s. This is the reason why, in the church, the accused and the guilty
have but one and the same appellation. Whoever is arraigned at her
tribunal has heaven and earth against him; the interrogatory is already a
species of torture. When the church accuses, she seems already convinced;
all her efforts tend to extort the confession of the crime, which, in
virtue of her infallibility, she discovers in darkness; from this
anticipated conviction of the guilt of the accused are produced all those
ambushes and snares laid for the purpose of obtaining, by surprise, the
confession of the accused. The names of the witnesses are concealed or
falsified. Everywhere, in the most trifling details, it is strikingly
evident that, truth is on one side, and the demon on the other." [See
Tardiff, pp. 139, 140.]

In the second place, that Catholicism has produced the Spanish absolutism
of the Catholic kings is sufficiently shown by the very name given to
these kings.

"Another no less deplorable consequence of the position of the clergy in
Spain and Portugal is, that they have no sooner confounded the cause of
religion with that of despotism, than this error, producing its
consequences, leads to a monstrous abuse of the word of God. Political
fury has invaded the pulpit and stained it with abject and sacrilegious
adulation.... The lips, whose mission is to speak peace, charity and
mutual love, have spoken the language of hatred and vengeance; horrible
vows, abominable threats in the presence of the tabernacles in which
abides the Son of Man, who sacrificed his life for the salvation of his
brethren." [Affairs de Rome, pp. 250 to 254.]

"Spain, since Phillip II., has remained closed and uninfluenced by the
ordinary progress of the human mind elsewhere. The monkish and despotic
spirit has long preserved itself in the midst of ignorance, without,
indeed, acquiring strength from abroad, but at the same time without
permitting the intelligence of the nation to borrow foreign arms against
it." [Idem, p. 53.]

We shall now see this Spanish Catholicism at work; for three centuries,
assisted by its worthy offspring, absolutism and the Inquisition, and at
every ruin, at every crime you meet with, if you ask who has done this,
the reply will assuredly be: the church of the Pope, the tyranny of the
Catholic kings, the Inquisition of the priests. To convince yourselves of
the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of
history,