It is true that Pope Pius IX. inaugurated his reign with a display of toleration till then unparalleled in the annals of the Papacy. In 1846 a general amnesty was proclaimed by which thousands of prisoners and exiles were pardoned for crimes which they had never committed, or of which they had never been legally convicted; two years later the Jews were relieved from the necessity of listening to sermons; and daylight seemed at last to have dawned upon Rome. But this period of liberalism proved as transient as it was unprecedented. The reaction soon set in, and the influence of the Jesuits and of obscurantism was re-established. In 1856 the Pope issued an encyclical condemning somnambulism and clairvoyance, and bidding all bishops to suppress the anti-Christian practices. Nine years later he hurled an anathema against the Freemasons--the deadly enemies of the Inquisition. In brief, the pontificate of Pius IX., despite its promising beginning, is chiefly distinguished for two fresh victories over reason: the discovery of the Immaculate Conception and the invention of Papal Infallibility. ♦1858♦ Under such conditions it is not surprising that the Church should not hesitate to allow a nurse to baptize her Jewish charge secretly, and then, on the ground that the child was a Christian, to tear it from the arms of its parents, and rear it to be a monk and a persecutor of its own people. Obscurantism and oppression vanished from Rome only with the Pope’s authority. For the Jews, as for the Christians of Rome, light came in the train of Italian unity. Among other mediaeval barbarities which ceased on the day on which the Italian Army entered Rome were the Inquisition and the bondage of the Jews. Israel has outlived Temporal Power also. In the Vatican all facilities are now given for the study of Rabbinic and Talmudic literature, once condemned to the flames. The pestilent slums of the Ghetto have been wiped off the face of the earth, and there is nothing left to recall the days of darkness, save the grey old synagogue and, close by, the Tiber, murmuring the sad tales of a world that is past. ♦1808♦ In Spain also the Inquisition, suppressed by Napoleon, revived after his fall; but only as the shade of its former self. ♦1826♦ Its last victims were a Quaker and a Jew, the former hanged, the latter roasted. But even Spain had to follow the tide of the times. ♦1837♦ The Jews, pitilessly driven out of the country when Catholicism ruled the Peninsula, were readmitted as soon as Catholicism faded into a mere name. In 1881 the Spanish Government actually invited the Jews who fled from Russia to settle in its dominions. Seville, where the Holy Office had instituted its human sacrifices in 1480, now boasts a Hebrew synagogue. Israel has outlived the Spanish Inquisition also. ♦1821♦