Bayle informs us, that the inquisition punished heretics by fire, to elude the maxim, _Ecclesia non novit sanguinem_; for burning a man, say they, does not shed _his blood_! Otho, the bishop at the Norman invasion, in the tapestry worked by Matilda, the queen of William the Conqueror, is represented with a _mace_ in his hand, for the purpose, that when he _dispatched_ his antagonist, he might not _spill blood_, but only break bones! Religion has had her quibbles as well as law. The establishment of this despotic order was resisted in France; but it may perhaps surprise the reader that a recorder of London, in a speech, urged the necessity of setting up an inquisition in England! It was on the trial of Penn the Quaker, in 1670, who was acquitted by the jury, which seems highly to have provoked the said recorder. “_Magna Charta_,” says the preface to the trial, “with the recorder of London, is nothing more than _Magna F——_!” It appears that the jury after being kept two days and two nights to change their verdict, were in the end both fined and imprisoned. Sir John Howell, the recorder, said, “Till now I never understood the reason of the policy and prudence of the Spaniards, in suffering the inquisition among them; and certainly it will not be well with us, till something _like unto the Spanish inquisition_ be in England.” Thus it will ever be, while both parties, struggling for pre-eminence, rush to the sharp extremity of things, and annihilate the trembling balance of the constitution. But the adopted motto of Lord Erskine must ever be that of every Briton, “_Trial by Jury_.” Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of seventy, so late as the year 1761, was burnt by these evangelical executioners. His trial was printed at Amsterdam, 1762, from the Lisbon copy. And for what was this unhappy Jesuit condemned? Not, as some imagined, for his having been concerned in a conspiracy against the King of Portugal. No other charge is laid to him in his trial, but that of having indulged certain heretical notions, which any other tribunal but that of the inquisition, would have looked upon as the deleterious fancies of a fanatical old man. Will posterity believe, that in the eighteenth century an aged visionary was led to the stake for having said, amongst other extravagances, “that the Virgin having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist, told him, that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies.”