Inquisition! Who knows its meaning better than the Jews? What people brought greater sacrifice to its bloody altars than they? Who has described it better than the Jew, _Samuel Usque_, the Jewish poet, whose lyre was silenced, and whose life was tortured out of his body by that very institution which he so eloquently and truthfully describes? "From Rome," he says, "a beast most monstrous, most ferocious, and most foul has come into our midst. Its very appearance strikes terror into every soul. When it raises its piercing, hissing, seething voice all Europe trembles. Its body is made of a composition of the hardest of steel and the deadliest of poison. In strength, in capacity for murder, in size and in speed it excels the fiercest of lions, the most poisonous of serpents, the tallest of elephants, and the speediest of eagles. Its very voice will kill quicker than the bite of the basilisk. Fire issues from its eyes, its jaws breathe forth flames. It lives from human bodies only. Wherever it comes, and though the sunshine in its noontide brightness, the densest darkness will at once set in. In its presence every blade of grass, every flower and blossom and tree, all wither and perish. Wherever it passes its pestiferous stench changes fertile valleys and luxurious fields and laughing meadows into unproductive deserts and howling wastes. Its name is _The Inquisition_." It was born in the early part of the thirteenth century. Fanaticism was its mother; its father was St. Dominic, who also was the father of the Dominican Order, and so the Inquisition and the Dominican friars were natural brothers, and "par nobile fratrum," a noble pair of brothers they were. Pope Innocent III. stood godfather to it. I fully sympathize with all past and present humanitarians in their efforts to wean men from the pernicious belief in the existence of Hell, but I can not accept their claims that Hell never existed. Hell did exist, not 10,000 leagues beneath the earth, but on its very face. Hell existed wherever the Inquisition lived. And Devils there were, too, and their names were "Dominican Monks." This ferocious beast-child came into this world with a mission: to detect, punish and suppress Heresy, Free Thought, and every Religious belief save that of the Church of St. Peter. Under Dominican nursing and training, it grew and prospered, and rapidly acquired a relentless exercise of its mission. Its heart was killed, its conscience stifled. It was never taught the meaning of the words pity and mercy. Scarcely was it full grown when it initiated its bloody career of 600 years of accursed life by a most cruel reign of terror in the southern provinces of France, where the presence and strength of the heretical _Albigenses_ and where the Moorish and Jewish civilization from across the Pyrenees had made themselves felt. The reign of terror ceased with the extermination of almost the entire population.