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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
A very portly volume on Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, by Rafael Sabatini, at the cost of twelve shillings and sixpence, has gone into its third edition. The publishers on the jacket of the book tell us that ‘it deals without bias and in a purely historical spirit with this phase of religious persecution.’ Certainly a book without bias dealing with the Inquisition must needs be written ‘in a purely historical spirit,’ and no doubt in time such a book will get written. But it is nonsense to speak of Mr, Rafael Sabatini as having already written it. You feel that he wants to be an historian, and that he is trying desperately hard to be without bias; but the result of his efforts is unhappy.
Of course, no one is biassed nowadays in favour of the Inquisition; so that Mr. Sabatini can be sure that he has it all his own way when he denounces its cruelty, its stupidity, its failure. Persecution has hardly ever been successful except to the persecuted, as we know in England in our own case: and Catholics who have suffered persecution at the hands of their countrymen in the past know enough of its folly to have little sympathy with the efforts of the Inquisition of Spain. Yet we have known also enough in our own time of the panic dread of German spies, of hostility to the Jews in many classes of society, of the American habit of applying torture to certain cases that fall under its police law, to be sure that the spirit that begat the Inquisition is alive, though normally very feebly alive, in all human nature.
1 Published by Stanley Paul and Co., 1924.
2 This is equalled by the Sphere (May 24, 1924, p. 200): ‘The Albigenses insisted on an Apostolic Christianity and lived a retired life of simple virtue in Lanquedoc.’
3 This bracketed remark is Mr. Sabatini's.
4 This interjection is Mr. Sabatini's own.