A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

No modern European nation has endured such vicissitudes of good and evil fortune as the Spanish. From the virtual anarchy of the Castilian kingdoms under Juan II and Enrique IV,...

The belief that, by prolonged meditation and abstraction from the phenomenal world, the soul can elevate itself to the Creator, and can even attain union with the Godhead, has e...

The Inquisition may be said to have reached its apogee under Philip IV. We have had ample opportunity to see how that pious monarch yielded to its aggressiveness, until it becam...

In the undefined and widely extending jurisdiction of the Inquisition there were a number of matters, more or less connected with the faith, of which it assumed cognizance. Thei...

The culmination of sorcery was witchcraft and yet it was not the same. In it there is no longer talk of pact with the demon, express or tacit, to obtain certain results, with th...

Although the Spanish Inquisition was founded for the suppression of crypto-Judaism, it promptly vindicated its jurisdiction over all aberrations from the faith. There were, at t...

The seduction of female penitents by their confessors, euphemistically known as _solicitatio ad turpia_ or "solicitation," has been a perennial source of trouble to the Church s...

Joseph de Maistre, in his profound ignorance of the Inquisition, started the theory that it was a mere political agency.[537] Apologists, like Hefele, Gams, Hergenrother and oth...

Man's effort to supplement the limitations of his powers by the assistance of spiritual agencies, and to obtain foreknowledge of the future, dates from the earliest ages and is...

Jansenism is a convenient term wherewith to stigmatize as heresy whatever is displeasing to Ultramontanism, whether in Church or State, and it served as a pretext for the contin...

From an early period the Church assumed jurisdiction over marriage, derived from the function of the priest for its due celebration, and when, in the twelfth century, matrimony...

In the earlier period, Spanish orthodoxy seems to have been little troubled with free-thinking, nor, when this was encountered, does it seem to have been visited with the same v...

Few subjects have been so fertile as Free-Masonry in the growth of legend and myth. If we may believe some of its over-enthusiastic members, the Archangel Michael was the Grand...

Blasphemy is a somewhat elastic term but, for our purpose, it may, in a general way, be defined as imprecation derogatory or insulting to the Divinity. Punished with lapidation...