The Inquisition Unmasked

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. As the Inquisition awes its Origin to the Decline of Church-discipline and Remissness of the Clergy, it opposes Obstacles to their Reform, which is absolutely necessary if the Nation is to prosper. JVlOST monstrous as is the plan of the Inquisition, and, generally speaking, most reprehensible...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. As the Inquisition awes its Origin to the Decline of Church-discipline and Remissness of the Clergy, it opposes Obstacles to their Reform, which is absolutely necessary if the Nation is to prosper. JVlOST monstrous as is the plan of the Inquisition, and, generally speaking, most reprehensible the conduct of its ministers, the plan of my work would be still more absurd and myself more deserving of reproof if, after manifesting the vices of this tribunal, I were not to extend my researches to another object beyond that of its abolition. Persons belonging to the clergy were they who first founded it; clergymen they who dictated its laws; and individuals of the same class those who exercised the duties of its judicature and sustained its institutions with the greatest firmness and zeal. If so, ought not the whole responsibility to fall on this same clergy? And, if it has been this description of persons who were the authors of all the evils thebury observed, when consulted by Adrian IV., that the Church of Rome was not the mother, but the stepmother of the other churches; that her see was occupied by scribes and pharisees, and that the pope had really become almost insupportable. Owing to the same decline, the Fathers of the Council of Constance conceived the project, which was not realized, of reforming the church, not only in its members, but also in its head; and, for this reason, Pope Eugenius IV. in that of Basle went so far as to confess that the church had not a sound part in her whole body.t Commenting on this lamentable de- cline, Jacob of Paradise, monk of the Carthusian convent of Hertford, used to say that he feared it would last till the end of the world; since the great ones of the earth, and above all the ecclesiastics, were the most opposed to r...