To recall the manifold horrors of the actual working of the Inquisition in Spain would be a painful and an odious task. To record them in any detail is surely superfluous; even though they are entirely denied by such eminent modern writers as Hefele, in Germany, or Menendez Pelayo, in Spain. The hidden enemy, the secret denunciation, the sudden arrest, the unknown dungeon, the prolonged interrogatory, the hideous torture, the pitiless judge, the certain sentence, the cruel execution, the public display of sacerdotal vengeance, the plunder of the survivors, innocent even of ecclesiastical offense--all these things are known to every reader of every history. All other considerations apart, it is an abuse of language to speak of the proceedings before the Inquisition as a trial, for the tribunal was nothing but a Board of Conviction. One acquittal in two thousand accusations was, according to Llorente, who had access to all the records of the Holy Office in Spain, about the proportion that was observed in their judicial findings. Statistics, as a rule, are not convincing, and figures are rarely impressive; yet it may be added that, according to Llorente’s cautious estimate, over ten thousand persons were burned alive during the eighteen years of Torquemada’s supremacy alone; that over six thousand more were burned in effigy either in their absence or after their death, and their property acquired by the Holy Office; while the number of those whose goods were confiscated, after undergoing less rigorous punishments, is variously computed at somewhat more or somewhat less than one hundred thousand. But it is obvious that even these terrible figures give but a very feeble idea of the vast sum of human suffering that followed the steps of this dreadful institution. For they tell no tale of the thousands who died, and the tens of thousands who suffered, in the torture chamber. They hardly suggest the anguish of the widow and the orphan of the principal victims, who were left, bereaved and plundered, to struggle with a hard and unsympathetic world, desolate, poor, and disgraced.