A NAME OF TERROR.

Otago Witness, Issue 3112, 5 November 1913, Page 75

A NAME OF TERROR.

(By John o’ London, in T.P.’s Weekly.) In this dark and moving book (“Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition ). M. Rafael Sabatini approaches the story of the Spanish Inquisition in the only way in whifh it should now be approached—-in a spirit free from Christian partisanship. He has not, he says —and his book makes good his words —written in the Catholic interest, or the Protestant interest, or the Jewish'interest-, holding that on the score of intolerance it is not for Christians to cast a stone at Jews, nor Jews at Christians, nor yet Christians of one sect a Christians of another. Each will hnd in his own history more than enough to answer for at the bar of Humanity. in Ms preface he quotes Lecky s gnm an irrefragable statement that while the Roman Catholic Church persecuted to the full extent of the power of her clergy, the Protestant churches have followed suit with the difference that their clerical power has been weaker for mischief. Against Torquemada’s triumphant persecutions we have to place the less su £'r? ss ‘ ful efforts of John Knox, of Queen Elizabeth, and of the Anabaptists, to name no others. In a word, if we are to free our minds from the very stupidity which produced that cancer of history which we call the Spanish, Inquisition, we must regard it primarily, not as the crime of one Church, hut as‘the supreme object lesson in the crimes of all. Not the Inquisition, but the spirit of. persecution, is the baffling and dreadful theme which requires to be discussed in the broadest terms of faith and human nature. —St Augustine.— The doctrine on which the Spanish Inquisition was based originated 1000 years earlier in the saintly and spacious mind of Saint Augustine, to whose writings Catholics and Protestants alike turn for the finest instruction and spiritual aid. He advocated the extermination by death not only of apostates from the true faith, but of followers of the pagan systems. Curiously enough, it was a Spanish theologian, Priscillian, who in Augustine s lifetime was burned for no greater heresy than proclaiming that the marriage of the clergy (then optional) was forbidden by Christ; and this heretic of the fourth century has been called the first martyr of a Spanish Inquisition. The very title of Inquisitor is more than 1000 years older than the auto-da-fe. Nor can there be a greater error than to suppose that the instrument set up in Spain by Torquemada was a sudden apparition like the guillotine. Long before Torqueniada was born there were regularly constituted Inquisitions in Italy, Spain, Germany, and ’France. The institution in its mediaeval form was canonically founded, early in the thirteenth century, by Pope Innocent 111, and in the form it then took we at once perceive the principles of that grim ■ structure to which, more than 2CO years later, Torqueniada was to add every sinister refinement. Put into its simplest terms, the method of the Inquisitions wa-s this; the Church discovered and convicted heretics, and then, under threat of interdict and excommunication, compelled the State to punish them. Resistance on the part of the State was both foreseen and encountered, but for centuries it wilted under the threatened curse of Rome. And thus was engendered that arch-hypocrisy under which the Church affected to wash its hands of the administration of torture and deatu. Not onl\ did no priest turn the rack or kindle the fire, hut the Church, with its genius for casuistry, avoided even the appearance of procuring the State to carry out its sentences. When a heretic was condemned he was “abandoned to the secular arm.’’ “They were careful,” says M. Sabatini, “not so much as to say that they delivered him to the secular arm; for delivery suggests activity in a matter in which they must remain absolutely passive. They merely abandoned him. Pilate-like, * they washed their hands of him. If "• the secular justiciaries chose to bear him away and burn him at the stake, in spite of their ‘earnest intercessions’ to the contrary, that, was the secular justiciaries’ affair.” These deceptions were crowned by the ghastly formula in which the judges, when convicting a heretic, expressed the hope that the civil authorities ■would not hurt him in life or limb, knowing full well that these very authorities were bound under the Papal threat of excommunication to pass and execute sentence within five days. Such was the Inquisition, whose introduction into Castile was for years pressed in vain upon Queen Isabella, but at last with success, by —Thomas de Torqueniada.—

M. Sabatini dwells for a moment - on tbe singular expressiveness of this man’s name. “To such an extraordinary degree •is it instinct with the suggestion of the machinery of fire and torture over which ho was destined to preside, that it almost seems a fictitious name, a nom de guerre, a grim invention. ’’ It was derived, however, simply from the town of Torqueinada (the Roman Turre Oremata) in the North of Spain. If there is one thing historically certain about Torqnemada it is that, according to his lights and those of his age, he was a good and even a saintly man. He kept his Dominican VOWS of poverty rigorously, his piety and chastity were as complete as his force of character was irresistible. He had been Isabella’s confessor in her girlhood, and he it was who, aided a web of circumstance which I must here ignore, finally persuaded a wise and normally humane Queen to admit the Inquisition to her realm. The fatal document was signed on September 27, 1480, and with appalling swiftness the curtain rises on the drama Of the Spanish Inquisition. —Grand Inquisitors. — In October the two Grand Inquisitors, Cardinal -Mendoza and Torquemadn, made

their entry into Seville, which they regarded as a hot-bed of those converts from the Jewish faith who were for ever relapsing, by force of blood and tradition, into Judaism. These “New Christians, as they were called, -were their sheep for the shearing.

The very rumour of their approach had filled the New Christians with anxiety, and a glimpse of the gloomy funereal pageant—the white-robed, black-hooded inquisitors with attendant familiars and barefoot friars, the procession headed by a Dominican carrying the White Cross —on its way to the Convent of St. Paul, where they took up their quarters, w r as enough to put to flight some thousands of those who had cause to fear that they might become the objects of the attention oi

that fearful court. Numerous prints have stamped that picture on the English imagination: it is the nightmare of history, and so hypnotic are the mere names and phrases of the Inquisition, that it may be doubted whether English eyes have even yet examined the facts, which, while they leave the horror of it all unabated, are . necessary to any understanding of this gigantic error. Now the nature of that error must be defined and understood if we are to exchange a merely traditional and nervous contact with the subject for an effective grasp of its character, and of its relation to the possibilities of human nature. It may be doubted whether the actual scope of the Inquisition is even now at all accurately known in this country. Who were its victims? I quote M. Sabatini:— . We touch here upon a point on which, the religious persecution known as the Inquisition compares favourably with any other religious persecution in history, and in common justice this point should not—as but too frequently has been the case—be obscured, ' There is too little to be urged in favour of this tribunal, so terribly inequitable in its - practices, that we cannot afford to slur over the one feature of its constitution that.is invested with a degree of equity. Whatever mav have been the case m the course of civil and popular persecution, whatever may have been done by a frenzied populace at the instigation of old fanatical preachers acting without the authority of their superiors in giving rein to the fierce bigotry they had nurtured in their souls, the Church herself, it must be clearly understood, neither urged nor sanctioned the persecution of those born in any religion that was not in itself a heresy of the Roman faith. The tribunal of the Inquisition was established solely—and moved solely —to deal with those who apostatised

or seceded from the ranks of the Roman Church, precise!}’ as an army deals with deserting soldiers. Fanatical, horribly narrow, cruelly bigoted as was the spirit of the Inquisition, yet the confined their prosecution to apostates. . . . With those' born in any other independent religion she had no concern. To Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, and Pagan, and to the savages of the New World, when it came nresently to be discovered, she accorded the fullest religious freedom.

Ifc is here that we' approach the mystery of this abomination. The most terrible quality of the Inquisitors was their sincerity'. To what end. therefore, should I transcribe from M. Sabatini’s paper the scaring details of their cruelty, misguidance, casuistry, and perversions? It is in the undeniable sincerity, the demonstrated good conscience, of the Inquisition that its last lessons lie, and these lessons are not even yet unnecessary or outworn. —The Mind of the Church.— The auto-da-fe, in short, was but the forced fruit of intolerance; and intolerance is not dead. It has been proved again and again that the animal in man, with its blind instincts of pursuit and destruction, can ascend into any region of our being, and inject its; feral breath into the passion of faith: — -

It may seem bitterly ironical that men should have been found who, in the name of the meek and compassionate Christ, relestl&ssly racked and burnt their fellow creatures. It was—bitterly, ; deplorably, tragically ironical. But they were not conscious of that irony. In what they did they were sincere—as sincere as St. Augustine when he urged the extermination of heretics; and none can call in question his sincerity' or the purity of his motives. The Church believed, as it believed in its own existence, that she and she alone was potential salvation, potential heaven. Without her walls all men were lost. The doctrine enveloped her like an atmosphere. “When,” says M. Sabatini, it is considered that such doctrines were held dogmatically, it will be realised that in the sight of the Church—whose business was the salvation of souls—there could be no sin so intolerable, so execrable, as heresy. It will be realised how it happened that the Church could consider those of her children who were guilty of such crimes as murder, rape, adultery, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain, with the tolerance of an indulgent parent, whilst rising up in intolerant wrath to smite the heretic whose life might be a model of pure conduct. The former were guilty of only the sins of weak humanity; and sinners who have the faith may seek forgiveness and find it in contrition. But heresy was not merely the worst of sins, *as some have held. In the eyes of the Church it transcended the realm of sin—at was infinitely worse than sin, because it represented a state that was entirely hopeless, a state not to be redeemed or mitigated by good actions or purity of life. Taking this view of heresy, the Church accounted it her duty to stamp out this awful soul-pesti-lence so as to prevent its spreading; and she had St. Augustine’s word for it that it was merciful to be merciless in the attainment of that object. '

Such was the mind of the Church and the general belief of her children. We may stigmatise it in what wurds we will, but in all such cases we must beware lest we be found blaspheming against human nature itself. We cannot declare that any Church, any age, or any great brotherhood of men has ever marched open-eyed into wickedness. Their eyes were holden, so that they knew not what they did. —The Sectarian Attitude.— It is on these things, at the last, that we have to ponder. The sectarian attitude is “alike unworthy and worthless. Must we, then, accept as truth M. Sabatini’s doctrine that “it would seem that bnly' when a faith has been diluted by certain general elements of doubt, that only when a certain degree of indifference has crept into- the observance of a prevailing cult, does it become possible for the members of that cult to bear them selves complacently ‘ towards the members of another”? What is our guarantee that when the next great creed or revival comes —be it religious, social, or scientific —it will be free from at least the spirit of persecution? The best, the only, guarantee lies in our desire to understand persecution while we execrate it, to remember that all men are of the same blood and proneness to error, and to realise that in the higher flights and experiences of the sbul—in all divine intoxication —man has desperate need to hold fast to something lower and . firmer —even to that wisdom and understanding which he has collected along the highway of his history, under, every banner of faith and under every cloud of doubt.

A RL MARKABLE !AVEMfOR. ’ LUBRICATING THE WORLD AND SAVING OIL, COAL, AND POWER. There is now residing in London one of those great natural scientific geniuses who are born and not made—Dr Edward G. Acheson. He is of the type of Edison, and has, indeed, worked with that great magician in his workshops. He is the holder of two distinguished scientific medals —the Count Rurnford .American medal, created in 1700, of which his- is the twenty-first, for the new industrial products of his electrical furnaces; and the Perkin research medal, of which Sir William Perkin, the discoverer of coal tar dyes, received the first in 1906, and Dr Acheson the fourth in 1910. Humphry Davy and Faraday, were holders of the Rumford English medal.

The ideal before his raind ( to-day is to lubricate the machinery of the British Empire —to say nothing of the w-orld, — and he is in a position to do so, for he has made one of the greatest discoveries in the world,of lubrication, and lias manufacturing plant enough distributed throughout Europe and America to supply his product where needed. i —Waste and Cost of Friction. — The general public, and even manufacturers, do not sufficiently realise the place which the oiling of machinery plpye in the world —nor the cost it adds to manufacture-. Stil less do they realise the enormous loss of power and the amount of power uselessly made and used because of friction between different parts of the same machinery, because of resistance due to imperfect lubrication of the hearings and moving parts. Leonard Arehbutt, in hie great work on lubrication, says that “considerably more than half the 10,000,000 horsepower in use in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. is spent in overcoming friction.”

Obviously, then, there is a large margin here for saving expense, and, as the cost of lubrication enters into everything made by machines, the importance of the issue great to every purchaser of made things. The manufacturers’ motto should be “Stop that friction!” Here are a series of possible economies and conservations of natural resources which every business man and every social reformer should assist in bringing about. It is possible — 1. To save one-quarter of the coal used in manufacture. 2. To save two-thirds of our lubricatinp oil and one-third of its cost.

3. To save 50 per cent, of wasted power, or one-quarter of total used. 4. To lengthen the life of the machinery. Let us see in detail how Dr Acheson’s invention, “ Oildag,” comes to the rescue and offers peace, to the heated world of machinery. The story of the invention is itself a romance. Oiling the World. — Fifty years ago the lubrication of the bearings and moving parts of machinery was provided for by sperm oil and animal fats, which to-day is, of course, impossible. Fifty years ago petroleum lubricating qj! was’ first placed on the world’s markets, and its consumption has increased to an astounding figure—namely, approximately 1,000,000,000 gallons a vear.

Authorities tell us that the consumption of petroleum lubricating oil is trebling every 15 yearn, and, further, that it is estimated the world’s supply of petroleum oil will be exhausted in another 50 years, providing the present methods of lubrication be continued for that period. During the last five, years the retail prices have nearly, if not altocrether, doubled, and we can confidently look forward to the price within a few years being exorbitant. Empire’s Lubrication 'Bill.—

Of the 1000 million gallons of lubricating oil now annually consumed by the world, a very large percentage ifi, of course, used by the British Empire. What this- nuay'be is problematical, but let us say one-fourth. This would give us 250 million gallons of lubricating oil utilised annually, and almost entirely purchased from external eourcee by the Empire. We find on investigation that the price varies in different countries of the Empire—thus it is 'higher in price per gallon in Canada than it is in Great

Britain; but, assuming that, the average price be Is 6d, we find that the annual lubrication bill of the British Empire would be £18,750,000. —To Save Our Coal. — Now Dr Acheson argues that the universal use in oil of Defiocculated-Acheson-Graphite, known as “ Oildag,” would reduce this oil cost by £12,600,000 (that is, two-thirds), less an approximate cost for the deflocculated graphite necessary of 6d on the gallon, or £6,250,000 —- leaving a net saving on the lubricating bill of £6,250,000 (or one-third) per annum.

While there should be a saving of considerable importance in the lubricating bill by the use of “ Oildag,” a very much greater saving would be simultaneously effected in the coal bill. For Dr Acheson and other authorities in the scientific and mechanical world, claim that the one-half of the coal bill which is being lost in overcoming friction in the' bearings of machinery can be reduced by one-half. This would mean the saving of onequarter of the entire fuel bill for power purposes, thus resulting in a large conservation in what is regarded as England’s most valuable asset.

It remains to point out what this “ Oildag is which offers to do such miracles, and to provide a solution of these problems of machinery. The word “Dag” stands for “ Deflocculated-Acheson-Graphite.” Romance of Invention,— A few years ago Dr Edward G. Acheson —who is also the inventor of carborundum, the world’s most efficient grinding material —at Niagara Falls, N.Y., found a way of making graphite in his great electric furnaces. A mixture of coal and other, substances is placed in one of the great electric furnaces, and there’ brought up to a temperature of "SOOOdeg F., when everything in the mixture is vapourised, and disappears like steam from boiled water, excepting the carbon in the mixture, and upon opening the furnace the carbon .will be found as a beautiful, soft, unctuous graphite. This graphite will be almost absolutely pure, analysing as high os 99.8 per cent, carbon.

, Having produced an absolutely gritless graphite. Dr Acheson in 1906 turned his attention to the use of this solid lubricant on an extensive scale. All former attempts in the application of natural graphite for general lubrication had encountered serious difficulties about introducing it to the wearing parts of machinery, and also there was the serious objection of the graphite being impure. Dr Acheson surmounted these difficulties, first by making a pure graphite, and then by producing what astounded the scientific'world—the deflocculaton _of graphite into such fine particles jbhat it would remain diffused in a liquid like oil or water, and flow wherever the liquid would go. This subdivided graphite, when mixed with oil, forms “ Oildag;” which is capable of entering not only the pores, but the molecular structure of metals, and which produces a wonderful lubricating effect, saves friction, saves coal, eaves oil, saves power, and saves noise too.

“ Oildag ” has been thoroughly tested by practical application in many fields where heretofore plain oil has been used, and hundreds of cases are cited where the use- of “ Oildag ” has effected savings of from 25 per cent, to 70 per cent, in the oil consumption. It promises to be an ideel lubricant for general use, while for pas engines it is stated to be unsurpassed., Wanted, a Spiritual “ Oildag.”—

If the inventor of this remarkable lubricant could only apply its efficacy, to those problems about which men do rub one another the wrong way, if it could be used to mollify friction in private, public, national and international affairs, what a saving there would be in heat and temper, in personal power and nervous energy, in cash and happiness, and spirituality! We still lack a spiritual “Oildag”' which shall moke smooth the world's rough places.