"There are various punishments with which ecclesiastical sanctions and imperial laws order heretics to be punished. Some are spiritual, and effect the soul alone; others are corporeal, and effect the body... Among the corporeal punishments, one which very much annoys heretics is the proscription and confiscation of their property."--_Alphonso ae Castro, cap_. 5: p. 98.
"Another punishment," says he, "is the deprival of every sort of preeminence, jurisdiction and government, which they previously had over all persons of all conditions; for he who is a heretic is, _ipso jure_, deprived of all things."--_Ib., cap_. 7: p. 1055.
"The last punishment of the body for heretics," he informs us, "is death, with which we will prove, by God's assistance, heretics ought to be punished."--_Ib. i cap_. 12: p. 123.
But it will be said that Protestants have been guilty of persecution as well as Catholics. This assertion is unquestionably true. We confess, with regret, that Protestantism, although she admits the right of private judgment, has proved a foe to civil and religious liberty, But unlike Catholicism, she has made concessions; reluctantly, indeed, but still she has made them. Guizot confesses that her practice has necessarily been inconsistent with her profession of toleration. She, however, claims not, like Catholicism, to be the source and supreme controller of all political power; nor to be the sole disposer of crowns and kingdoms; nor has she elaborated a policy, adopted a systematic course of measures, and organized a clerical force for the acquisition of supreme and universal temporal and spiritual dominion. She has no central head, with spies penetrating all domestic and national secrets, and communicating to it the information they have acquired. She has no political-machinery ramifying every part of Christendom, and acting in concert for the promotion of her interests. She has no convents, nor nunneries; nor monastic vows; no father confessors; no religious confessional; no religious orders, no military knights; and no spiritual guides. She imposes no oaths of allegiance on her priests, requiring them to adopt every available method of subjugating all government under her authority. She has no inquisition, no rack and torture for her opponents; no pretensions to absolve subjects from their oaths of allegiance; no interdicts to alarm superstitious minds by the suspension of religious worship in disaffected kingdoms. She has never interfered between rulers and their subjects, concocting treason, fomenting sedition, and producing anarchy. She has never organized armies for the extension of her dominion, and for the subjugation of kingdoms to her authority. She has never butchered whole cities for unbelief, nor in one day put one hundred thousand heretics to death. She has done none of these things, yet her hands are not unstained with innocent blood. Would they were. Henry VIII., of England, persecuted with equal severity those who believed in the pope's right to temporal power, and those who disbelieved the other dogmas of Catholicism. The Church of England, under Charles I., inflicted the most atrocious punishment on the Irish Catholics; under James I., on the Puritans; and under Elizabeth, it oppressed both Catholics and dissenters with tyrannical measures, and illiberal disabilities. The Puritan Cromwell persecuted both Catholics and Episcopalians. In Ireland he wasted the Catholics with fire and sword; in Scotland he put whole garrisons of dissenters to death; and as his schemes for obtaining the royal dignity suggested, persecuted Covenanters, Republicans, and Puritans. When Charles II. was elevated to the throne he deprived 2000 dissenting clergymen of their livings; and by his five-mile act prohibited them from approaching within five miles of their former parishes. But the rigor of Protestantism eventually relaxed its severity. Under William III. some of the disabilities which oppressed the dissenters were removed; and under that of George III. additional toleration was accorded. Still it must be admitted that the ablest agents in extorting these concessions to religious liberty were the Free Thinkers of that age. Yet the Quakers, always the most respectable body of citizens, and the professors of the most harmless of all creeds, were still punished with fines, confiscation, imprisonment and death. All who disbelieved in the holy trinity were also subject to similar persecutions. Not until 1813 did Protestant England cease to punish a belief in Unitarianism with imprisonment, and legal disabilities.