A Romanist Author on the Inquisition.—Mr. Lilly, a Roman Catholic author, has written a book entitled “Christianity and Modern Civilisation,” and therein he gives a chapter on the Inquisition. The following remarks by the Glasgow Herald reviewer on the matter are of interest:—Mr. Lilly’s views on the Inquisition are interesting as a elaborate apology for the “Holy Office” from the point of view of first principles, coupled with an admission of relief at the disappearance of its “savage jurisprudence.” He gives a very detailed account of a “process,” which makes the reader’s blood alternately run cold with horror and boil with indignation, deriving it from the manual of Father Masini, “a highly esteemed Inquisitor at Bologna, where he made full proof of his ministry, wielding with much effect the weapons which he has, so to speak, collected and arranged for the use of his brethren.” We think we are perfectly safe in saying that a perusal of this realistic narrative will convince every non-Roman reader that a process before the Holy Office was a combination of cunning, fraud, injustice, and hypocrisy with the most calculated, deliberate, and abominable cruelty. And even Mr. Lilly admits “that it is impossible for anyone at this day, however inured to spectacles of horror, to think of it without shuddering.” He congratulates himself, accordingly, on the disappearance of the Inquisition—as he hopes for ever—and attributes its “disappearance” to “a rise in the moral level of humanity.” But he omits to mention that the Inquisition did not “disappear” through any elevation in the moral sentiments of the Church upon the subject, but was simply suppressed by the interference of the secular powers. And it is perhaps not without significance that he finds the real germ of the Holy Office in the writings of St. Paul, that he regards it as a natural and indeed inevitable evolution from that sacred germ, and that he describes the principle of toleration, to which he attributes its ultimate disappearance, as due in part to the growth “of religious scepticism and religious indifference—of the spirit which led Montaigne to protest that “to roast a man alive in honour of one’s conjectures is really to rate them too highly.” If what Mr. Lilly regards as the age of faith were to return, there seems no reason why the Inquisition should not return with it.
The Band on the Pier.—The following extract from the London society paper “Truth” regarding a projected piece of Sabbath-breaking is significant:—The band of the 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders was to have played on the pier at Southport on Sunday, but at the last moment the engagement was cancelled in consequence—so it is reported—of a protest that a Sabbatarian cleric addressed to the War Office. Can this be true? On the face of it the statement seems incredible, for such action on the
part of the War Office would be a reflection upon the conduct of the King in permitting military bands to play on the terrace at Windsor Castle on Sundays, to say nothing of the conduct of the Duke of Cambridge as Ranger, and the General Officer Commanding the Home District, who are jointly responsible for similar performances in Hyde Park.—We are much obliged to the “Sabbatarian cleric,” and hope he may prevail many more times in the same way. The cool ungodliness of the writer of this paragraph is to be noted. The law of God commanding the observance of the Sabbath is, it seems, to be shelved without ceremony lest King Edward VII. should be put out of countenance in his career of royal Sabbath-breaking. We have no doubt this Sadducean litterateur has long ago freed himself from the last scruple of conscience respecting the Puritan Sabbath. It may, however, dawn on him in a lucid interval that an observance which is part of the common law of Great Britain, and which has been honoured by many kings wiser and more famous than King Edward VII., is not without a deep basis in the Divine order of things, and that the attempt to banish and sneer it down may be a very risky one.