The Inquisition | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 1888

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 3, No. 10.

The Inquisition.

Not to go outside of the Roman Catholic Church, the doctrine on which the Inquisition was founded is by no means abandoned by that church, nor even less tenaciously held, than it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The object of the Inquisition was not to punish crime, but to suppress error. It recognized no distinction between crime and sin, between offenses against man, of which man may take cognizance, and offenses against God, of which God alone can take cognizance. It was an organized revolt against the law, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” It made inquisition into the secret thoughts and interior life of the people, and judged them, not merely for acts perpetrated, but for opinions entertained. “The duty of the Inquisition, moreover, was distinguished from that of the ordinary judge by the fact that the task assigned to him was the impossible one of ascertaining the secret thoughts and opinions of the prisoner. External acts were to him only of value as indications of belief, to be accepted or rejected as he might deem them conclusive or illusory. The crime he sought to suppress by punishment was a purely mental one—acts, however criminal, were beyond his jurisdiction.” Hence it was that disavowal of the heresy charged was of no avail; if persisted in, it was often

regarded only as evidence of contumacy. Hence, too, arose the use of torture, to compel the heretic to confess that he entertained the heretical opinions charged upon him; for only by confession and penance could he be redeemed from the sin; and we must give the inquisitors credit for laboring often for the salvation of the soul, though by means that were full of cruelty to the body.

One of the lessons which this history has for us is that no faculty is more cruel than that of conscience, when it is directed by self-will, not by faith and love. Now, the Roman Catholic Church has by no means abandoned its claim to judge of the thoughts and intents of the heart. It has by no means accepted the modern distinction between crimes and sins, nor agreed that to man is given alone the right to judge of and punish crime, and that God has reserved to himself the exclusive jurisdiction of sins that are not crimes. Still less does it accept the Protestant doctrine—which we believe also to be clearly New Testament doctrine—that the function of the church is a teaching, not a ruling, function, and that the State and Church should be forever kept separate. “In no age of Christianity,” says the “Catholic Dictionary,” “has the church had any doubt that in her hands, and only in hers, was the deposit of the true faith and religion placed by Jesus Christ, and that, as it is her duty to teach this to all nations, so she is bound by all practical and lawful means to restrain the malice or madness of those who would corrupt the message or resist the teacher.” And it specifies the act of Paul in striking the sorcerer, Sergius Paulus, with blindness, as an evidence of the right of the church to punish false doctrine.

Similarly the late Pope, Pius IX., explicitly reckons among the errors of our times the doctrine that “the church has not power to use force,” and anathematizes those who deny that it possesses the authority by which it “pronounces upon what is lawful and what is not lawful,” even in public and social actions, or who assert that its laws “have no binding force until they have been confirmed by the sanction of the civil power.” Indeed, the very existence of the confessional is a continuous claim by that church of a right and a duty to inquire into the secret thoughts and inner life of at least all its communicants; while its writers frankly concede that, if it no longer uses force to compel obedience to its laws, this is due, not to the want of will, but to the want of power. Nor is this disregard of the distinction between crimes and sins, and this notion that the State could be redeemed if only the church and the ministry, or at least professedly Christian people, could get the control of politics, and the prayer-meetings become primaries, by any means confined to Roman Catholic circles. But this hint must suffice; to follow it out would take us too far from our immediate and legitimate purpose.

There is no room here to write or even to suggest the history of the Inquisition. . . . It is a history of despotism, inaugurated by conscience, but carried on by greed and by ambition. It is a history of the awful results which flow from lodging despotic power in the hands of any man or class of men—results more awful the more conscientious the men are to whom it is at first intrusted. It is a history which illustrates and enforces the truth that it is not safe to lift any set of men above the laws, or to give to any set of men irresponsible power over their fellows. It is a history, not merely of the Roman Catholic Church, but of humanity, and one which in a different form might easily be repeated if ever a like power were lodged in any class, civil or ecclesiastical, Papal or Protestant.—Christian Union, in notice of Lea’s History of the Inquisition.