the
Netherlands to death as heretics. From this universal doom only
a few persons, especially named, were excepted. A proclamation
of the king, dated ten days later, confirmed this decree of the
Inquisition, and ordered it to be carried into instant
execution, without regard to age, sex, or condition. This is
probably the most concise death warrant that was ever framed.
Three millions of people, men, women, and children, were
sentenced to the scaffold in three lines."

Roman Catholic writers admit that the papal church has sought to
exterminate what it calls heresy, by the power of the sword.

The _Western Watchman_ (St. Louis), Dec. 24, 1908, says:

"The church has persecuted.... Protestants were persecuted in
France and Spain with the full approval of the church
authorities. We have always defended the persecution of the
Huguenots, and the Spanish Inquisition. Wherever and whenever
there is honest Catholicity, there will be a clear distinction
drawn between truth and error, and Catholicity and all forms of
error. When she thinks it good to use physical force, she will
use it."

Prof. Alfred Baudrillart, rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris,
says:

"The Catholic Church is a respecter of conscience and of
liberty.... She has, and she loudly proclaims that she has, a
'horror of blood.' Nevertheless, when confronted by heresy, she
does not content herself with persuasion; arguments of an
intellectual and moral order appear to her insufficient, and
she has recourse to force, to corporal punishment, to torture.
She creates tribunals like those of the Inquisition, she calls
the laws of the state to her aid, if necessary she encourages a
crusade, or a religious war, and all her 'horror of blood'
practically culminates into urging the secular power to shed
it, which proceeding is almost more odious--for it is less
frank--than shedding it herself. Especially did she act thus in
the sixteenth century with regard to Protestants. Not content
to reform morally, to preach by example, to convert people by
eloquent and holy missionaries, she lit in Italy, in the Low
Countries, and above all in Spain, the funeral piles of the
Inquisition. In France under Francis I and Henry II, in England
under Mary Tudor, she tortured the heretics, whilst both in
Fra