It is not worth while at present to pursue these disputes which reveal the character of the Inquisition and the resistance offered to it by the comparatively free populations subject to the crown of Aragon. We shall have ample opportunity hereafter to note the persistant arrogance of the inquisitors under the royal favor, the restlessness of the people and the fruitlessness of their struggle for relief from oppression. The Holy Office had become part of the settled policy of the House of Austria. The Lutheran revolt had grown to enormous proportions and no measures seemed too severe that would protect the faith from an enemy even more insidious and more dangerous than Judaism. The system grew to be an integral part of the national institutions to be uprooted only by the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic war. At what cost to the people this was effected is seen in the boast, in 1638, of a learned official of the Inquisition that in its favor the monarchs had succeeded in breaking down the municipal laws and privileges of their kingdoms, which otherwise would have presented insuperable obstacles to the extermination of heresy, and he proceeds to enumerate the various restrictions on the arbitrary power of the secular courts which the experience of ages had framed for the protection of the citizen from oppression, all of which had been swept away where the Inquisition was concerned, leaving the subject to the discretion of the inquisitor.[727]
What gave to the Spanish Inquisition its peculiar and terrible efficiency were the completeness of its organization and its combination of the mysterious authority of the Church with the secular power of the crown. The old Inquisition was purely an ecclesiastical institution, empowered, it is true, to call upon the State for aid and for the execution of its sentences, but throughout Christendom the relations between Church and State were too often antagonistic for its commands always to receive obedience. In Spain, however, the Inquisition represented not only the pope but the king; it practically wielded the two swords--the spiritual and the temporal--and the combination produced a tyranny, similar in character, but far more minute and all-pervading, to that which England suffered during the closing years of Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church.