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Show 68 awful, and proofs of it crowd on us from the records of the earliest and latest times. Thus, the worship of the immoral deities of heathenism was sustained by the great men of antiquity. The bloodiest and most unrighteous wars have been instigated by patriots. For ages the J ews were thought to ~ave forfeited the rights of men, as much as the Afncan race at the South, and were insulted, spoiled, and slain, not by mobs, but by sovereigns and prelates, who really supposed themselves avengers of the crucified Savior. Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, men of singular humanity, doomed Christians to death, surrendering their better feelings to what they thought the safety of the State. F ew names in history are more illustrious than Isabella of Castile. She was the model in most respects of a noble woman. But Isabella outstripped her age in what she thought pious zeal against heretics. Having taken lessons in her wars against the Moors, and in the extermination of the Jews, she entered fully into the spirit of the inquisition; and by her great moral power contributed more than any other sovereign to the extension of its fearful influence, and thus the horrible tortures and murders of that infernal institution, in her ill-fated country, lie very much at her door. Of all the causes which have contributed to the ruin of Spain, the gloomy, unrelenting spirit of religious bigotry has wrought most 69 deeply; so that the illustrious Isabella, through her zeal for religion and the salvation of her subjects, sowed the seeds of her country's ruin. It is remarkable that Spain, in her late struggle for freedom, has not produced one great man ; and at this moment, the country seems threatened with disorganization; and it is to the almost universal corruption, to the want of mutual confidence, to the deep dissimulation and fraud which the spirit of the inquisition, the spirit of misguided religion, has spread through society, that this degradation must chiefly be traced. The wrongs, woes, cruelties inflicted by the religious, the conscientious, are among the most important teachings of the past. Nor has this strange mixture of good and evil ceased. Crimes, to which time and usage have given sanction, are still found in neighborhood with virtue. Examples, taken from other countries, stagger belief, but are true. Thus, in not a few regions, the infant is cast out to perish by parents who abound in tenderness to their surviving children. Our own enormities are to be understood hereafter. Slavery is not then absolved of guilt by the virtues of its supporte rs, nor are its wrongs on this account a whit less~... erable. T he inquisition was not a whit less infernal, because sustained by Isabella. Wars are not a whit less murderous, because waged for our country's glory; nor was the slave trade less a com- |
