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Inquisition   /ˌɪnkwəzˈɪʃən/   Listen
Inquisition

noun
1.
A former tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church (1232-1820) created to discover and suppress heresy.
2.
A severe interrogation (often violating the rights or privacy of individuals).



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"Inquisition" Quotes from Famous Books



... of one female woman to another is something awful. As a general thing, E. E. Dempster is a good-natured, amiable person, but her conduct on the very day after that heavenly season on the shore was worthy of the Spanish Inquisition. She has lacerated the heart in my bosom, and torn me away from this place like a ruthless highwayman. That is what she ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... despairing gesture by silently pointing to heaven." The Wandering Jew may be gone, but the theater of that appalling prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean—will echo, in short, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... guilt or innocence;[8]—The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]—and the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, as if spell-bound, with gratified attention to stories of witches at Oxford, and devils at Mascon.[10] ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... actual residents, who have rendered services in the islands. Workmen and mechanics in Manila should be paid there, and not in Mexico; a special official should be placed in charge of the ships; and there should be no commissary of the Inquisition in the islands. Complaint is made that too much money is sent thither from Mexico, apparently by speculators interested in the Chinese trade; and request is made that the export trade of the islands with Mexico be confined entirely to citizens of the former. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... Dominic, the glory of the schools, Writing, one day, "The Inquisition's" rules, Stopt, when the evening came, for want of light. The devils, who below from morn till night, Well pleased, had seen his work, exclaimed with sorrow, "Something he will forget before to-morrow!" One zealous imp ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... let that be enough; let us remember that the day must come that He who will come shall come, and shall not tarry. Let Him judge; let Him make inquisition for blood. Let our care be that we who are called and vowed to His service are found not called alone, but chosen ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green

... library is stocked to a charm; and Madge, that blessed wife, is there—adorning and giving life to it all. To think, even, of her possible death, is a suffering you class with the infernal tortures of the Inquisition. You grow twain of heart and of purpose. Smiles seem made for marriage; and you wonder how you ever ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur

... monk, born in Sienna; after 40 years' zeal in the service of the Church embraced the Reformed doctrine; fled from the power of the Inquisition to Geneva; took refuge in England; ministered here and there to Italian refugees, but was hunted from place to place; died at last of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of all the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police, and the kernel of the army for foreign service, was ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... betrays the amateur touch. It is regrettable, too, for he chose an excellent theme and setting. The time is near the close of the sixteenth century, under the rule of Philip II. of Spain and the much-dreaded Inquisition. An inventor, a pupil of Galileo, barely escapes the Holy Office because of having discovered the secret of the steamboat. Referring to the preface again, we find Balzac maintaining, in apparent candor, that he had historic ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden

... conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years' War, to the scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this fighting? The same differences of opinion ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... only tolerated, but protected, authorised, applauded, nay, actually commanded by the people with power in their hands; the sermons, or rather the tocsins that are rung against us at Versailles in the presence of the king, nemine reclamante; the new intolerable inquisition that they are bent on practising against the Encyclopaedia, by giving us new censors who are more absurd and more intractable than could be found at Goa; all these reasons, joined to some others, drive ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... Last, I enjoin each here to lend his aid For my sake, and the God's, and for your land Reft of her increase and renounced by Heaven. It was not right, when your good king had fallen, Although the oracle were silent still, To leave this inquisition unperformed. Long since ye should have purged the crime. But now I, to whom fortune hath transferred his crown, And given his queen in marriage,—yea, moreover, His seed and mine had been one family ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... ends of the earth; give ear, ye that have dominion over much people, and make your boast in multitudes of nations. Because your dominion was given you from the Lord, and your sovereignty from the Most High, who shall search out your works, and shall make inquisition of your counsels; because being officers of his kingdom ye did not judge aright, neither kept ye law, nor walked after the counsel of God. Awfully and swiftly shall he come upon you, because a stern judgement befalleth them that be in high place: for the man of low estate ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various

... Harrison and Craye, reprehending them very gently for the tone they had adopted to a repentant sinner, and when they returned to their study, they used the language of despair. They then made headlong inquisition through the house, driving the fags to the edge of hysterics, and unearthing, with tremendous pomp and parade, the natural and inevitable system of small loans that prevails ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... sons must die. We give ours freely; they die to redeem the very brothers that slay them; they give their blood in expiation of this great sin, begun by you in England, perpetuated by us in America, and for which God in this great day of judgment is making inquisition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... a bribe Phil discovered that a special inquisition had been hastily organized to procure perjured testimony against Ben on the charge of complicity in the murder of a carpet-bag adventurer named Ashburn, who had been killed at Columbia in a row in a disreputable resort. This murder had occurred the week ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... laid with solidity the foundations of that science of Dynamics, of which astronomy is the most splendid illustration; and it was he who, by promulgating the doctrines taught by Copernicus, incurred the wrath of the Inquisition. ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... a grievance against Dill that was some sorer than a carbuncle and it relieved its feelings by inventing punishments should he ever return to the camp which in ingenuity rivalled the tortures of the Inquisition. Bruce, too, often speculated concerning Dill, for it looked as though he had purposely betrayed Sprudell's interest. Certainly a man of his mining experience knew better than to make locations in the snow and to pass assessment work which was obviously ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... snow on the ground. There they procured horses and a sled and started with the body, but when within a short distance of the Pennsylvania line they were overtaken by a messenger with a requisition from the Governor of Maryland to return the body to Baltimore county, in order that an inquisition and post-mortem examination might be held in legal form. With sorrowful hearts they turned back; (one of these young men told me that at no place south of Port Deposit could they get any one to assist them in handling the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... the people are fond of triumphantly pointing to the condition of the States of Mexico, as telling the history of our own future, let our present government be once interrupted in its functions. Are Mexicans Yankees? Are Spaniards Anglo-Saxons? Are Catholicism and religious freedom, the Inquisition and common schools, despotism and democracy, synonymous terms? Could a successful republic, on our model, be at once instituted in Africa on the assassination of the King of Timbuctoo? Have two centuries of education nothing to do with our success, or an eternity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... Romans will have that of the editorial WE; for the canons of the Church Militant they will have ubiquitous reporters discharging themselves in the public ear; the testimony of the pillars of the Church will be replaced by the assertions of the editorial columns; the Inquisition will become a press club-house for Reporters and Interviewers, and the Propaganda an office where 'extras' are concocted and forced on the unsuspecting public. At least let us hope that the change will offer a reputable business for the army of beggars ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various

... Because the man, Who claims protection from authority, Showing his confidence and his submission To that authority, can hardly be Suspected of combining to destroy it. 520 Had I sate down too humbly with this blow, A moody brow and muttered threats had made me A marked man to the Forty's inquisition; But loud complaint, however angrily It shapes its phrase, is little to be feared, And less distrusted. But, besides all this, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... letters; I did as bad,—I lent 'em to a friend to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition into our papers; for much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you were among us, and delighted to be with you, it has been, his fashion, ever since to depreciate and cry you down,—you were the cause of my ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... the cathedral are the finest old gabled houses I ever saw, Charley. I never tire in looking at them. They were the great houses of the time when the Duke of Alva made Antwerp the scene of his cruel despotism, and when the Inquisition carried death and misery into men's families. The oppressions of the Spaniards in this city sent many of the best manufacturers from the Low Countries to England; and ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... he advised. "The chairs are a job lot bought at the sale after the suppression of the Holy Inquisition in Spain. This is a pretty good negative," he went on, holding it up to the light with his head at the angle of discriminating judgment. "Washed enough now, I think. Let us leave it to dry, and get rid ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... courage doth but inspire the enemy with terror, so that he turns and flees from them. Besides, our lads are fighting God's battle against bigotry, idolatry, and fiendish cruelty as exemplified in the tortures inflicted upon poor souls in the hellish Inquisition, and 'twould be sinful and a questioning of God's goodness to doubt that He will watch over them who are waging war upon ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... Middle Ages, I don't know. Dark Ages, we used to call 'em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except that they're over now." He continued for some minutes on the uselessness of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... walk along a street of nicely-decorated and apparently well-stocked shops, have the slightest conception of the hollowness of many of the appearances. The reality has been tested in part by the income-tax inquisition, which shews a surprising number of respectable-looking shops not reaching that degree of profit which brings the owner within the scope of the exaction. It may be that some men who are liable, contrive to make themselves ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various

... VIII. of England in Henry VII. chapel, Westminster, and at Hampton Court. Afterwards he went to Spain and came to a bad end there, as Condivi says. He died in the prisons of the Inquisition, he had been condemned for destroying a figure of the Madonna of his own carving; his patron paid him insufficiently, so he went to the house, hammer in hand, and destroyed the statue, with this unfortunate result. He starved himself to death in prison as a worse fate ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... hundred years they have resisted all the influences of nature, and all the customs of society, and all the powers of persecution, driving them toward amalgamation, and irresistible in all other instances? In the face of the power of the Chinese Empire, in spite of the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, amid the chaos of African nationalities, and the fusion of American democracy, in the plains of Australia, and in the streets of San Francisco, the religion, customs, and physiognomy of the children ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... upon the timely accident by which I had escaped. Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no more. And the death just avoided, was of that very character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Catholic. But in tracing sectarian animosities back to their source, you may always expect to crash up against Vested Interests. For instance, the great Fact of the English Reformation was the confiscation of Church property. Afterward, a Protestant England submitted peaceably to the Inquisition; but when Mary proposed restitution of the abbey tenures— whoop! to your tents, O Israel! The noble army of prospective martyrs could n't conform to that heresy; and the stubborn Tudor had to back down. Again, Wesleyanism tapped ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... work so witty that it was constantly attributed to Erasmus, and so carefully destroyed that Heinsius gave a hundred gold pieces for the copy which Count Hohendorf afterwards placed among the imperial rarities at Vienna. The satirist's volume of Letters from Obscure Men completed the rout of the Inquisition; and we are told by the way that it saved the life of Erasmus by throwing him into a violent ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... webs, long pendent there, Of sable bards a subtle snare, Of all-collective disposition, Which holds like gout of inquisition, May well denominated be, ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... instinctively. There was a new accent to the inquisition, different from all the other questions he had run. He looked at Tough McCarty's stocky frame and battling eyes, and suddenly knew that he was face to face with a human being between whom and himself there could never be a question ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... assault of destiny, might have appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him, this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto. He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... to an inquisition which would decide once and for all whether he was to go forth and conquer the world with a university education behind him, or go back to the plough and sup porridge for the rest of his life. To-morrow he was to have his opportunity, ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... in religion as well as in society. Along with democratic ideas filtering in with the exiles from the great Flemish cities, came a breath of that restless and unquiet spirit which soon awakened the concern of the inquisition in the Netherlands. There brotherhoods, some mystical and quietistic, others enthusiastic and fanatical, were growing in numbers and importance. Some of these bodies, Beguines, Beghards, and what not, were harmless ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... commissaires du Pape, commencerent a instruire leur proces comme a des heretiques, et comme s'ils eussent ete en pays d'inquisition; mais la procedure etant trop longue pour des gens qui etoient deja condamnes, Christierne, dans la crainte qu'il ne se fit quelque revolte en leur faveur, leur envoya des bourreaux sans autre formalite, pour ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker

... the works of Cornelius Jansenius, umquhile Bishop of Ypres, but which, the Jansenists asserted, were not to be found in anything Jansenius had ever written. And in the attempt to decide this simple question of fact, as Pascal calls it, the School of the Sorbonne and the Court of the Inquisition were completely baffled; and zealous Roman Catholics heard without conviction the verdict of councils, and failed to acquiesce in the judgment of even ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... more confusion than can easily be imagined; entered the torture chamber, entered the inquisition, entered the tentacles of that sly and beaming polyp, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... ergastula or workhouses, in which slaves guilty of offences were forced to work off their penalties in chains and were confined to filthy dungeons; and he modified the law previously existing to the extent that if a master was killed in his own house, the inquisition by torture could not be extended to the whole household, but to those only who, by proximity to the deed, could have noticed it.[206] Gaius observes[207] that for slaves to be in complete subjection to masters who have power of ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... exhausted. In tracing customs, it is easy to see the bias unknowingly received from natural significations, significations which take their rise in the spiritual world. The San Benito or auto-da-fe dress of the Spanish Inquisition was yellow, blazoned with a flaming cross; and, as a mark of contempt for the race, the Jews of Catholic Spain were condemned to wear a yellow cap. Distinguishing colors in dress have ever been one of the most common methods of expressing distinction of class ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... religious tenets to the public; because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed. It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... dealing with a contagious disease is to apply to it the recognized principles of notification. Every new application of the principle, it is true, meets with opposition. It is without practical result, it is an unwarranted inquisition into the affairs of the individual, it is a new tax on the busy medical practitioner, etc. Certainly notification by itself will not arrest the progress of any infectious disease. But it is an essential element in every attempt to deal with the prevention of disease. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... twentieth-century world are acquainted with many more kinds of torture than the ingenious managers of the Inquisition ever dreamed of in their most lurid nightmares. And of all these peculiarly modern forms of torture, perhaps the fashionable girls' school such as Herndon Hall takes first rank. A boys' school of the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... sought not only to save himself from exposure, but to complete his work by succeeding to the Tressilian estates. Sir Oliver was to have been sold into slavery to the Moors of Barbary. Instead the vessel upon which he sailed was captured by Spaniards, and he was sent to the galleys by the Inquisition. When his galley was captured by Muslim corsairs he took the only way of escape that offered. He became a corsair and a leader ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... to Gora, but to no one else but Mortimer. She had kept his love letters in it for a time, written while the family was applying the polite methods of the modern inquisition at Rincona, They had remained there, forgotten, until her mother's death, when she had remembered the secret drawer as a safe hiding place for her keys and jewels; which, with her mother's, had formerly reposed in the safe ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... of the hilarity incident to the presence at dinner of Jeff and of his guest, Mr. Lawrence, Miss Jemima had pushed her inquisition even further than usual. George Washington watched her with growing suspicion, his head thrown back and his eyes half closed, and so, when, just before dinner was over, he went into the hall to see about ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page

... fear, we must hold fast to our heritage as free men. We must renew our confidence in one another, our tolerance, our sense of being neighbors, fellow citizens. We must take our stand on the Bill of Rights. The inquisition, the star chamber, have no ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... special regard, and, over all, the pond lily, then the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what it concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... Lunnasting, had he not wished to steal a march on Pedro Alvarez. He had discovered that the worthy lieutenant suspected his designs, and would, if he had the power, counteract them; he therefore resolved to deprive him, forthwith, of that power. The Inquisition, that admirable institution for the destruction of heresy, existed in full force in those days in Spain, and the father well knew that if he could induce its officials to lay hands on his rival that he would give him no further ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... again how little she knew, and listen to fresh reproaches. She tried to brace herself for the ordeal when ordered to the study, but her heart failed her as she tapped at the door, and she entered with something of the apprehension of a victim of the Inquisition facing the torture chamber. She advanced hesitatingly towards the Principal's desk, and stood without speaking, a forlorn enough little figure to have excited compassion in the most mercenary heart. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil

... that it was best, that it was right, that this peerless woman should wed a man of Beaumont's position and culture, still that gentleman's assured deliberate advance was like the slow and torturing contraction of the walls of that terrible chamber in the Inquisition which, by an imperceptible movement, closed in upon and crushed the prisoner. For a time he felt that he could not endure the pain, and he grew ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... Marion with his lovely Louisa, were living on a small farm in the vicinity of Rochelle. As he walked one afternoon in the main street of that city, he was very rudely accosted by a couple of officers of the holy inquisition, whose looks and dress were as dark ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... members, grew most hot and dangerous. Saint Dominic had come into the South; and in his fearful, fiery sermons, he not only prophesied that the Albigenses would swell the number of the damned at the Day of Judgment, but also advocated that, living, they should know the hell of Inquisition. Partisans of the Catholic Faith were solemnly consecrated "Crusaders" by Pope Innocent III, and wore the cross in these Wars of Extermination as they had worn it in the Holy Wars of Palestine. In 1209 their army advanced against Beziers, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... around which sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses, was universally held to be the express teaching of the Bible; and when Galileo ventured to maintain the new views in Italy, the Roman Curia took up the question, and by the agency of the Inquisition wrung from him a reluctant retractation of his so-called heresy. But it was of no avail. The new doctrine was true, and it could not be crushed. Fresh evidence of its truth was continually coming forward, till at last it was universally received. Then the defenders of the Bible had recourse to the ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... of Philip II. of Spain and of Charles IX. of France shortly supplied England with the population of which she stood in need—active, industrious, intelligent artizans. Philip set up the Inquisition in Flanders, and in a few years more than 50,000 persons were deliberately murdered. The Duchess of Parma, writing to Philip II. in 1567, informed him that in a few days above 100,000 men had already left the country with their money and goods, and that more ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the Inquisition.' ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford

... sins as well as his own. She was not a person to yield to any one where her power and rights were in question, so that in all matters concerning home policy, she is at least entitled to an equal share of the discredit; and in the establishment of the Inquisition, and the persecution of the Jews and Moors, she stands alone. Ferdinand was always disposed to put his religion behind his interest, and was urged by his wife into measures of which he disapproved; sometimes, indeed, she ordered or permitted persecutions ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... Ueber eine Inquisition gegen die Waldenser in der Gegend von Altenburg und Zwichau, in the Zeitschrift fr Brd. Gesch. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... presidency, which is unparalleled in labor history and alone is conclusive evidence of his executive skill, scarcely a year has passed without some dramatic incident to cast the searchlight of publicity upon him—a court decision, a congressional inquiry, a grand jury inquisition, a great strike, a nation-wide boycott, a debate with noted public men, a political maneuver, or a foreign pilgrimage. Whenever a constituent union in the Federation has been the object of attack, he has jumped into the fray ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... assassin's knife. He revels in a coarse oath, laughs in a perjured vow, and breathes in a lie. He has kept celebrated company in times gone by. He was Superintendent of the Coliseum when the Christian martyrs were given to the wild beasts. He was long time a familiar in the Spanish Inquisition, and adviser of the Catholic priesthood in those days, and Governor of the Bastile afterwards. He was the king's minister of pleasure in the days of the latter Louises. He was court chaplain when Ridley and Latimer were burned. He was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... to pass by; and they were themselves sensible that he had just cause to be angry at them, and that his eagerness was for their advantage; yet did they desire he would have a little longer patience, lest, upon any disappointment they might meet with, they should put the city into disorder, and an inquisition should be made after the conspiracy, and should render the courage of those that were to attack Caius without success, while he would then secure himself more carefully than ever against them; that ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... asked me if I had been in Spain, and if I was not imprisoned by the Inquisition. I told him that I had seen the abolition of the Inquisition voted, and of the injudicious manner ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... in my new position satisfied me that Doctor Dulcifer preserved himself from betrayal by a system of surveillance worthy of the very worst days of the Holy Inquisition itself. ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins

... more returns to truth and justice necessary,—the Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the mischief ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... growing more and more like the man in whose company she had gone to Penterby. His demand upon her presence was increasing in power, because he was sitting up, leaving his room, coming in search of her. Sally felt that already he was beginning to exercise an inquisition. A tremor shook her nerves. Sometimes it seemed to her that Gaga's glance held a strangeness, almost a faint suspicion. When she thought that she was conscious of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... he had been an extensive traveller and had seen with his own eyes the methods which the Spanish Inquisition employed to compel uniformity of faith and, with his whole moral being revolting from these unspiritual methods, he dedicated himself to the cause of liberty of religious thought, and for this he wrote and spoke and wrought ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... said his friend, "you will hear that man—that wonderful man—called by a name which is not his: his real name is Acosta: he is a Portuguese Jew, a Rosicrucian, and Cabalist of the first order, and compelled to leave Lisbon for fear of the Inquisition. He performs here, as you see, some extraordinary things, occasionally; but the master of the house, who loves him excessively, would not, for the world, that his name should ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... who began to be annoyed by this inquisition, "give me, I beg you, the proof that you have ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the inquisition, and proposed a decree to refer the business to the court of Areopagus, and to punish those whom that court should find guilty. But being himself one of the first whom the court condemned, when he came to the bar, he was fined fifty talents, and committed ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... Congress. The proposal was at once accepted and its crafty backers secured a committee dominated entirely by themselves. Chandler was a member; Wade became Chairman.(3) This Committee on the Conduct of the War became at once an inquisition. Though armed with no weapon but publicity, its close connection with congressional intrigue, its hostility to the President, the dramatic effect of any revelations it chose to make or any charges it chose to bring, clothed it indirectly with immense power. Its inner purpose may be stated ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... whose imprisonment in the Roman Inquisition is a familiar story, has published "Dealings with the Inquisition, or Papal Rome, her Priests and her Jesuits; with Important Disclosures." It ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... weak point in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into private life which is to be made by the rulers. The magistrate is always watching and waylaying the citizens. He is constantly to receive information against improprieties of life. Plato does not seem to be aware ...
— Laws • Plato

... smile upon his lips, tried occasionally to cry pity for his friend's verses, given up to such ferocious executioners. But these literary murderers, ready to destroy a comrade's book, are more pitiless than the Inquisition. There were two inquisitors more relentless than the others; first, the little scrubby fellow who claimed for his share all the houris of a Mussulman's palace; another, the great elegist from the provinces. Truly, his heartaches must have made him gain flesh, for very soon he was ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... I was telling you, at three o'clock, Mr. Pultney rose up, and moved for a secret committee of twenty-one. This inquisition, this council of ten, was to sit and examine whatever persons and papers they should please, and to meet when and where they pleased. He protested much on its not being intended against any person, but merely to give the King advice, and on this foot they fought it ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... allowed to men by the Koran in the beating of their wives, has led the entire population of the East to set a low estimate upon the life of woman. Until recently in Syria women were poisoned, thrown down wells, beaten to death, or cast into the sea, and the government made no inquisition into the matter. According to Mohammedan law, a prosecution for murder must always be commenced by the friends of the victim, and if they do not enter complaint, or furnish witnesses, the murderer is not even arrested. And if he be convicted of the crime, he is released on paying ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... hills of Galilee. He was as unsafe when He went up to Jerusalem as John Huss when he went to the Council of Constance with the Emperor's safe-conduct in his belt; or as a condemned heretic would have been in the old days, if he had gone and stood in that little dingy square outside the palace of the Inquisition at Rome, and there, below the obelisk, preached his heresies! Christ had been condemned in the council of the nation; but there were plenty of hiding-places among the Galilean hills, and the frontier was close at hand, and it needed a long ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his growth stopped completely, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... her voice sank, as the inquisition proceeded. "Dear Frederic's" death was not the subject she would have chosen of her free will to discuss with this man of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... the least that could be desired for it, and another would insist that it had reached a harmless and doddering old age. A writer would assert that Christianity was a religion of wrath and blood, and would point to the Inquisition, and to the religious wars which have at one time or another swept over the civilized world. But by the time the reader's blood was up, he would come across some virile atheist's proclamation of the feeble, mattoid character of the religion in question, as illustrated by its quietist saints, the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... bishop's question. The Congregation of the Council answered by a simple affirmative. In 1892, Greenwich time was introduced for State purposes into all railway, postal, and Government offices in Holland. The query was put to the Congregation of the Inquisition if the clergy and people might, for the purpose of fast and other ecclesiastical obligations, follow the new time, or were they obliged to retain the true time? The reply was "affirmative ad primam: negative ad secundam partem." "In a word, ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... itching to tell his story. He was likely to tell it quicker for not being questioned; your Cockney dislikes anything he can construe into inquisition. I remarked that the road didn't seem made for speed—too narrow and too rough—and ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... we have seen the entire Sex submitting to torture in a middle ground—namely, the waist—with an equal degree of magnanimity. The corsets also formed an engine which would have perfectly fitted the purposes of the Inquisition; indeed, there were some ingenious devices of the Holy Office which did not greatly differ from it. It might almost shake the common-sense of admiration for martyrial sufferings, to find that every little girl in England was for some years both able and willing to endure a regular torture, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various

... supposed to occupy a quasi parental position toward you; and am the authorized custodian of your secrets, should you, like most persons of your age, chance to possess any. Your mother, you are aware, invested me with this right as her vicegerent, consequently you must pardon the inquisition into the state of your affections, which just now I am compelled to make. Although I consider you entirely too young for such grave propositions, it is nevertheless proper that I should be the medium of their presentation when they become inevitable. Upon ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... typical New Yorker. He had too real and intense an interest in all created things to fear Mrs. Maitland's gently suspicious inquisition. In addition to this he was so genuinely interested in at least one of the Bostonians before him that he naturally and easily escaped the pitfalls into which another might have tumbled. So thoroughly, indeed, did he win approval and disarm suspicion that before very long he had his reward in being ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... 3, 1431, by order of King Henry VI of England, Jeanne was placed in the hands of Peter Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had already moved to have her delivered up to the Inquisition of France, as demanded by the University of Paris. The Bishop proceeded to form at Rouen a "court of justice" for her trial, and on February 21st the Maid was brought before her judges—"Norman priests and doctors of Paris"—in the chapel of Rouen castle. The trial lasted ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... Jupiter and the phases of Venus, through a telescope made with his own hands. When compelled on bended knee to publicly renounce his heretical doctrine that the earth moves around the sun, all the terrors of the Inquisition could not keep this feeble man of threescore years and ten from muttering to himself, "Yet it does move." When thrown into prison, so great was his eagerness for scientific research that he proved by a straws in his cell that ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... without being imbecile, childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the Dies Irae and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the Ancren Riwle. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry; though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry not cabined and cribbed by our limits. In ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... prints, and from these he took occasion to give us many amusing and interesting accounts of Spain, where he had passed the early part of his life. From Don Quixote to Gil Blas—to the Duc de Lerma— to the tower of Segovia—to the Inquisition—to the Spanish palaces and Moorish antiquities, he let me lead him backwards and forwards as I pleased. My mother was very fond of some of the old Spanish ballads and Moorish romances: I led to the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... of Shrewsbury The Earl of Dorset Questions put to the Magistrates Their Answers; Failure of the King's Plans List of Sheriffs Character of the Roman Catholic Country Gentlemen Feeling of the Dissenters; Regulation of Corporations Inquisition in all the Public Departments Dismission of Sawyer Williams Solicitor General Second Declaration of Indulgence; the Clergy ordered to read it They hesitate; Patriotism of the Protestant Nonconformists of London Consultation of the London Clergy Consultation ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... enquire into the private opinions of every person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)—heretics who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned if they will promise ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... adorned on wall and ceiling with paintings by the great masters. The Hall of the Great Council is esteemed one of the finest rooms in Europe. It is indeed a magnificent apartment: but perhaps a more particular interest centres in the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci, or Hall of the Inquisition, as it was sometimes appropriately called. Here the chairs of the terrible Ten still remain, as though for some impending solemn conclave. Awful pictures of bloodshed and death frown down from ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... him, and expressed himself bitterly enough about it. Even at a later period he does not seem to have sufficiently observed its usages, and by loose speech he perhaps made himself suspicious to devout believers—here and there at least a slight fear of the Inquisition is perceptible. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Richard Grenville: "I know you are no coward; You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard, To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... in 1784, when they had obtained what they wanted. Acting under their sanction, however, he asserted a claim to their protection, and after giving a detailed historical account of parliamentary proceedings with regard to British India, he remarked that there were three species of inquisition which might be adopted against a state culprit; the house might order a prosecution by the attorney-general; or it might proceed by a bill of pains and penalties; or it might act upon the ancient and constitutional mode of impeachment. As ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... have. Do none confess but the guilty? What is all that we have read about the Inquisition and the old tortures? I have had to learn that torturing has not gone out of the ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... Grene in 1582 held lands of which ten and a half acres had been gradually acquired through as many as ten grants. This land had formed part of six other holdings, and much of the rest of the land belonging to these holdings had also been alienated.[92] The Inquisition of 1517 reported numerous cases of engrossing, and Professor Gay notes some of the entries in the returns of the Inquisition of 1607 which are also interesting in this connection: W. S. separated six yardlands from a manor house and put a widow in the house, a laborer in the kitchen and ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley

... 14. The Inquisition of the Sheriffs. 1170.—It was not long before Henry discovered another way of diminishing the power of the barons. In the early part of his reign the sheriffs of the counties were still selected from the great landowners, and the sheriff was not merely the collector of the king's revenue in his ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... Poland! poor Hungary! What abominable deeds! First of all, they knocked down the trees of Liberty, then they restricted the right to vote, shut up the clubs, re-established the censorship and surrendered to the priests the power of teaching, so that we might look out for the Inquisition. Why not? The Conservatives want to give us a taste of the stick. The newspapers are fined merely for pronouncing an opinion in favour of abolishing the death-penalty. Paris is overflowing with bayonets; sixteen departments are in a state of siege; ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... who had heard of what she had done, followed her so close that she was forced to take shelter in a little alehouse, the Angel. Mr. Fisher, a gentleman who was afterwards one of the jury upon the coroner's inquisition, came there, and prevailed with her (or in other words forced her) to return home. Upon her return, the inquest sitting, she sends for Mr. Fisher into another room and said, "Dear Mr. Fisher, what do you think they will do with me? Will they send me to Oxford gaol?" "Madam," ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead

... English Denizen in 1748, was an Italian descendant from one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced to emigrate from the Spanish Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the Venetian Republic. His ancestors had dropped their Gothic surname on their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... natives, had managed to revolutionize their minds, and so spared their country those scenes of blood which blot with a fearful stain the history of Spanish power in America. But the influence of churchmen, as usual, in the Philippines, was not always to be well directed; for the merciless Inquisition having established itself at Manilla, commenced its terrible career. No one was safe, none were exempt from its powers; its emissaries penetrated even into the palace of the Governor. Moderation in religion, or remissness in its strictest observances, became crimes, ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking

... of Bannon in explorer's kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... raise the means of continuing his studies for the ministry. Under suspicion of being an Abolitionist, he was arrested by the "Vigilance Committee" (a Lynch-law institution), while attending a religious meeting in the neighbourhood of Nashville. After an afternoon and evening's inquisition, he was condemned to receive twenty lashes with the cow-hide on his naked body. Between 11 and 12 on Saturday night the sentence was executed upon him, in the presence of most of the committee, and of an infuriated and blaspheming mob. The Vigilance ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies



Words linked to "Inquisition" :   interrogation, examination, Spanish Inquisition, Roman Inquisition, Congregation of the Inquisition, interrogatory, judicature, court, tribunal



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