22 Augustine and the Inquistion

Augustine and the Inquisition

Sylvester Hassell agrees that the blame for the Roman Catholic Inquisition belongs to Augustine. He says, “Augustine’s theory of the right of a State to persecute its citizens to make them conform to a national religion involved the germs of absolute spiritual despotism, and of even the horrors of the Inquisition” (pg 407). The pattern laid down by Augustine in his campaign against the Donatists set the pattern for the Roman Catholic Church for more than a thousand years. Literally rivers of blood were shed by those who thought they had the right to persecute and kill those who would not submit to their authority. Augustine was long since dead when the Roman Catholic Inquisition was doing its torture and killing, but he was the man who laid the groundwork, and set the machinery in motion. The Inquisition was a court system set up by the Roman Catholic authorities to try those whom they deemed to be heretics. Those who refused to deny their faith were tortured and killed in the most diabolical ways. They were burned at the stake. They were put on the rack, and their bones were pulled out of joint. They were tied up in sacks with scorpions. They were scalded with boiling oil. Human ingenuity exhausted itself in devising new ways of torture. That persecution reached its height in the 1500’s in what came to be called the Spanish Inquisition. Thomas Torquemada was at its head. Under his leadership there was a constant parade of innocent victims led to the stake and burned alive. Their only offence was in worshiping God in a manner not approved by the Roman Catholic authorities. He did his job so well that today, over four hundred years later, Spain is still virtually free of spiritual religion.

It has always been necessary to enforce infant baptism by the sword. Hassell says, “In order to enforce conformity to her religious creed and ceremonial, she has murdered fifty millions of human beings, with every imaginable device of diabolical cruelty-thus shedding enough martyr blood to fill a stream ten feet wide, ten feet deep, and twenty-five miles long.”

Rome shed all that innocent blood in order to do two things: 1st, to prevent believer’s baptism (they called itanabaptism, rebaptism, if the person had been baptized before by a Catholic priest), and 2nd, to enforce infant baptism.

It is questionable whether any religious practice by any people has ever had a bloodier history than infant baptism.

Infant baptism came to England almost 200 years later. It was introduced there as it was other places, by the sword. Orchard records, “Infant Baptism was not known to the Welsh Christians until A.D. 596 or 600, when Austin [Augustine of Canterbury] was sent by Gregory, Bishop of Rome, to convert the Saxons. In this he was successful, and according to Fox, he baptized ten thousand in the River Swale....But these Baptists utterly refused to practice the traditions of Rome for the commands of Christ, when this emissary of Rome threatened them in this wise, ‘sins ye wol not receave peace of your brethren, ye shall of other receave warre and wretche.’ The Saxons shortly after invaded Wales, it is thought through the influence of Austin, and slaughtered incredible numbers.” (Orchard ppg xxii).

“‘The Church of Rome says Mr. W.E. H. Lecky, “has caused more wars, has shed more innocent blood, and inflicted more unmerited suffering, than any other institution that has ever existed among mankind.’ The history of the sixteenth century, with the decade preceding and following it, presents the most forcible illustrations of this horrible truth.”

“Among these illustrations are the cruel enslavement and extinction, by the Spanish and Portugese Catholics, of untold millions of the poor, inoffensive Indians of North, Central and South America; the inauguration, by the same Catholic nations, of the horrors of the African slave-trade; the Portugese persecution and enslavement of thousands of the NestorianSt. Thomas Christiansin India; the pitiless impoverishment, enslavement or expulsion, with indescribable sufferings, of about a million Jews and a million Moors from Spain and Portugal; thirty-eight years of religious wars in France, and similar but shorter wars in Switzerland, Germany and Holland; three Catholic insurrections in England, and the sending forth of the Spanish Armada against the same Protestant country; the execution of about a thousand persons, on account of their religion, by the Anglo-Catholic Pope, King Henry VIII., and of about three hundred, on the same account, by his daughter, Bloody Queen Mary; the execution of from fifty to a hundred thousand Protestants in the Netherlands, and the condemnation of all the three million Netherlanders to death; the frightful massacres of the French Waldenses in Provence, and of the Italian Waldenses in Calabria, and of the Huguenots or French Protestants on the eve of St. Bartholomew (on account of which the pope sung aTe Deumand issued a medal); and the diabolical cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, with its luridAutos-da-fe, all over Southern Europe, effectually repressing, in those countries, all exhibitions of the spirit of religious freedom” (Hassell ppg 499,500). The Roman Catholic Inquisition was every bit as bloody as Leckey says it was, but he goes on to say what most historians are unwilling to say.

“‘The first Protestants,’ says Mr. Lecky, ‘were as undoubtedly intolerant as the Catholics.’ They derived the practice from the Catholics, and they persecuted the Catholics and other Protestants, and especially theAnabaptists. Persecution is directly opposed to the fundamental Protestant principle of the right of private judgment, and has, therefore, happily declined in almost all Protestant countries; but intolerance is the essence of Roman Catholicism, and, if armed with the power of the State, it would today wreak the same bloody and exterminating vengeance upon its opponents as it has practiced, when able, for fifteen hundred years. (Hassell pg 500).