It only remains to mention here, the hypocritical manner in which the Inquisitors deliver over those who are sentenced to death, into the hands of the secular power. Having declared the condemned individual "an apostate heretic, a defaulter, and an abettor of heretics, and that he has thereby fallen into and incurred the sentence of grievous excommunication," &c. they, adding insult to cruelty, add, "Nevertheless we earnestly beseech and enjoin the said secular arm, to deal so tenderly and compassionately with him, as to prevent the effusion of blood, or danger of death!!" No words can do justice to such a masterpiece of hypocrisy; for let it be remembered that the Inquisition positively commands the civil magistrate to put the condemned to death. The gross falsehood of its professions, therefore—the aspect of meekness which it thus displays, while it thirsts for the blood of, and dooms to the flames, its wretched victim—literally prove that "there is no faithfulness in their mouth—that their inward part is very wickedness—and that their throat is an open sepulchre." "Is there in all history," says Dr. Geddes, "an instance of so gross and confident a mockery of God, and the world, as this of the Inquisition, beseeching the civil magistrate not to put the heretics they have condemned and delivered to them to death? For were they in earnest when they made this solemn petition to the secular magistrates, why do they bring their prisoners out of the Inquisition, and deliver them to those magistrates with coats painted over with flames? Why do they teach that heretics, above all other malefactors, ought to be punished with death? And why do they never resent the secular magistrates having so little regard to their earnest and joint petition, as never to fail to burn all the heretics that are delivered to them by the Inquisition, within an hour or two after they have them in their hands? And why, in Rome, where the supreme, civil, and ecclesiastical authority are lodged in the same person, is this petition of the Inquisition, which is made there as well as in other places, never granted?" The truth is, as already noticed, the Inquisitors are commanded by the bulls of various Popes, to compel the civil magistrate, under penalty of excommunication, and other ecclesiastical censures, within six days, readily to execute the sentences pronounced by the Inquisitors against heretics, that is, to commit them to the flames! FOOTNOTES: [14] Not only are persons against whom something has been proved subjected to this monstrous engine of Inquisitorial cruelty, for the purpose of drawing from them some additional confessions; those also who cannot make their innocence plainly appear to the Inquisitor, (and who can in a court so iniquitous?) who in the smallest degree contradict themselves, who faulter, tremble, or even turn pale, are considered guilty, and as such are condemned to the rack!