in every house, diving into the secrets of every fireside, judging, and
executing its horrible decrees without responsibility. It condemned not
deeds, but thoughts. It affected to descend into individual conscience,
and to punish the crimes which it pretended to discover. Its process was
reduced to a horrible simplicity. It arrested on suspicion, tortured till
confession, and then punished by fire. Two witnesses, and those to
separate facts, were sufficient to consign the victim to a loathsome
dungeon. Here he was sparingly supplied with food, forbidden to speak, or
even to sing to which pastime it could hardly be thought he would feel
much inclination--and then left to himself, till famine and misery should
break his spirit. When that time was supposed to have arrived he was
examined. Did he confess, and forswear his heresy, whether actually
innocent or not, he might then assume the sacred shirt, and escape with
confiscation of all his property. Did he persist in the avowal of his
innocence, two witnesses sent him to the stake, one witness to the rack.
He was informed of the testimony against him, but never confronted with
the witness. That accuser might be his son, father, or the wife of his
bosom, for all were enjoined, under the death penalty, to inform the
inquisitors of every suspicious word which might fall from their nearest
relatives. The indictment being thus supported, the prisoner was tried by
torture. The rack was the court of justice; the criminal's only advocate
was his fortitude--for the nominal counsellor, who was permitted no
communication with the prisoner, and was furnished neither with documents
nor with power to procure evidence, was a puppet, aggravating the
lawlessness of the proceedings by the mockery of legal forms: The torture
took place at midnight, in a gloomy dungeon, dimly, lighted by torches.
The victim--whether man, matron, or tender virgin--was stripped naked,
and stretched upon the wooden bench. Water, weights, fires, pulleys,
screws--all the apparatus by which the sinews could be strained without
cracking, the bones crushed without breaking, and the body racked
exquisitely without giving up its ghost, was now put into operation. The
executioner, enveloped in a black robe from head to foot, with his eyes
glaring at his victim through holes cut in the hood which muffled his
face, practised successively all the forms of torture which the devilish
ingenuity of the monks had invented. The ima