Note 308 — Chapter X

Such, at least, several of his letters to the Pope, Clement XII., would seem to indicate. It is not impossible that the strenuous opposition which the Jesuits gave to the Inquisition may have had something to do with their expulsion. Some of them went great lengths in their attacks. P. Antonio Vieyra, the celebrated Portuguese Jesuit, in his ‘Relaçaõ Exactissima, Instructiva, Curioza, Verdadeira, Noticioza do Procedimento das Inquiziçois de Portugal’ (Em Veneza, 1750), is almost as severe as Protestant writers have been against the Inquisition. Particularly does he inveigh against the prison system of the Holy Office (pp. 3-5, chap. i.). In the last chapter (p. 154), Vieyra calls Saavedra, the founder of the Portuguese Inquisition, a tyrant, and in recounting his deeds calls him tyranno, cruel, falsario, herege, and ladram (a thief), and finishes by asserting that the tribunal invented by such a man ‘had its roots in hell’, and that ‘its ministers could not go to heaven’.