Note 457 — Chapter III

The persecution of Carranza has occupied the pens of several Castilian writers. The most ample biographical notice of him is by the Doctor Salazar de Miranda, who derived his careful and trustworthy narrative from the best original sources. Llorente had the advantage of access to the voluminous records of the Holy Office, of which he was the secretary; and in his third volume he has devoted a large space to the process of Carranza which, with the whole mass of legal documents growing out of the protracted prosecution, amounted, as he assures us, to no less than twenty-six thousand leaves of manuscript. This enormous mass of testimony leads one to suspect that the object of the Inquisition was not so much to detect the truth as to cover it up. The learned editors of the "Documentos Inéditos" have profited by both these works, as well as by some unpublished manuscripts of that day, relating to the affair, to exhibit it fully and fairly to the Castilian reader, who in this brief history may learn the value of the institutions under which his fathers lived.