The Tortures oft the Inquisition.

A Stunning Blow — Three Classes in Italy — Flight of Peter Martyr Vermigli — of Ochino — Caraffa made Pope — The Martyrs, Mollio and Tisserano — Italian Protestantism Crushed — A Notable Epoch — Three Movements — The Inquisition at Nuremberg — The Torture-Chamber — Its Furnishings — Max Tower — The Chamber of Question — The various Instruments of Torture — The Subterranean Dungeons — The Iron Virgin — Her Office — The Burial of the Dead.

THE re-establishment of the Inquisition decided the question of the Reformation of Italy. The country, struck with this blow as it was lifting itself up, instantly fell back into the old gulf. It had become suddenly apparent that religious reform must be won with a great fight of suffering, and Italy had not strength to press on through chains, and dungeons, and scaffolds to the goal she wished to reach. The prize was glorious, she saw, but the price was great. Pallavicino has confessed that it was the Inquisition that saved Italy from lapsing into Protestantism.1

The religious question had divided the Italians of that day into three classes. The bulk of the nation had not thought on the question at all, and harbored no purpose of leaving the Church of Rome. To them the restoration of the Inquisition had no terrors. There was another and large class who had abandoned Rome, but who had not clearness to advance to the open profession of Protestantism. They were most to be pitied of all should they fall into the hands of the inquisitors, seeing they were too undecided either to decline or to face the horrors of the Holy Office. The third class were in no doubt as to the course they must pursue. They could not return to a Church which they held to be superstitious, and they had no alternative before them but provide for their safety by flight, or await death amid the fires of the Inquisition. The consternation was great; for the Protestants had not dreamed of their enemies having recourse to such violent measures. Numbers fled, and these fugitives were to be found in every city of Switzerland and Germany.2

Among these was Bernardino Ochino, on whose eloquent orations all ranks of his countrymen had been hanging but a few months before, and in whose audience the emperor himself might be seen when he visited Italy. Not, however, till he had been served with a citation from the Holy Office at Rome did Ochino make his escape. Flight was almost as bitter as death to the orator. He was leaving behind him the scene of those brilliant triumphs which he could not hope to renew on a foreign soil. Pausing on the summit of the Great St. Bernard, he devoted a few moments to those feelings of regret which were so natural on abandoning so much that he could not hope ever again to enjoy. He then went forward to Geneva. But, alas! the best days of the eloquent monk were past. At Geneva, Ochino’s views became tainted and obscured with the new philosophy, which was beginning to air itself at that young school of pantheism. Peter Martyr Vermigli soon followed. He was presiding over the convent of his order in Lucca, when the storm came with such sudden violence. He set his house in order and fled; but it was discovered after he was gone that the heresy remained although the heretic had escaped, his opinions having been embraced by many of the Luccese monks.

The same was found to be the case with the order to which Ochino belonged, the Capuchins namely, and the Pope at first meditated, as the only cure, the suppression of both orders. Peter Martyr went ultimately to Strasburg, and a place was found for him in its university, where his lamp continued to burn clearly to the close. Juan di Valdez died before the tempest burst, which drove beyond the Alps so many of the distinguished group that had formed itself around him at Pausilippo, and saw not the evil days which came on his adopted country. But the majority of those who had embraced the Protestant faith were unable to escape. They were immured in the prisons of the various Holy Offices throughout Italy; some were kept in dark cells for years, in the hope that they would recant, others were quickly relieved by martyrdom. The restorer of the Inquisition, the once reforming Caraffa, mounted the Papal chair, under the name of Paul IV. The rigors of the Holy Office were not likely to be relaxed under the new Pope; but twenty years were needed to enable the torture and the stake to annihilate the Protestants of Italy.3.

Peter Martyr Vermigli Italian victim of the Inquisition. Of those who suffered martyrdom we shall mention only two — Mollio, a Bolognese professor, renowned throughout Italy for his learning and his pure life; and Tisserano, a native of Perugia. On the 15th of September, 1553, an assembly of the Inquisition, consisting of six cardinals with their episcopal assessors, was held with great pomp at Rome. A train of prisoners, with burning tapers in their hands, was led in before the tribunal. All of them recanted save Mollio and Tisserano. On leave being given them to speak, Mollio broke out, says Mc Crie, “in a strain of bold and fervid invective, which chained them to their seats, at the same time that it cut them to the quick.”

He rebuked his judges for their lewdness, their avarice, and their blood-thirsty cruelty, and concluded as follows: — “‘Wherefore I appeal from your sentence, and summon you, cruel tyrants and murderers, to answer before the judgment-seat of Christ at the last day, where your pompous titles and gorgeous trappings will not dazzle, nor your guards and torturing apparatus terrify us. And in testimony of this, take back that which you have given me.’ In saying this, he threw the flaming torch which he held in his hand on the ground, and extinguished it. Galled, and gnashing upon him with their teeth, like the persecutors of the first Christian martyrs, the cardinals ordered Mollio, together with his companion, who approved of the testimony he had borne, to instant execution. They were conveyed, accordingly, to the Campo del Flor, where they died with the most pious fortitude.”4

Mollio throwing down his torch before the Inquisition The eight years that elapsed between 1534 and 1542 are notable ones in the annals of Protestant Christianity. That epoch witnessed the birth of three movements, Which were destined to stamp a character upon the future of Europe, and powerfully to modify the conflict then in progress in Christendom. In 1534 the Jesuits recorded their first vow in the Church of Mont-Martre, in Paris. In 1540 their society was regularly launched by the Papal edict. In 1542, Paul III issued the bull for the re-establishment of the Inquisition.

The meeting of these dates — the contemporaneous rise of these three instrumentalities, is sufficiently striking, and is one of the many proofs which we meet in history that there is an Eye watching all that is done on earth, and that never does an agency start up to destroy the world, but there is set over against it a yet more powerful agency to convert the evil it would inflict into good. Jesuitism, the consummation of error — the Inquisition, the maximum of force, stand up and array themselves against the “heretics.”

This is the struggle with the record of which we shall presently be occupied. Meanwhile we proceed to describe one of those few Inquisitions that remain to this day in almost the identical state in which they existed when the Holy Office was being vigorously worked. This will enable us to realize more vividly the terror of that weapon which Paul III prepared for the hands of the Jesuits, and the Divine power of that faith which enabled the confessors of the Gospel to withstand and triumph over it. Turn we now to the town of Nuremberg, in Bavaria. The zeal with which Duke Albert, the sovereign of Bavaria, entered into the restoration of Roman Catholicism, we have already narrated. To further the movement, he provided every one of the chief towns of his dominions with a Holy Office, and the Inquisition of Nuremberg still remains — an anomalous and horrible monument in the midst of a city where the memorials of an exquisite art, and the creations of an unrivalled genius, meet one at every step. We shall first describe the Chamber of Torture.5

The house so called immediately adjoins the Imperial Castle, which from its lofty site looks down on the city, whose Gothic towers, sculptured fronts, and curiously ornamented gables are seen covering both banks of the Pegnitz, which rolls below. The house may have been the guard-room of the castle. It derives its name, the Torture-chamber, not from the fact that the torture was here inflicted, but because into this one chamber has been collected a complete set of the instruments of torture gleaned from the various Inquisitions that formerly existed in Bavaria. A glance suffices to show the whole dreadful apparatus by which the adherents of Rome sought to maintain her dogmas. Placed next to the door, and greeting the sight as one enters, is a collection of hideous masks. These represent creatures monstrous of shape, and malignant and fiendish of nature, It is in beholding them that we begin to perceive how subtle was the genius that devised this system of coercion, and that it took the mind as well as the body of the victim into account. In gazing on them, one feels as if he had suddenly come into polluting and debasing society, and had sunk to the same moral level with the creatures here figured before him. He suffers a conscious abatement of dignity and fortitude.

The persecutor had calculated, doubtless, that the effect produced upon the mind of his victim by these dreaded apparitions, would be that he would become morally relaxed, and less able to sustain his cause. Unless of strong mind, indeed, the unfortunate prisoner, on entering such a place, and seeing himself encompassed with such unearthly and hideous shapes, must have felt as if he were the vile heretic which the persecutor styled him, and as if already the infernal den had opened its portals, and sent forth its venomous swarms to bid him welcome. Yourself accursed, with accursed beings are you henceforth to dwell — such was the silent language of these abhorred images. We pass on into the chamber, where more dreadful sights meet our gaze. It is hung round and round with instruments of torture, so numerous that it would take a long while even to name them, and so diverse that it would take a much longer time to describe them. We must take them in groups, for it were hopeless to think of going over them one by one, and particularising the mode in which each operated, and the ingenuity and art with which all of them have been adapted to their horrible end.

There were instruments for compressing the fingers till the bones should be squeezed to splinters. There were instruments for probing below the finger-nails till an exquisite pain, like a burning fire, would run along the nerves. There were instruments for tearing out the tongue, for scooping out the eyes, for grubbing-up the ears. There were bunches of iron cords, with a spiked circle at the end of every whip, for tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare. There were iron cases for the legs, which were tightened upon the limb placed in them by means of a screw, till flesh and bone were reduced to a jelly. There were cradles set full of sharp spikes, in which victims were laid and rolled from side to side, the wretched occupant being pierced at each movement of the machine with innumerable sharp points. There were iron ladles with long handles, for holding molten lead or boiling pitch, to be poured down the throat of the victim, and convert his body into a burning cauldron. There were frames with holes to admit the hands and feet, so contrived that the person put into them had his body bent into unnatural and painful positions, and the agony grew greater and greater by moments, and yet the man did not die. There were chestfuls of small but most ingeniously constructed instruments for pinching, probing, or tearing the more sensitive parts of the body, and continuing the pain up to the very verge where reason or life gives way. On the floor and walls of the apartment were other and larger instruments for the same fearful end — lacerating, mangling, and agonizing living men; but these we shall meet in other dungeons we are yet to visit.

Some Quotes:

Descriptions of the Jesuits:

“My history of the Jesuits is not eloquently written, but it is supported by unquestionable authorities, is very particular and very horrible. Their restoration [i.e., the Jesuits’ reinstatement as an official order by Pope Pius VII in 1814] is indeed a step toward darkness, cruelty, perfidy, despotism, death … I do not like the appearance of the Jesuits. If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of Loyola’s [i.e., the Jesuits, the “Company”]. ” John Adams (1735-1826; 2^nd President of the United States; Quote taken from a letter in 1816 to Thomas Jefferson)

“The organization of the [Roman Catholic] Hierarchy is a complete military despotism, of which the Pope is the ostensible [i.e., apparent; seeming] head; but of which, the Black Pope [Ed. Note: The Superior General of the Jesuits], is the real head. The Black Pope is the head of the order of the Jesuits, and is called a General [i.e., the Superior General]. He not only has command of his own order, but directs and controls the general policy of the [Roman Catholic] Church. He [the Black Pope] is the power behind the throne, and is the real potential head of the Hierarchy. The whole machine is under the strictest rules of military discipline. The whole thought and will of this machine, to plan, propose and execute, is found in its head. There is no independence of thought, or of action, in its subordinate parts. Implicit and unquestioning obedience to the orders of superiors in authority, is the sworn duty of the priesthood of every grade…” Thomas M. Harris (U.S. Army Brigadier General; Author of the book Rome’s Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln)

“The Jesuits are a military organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power – power in its most despotic exercise – absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man [i.e., the Black Pope, the Superior General of the Jesuits]. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms: and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses… The [Superior] General of the Jesuits insists on being master, sovereign, over the sovereign. Wherever the Jesuits are admitted they will be masters, cost what it may… Every act, every crime, however atrocious, is a meritorious work, if committed for the interest of the Society of the Jesuits, or by the order of the [Superior] General.” Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821; Napoleon I, emperor of the French)

“The Jesuits…are simply the Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with the Pontiff of Rome for emperor…that’s their ideal… It is simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination – something like a universal serfdom with them [i.e., the Jesuits] as masters – that’s all they stand for. They don’t even believe in God perhaps.” (1880) Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881; Russian novelist)

“…This ‘Directorium Inquisitorum’ was dedicated to Gregory XIII, the pope who bestowed upon Jesuits the right to deal in commerce and banking, and who also decreed that every papal legate should have a Jesuit advisor on his personal staff.” F. Tupper Saussy

“The [British] East India Company was a major subsidizer of the Jesuit mission to Beijing [China]. The Jesuits, in turn, interceded with oriental monarchs to secure lucrative commercial favors for the company, including monopolies on tea, spices, saltpeter (for explosives), silks, and the world’s opium trade. Indeed…the [East India] Company appears to owe its very existence to the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Jesuits] .” F. Tupper Saussy

“…the order of the Jesuits was created – the most cruel, unscrupulous, and powerful of all the champions of popery… they knew no rule, no tie, but that of their order, and no duty but to extend its power… There was no crime too great for them to commit, no deception too base for them to practice, no disguise too difficult for them to assume. [Though] vowed to perpetual poverty and humility, it was their studied aim to secure wealth and power, to be devoted to the overthrow of Protestantism, and the re-establishment of the papal supremacy… “When appearing as members of their [Jesuit] order, they wore a garb of sanctity…but under this blameless exterior the most criminal and deadly purposes were often concealed. It was a fundamental principle of the order that ‘the end justifies the means’. By this code, lying, theft, perjury, [and] assassination, were not only pardonable but commendable, when they served the interests of the Church [Ed. Note: more specifically, the interests of the Superior General of the Jesuits]. Under various disguises the Jesuits worked their way into offices of State, climbing up to be the counselors of kings, and shaping the policy of nations. They became servants [in order] to act as spies upon their master… The Jesuits rapidly spread themselves over Europe, and wherever they went, there followed a revival of popery. To give them greater power, a bull was issued re-establishing the inquisition …and atrocities too terrible to bear the light of day were repeated in its secret dungeons.” (1888) Ellen G. White (Author of the book The Great Controversy) [note: Liberty To The Captives does not endorse Ellen G. White or her doctrines.]

Warnings About the Jesuits:

“It is my opinion that if the liberties of this country – the United States of America – are destroyed, it will be by the subtlety of the Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, for they are the most crafty, dangerous enemies to civil and religious liberty. They have instigated most of the wars of Europe.” Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834; French statesman and general; served in the American Continental Army under General George Washington)

“ [The Jesuits] are the deadly enemies of civil and religious liberty. Nothing that stands in their way can become so sacred as to escape their vengeance… Because of this, a sense of both duty and security demands that the history and character of this skilled and powerful adversary [i.e., the Jesuits] …should be understood; as also the causes which have led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from every country in Europe, the public odium which has rested upon them for many years, their long continued disturbance of the peace of nations, and the final suppression and abolition of their society by one of the best and most enlightened of the popes [i.e., Pope Clement XIV] .” R.W. Thompson (Ex-Secretary, American Navy)

“This society of men [i.e., the Jesuits], after exerting their tyranny for upwards of two hundred years, at length became so formidable to the world, threatening the entire subversion of all social order, that even the Pope [Ed. Note: Pope Clement XIV]… was compelled to dissolve them. ((Ed. Note: The Jesuit Order was banned by Pope Clement XIV in his Papal ‘Bull of Suppression’ in 1773. He was assassinated by the Jesuits in 1774.))

They [i.e., the Jesuits] had not been suppressed, however, for fifty years, before the waning influence of Popery and Despotism required their useful labors to resist the light of Democratic liberty, and the Pope (Pius VII), simultaneously with the formation of the Holy Alliance, revived the order of the Jesuits in all their power… [The] Jesuits…are a secret society, a sort of Masonic order, with superadded features of revolting odiousness, and a thousand times more dangerous. They are not merely priests, or of one religious creed; they are merchants, and lawyers, and editors, and men of any profession, having no outward badge (in this country) by which to be recognized; they are about in all your society.” Samuel Morse (1791-1872; American inventor of the telegraph)

“During the night preceding the day appointed for the public ceremony of announcing the abolition of the Jesuits, [Pope] Clement XIII was suddenly seized with convulsions, and died, leaving the act unperformed, and the Jesuits victorious. Cormenin…records this event in the terse and expressive words: ‘The Jesuits had poisoned him’.” R.W. Thompson (Ex-Secretary, American Navy) ((Ed. Note: Clement XIII was assassinated (poisoned) in 1769 the day before he was to sign a Papal Bull suppressing the Jesuits.))

A comment.

The above listed quotations tell quite a story. We find famous persons (former U.S. presidents, the inventor of the telegraph, an emperor, army generals, historians, a great Russian novelist, a pope, etc.) condemning the Jesuits, warning about the Jesuits, describing Jesuit assassinations, and even abolishing the Jesuits as a Catholic Order (i.e., Pope Clement XIV).

Why did at least 11 other popes try to “curb the excesses” of this Roman Catholic Order called the “Society of Jesus”? In 1769, one pope [Clement XIII] was getting ready to sign a Papal Bull suppressing the Jesuits when he was assassinated the day before the official signing was to occur. The next pope [Clement XIV] did suppress and abolish the Jesuits in 1773.

What could the Jesuits have done to cause them to be expelled from 83 (eighty-three) countries, city states, and cities – expulsions carried out mostly by Roman Catholic monarchs?

Conclusion.

T he order of Jesuits, of the Society of Jesus, one of the most celebrated of the Monastic orders of the Romish Church, was founded in the year 1530, by Ignatius Loyola. This remarkable person, at first a soldier, and afterwards a priest, combined in his character all the military courage, intrepidity and spirit of command of the former, with the craft and bigoted zeal of the latter. He proposed a plan of the constitution and laws of his new order, which he affirmed to have been suggested by the immediate inspiration of Heaven, and appealed to the Roman Pontiff, Paul III., for the sanction of his authority, to confirm the institution. Its avowed object was to extend the authority of the Pope, and the dominion of the Church of Rome throughout the world.

It was a fundamental maxim of the Jesuits, from their first institution, to conceal the rules of their order in impenetrable mystery. They never communicated them, even to the greater part of their own members; and refused to produce them when requested by Courts of Justice. During the persecutions, however, which have been carried on against them in Portugal and France, the Jesuits have produced the mysterious volumes of their institute, the Monita Secreta. These records enable us to investigate and delineate, with certainty and precision, the principles of their government, and the sources of their power.

The primary object of the society was to establish a universal, although secret, empire, over the entire globe, of which the General at Rome should be the sovereign. Kings themselves were to be its subjects, and savage, barbarous and civilized nations, alike, controlled by its subtle and omnipresent power. It sought to make the governments of all nations; and every class of society, and every individual member of society, high or low, subservient to its authority, and purposes; and all this wide spread machinery of government — this stupendous and fearful power, was to be employed to establish the Pope's authority, to bind the nations to the footstool of papal despotism. The members of the society, and their countless minions swarmed the world, insinuating themselves into every department of society, and secretly establishing their ascendancy over all classes of men.

The maxims of policy adopted by this order, were, like its constitution, remarkable for their union of laxity and rigor. They were in no degree shackled by prejudice, superstition or real religion. Expediency, in its most simple and licentious form, was the basis of their morals, and their principles and practices were uniformly accommodated to the circumstances in which they were placed. The paramount principle of the order, from which none of its members ever swerved, was simply this, that its interests were to be promoted by all possible means, at all possible expense. In order to acquire more easily an ascendancy over persons of rank and power, they propagated a system of the most relaxed morality, which accommodated itself to the passions of men, justified their vices, and authorized almost every action which the most audacious or crafty politician would wish to perpetrate. To persons of stricter principles they studied to recommend themselves by the purity of their lives, and sometimes by the austerity of their doctrines. While sufficiently compliant in the treatment of immoral practices, they were generally rigidly severe in exacting a strict orthodoxy in opinions.

“They are a sort of people,” said the abbe Boileau, “who lengthen the creed and shorten the decalogue.” They adopted the same spirit of accommodation in their missionary undertakings; and their christianity, chameleon-like. readily assumed the color of every religion where it happened to be introduced. They freely permitted their converts to retain a full proportion of the old superstitions, and suppressed, without hesitation, any point in the new faith which was likely to bear hard on their prejudice or propensities. They proceeded to still greater lengths; and besides suppressing the truths of revelation, devised the most absurd falsehoods, to be used for attracting disciples, or even to be taught as parts of Christianity. One of them in India produced a pedigree to prove his own descent from Brama; and another in America assured a native chief that Christ had been a valiant and victorious warrior, who in the space of three years had scalped an incredible number of men, women and children. It was, in fact, their own authority, not the authority of true religion, which they wished to establish; and Christianity was generally as little known, when they quitted the foreign scenes of their labors, as when they entered there.

So formidable did this ambitious and grasping society become, to the rights and safety of nations, that they were expelled from England in 1604; from Venice in 1606; from Portugal in 1759; and from Spain in 1767; the example of Spain was soon followed by Ferdinand VI. of Naples, and by the prince of Parma. Repudiated, by the kingdoms in which it had been fostered, and universally detested, this band of conspirators against the rights of man, was at last entirely suppressed by an order of Pope Clement XIV. in 1773.

In August, 1814, a bull was issued by Pope Pius VII., restoring this formidable order to all their former privileges, and calling upon all Catholic princes to afford them protection and encouragement. This act of their revival is expressed in all the solemnity of papal authority; and even affirmed to be above the recall or revision of any judge, with whatever power he may be clothed. The number of Jesuits at present in Europe and America, amounts to several thousand. Their general resides at Rome. In Italy, including Sicily, there are seven hundred, who possess eighteen colleges for the instruction of youth.

It is too obvious that the Jesuits have formed the magnificent scheme of presenting, as a splendid offering at the shrine of their pontifical master, our glorious country, redeemed from the savage by our protestant fathers, and bequeathed to their sons with the precious legacy of civil and religious freedom, and the protestant bible, the bulwark of both. An achievement, worthy the fame of their ancient order — worthy the craft and ghostly prowess of the successions of Ignatius Loyola.

[1] by Dr. J. A. Wylie LL.D. The History Of Protestantism. Rev. J. A. Wylie, LL.D., Author of “The Papacy,” “Daybreak in Spain,” etc. VOLUME 2., BOOK 15.

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