“Burn everybody,” the Inquisition seemed to say, “God can easily sort out his own.” Poor fools, hysterical women and idiots were roasted alive for the crime of magic.

Catherine de Medicis, the author of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, had in her service an apostate Jacobin priest who was proficient in the black art. King Charles lay dangerously ill, and Catherine, the queen mother, had everything to lose by the death of the King. In her anxiety she commanded the priest to inquire of the Devil what should be done to save the life of the King. The priest, taking with him a beautiful child, went into the chapel and after administering to the child its first communion, decapitated it on the very steps of the altar and placed the palpitating head upon the paten. Then, standing on a reversed cross, he celebrated the Devil’s Mass before an image of the Demon, and commanded the Devil to answer by the lips of this murdered child the question of the Queen. Then a strange voice, which had nothing human about it, made itself audible in this poor little martyr’s head. But the sorcery availed nothing, the King died.—Elephas Levi.

“Pope Sylvester was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and enchanter. The brazen oracular head made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the work of or inhabited by a demon, but because the spook, that was fixed inside by mesmeric power, talked incessantly and disturbed the eloquent saint. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the animated gods of the ancient temples. It was demonstrated that this Pope was constantly attended by demons or spirits. Benedict IX, John XX and the VI and VII Gregory were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, it was said, could shake lightning out of his sleeve. In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. John Reuchlin, father of the Reformation and teacher of Luther, was a Kabalist and occultist. The occult knowledge gleaned by religion from the fat fields of theurgy was sedulously guarded for its own use, and it sent to the stake only those practitioners who poached on its preserves. Between 1580 and 1595 in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned nine hundred witches.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-57.

“The gorgeous standard of the Inquisition is represented as waving in the Heavenly breezes at the foot of the Great White Throne of the Almighty. On its crimson, damask face is the cross, the symbol of the Son of God who died for mankind, with an olive branch on one side and a sword stained to the hilt with human gore on the other.”

“The true origin of the daily accusations and death sentences for witchcraft are traced by Dr. Soldan, of Stuttgart, to personal, political and religious enmities. Prince Bishop, John George II, of Bamberg, caused six hundred to be burned for sorcery in five years. The petty princes were not unwilling to seize upon any pretence to fill their coffers, the persons most persecuted being those whose property was a matter of consideration.”—Sorcery and Magic, 2-185. A horse was burnt at the stake in Lisbon in 1601 for witchcraft, because it could tell the number of spots on a card.

In the list of twenty nine burnings, or autos da fe, in nineteen months in Germany, 162 persons were murdered, of whom 28 were Protestants, 100 wealthy citizens and 34 little children, the youngest an infant. Wright says that 27 little girls, from seven to ten years of age, were burnt as witches. Lorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquamada in eighteen years burned at the stake 10,220 persons, and otherwise punished 97,321. In Andalusia alone, in a single year, the Inquisition sent to the stake 2000 Jews.—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 1-136. “We learn that much money was realized by selling to the rich dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition.”—Conflict Between Religion and Science, 146.

Stevens says: “A monk of St. Anthony, having been at Jerusalem, brought home with him a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, the snoot of a seraphim, one of the nails of a cherub, one of the ribs of the Word Made Flesh, some rays of the Star of the East, and a vial of St. Michael’s sweat. Henry III, of England, received from the Grand Master of the Templars a vial containing some of the blood that Christ shed upon the cross, attested by the seal of the Patriarch of Jerusalem.”

The hand of one of the innocents massacred by Herod, although Herod died four years B. C., was, in 1837, still preserved in the Convent at Bethlehem. There also is the pit in which the bodies of the infants were thrown, and also the manger which came down from the constellation of the Crab. Some depraved Christian copped the stone on which the cock crowed when Peter denied his Master, and, in 1837, it was said to be in a church in Rome. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, among other wonders, is a monument erected over the grave of Adam, who never existed, and there is a polished marble bathtub or sarcophagus, which they claimed was the sepulchre hewn out of the rock. See Travels in Holy Land, 2-163.

The fight of the fools and fakirs over the location of the grave of a mythical sun-god is certainly ludicrous, but more amusing was the magic trick of the early Christians who stole the grave of Adam either from Hebron or Mecca and also swiped the grave of Christ from the Damascus Road, north of Jerusalem, and exhibited both, with other shell and three-card-monte games, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the centre of Jerusalem, for the purpose of annexing the coin of the dupes, farmers and come-ons from all over the world.

According to Tichenor, over three hundred years after the crucifixion, St. Helena found the true cross, and also dug up the crosses of the two thieves, and this lumber was sold for centuries to millions of the faithful. Even a splinter will save you from Hell and cure you of what ails you. And the bones, hair and nails of the Apostles have been sold all over the world. You could formerly buy a gunnysack full of St. Peter’s fingers and toes if you had the necessary dough. The people not only worshipped the Mother of God, but worshipped St. Ann, the Grandmother of God. God came unto Mary in the form of Gabriel, and to prove it the monk Eiseling exhibited all over Europe a pin-feather from Gabriel’s wing, which he shed at the conference. Thorns, from the crown of thorns, the blood of Jesus, by the drop or the bottle, and the milk of the Holy Virgin were peddled out all over the world for centimes.—See Tichenor’s Roman Religion.