d eighty thousand persons, of whom about six thousand were
committed to the flames.

Inquisitors made no secret of their hatred towards heretics; to destroy
them they considered a sacred duty. Far from ashamed of their cruelty
towards heretics, they gloried in it, as undeniable evidence of their
enthusiasm in the cause of Christ. Simoncas, one of their most esteemed
writers, said, 'the heretics deserve not merely one death, but many
deaths; because a single death is the punishment of an ordinary heretic;
but these (the heretics) are deserving of punishment without mercy, and
particularly the teachers of the Lutheran heresy, who must by no means
be spared.' Pegma, another of their writers, insists, that dogmatical
heretics should be punished with death, even though they gave the most
unequivocal proof of their repentance.

That eminently pious monarch, Phillip the Second of Spain, so loved to
hear heretics groan, that he rarely missed Auto da Fes; at one of which
several distinguished persons were to be burnt for heresy; among the
rest Don John de Cesa, who while passing by him, said,' Sire, how can
you permit so many unfortunate persons to suffer? How can you be witness
of so horrid a sight without shuddering?' Phillip coolly replied, 'If my
son, sir, were suspected of heresy, I should myself hand him over to the
Inquisition.' 'My detestation,' continued he, 'of you and your
companions is so great, that I would act myself as your executioner, if
no other could be found.'

Phillip the Fifth, as may be seen in Coxe's Memoirs of the Kings of
Spain, 'presented about the year 1172, three standards taken from
'infidels' to our lady of Atocha; and sent another to the Pope, as the
grateful homage of the Catholic King to the head of the Church. He also,
for the first time, attended the celebration of an Auto da Fe, at which
in the commencement of his reign he had refused with horror to appear,
and witnessed the barbarous ceremony of committing twelve Jews and
Mohammedans to the flames.' So great during times inclined to religion
was inquisitorial power, that monarchs and statesmen of liberal
tendencies were constrained to quail before it. It is related that a
Jewish girl, entered into her seventeenth year, extremely beautiful, who
in a public _act of faith_, at Madrid, June 30th, 1680, together with
twenty others of the same nation of both sexes, being condemned to the
stake, turned herself to the Queen of Spain, then present,