"At the end of a month, he succeeded in obtaining another audience, and
added to his former confessions what he had remembered, for the first
time, touching the Inquisition. But they told him that that was not what
they wanted, and sent him back again. This was intolerable. In a frenzy
of despair he determined to commit suicide, if possible. Feigning
sickness, be obtained a physician who treated him for a fever, and
ordered him to be bled. Never calmed by any treatment of the physician,
blood-letting was repeated often, and each time he untied the bandage,
when left alone, hoping to die from loss of blood, but death fled from
him. A humane Franciscan came to confess him, and, hearing his tale of
misery, gave him kind words, asked permission to divulge his attempt
at self-destruction to the inquisitor, procured him a mitigation of
solitude by the presence of a fellow-prisoner, a negro, accused of
magic; but, after five months, the negro was removed, and his mind,
broken with suffering, could no longer bear up under the aggravated
load. By an effort of desperate ingenuity he almost succeeded in
committing suicide, and a jailer found him weltering in his blood and
insensible. Having restored him by cordials, and bound up his wounds,
they carried him into the presence of the inquisitor once more; where he
lay on the floor, being unable to sit, heard bitter reproaches, had his
limbs confined in irons, and was thus carried back to a punishment that
seemed more terrible than death. In fetters he became so furious, that
they found it necessary to take them off, and, from that time, his
examinations assumed another character, as he defended his positions
with citations from the Council of Trent, and with some passages of
scripture, which he explained in the most Romish sense, discovering
a depth of ignorance in Don Fernando that was truly surprising. That
'grand Inquisitor,' had never heard the passage which Dellon quoted to
prove the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, 'Except a man be born
of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.'
Neither did he know anything of that famous passage in the twenty-fifth
session of the Council of Trent, which declares that images are only to
be reverenced on account of the persons whom they represent. He
called for a Bible, and for the acts of the council, and was evidently
surprised when he found them where Dellon told him they might be seen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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