A Distinction in Name Not in Fact.
A writer in the Catholic Mirror tells us that we must take great care not to confound the Roman Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition. “One is purely ecclesiastical and the other is purely secular. The one was undertaken and must be defended from a religious standpoint; the other was established and perpetrated by the civil government, and must have for its justification national rights and privileges.” This is a distinction without a difference. The end was the same in each—the extirpation of heresy. It might be called in one case a crime against God and the church, and in the other case against the state, but the inquisitions were of the same class, inspired by the same motive, with the same object in view, let the name be what it will. This attempt to justify by making distinctions is hiding counsel by words without knowledge, or blinding minds by sophistry.