"'But, though out of hell,' says one who witnessed an auto-da-fé, 'there cannot possibly be a more lamentable spectacle than this, added to the sufferers (as long as they can speak) crying out, '_Misericordia por amor di Dios!_' (Mercy, for the love of God!) yet it is beheld by people of both sexes, and all ages, with such transports of joy and satisfaction as are not, on any other occasion, to be met with.' He adds, at another place: "'That the reader may not think that this inhuman joy is the effect of a natural cruelty that is in these people's dispositions, and not of the spirit of their religion, he may rest assured that all public malefactors, except heretics, have their violent deaths nowhere more tenderly lamented than amongst the same people, even when there is nothing in the manner of their deaths that appears inhuman or cruel.'" [18] See Appendix, No. II. [19] "The Inquisition," says Salgado, "is subject to no other laws, but arbitrarily racks souls, and murders bodies, of which there are clouds of witnesses,—men condemned, because the Inquisition would be cruel. What blasphemy in this tribunal ever to pretend to be actuated by a divine impulse, where every brick seems a conjuring spell, and every officer a tormenting fiend; for suppose a Jew, a Mahometan, or a Christian, in their hands, what do they pretend to do with such an one? Would they chastise him? What need have they then of so many officers? Why such scandalous methods, as a secret chamber, an unseen tribunal, invisible witnesses, a perfidious secretary, and merciless servants,—confiscation of goods through fraud and guile, keepers as hard hearted as the relentless walls, the fiscal mutes, the shameful sanbenitos, unrighteous racks, a theatre filled with horror to astonish the prisoner, a hypocritical sentence, a disguised executioner, and a peremptory judgment? In all the times of Paganism, no such Roman tribunal was ever erected. In their amphitheatres, men had not quite put off humanity; those condemned to die were exposed to wild beasts to be torn to pieces, they knew their executioner; but here the condemned are tormented by disguised ones;—men they should be by their shape, but devils by their fierceness and cruelty." [20] "I myself," says the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, "saw the pile on which the last victim was sacrificed to Roman infallibility. It was an unhappy woman whom the Inquisition of Seville committed to the flames, under the charge of heresy, about forty years ago, (this was written in 1825.) She perished on a spot where thousands had met the same fate. I lament from my heart, that the structure which supported their melting limbs, was destroyed during the late convulsions. It should have been preserved, with the infallible and immutable canon of the Council of Trent over it, for the detestation of future ages." [21] A copy of this work is to be found in the Franklin Library in Philadelphia. CHAPTER VI.