RELIGION, EDUCATION, FINE ARTS. 



499 



eight feet high and five feet wide, which twist 

 and turn in all directions, very much resem- 

 bling mines, and at irregular intervals into 

 wide and lofty vaulted chambers. The graves, 

 where are buried many of the saints and mar- 

 tyrs of the primitive church, were constructed 

 by hollowing out a portion of the rock at the 

 side of the gallery large enough to contain 

 the body. The catacombs at Naples, cut into 

 the Capo di Monte, resemble those at Rome, 

 and evidently were used for the same purpose, 

 being in many parts literally covered with 

 Christian symbols. In one of the large vaulted 

 chambers there are paintings which have re- 

 tained a freshness which is wonderful. Simi- 

 lar catacombs have been found at Palermo and 

 Syracuse, and in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, 

 Persia, Egypt, and in Peru and other parts of 

 South America. 



Apocrypha, The. In the earliest churches 

 the word Apocrypha was applied with very 

 different significations to a variety of writ-' 

 ings ; sometimes it was given those whose 

 authorship and original form were unknown ; 

 sometimes to writings containing a hidden 

 meaning ; sometimes to those whose public 

 use was not thought advisable. In this last 

 signification it has been customary, since the 

 time of Jerome, to apply the term to a number 

 of writings which the Septuagint had circulated 

 among the Christians, and which were some- 

 times considered as an appendage to the Old 

 Testament, and sometimes as a portion of it. 

 At the Council of Laodicea, 360 A. D., the 

 Greek Church rejected all books except those 

 in the present Protestant canon. In 474 Pope 

 Gelasius convened a council of seventy bishops, 

 which confirmed the opinion of Pope Innocent 

 I., recognizing the Apocryphal books as sacred, 

 and rejecting some of the doubtful books of 

 the New Testament. The Council of Trent, 

 1545-'G3, finally settled the question for the 

 Roman Catholic Church, accepting the Apocry- 

 pha as a part of the sacred canon. The Prot- 

 testant churches reject their use in public 

 worship. Ft was customary at onetime to bind 

 up the Apocrypha between the authorized 

 versions of the Old and New Testaments, 

 though this has now ceased, and, as a conse- 

 quence, this curious, interesting, and instruct- 

 ive part of Jewish literature is now known only 

 to scholars. 



Inquisition, The, was a tribunal in the 

 Roman Catholic Church for the discovery, re- 

 pression, and punishment of heresy, unbelief, 

 and other offenses against religion. From the 

 very first establishment of Christianity as the 

 religion of the Roman empire, laws more or 

 less severe existed, as in most of the ancient 

 religions, for the repression and punishment of 



dissent from the national creed, and the Em- 

 perors Theodosius and Justinian appointed of- 

 ficials called " inquisitors," whose special duty 

 it was to discover and to prosecute before the 

 civil tribunals offenders of this class. For 

 several centuries cases of heresy were tried be- 

 fore the ordinary courts, but in course of time 

 the examination of those accused of this crime 

 was handed over to the bishops. Special ma- 

 chinery for the trial and punishment of here- 

 tics was first devised in the eleventh and twelfth 

 centuries against the various sects who had 

 separated from the Church, and who became 

 known under the general term of Albigenses. 

 Heresy was then regarded as a crime against 

 the state as well as the Church, and the civil, 

 no less than the ecclesiastical, authorities were 

 arrayed against those sects. The murder of a 

 papal legate in 1205 gave a pretext for declar- 

 ing against the Albigenses a war in which thou- 

 sands perished, and in 1299 the Council of 

 Toulouse decreed the " Inquisition " for their 

 extermination. The searching out of here- 

 tics was first given to the bishops of the 

 Church, but the Pope (Gregory IX.), fearing 

 that these would not be active enough, trans- 

 ferred their work to the Dominican friars. A 

 guild was also formed called the ' ' Militia of 

 Jesus Christ," whose object was to aid in- 

 quisitors in their work. The Church found 

 the heretics, examined, and sentenced them, 

 and then called in the civil authority to put 

 its sentence into execution. The inquisitorial 

 courts at first only held occasional sessions, but 

 after 1248 they sat permanently. A person, 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 

 conducted secretly. He was not confronted 

 with his accusers, nor were their names, even, 

 made known to him. The evidence of an ac- 

 complice w r as admissible, and the accused him- 

 self was liable to be put to torture, in order to 

 extort a confession of guilt. The punish- 

 ments to which, if found guilty, he was liable, 

 were death by fire, as exemplified in the ter- 

 rible auto-da-fe\ or on the scaffold, imprison- 

 ment in the galleys for life or for a limited 

 period, forfeiture of property, civil infamy, 

 and in minor cases retraction and public pen- 

 ance. 



Inquisition, Spanish. The Inquisition 

 was introduced in Spain in 1232, by Pope 

 Gregory's appointment of the Dominicans of 

 Aragon as inquisitors, and it ultimately came 

 to be viewed by the people with most ab- 

 ject terror. At first it passed no sentence 

 more severe than the confiscation of property, 

 but toward the close of the fifteenth century, 



