' 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, and prayed,
that out of her goodness and clemency she might be delivered from the
dreadful punishment of the fire. 'Great Queen,' said she, 'is not your
presence able to bring me some comfort under my misery? Consider my
youth, and that I am condemned for a religion which I have sucked in
with my mother's milk.' The Queen turned away her eyes, declaring, she
pitied the miserable creature, but did not dare to intercede for her
with a single word.
Not only have Roman Catholic writers defended these inquisitorial
abominations, but, with what every Protestant must needs consider daring
and blasphemous impiety, laboured to prove that the first Inquisitor was
God himself.
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