marseille, Leonce and Jouffre had become bankrupt, involving in their misfortune their connections in all parts of France. Well, now that the ruin had come and publicity was inevitable, the Jesuits refused to pay the debt, pleading that they were protected from the claims of their creditors by their constitutions. The cause now came to a public hearing. After several pleas had been advanced and abandoned, the Jesuits took their final stand on the argument which, in an evil hour for themselves, they had put forth at first in their defense. Their rules, they said, forbade them to trade, and the fault of individual members could not be punished upon the order. They were shielded by their constitutions. The Parliament ordered these documents to be produced. They had been kept secret until now. They were laid before Parliament on the 16th of April, 1761. The result was disastrous for the Jesuits. They lost their cause and became much more odious than before. The disclosure revealed Jesuitism to men as an organization based on the most iniquitous maxims and armed with the most terrible weapons for the accomplishment of their purposes, which was to plant their own supremacy on the ruin of society. The constitutions were one of the principal grounds of the decree for the extinction of the order in France in 1762. That political kingdoms and civil communities should feel the order a burden too heavy to be borne is not to be wondered at when we reflect that even the popes, of whose throne it was the pillar, have repeatedly decreed its extinction. Strange as it may seem, The first bolt in later times that fell on the Jesuits was launched by the hand of Rome. Benedict IV, by a bull issued in 1741, prohibited them from engaging in trade and making slaves of the Indians. In 1759, Portugal, finding itself on the brink of ruin by their intrigues, shook them off. This example was soon followed in France, as we've already narrated. Even in Spain, with all its devotion to the Papal See, all the Jesuit establishments were surrounded one night in 1767 with troops. And the whole fraternity, amounting to 7,000, were caught and shipped off to Italy. Immediately thereafter, a similar expulsion befell them in South America. Naples, Malta, Parma were the next to drive them from their soil. The severest blow was yet to come. Clematha XIII, hitherto their firm friend, yielding at last to the unanimous demands of all the Roman Catholic courts, summoned a secret conclave for the suppression of the order. A step necessary, said the brief of his successor, in order to prevent Christians rising one against another and massacring one another in the very bosom of our common mother, the Holy Church. Clement died suddenly the very evening before the day appointed for the conclave. Lorenzo Gangagneli was elevated to the vacant chair under the title of Clement XIV. Gangagneli was studious, learned of pure morals and of genuine piety. From the schoolmen, he turned to the fathers. Forsaking the fathers, he gave himself to the study of the Holy Scriptures. where he learned on what rock to fix the anchor of his faith. Clement XIV strove for several years with honest but mistaken zeal to reform the order. His efforts were fruitless. On the 21st of July, 1773, he issued the famous bull Dominus Ac Redemptor Noster by which he dissolved and forever annihilated the order as a corporate body. at a moment when it counted 22,000 members. The bull justifies itself by a long and formidable list of charges against the Jesuits. Had this accusation proceeded from a Protestant pen, it might have been regarded as not free from exaggeration, but coming from the papal chair, it must be accepted as the sober truth. The Bull of Clement charged them with raising various insurrections and rebellions with plotting against bishops, undermining the regular monastic orders, and invading pious foundations and corporations of every sort, not only in Europe, but in Asia and America, to the danger of souls and the astonishment of all nations. It charged them with engaging in trade, and that instead of seeking to convert the heathen, they had shown themselves intent only on gathering gold and silver and precious jewels. They had interpolated pagan rites and manners with Christian beliefs and worship. They had set aside the ordinance of the church and substituted opinions which the apostolic chair had pronounced fundamentally erroneous and evidently subversive of good morals. Tumults, disturbances, violences had followed them in all countries. In fine, they had broken the peace of the church. and so incurably that the pontificates of his predecessors, Urban VIII, Clement IX, X, XI, and XII, Alexander VII and VIII, Innocent X, XI, XII, and XIII, and Benedict XIV had been passed in abortive attempts to reestablish the harmony and concord which they had destroyed. It was now seen that the peace of the church would never be restored while the order existed and hence the necessity of the bull, which dispossessed the Jesuits of every office, service, and administration, took away from them their houses, schools, hospitals, estates, withdrew all their statutes, usages, decrees, customs, and ordinances. and pronounced all the power of the general, provincial, visitors, and every other head of the same order, whether spiritual or secular, to be forever annulled and suppressed. The present ordinance, said the bull in conclusion, shall remain in full force and operation from henceforth and forever." Nothing but the most tremendous necessity could have made Clement XIV issue this bull. He knew well how unforgiving was the pride and how deadly the vengeance of the society. And he did not conceal from himself the penalty he should have to pay for decreeing its suppression. On laying down his pen after having put his name to the bull, he said to those around him that he had subscribed his death warrant. The Pope was at that time in robust health. and his vigorous constitution and temperate habits promised a long life. But now, dark rumors began to be whispered in Italy that the pontiff would die soon. In April of the following year, he began to decline without any apparent cause. His illness increased. No medicine was of any avail. And after lingering in torture for months, he died September 22nd, 1774. Several days before his death, says Caraccioli, his bones were exfoliated and withered like a tree which, attacked at its roots, withers away and throws off its bark. The scientific men who were called in to embalm his body found the features livid, the lips black, the abdomen inflated, the limbs emaciated and covered with violet spots. The size of the heart was diminished, and all the muscles were shrunk up, and the spine was decomposed. They filled the body with perfumed and aromatic substances, but nothing could dispel mephitic effuvia. The suppression with which Clement XIV smote the Society of Jesus was eternal, but the forever of the bull lasted only in actual deed during the brief interval that elapsed between 1773 and 1814. That short period was filled up with the awful tempest of the French Revolution. To the fallen thrones and desecrated alders of which the Jesuits pointed as the monuments of the divine anger at the suppression of their order. Despite the bull of Clement, the Jesuits had neither ceased to exist nor ceased to act. Amid the storms that shook the world, they were energetically active. In revolutionary conventions and clubs, in war councils and committees, on battlefields they were present, guiding with unseen but powerful touch the course of affairs. Their maxim is, if despotisms will not serve them, to demoralize society and render government impossible, and from chaos to remodel the world anew. The Society of Jesus, which had gone out of existence before the Revolution, as men believed, started up in full force the moment after, prepared to enter on the work of molding and ruling the nations which had been chastised but not enlightened. Scarcely had Pius VII returned to the Vatican when, by a bull dated August 7, 1814, he restored the Order of Jesus. Thaddeus Borzodowski was placed at their head. Once more, the brotherhood stalked abroad in their black berettas. In no long time, their colleges, seminaries, and novitiates began to flourish in all the countries of Europe, Ireland, and England not accepted. Their numbers swelled by the sodalities of St. Vincent de Paul, brothers of the Christian doctrine, and other societies affiliated with the order became greater, perhaps, than they ever were at any former period. And their importance was vastly enhanced by the fact that the contest between the order and the papal chair ended, temporarily at any rate, in the enslavement of the popedom of which they inspired the policy, indicted the decrees, and wielded the power. Chapter 10, Restoration of the Inquisition. There is one arm of the Jesuits to which we have not yet averted. The weapon that we refer to was not indeed unknown to former times, but it had fallen out of order and had to be refurbished and made fit for modern exigencies. No small part of the success that attended the operations of the Jesuits was owing to their use of it. was the Inquisition. We've narrated in a former chapter the earnest attempt made at the Conference of Radisbon to find a basis of conciliation between the Protestant and the Popish churches. The way had been paved at Rome for this attempted reconciling of the two creeds by an infusion of new blood into the College of Cardinals. Gaspar Cantorini, a senator of Venice, who was known to hold opinions on the doctrine of justification differing very little, if at all, from those of Luther, was invested with the purple of the cardinalate. The chair of the Doge, almost within his reach, Contarini was induced to come to Rome and devote the influence of his high character and great talents to the doubtful experiment of reforming the papacy. By his advice, Several ecclesiastics, whose sentiments he approximated to his own, were added to the Sacred College, among others, Salileto, Gilberto Carafa, and Reginald Paul. In the end, these new elections but laid a basis for a more determined and bloody resistance to Protestantism. This was in the future, as yet. Meanwhile, the reforming measures, for which this change in the Cardinalate was to pave the way, were taken. Deputies were sent to the Ratespon conference with instructions to make such concessions to the reformers as might not endanger the fundamental principles of the papacy or strip the tiara of its supremacy. The issue was what we have announced in a previous part of our history. When the deputies returned from the diets and told Paul III that all their efforts to frame a basis of agreement between the two faiths had proved abortive, and that there was not a country in Christendom where Protestantism was not spreading, the Pope asked in alarm, what then is to be done? Cardinal Carafa and John Alvarez de Toledo, Bishop of Burgos, to whom the question was addressed, immediately made answer, reestablish the Inquisition. The proposal accorded well with the gloomy genius, unbending opinions, and stern bigotry of the men from whom it came. Carapha and Toledo were old Dominicans, the same order to whom Innocent III had committed the working of the Holy Tribunal when it was first set up. Men of pure but austere life, they were prepared to endure in their own persons or to inflict on the persons of others any amount of suffering and pain rather than permit the Roman Church to be overthrown. Re-establish the Inquisition, said Carapha. Let the Supreme Tribunal be set up in Rome. with subordinate branches ramifying over all Europe. Here in Rome must the successors of Peter destroy all the heresies of the whole world. The Jesuit historians take care to tell us that Carapha's proposal was seconded by a special memorial from the founder of their order, Ignatius Loyola. The bull reestablishing the Inquisition was published July 21st 1542. The, quote, holy office revived with terrors unknown to it in former ages. It had now a plentitude of power. Its jurisdiction extended over all countries. Not a man in all Christendom, however, exalted in rank or dignity, but was liable to be made answerable at its bar. The throne was no protection. The altar was no shield. Withered age and blooming youth, matron and maiden, might any hour be seized by its familiars and undergo the question in the dark underground chamber, where behind a table, with its crucifix and taper, sat the inquisitor, his stern, pitiless features surmounted by his black cow, and all around the instruments of torture. Till the most secret thought had been wrung out of the breast, no mercy was to be shown, For the Inquisitor to feel the least pity for his writhing victim was to debase himself, as such were the instructions drafted by Carapha. The history of the man who restored the Inquisition is one of great interest and more than ordinary instruction, but it is touchingly sad. Carapha had been a member of the Oratory of Divine Love, which was a little circle of moderate reformers. that held its sittings in the Trastevere at Rome and occupied, as regarded the reform of the Roman Church, a position midway between the champions of things as they were and the company of decided adherents of the gospel, which held its reunions at Jaha in Naples, and of which we shall speak below. Carapha had tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come, but the gracious stirrings of the spirit and the struggles of his own conscience he had quelled. And from the very threshold of rest, which he was seeking in the gospel, he had cast himself again into the arms of an infallible church. With such a history, it was not possible that Carapha could act a middle part. He threw himself with sterner zeal into the dreadful work of reviving the Inquisition than did even Paul III, under whom he served and whom he was destined to succeed. Carapha, says the historian Ranke, lost not a moment in carrying this edict into execution. He would have thought it waste of time to wait for the usual issue of means from the apostolic treasury, and though by no means rich, he hired a house for immediate proceedings at his own expense. This he fitted up with rooms for the officers and prisons for the accused, supplying the latter with strong bolts and locks, with dungeons, chains, blocks, and every other fearful appurtenance of his office. He appointed commissioner generals for the different countries. The resolution to restore the Inquisition was taken at a critical moment for Italy and all the countries south of the Alps, The dawn of the Protestant day was breaking around the very throne of the Pope. From the city of Ferrara in the north, where the daughter of Louis XII, the correspondent of Calvin, sheltered in her palace the disciples of the gospel, to the ancient Parthenon, which looks down from its fig and aloe-covered heights upon the calm waters of its bay, the light was breaking in a clearness and fullness that gave promise that in proportion to the depth of the previous darkness, so would be the splendors of the coming day. Distinguished as the land of the Renaissance, Italy seemed about to become yet more distinguished as the land of Protestantism. At the foot of Fiesco and in that Florence on which Cosimo and the brilliant group of scholars around him had so often looked down while they talked of Plato, There were men who had learned a better knowledge than that which the Greek sage had taught. In Padua, in Bologna, in Lucca, in Modena, in Rome, and in other cities of classic fame, some of the first families had embraced the gospel. Men of rank in the state and of eminence in the church, persons of mark in the Republic of Letters, orators, poets, and some noble ladies as eminent for their talents as for their birth. were not ashamed to enroll themselves among the disciples of that faith, which the Lutheran princes had confessed at Augsburg, and which Calvin was propagating from the little town on the shores of the Le Mans, then beginning to attract the notice of the world. But of all the Protestant groups now forming in Italy, none equaled in respect of brilliance, of rank, luster of talent, and devotion of faith than that which had gathered around Juan de Valdez on the lovely shore of Naples. This distinguished Spaniard had been forced to leave the court of Charles V and his native land for the sake of the gospel. On the western arm of the Bay of Naples, hard by the tomb of Virgil, looking down on the calm sea and the picturesque island of Capri with the opposite shore on which Vesuvius, with its pennant of white vapor atop, kept watch over the cities, which 1,400 years before it had wrapped in a winding sheet of ashes and enclosed in a tomb of lava, was placed the Villa of Valdez. There his friends often assembled to discuss the articles of the Protestant creed. and confirm one another in their adherence to the gospel. Among these was Peter Martyr of Vermigli, prior of St. Peter's Adharam. In the wilderness of Romanism, the prior had become parched with thirst, for no water could he find that could refresh his soul. Valdez led him to a fountain, whereat Martyr drank and thirsted no more. In his turn, he zealously led others to the same living stream. Another member of that Protestant band was Caserta, a Neapolitan nobleman. He had a young relative, then wholly absorbed in the gaieties and splendors of Naples. Him, Caserta introduced to Valdez. This was Galeazzo Caraccioli, only son of the Marquis of Vico, who embraced the gospel with his whole heart. And when the tempest dispersed the brilliant company to which he had joined himself, leaving his noble palace, his rich patrimony, his virtuous wife, his dear children, and all his flourishing honors, he cleaved to the cross. And repairing to Geneva was there, in the words of Calvin, content with our littleness and lives frugally according to the habits of the commonality, neither more nor less than any one of us. In 1536, this select society received another member. Bernardino Occhino, the great orator of Italy, came at that time to Naples to preach the Lent sermons. A native of Siena, he assumed the cowl of St. Francis, which he afterwards exchanged for the frock of the more rigid order of the Capuchins. He was so eloquent that Charles V said of him, that man is enough to make the stones weep. His discourses were impregnated with the great principles of the Protestant faith, and his eloquence drew overwhelming crowds to the church of St. Giovanni Maggiore, where he was now preaching. His accession to the society around Valdez gave it great additional strength, for the preacher was daily scattering the seeds of divine truth among the common people. And not among these only, for persons of all ranks crowded to hear the eloquent cappuccino. Among his audience might be seen Gilia de Gonzaga, widow of the Duke of Trageto, reputed the most beautiful woman in Italy, and what was higher praise, one of the most humble and sincere of its Christians. And there was Vittoria Colonna, Marchioness of Pescaro, also renowned for the loveliness of her person, and not less renowned for her talents and virtues. And there was Pietro Carnesetti, the patrician of Florence, and a former secretary of Clement VII, now a disciple, and afterwards to be a martyr of the gospel. Such were the illustrious men and the highborn women that formed this Protestant propaganda in Naples. It comprehended elements of power which promised brilliant results in the future. It formed a galaxy of rank, talent, oratory, genius, and tact, adapted to all classes of the nation, and constituted, one would have thought, such an organization or bureau as was sure to originate and in due time accomplish the Reformation of Italy. The ravages the Gothic nations had inflicted, and the yet greater ravages of the papacy, were on the point of being repaired. The physical loveliness which Italy had known in her first days, and a moral beauty greater than she had ever known, were about to be restored to her. It was during those same years that Calvin was beginning his labors at Geneva, and fighting with the pantheistic libertines for a secure foothold on which to place his Reformation, that this little phalanx of devoted Protestant champions was formed on the shores of Naples. Of the two movements, the southern one appeared at that hour by much the more hopeful. Contemplated from a human point of view, it had all the elements of success, Here the flower of an ancient nation was gathering on its own soil to assay the noble task of evoking into a second development those mighty energies which had long slumbered but were not dead in the bosom of a race that had given arts and letters and civilization to the West. Every needful power and gift was present. And the little company here, Confederate, for the glorious enterprise Though small in numbers, this little host was great in names, comprehending as it did men of ancient lineage, of noble birth, of great wealth, of accomplished scholarship, of potential genius, and a poetical genius, and of popular eloquence. They could appeal, moreover, to a past of renown, the traditions of which had not yet perished, the memory of which might be helpful in the struggle to shake off the yoke of the present. These were surpassing advantages compared with the conditions of the movement of Geneva, a little town which had borrowed glory from neither letters nor arms. With a population rude, lawless, insolent, a diminutive territory, overshadowed on all sides by powerful and hostile monarchs, who stood with arm uplifted to strike down Protestantism should it here raise its head. And most discouraging of all, the movement was guided by but one man of note, And he a stranger, an exile, without the prestige of birth, or rank, or wealth. The movement at Geneva cannot succeed, and that at Naples cannot fail, so would we have said. But the battle of Protestantism was not to the strong. The world needs to have the lesson often repeated, that it is the truth of principles and not the grandeur of names that gives assurance of victory. The young vine planted beneath the towers of the ancient Parthenope in which was shooting forth so hopefully in the golden air of that classic region was to wither and die, while that which had taken root beneath the shadow of the Alps was to expand amid the rude blast of the Swiss mountains and stretch its boughs over Christendom. Chapter 11, The Tortures of the Inquisition. The reestablishment of the Inquisition decided the question of the reformation of Italy. The country, struck with this blow as it was lifting itself up, instantly fell back into the old gulf. It had become suddenly apparent that religious reform must be won with a great fight of suffering. Italy had not strength to press on through chains and dungeons and scaffolds to the goal she wished to reach. The prize was glorious, she saw, but the price was great. Pallavicino has confessed that it was the Inquisition that saved Italy from lapsing into Protestantism. The religious question had divided the Italians of that day into three classes. The bulk of the nation had not thought on the question at all, and harbored no purpose of leaving the Church of Rome. To them, the restoration of the Inquisition had no terrors. There was another in large class who had abandoned Rome, but who had not clearness to advance to the open profession of Protestantism. They were most to be pitied of all, should they fall into the hands of the Inquisitors, seeing they were too undecided either to decline or to face the horrors of the Holy Office. The third class were in no doubt as to the course they must pursue. They could not return to a church which they held to be superstitious. They had no alternative before them, but and provide for their safety by flight or await death in the fires of the Inquisition. The consternation was great, for the Protestants had not dreamed of their enemies having recourse to such violent measures. Numbers fled, and these fugitives were to be found in every city of Switzerland and Germany. Among these was Bernardino Ocino. on whose eloquent orations all ranks of his countrymen had been hanging but a few months before, and in whose audience the emperor himself might be seen when he visited Italy. Not, however, until he had been served with a citation from the Holy Office at Rome did Ocino make his escape. Flight was almost as bitter as death to the orator. He was leaving behind him the scene of those brilliant triumphs which he could not hope to renew on a foreign soil. Pausing on the summit of the great St. Bernard, he devoted a few moments to those feelings of regret which were so natural on abandoning so much that he could not hope ever again to enjoy. He then went forward to Geneva, but alas, the best days of the eloquent monk were passed. At Geneva, Ocino's views became tainted and obscured with the new philosophy, which was beginning to air itself at that young school of pantheism. Peter Martyr Vermigli soon followed. He was presiding over the convent of his order in Lucca. When the storm came with such sudden violence, he set his house in order and fled. but it was discovered after he was gone that the heresy remained, although the heretic had escaped, his opinions having been embraced by many of the Lucis monks. The same was found to be the case with the order to which Ocino belonged, the Capuchins namely, and the Pope at first meditated as the only cure, the suppression of both orders. Peter Martyr went ultimately to Strasbourg and a place was found for him in its university. where his lamp continued to burn clearly to the close. Juan de Valdez died before the tempest burst, which drove beyond the Alps so many of the distinguished group that had formed itself around him at Pasolipo and saw not the evil days which came on his adopted country. But the majority of those who had embraced the Protestant faith were unable to escape. They were immured in the prisons of the various Holy Offices throughout Italy. Some were kept in dark cells for years in the hope they would recant. Others were quickly relieved by martyrdom. The Restorer of the Inquisition, the once-reforming Carapha, mounted the papal chair under the name of Paul IV. The rigors of the Holy Office were not likely to be relaxed under the new Pope. Twenty years were needed to enable the torture and the stake to annihilate the Protestants of Italy. Of those who suffered martyrdom, we shall mention only two. Amolio, a Bolognese professor, renowned throughout Italy for his learning and his pure life, and Tisarano, a native of Perugia. On the 15th of September, 1553, an assembly of the Inquisition, consisting of six cardinals with their Episcopal assessors, was held with great pomp at Rome. A train of prisoners with burning tapers in their hands was led in before the tribunal. All of them recanted, save Mollio and Tiserano. On leave being given them to speak, Mollio broke out, as says Macri, in a strain of bold and fervid invective, which chained them to their seats at the same time that it cut them to the quick. He rebuked his judges for their lewdness, their avarice, and their bloodthirsty cruelty, and concluded as follows. Wherefore, I appeal from your sentence and summon you, cruel tyrants and murderers, to answer before the judgment seat of Christ at the last day. where your pompous titles and gorgeous trappings will not dazzle, nor your guards and torturings apparatus terrify us. And in testimony of this, take back that which you have given me." And it's saying this, he threw the flaming torch, which he held in his hand on the ground and extinguished it. galled and gnashing upon him with their teeth like the persecutors of the first Christian martyrs, the cardinals ordered Mullio, together with his companion, who approved of the testimony he had borne, to instant execution. They were conveyed accordingly to the Campo del Fiore, where they died with the most pious fortitude. The eight years that elapsed between 1534 and 1542 are notable ones in the annals of Protestant Christianity. That epoch witnessed the birth of three movements which were destined to stamp a character upon the future of Europe, powerfully to modify the conflict then in progress in Christendom. In 1534, the Jesuits recorded their first vow. in the Church of Montmartre in Paris. In 1540, their society was regularly launched by the papal edict. In 1542, Paul III issued the bull for the reestablishment of the Inquisition. And in 1541, Calvin returned to Geneva to prepare that spiritual army that was to wage battle with Jesuitism backed by the Inquisition. The meeting of these dates The contemporaneous rise of these three instrumentalities is sufficiently striking and is one of the many proofs which we meet in history that there is an eye watching all that is done on earth. That never does an agency start up to destroy the world, but there's set over against it a yet more powerful agency to convert the evil it would inflict into good. It is one of these great epics at which we have arrived. Jesuitism, the consummation of error, the Inquisition, the maximum of force, stand up and array themselves against a now developed, fully developed Protestantism. In following the steps of the combatants, we shall be led in succession to the mountains of the Waldenses, to the cities of France, to the swamps of Holland, to the plains of Germany, to Italy, to Spain, to England and Scotland. round the whole of Christendom will roll the tide of this great battle, casting down one nation into the darkness of slavery, lifting up another into the glory of freedom, and causing the gigantic crimes of the persecutor and the despot to be forgotten in the excelling splendor of the patriot and the martyr. This is the struggle with the record of which we shall presently be occupied. Meanwhile, we proceed to describe one of those few inquisitions that remain to this day in almost the identical state in which they existed when the Holy Office was being vigorously worked. This will enable us to realize more vividly the terror of that weapon which Paul III prepared for the hands of the Jesuits and the divine power of that faith which enabled the confessors of the gospel to withstand and triumph over it. Turn we now to the town of Nuremberg in Bavaria, the zeal with which Duke Albert, the sovereign of Bavaria, entered into the restoration of Roman Catholicism we've already narrated. To further the movement, he provided every one of the chief towns of his dominions with a holy office, and the Inquisition of Nuremberg still remains an anomalous and horrible monument in the midst of a city where the memorials of an exquisite art and the meetings of an unrivaled genius meet one at every step. We shall first describe the Chamber of Torture. The house so-called immediately adjoins the imperial castle, which from its lofty site looks down on the city, whose Gothic towers, sculptured fronts and curiously ornamented gables are seen covering both banks of the pendix, which rolls below. The house may have been the guard room of the castle. It derives its name, the torture chamber, not from the fact that the torture was here inflicted, but because into this one chamber has been collected a complete set of the instruments of torture gleaned from the various inquisitions that formerly existed in Bavaria. A glance suffices to show the whole dreadful apparatus by which the inheritance of Rome sought to maintain her dogmas. Placed next to the door and greeting the site as one enters is a collection of hideous masks. These represent creatures monstrous of shape and malignant and fiendish of nature. It is in beholding them that we begin to perceive how subtle was the genius that devised this system of coercion and that it took the mind as well as the body of the victim into account. In gazing on them, one feels as if he had suddenly come into polluting and debasing society and had sunk to the same moral level with the creatures here figured before him. He suffers a conscious abatement of dignity and fortitude. persecutor had calculated, doubtless, that the effect produced upon the mind of his victim by these dreadful apparitions would be that he would become morally relaxed, less able to sustain his cause. Unless of strong mind, indeed, the unfortunate prisoner, on entering such a place and seeing himself encompassed with such unearthly and hideous shapes, must have felt as if he were the vile heretic which the persecutor styled him. and as if already the infernal den had opened its portals and sent forth its venomous swarms to bid him welcome. Yourself accursed with accursed beings are you henceforth to dwell. Such was the silent language of these abhorred images. We pass on into the chamber where more dreadful sights meet our gaze. It is hung round and round with instruments of torture so numerous that it would take a long while even to name them and so diverse that it would take a much longer time to describe them. We must take them in groups for it were hopeless to think of going over them one by one and particularizing the mode in which each operated and the ingenuity and art with which all of them have been adapted to their horrible end. These were instruments for compressing the fingers, for example. until the bones should be squeezed to splinters. There were instruments for probing below the fingernails till an exquisite pain like a burning fire would run along the nerves. There were instruments for tearing out the tongue, for scooping out the eyes, for grubbing up the ears. There were bunches of iron cords with a spiked circle at the end of every whip for tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare. There were iron cases for the legs, which were tightened upon the limb placed in them by means of a screw, till flesh and bone were reduced to a jelly. There were cradles set full of sharp spikes in which victims were laid and rolled from side to side, the wretched occupant being pierced at each movement of the machine with innumerable sharp points. There were iron ladles with long handles for holding molten lead or boiling pitch to be poured down the throat of the victim and convert his body into a burning cauldron. There were frames, frames with holes to admit the hands and feet so contrived that the person put into them had his body bent into unnatural and painful positions And the agony grew greater and greater by moments, and yet the man did not die. There were chestfuls of small but more ingeniously constructed instruments for pinching, probing, or tearing the more sensitive parts of the body, and continuing the pain up to the very verge where reason or life gives way. On the floor and walls of the apartment were other and larger instruments for the same fearful end, lacerating, mangling, and agonizing living men. But these we shall meet in other dungeons we are yet to visit. The first impression on entering the chamber was one of bewildering horror. A confused procession of mangled, mutilated, agonizing men, speechless in their great woe, the flesh peeled from off their livid sinews, the sockets where eyes had been, hollow and empty, seemed to pass before one. The most dreadful scenes which the great genius of Dante has imagined appeared tame in comparison with the spectral groups which this chamber summoned up. The first impulse was to escape, lest images of pain, memories of tormented men who were made to die a hundred deaths in one should take hold of one's mind, never again to be effaced from it. The things we have been surveying are not the mere models of the instruments made use of in the Holy Office. They are the veritable instruments themselves. We see before us the actual implements by which hundreds and thousands of men and women, many of them saints and confessors of the Lord Jesus, were torn, mangled, and slain. These terrible realities the men of the 16th century had to face and endure or renounce the hope of the life eternal. Painful they were to flesh and blood, nay, not even endurable by flesh and blood unless sustained by the spirit of the mighty God. We leave the torture chamber to visit the Inquisition proper. We go eastward, about half a mile, keeping close to the northern wall of the city, till we come to an old tower, styled in the common parlance of Nuremberg, the Max Tower. We pull the bell, the iron handle and chain of which are seen suspended beside the doorpost. The Cicerone appears, carrying a bunch of keys, a lantern, and some half a dozen candles. The lantern is to show us our way, and the candles are for the purpose of being lighted and stuck up at the turnings in the dark underground passages which we're about to traverse. Should mischance befall our lantern, these tapers, like beacon lights in a narrow creek, will pilot us safely back into the day. The Cicero, selecting the largest from the bunch of keys, inserts it in the lock of the massy portal before which we stand. Bolt after bolt is turned, and the door, with horse heavy groan as it turns on its hinge, opens slowly to us. We begin to descend. We go down one flight of steps. We go down a second flight. We descend yet a third. And now we pause a moment. The darkness is intense, for here never came the faintest glimmer of day, but a gleam thrown forward from the lantern showed us that we were arrived at the entrance of a horizontal narrow passage. We could see by the flickering of the light upon its sides and roof that the corridor we were traversing was hewn out of the rock. We had gone only a few paces when we were brought up before a massy door. As far as the dim light served us, we could see the door, old, powdery with dust, and partly worm-eaten. Passing in, the corridor continued, and we went forward other three paces or so, when we found ourselves before a second door. We opened and shut it behind us, as we did the first. Again, we began to thread our way. A third door stopped us. We opened and closed it in like manner. Every step was carrying us deeper into the heart of the rock, multiplying the barriers between us and the upper world. We were shut in with the thick darkness and the awful silence. We began to realize what must have been the feelings of some unhappy disciple of the gospel, surprised by the familiars of the Holy Office, led through the midnight streets of Nuremberg, conducted to Max Tower, led down flight after flight of stairs, and along this horizontal shaft in the rock, and at every few paces a massy door with its locks and bolts closing behind him. He must have felt how utterly he was beyond the reach of human pity and human aid. No cry, however piercing, could reach the ear of man through these roofs of rock. He was entirely in the power of those who had brought him thither. At last we came to a side door in the narrow passage. We halted, applied the key, and the door, with its ancient mold creaking harshly as if moving on a hinge long disused, opened to let us in. We found ourselves in a rather roomy chamber. It might be about 12 feet square. This was the chamber of question. Along one side of the apartment ran a low platform, and there sat of old the inquisitors, three in number, the first a divine, the second a casuist, the third a civilian. The only occupant of that platform was the crucifix, or image of the Savior on the cross, which still remained. The six candles that usually burned before the Holy Fathers, quote unquote, were of course extinguished, but our lanterns supplied their place and showed us the grim furnishings of the apartment. In the middle was the horizontal rack or bed of torture on which the victim was stretched till bones started from bone, and his dislocated frame became the seat of agony, which was suspended only when it had reached a pitch that threatened death. Leaning against the wall of the chamber was the upright rack, which is simpler, but as an instrument of torture not less effectual than the horizontal one. There was the iron chain which wound over a pulley and hauled up the victim to the vaulted roof, and there were the two great stone weights which, tied to his feet and the iron cord let go, brought him down with a jerk that dislocated his limbs, while the spiky rollers which he grazed in his descent cut into and excoriated his back, leaving his body a bloody, dislocated mass. Here, too, was the cradle of which we have made mention above, amply garnished within with cruel knobs on which the sufferer, tied hand and foot, was thrown at every movement of the machine to be bruised all over and brought forth discolored, swollen, bleeding, but still living. All around, ready to hand, were hung the minor instruments of torture. There were screws and thumbkins for the fingers, spiked collars for the neck, iron boots for the legs, gags for the mouth, claws to cover the face and permit the slow percolation of water drop by drop down the throat of the person undergoing this form of torture. There were rollers set round with spikes, for bruising the arms and back. There were iron scourges, pincers and tongs for tearing out the tongue, slitting the nose and ears and otherwise disfiguring and mangling the body till it was horrible and horrifying to look upon it. There were other things of which an expert only could tell the name and the use. Had these instruments a tongue and could the history of this chamber be written, how awful the tale. We shall suppose that all this has been gone through, that the confessor has been stretched on the bed of torture, has been gashed, broken, mangled, and yet by power given him from above has not denied his Savior. He's been tortured, not accepting deliverance. What further punishment has the holy office in reserve for those from whom its torments have failed to extort a recantation? These dreadful dungeons furnish us with the means of answering this question. We return to the narrow passage and go forward a little way. Every few paces there comes a door, originally strong and massy and garnished with great iron knobs, but now old and moldy and creaking while open with a noise painfully loud in the deep stillness. The windings are numerous. But at every turning of the passage, a lighted candle is placed, lest peradventure the way should be missed and the road back to the living world be lost forever. A few steps are taken downwards very cautiously, for a lantern can barely show the ground. Here there is a vaulted chamber entirely dug out of the living rock, except the roof, which is formed of hewn stone. It contains an iron image of the Virgin, And on the opposite wall, suspended by an iron hook, is a lamp, which, when lighted, shows the goodly proportions of Our Lady. On the instant of touching a spring, the image flings open its arms, which resemble the doors of a cupboard, and which are seen to be stuck full on the inside with poignards, each about a foot in length. Some of these knives are so placed as to enter the eyes of those whom the image enfolded in its embrace. Others are set so as to penetrate the ears and brain, others to pierce the breast, and others again to gore the abdomen. The person who had passed through the terrible ordeal of the questioned chamber, but had made no recantation, would be led along the torturous passage by which he had come, by which we had come, and ushered into this vault were the first object that would greet his eye, the pale light of the lamp falling on it, would be the Iron Virgin. He would be bidden to stand right in front of the image. The spring would be touched by the executioner. The Virgin would fling open her arms, and the wretched victim would straightway be forced within them. Another spring was then touched. The Virgin closed upon her victim. A strong wooden beam fastened at one end to the wall by a movable joint, the other placed against the doors of the iron image was worked by a screw. And as the beam was pushed out, the spiky arms of the Virgin slowly but irresistibly closed upon the man, cruelly goring him. When the dreadful business was ended, It needed not that the executioner should put himself to the trouble of making the virgin unclasp the mangled carcass of her victim. Provision had been made for its quick and secret disposal. At the touching of a third spring, the floor of the image would slide aside and the body of the victim dropped down the mouth of a perpendicular shaft in the rock. We look down this pit and can see at a great depth the shimmer of water A canal had been made to flow underneath the vault where stood the Iron Virgin, and when she had done her work upon those who were delivered over to her tender mercies, she let them fall with quick descent and sullen plunge into the canal underneath, where they were floated to the Pegnitz, from the Pegnitz to the Rhine, and by the Rhine to the ocean, there to sleep beside the dust of husks and Jerome. 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