Quotable

The Inquisition was the masterpiece of infernal craft and malice, and its deeds were far more worthy of fiends than men. If the church of Rome could at this moment...become a pure community, ten thousand years of immaculate holiness and self-denying philanthropy could not avail to blot out the remembrance of the enormous crimes with which the Inquisition has loaded it. There is a deep and indelible sentence of damnation written upon the apostate church by avenging justice...registered in heaven; nor can any pretenses to present liberality reverse the condemnation...its infamy is engraved in the rock for ever....[The Roman Catholic Church] wallowed so greedily in oppression, torture, and murder in her palmy days, that the foam of human gore hangs around her wolfish fangs, and men will not believe her to be a gentle lamb, let her bleat as she may.

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Sword and the Trowel, II:113-14, 116