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He holds out his finger and bids the guards arrest Jesus. He knits his thick grey brows, and his eyes gleam with a sinister light. "The Inquisitor sees everything he sees them set the coffin down at Jesus's feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. We may indeed express our abhorrence a little more light-heartedly when Professor Higgins, in My Fair Lady, wishes to evoke the most frightful of possible alternatives, he sings, "I'd prefer a new edition/Of the Spanish Inquisition," and, with the shivers running up and down the spine, we know exactly what he means.Īt a rather more sophisticated level was the picture drawn by Dostoyevsky who, in The Brothers Karamazov, imagines the Grand Inquisitor, with "his withered face and sunken eyes," in confrontation with Jesus on the streets of Seville, where the Savior has just restored life to a dead child.
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Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Pit and the Pendulum," is, to be sure, a piece of fiction, its author a specialist in creating scenes of horror and dread, as the titles of some of his other works suggest: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror Worm." Yet Poe's hideous image of the red-hot poker being prepared as an instrument of torture by grinning Spanish sadists the "most demoniac of men" did not strain the credulity of his readers a century and a half ago, nor does it today. Oh, most unrelenting! Oh, most demoniac of men! 'Death,' I said, 'any death but that of the pit.'"Īnd so on for twenty pages reads the most familiar literary indictment of the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition. There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors. A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. A deeper glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies. "Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of the vapor of heated iron. Shop: Roman Catholic "RC" Brand Original Black Logo Collection Premium Tee | Multiple colors and sizes available!