The procedure of the inquisition deserves a brief notice. The party, if suspected of heresy, or denounced as guilty, Was liable to be arrested and detained in prison, only to be. brought to trial when it might seem fit to his judges. The proceedings were con ducted secretly. He was not confronted with his accusers, nor were their names evim then made known to him. The evidence of an accomplice was admissible, and the accused himself was liable to be put lo the torture, in order to extort a confession of his guilt. The punishments to which, if found guilty, lie was liable, were death by fire, as exemplified in the terrible Auto da Fe (q.v.), or on the scaffold, imprisonment in the galleys for life or for a limited period, forfeiture of property, civil infamy, and in minor cases, retractation and public penance. This form of procedure is strangely at variance with modern ideas; but it is fair to recollect that some of the usages were but the ordi nary procedures in all the courts of the age, whether civil or ecclesiastical.
The rigor of time Spanish inquisition abated in the latter part of the 17th century. In the reign of Charles III., it was forbidden to punish capitally without the royal war rant; and in 1770 the royal authority was required as a condition even for an arrest, From 1808, under king Joseph Bonaparte, the inquisition was suppressed until the restoration: it was again suppressed on time establishment of the constitution in 1820; but it was partially restored in 1825; nor was it till 1834 and 1835 that it was finally abolished in Spain, its property being applied to the liquidation of the national debt.
Time inquisition was established' in Portugal in 1557, and its jurisdiction was extended to the Portuguese colonies • in India, The rigor of its processes, however, was much mitigated in the 18th c., -and under John VI. it fell altogether into disuse.
The inquisition in Rome and the papal states never ceased, from time time of its establishment, to exercise a severe and watchful control over heresy, or the suspicion of heresy, which offense was punished by imprisonment and civil disabilities; but of capital sentences for heresy, the history of the Roman inquisition presents few instances, and according t6.13alruci(Oit Cttiliziclion, p. "has t dyer been known to order the execution of a capital sentence" for the crime of heresy. The tribunal still exists under the direction of a congregation, but its action is confined to the examina tion of books and the trial of ecclesiastical offenses, and questions of church law, as in the recent case of the boy Mortara; and its most remarkable prisoner in recent times was an oriental impostor, whO, by means of forged credentials, succeeded in obtaining his ordination as a bishop.—See Llorente's lstoria Critica de la Inguisicion ; Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella ; Defele's De). Cardinal Ximenes ; tine Biographie ; Balmez, Catholicism and Protestantism compared in Relation to