Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/216

190 190 ILLNESS AND DEATH OF ISABELLA. n. I'ART ing the age ; for these very acts are not only ex- cused, but extolled by her contemporaries, as con- stituting her strongest claims to renown, and to the gratitude of her country .^^ They proceeded from the principle, openly avowed by the court of Rome, that zeal for the purity of the faith could atone for every crime. This immoral maxim, flowing from the head of the church, was echoed in a thousand different forms by the subordinate clergy, and greed- ily received by a superstitious people.^° It was not to be expected, that a solitary woman, filled with natural diffidence of her own capacity on such subjects, should array herself against those venerated counsellors, whom she had been taught from her cradle to look to as the guides and guar- dians of her conscience. And later Howcvcr mischicvous the operations of the In- quisition may have been in Spain, its establishment, in point of principle, was not worse than many other measures, which have passed with far less censure, though in a much more advanced and civ- ilized age.^^ Where, indeed, during the sixteenth, 33 Such encomiums become still Spain, under the pontificate of Al- more striking in writers of sound exanderVL and his immediate pre- and expansive views like Zurita decessors,in the 90th chapter of his and Blancas, who, although flour- eloquent and philosophical " His- ishing in a better instructed age, toire des R6publiques Italicnnes." do not scruple to pronounce the ^^ I borrow almost the words of Inquisition " the greatest evidence Mr. Hallam, who, noticing the pe- of her prudence and piety, whose nal statutes against Catholics under uncommon utility, not only Spain, Elizabeth, says, " They establish- but all Christendom, freely ac- ed a persecution, which fell not at knowledged"! Blancas, Commen- all short in principle of that for tarii, p. 203. — Zurita, Anales, which the Inquisition had become torn. V. lib. 1, cap. 6. so odious." (Constitutional His- ^0 Sismondi displays the mis- tory of England, (Paris, 1827,) chievous influence of these theolog- vol. i. chap. 3.) Even Lord Bur- ical dogmas in Italy, as well as leigh, commenting on the mode times