consider what we should believe about the Hebrew religion, if we took the word of rival priestly castes!  Consider, for example, that in this twentieth century we saw an orthodox Jew tried in a Russian court of law for having made a sacrifice of Christian babies; nevertheless we know that the Jews represent a considerable part of the intelligence and idealism of Russia.  We know in the same way that the Moors had most of the culture and all of the scientific knowledge of Spain, that the Huguenots had most of the conscience and industry of France; and we know that they were massacred or driven out to death by the priestly castes of the Middle Ages.

#The Holy Inquisition#

Let us have one glimpse of the conditions in those mediaeval times, so that we may know what we ourselves have escaped.  In the fifteenth century there was established in Europe the cult of a three-headed god, whose priests had won lordship over a continent.  They were enormously wealthy, and unthinkably corrupt; they sold to the rich the license to commit every possible crime, and they held the poor in ignorance and degradation.  Among the comparatively intelligent and freedom-loving people of Bohemia there arose a great reformer, John Huss, himself a priest, protesting against the corruptions of his order.  They trapped him into their power by means of a “safe-conduct”—­which they repudiated because no promise to a heretic could have validity.  They found him guilty of having taught the hateful doctrine that a priest who committed crimes could not give absolution for the crimes of others; and they held an auto de fe—­which means a “sentence of faith.”  As we read in Lea’s “History of the Inquisition”: 

The cathedral of Constance was crowded with Sigismund (the Emperor) and his nobles, the great officers of the empire with their insignia, the prelates in their splendid robes.  While mass was sung, Huss, as an excommunicate, was kept waiting at the door; when brought in he was placed on an elevated bench by a table on which stood a coffer containing priestly vestments.  After some preliminaries, including a sermon by the Bishop of Lodi, in which he assured Sigismund that the events of that day would confer on him immortal glory, the articles of which Huss was convicted were recited.  In vain he protested that he believed in transubstantiation and in the validity of the sacrament in polluted hands.  He was ordered to hold his tongue, and on his persisting the beadles were told to silence him, but in spite of this he continued to utter protests.  The sentence was then read in the name of the council, condemning him both for his written errors and those which had been proven by witnesses.  He was declared a pertinacious and incorrigible heretic who did not desire to return to the Church; his books were ordered to be burned, and himself to be degraded from the priesthood and abandoned to the secular court.  Seven bishops arrayed him in priestly garb and warned him to recant