This history will make known numberless attempts perpetrated by the inquisitors against magistrates who defended the rights of sovereign authority, in opposition to the enterprises of the _holy office_ and the court of Rome; and which enables me to state the trials of many celebrated men and ministers who defended the prerogatives of the crown, and whose only crimes were having published works on the right of the crown, according with the true principles of jurisprudence. These trials will display the Counsellors of the Inquisition carrying their audacity to such a height, as to deny that their temporal jurisdiction was derived from the concession of their sovereign, and actually prosecuting all the members of the council of Castile, as rash men, suspected of heresy, for having made known and denounced to the king this system of usurpation. In addition to these intolerable acts, will be found accounts of their assumption of superiority over viceroys, and other great officers of state. I have also shewn, that these ministers of persecution have been the chief causes of the decline of literature, and almost the annihilators of nearly all that could enlighten the people, by their ignorance, their blind submission to the monks who were qualifiers, and by persecuting the magistrates and the learned who were anxious to disseminate information. These monks were despicable scholastic theologians, too ignorant and prejudiced to be able to ascertain the truth between the doctrines of Luther and those of Roman Catholicism, and so condemned, as Lutheran, propositions incontestably true.
The horrid conduct of this _holy office_ weakened the power and diminished the population of Spain, by arresting the progress of arts, sciences, industry, and commerce, and by compelling multitudes of families to abandon the kingdom; by instigating the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors; and by immolating on its flaming piles more than _three hundred thousand victims_!! So replete with duplicity was the system of the inquisitors-general, and the council of this _holy office_, that if a papal bull was likely to circumscribe their power, or check their vengeance, they refused to obey, on the pretext of its being opposed to the laws of the kingdom, and the orders of the Spanish government. By a similar proceeding, they evaded the ordinances of the king, by alleging that papal bulls prevented them from obeying, under pain of excommunication.