“It is a curious fact, that in all the lives of holy and sainted nuns that have been given to the world, the arch-tempter is always described as tempting them through the passions. He invariably is made to appear in the form of a very handsome young man! It is equally observable, that in the lives of holy monks and sainted friars, the arch-enemy is usually said to have appeared in the form of a very lovely young female! All this is very natural; and it shows, that even within the walls of both the monastery and the convent, the monks and the nuns are sometimes thinking of other subjects than those of heaven!”—Pp. 183-186.

Although the internal economy of nunneries is generally concealed with the utmost vigilance from the public, yet many things transpire at Rome, from time to time, that indicate the state of morals among their occupants, and to demonstrate the wickedness that is practised by them in secret. Mr. Seymour states some fearful facts. He remarks,—“Every one who knows anything of Italy, and especially of Rome, is aware that the most debauched and profligate characters in the land are among these inmates of the cloister. At present, the question concerns the moral character of the nunneries. So many things have of late years been stated—so many narratives of vice have been published—so many personal histories of victims to the system have been given—and so much has been said and written as to the dangers of the confessional, that I feel justified in saying a few words as to the moral state of the nunneries in Italy.

“I entertain a favourable opinion of many of these nunneries; believing that they realise that for which they are designed, namely, a safe retreat for unprotected females, and are conducted in a manner that bespeaks a moral and religious sisterhood. But I entertain a less favourable opinion of others. It should ever be remembered, however, that from the very nature of some of these establishments, there is no possibility of knowing what passes within them. Immured within those lofty walls and iron bars, none can go forth to reveal what may have passed within: so that, though possibly the most hideous forms of vice may reign throughout—though every chamber may be a polluted place—though violence and murder may stain every gallery; yet there is no voice to tell it to the world. I have already stated that an official gentleman, who, at times, was obliged to attend the cardinal-vicar at the formal visitation of monasteries, gave us some information on the subject. His wife informed my wife, that on one occasion, shortly before our visit to Rome, they found in a nunnery, which they named, and which was not ten minutes’ walk from our residence, that no less than four of the nuns were enceinte! They were immediately removed to another establishment; the reverend confessor was removed elsewhere, and the whole affair was kept as secret as possible. It would never have been known, were it not that this nunnery was one of those whose inmates are occupied in teaching the young ladies of Rome, and young ladies will talk. And matters became more canvassed, owing to the impression that the poor confessor was only a scape-goat for a higher personage, whose guilt was to be concealed by the dismissal of a subaltern.

“But there are some establishments from which even this suspicion could never go forth. They are so closely kept, that mortal eye can never see the intima penetralia. The ‘sepulte vive,’ for example, that is, the ‘buried alive,’ are establishments of this kind. The young creature, as a part of the ceremonial of admission, is laid alive in her coffin; and, when once admitted, she is, in fact, as if dead and buried to her friends; for she is never allowed to see again father or mother, brother or sister! Once a year, on an appointed day, the parents of the ‘buried alive,’ may attend at the nunnery, and the young creature within may hear their loved and familiar voices, but she must never see them; and, as no kind of intercourse is ever permitted, she can never know whether they are living or dead, except as she hears or does not hear their voices on that day. If a parent has died during the year, the abbess assembles the nuns, she tells them that the parent of one of them is dead, and desires all to pray for the soul of the departed; but she never reveals the name of the dead; so that all the nuns are left in a state of agonising suspense, till the one day comes round, and all listen to catch the tone of their parents’ voices; and the absence of the longed-for voice tells the tale of the bereaved recluse! Such, at least, is the account the Romans give of these establishments, which thus seem the very climax of cruelty, rending and agonising the hearts of the inmates, under the pretence of a desire to wean them from the world!”—Pp. 186-188.

Language fails to characterise this system of manifold iniquity and refined barbarity. But deeds even worse than these may well be imagined. Mr. Seymour observes, therefore, “But that which concerns our present subject is the veil of secresy that covers all within such establishments as these. There may be—I must not say there is—there may possibly be the most frightful vice—there may be the most ruffian violence—there may possibly be the veriest climax of profligacy—there may possibly be all this, and the public never know it. History has recorded the fact, that in the apartments of the inquisitors of Spain there were found sixty-two young women, who had been corrupted and ruined by the inquisitors, and kept there where the public can never know it. The French soldiery flung open the Inquisition, and revealed the secret.” [See Chapter XIX.] “There is no security against the same evil in a very large proportion of the nunneries; for every crime of earth and hell may possibly be rife throughout their cloisters, and the cry of innocence and outraged virtue, stifled within the walls, may remain unheard by the world without. While we were at Rome, an abbess of one of the nunneries rushed forth frantically from the opened gates, plunged into the Tiber, and there sought, in its deep waters, to drown the memory and remorse of the past! We were surprised at the pains taken to deny and conceal this fact, though known and witnessed by hundreds. The ecclesiastics could not bear to hear it mentioned!”—Pp. 188, 189.

CHAPTER XXIII.

“THE KISS OF THE VIRGIN MARY.”

Many persons have denied its existence, as too horrible to be credible; but, besides the evidence already adduced, from the testimony of that military officer, and of Madame Faulcaut, who had seen it in the Inquisition of Saragossa, it appears to have been common in Germany. The following testimony is from a work called “The Kiss of the Virgin; a Narrative of Researches made in Germany, during the years 1832 and 1834, for the purpose of ascertaining the mode of inflicting that ancient punishment, and of proving the often denied and generally disputed fact of its existence: by R. L. Pearsall, of Willsbridge, Esq., in a Letter to the Rev. H. T. Ellacombe, F.S.A., Vicar of Bitton in Gloucestershire.”

This narrative was read, January 12th, 1837, before the Society of Antiquaries, and published in their “Transactions,” vol. xxvii., pp. 227-256.

Mr. Pearsall remarks, “In England, thanks to the publicity of our judicial proceedings, those who fell under the hands of the executioner perished before the eyes of the world, in a mode prescribed by the law. This was not the case in other countries. Wherever there was a despotic monarch, or an irresponsible corporation endowed with an unlimited criminal jurisdiction, men were accused, imprisoned, and never more heard of. Their probable fate could be guessed only from circumstances, or from some unguarded expression from the lips of such as were likely to be aware of it.

“‘Passer par les oubliettes,’ was a well-known phrase in France; and yet few were able to define its meaning accurately. Every one, however, understood that when a man was considered by the tribunals to be guilty of certain crimes, he was doomed to pass, as it were, into oblivion, by descending through trap-doors, called oubliettes, into the nether regions of the prison, from which he never returned.

“‘The Kiss of the Virgin,’ (or Jungfern-Kuss), was an equally well-known phrase in Germany, and its import was almost as little understood. A general impression, however, reigned among the multitude, that, in certain towers and prisons, there was a terrible engine, which not only destroyed life, but also annihilated the body of the person sacrificed; and this, from being constructed in the form of a young girl, was called ‘The Virgin.’

“During a residence in Germany, some years ago, chance threw me in the way of hearing much of this engine, without being able clearly to understand what it was, excepting that it exercised the functions of executioner in the form of the Virgin Mary, and exterminated its victims by hugging them in arms furnished with iron blades. Thus they were soon deprived of life. It was said to have existed in many towns and castles, and even convents. Some represented it to be an image of the Virgin Mary, which the culprit was told to kiss, and which, on being touched by him, was set in motion by inward machinery, which caused the figure to fall down and crush him. Others said, that its arms expanded and clasped him to a breast, out of which poniards protruded. Others, again, represented it merely as an emblem of Justice, placed above a trap-door, on which the culprit trod, as he advanced to pay her his homage, and which, being left unbolted, sank underneath his weight, and precipitated him into an abyss.

“The difficulty of obtaining evidence respecting it, and the contradictory and, consequently, unsatisfactory nature of the little that I did for some time obtain, made me begin to treat the stories which I had heard as the result of popular error. Added to this, I found almost all the members of the modern school of philosophy prepared to treat the thing as an old woman’s tale; and one of them told me that the whole affair was a mere monkish lie.

“Discouraged as I was by the result of my inquiries, I could not altogether hold the thing as utterly without basis. And being loath to treat as mere idle rumour that which had been heard of by every German, and was believed by the great majority of the people, I was tempted to take a middle course between belief and unbelief, and to conclude that the Virgin must have been the plank, or German guillotine. The conclusion which I arrived at was, however, disturbed by a passage which I accidentally met in a book, entitled, ‘Materialen zur Nürnber-gerisehen Geschichte herausge geben von D. T. C. Siebenkees, Nürnberg, 1792.’

“The passage in question is represented to have been extracted from a Chronicle (which the author has not indicated), and may be thus rendered in English:—‘In the year of our Lord 1533, the Iron Virgin was constructed, for the punishment of evil-doers, within the walls of the Frogs-Tower, opposite the place called Die Sieben Zeiler—that is to say, the Seven Ropes; so, at least, it was publicly given out, to justify the thing. Therein was an iron statue, seven feet high, which stretched abroad both its arms in the face of the criminal, and death by this machine was said to send the poor sinner to the fishes. For, so soon as the executioner moved the step on which it stood, it hewed, with broad hand-swords, the criminal into little pieces, which were swallowed by fishes in hidden waters. Such secret tribunals existed formerly in many countries.”

Mr. Pearsall pursued his inquiries with indefatigable industry in the German cities, and made many discoveries in secret “torture chambers.” “Many persons of the better class,” he remarks, “to whom I spoke on the subject, denied that the Virgin had ever existed in Austria; but my laquais de place, and others of the lower class, told me, that when they were young, it was said to be standing in a tower which hangs over the canal that runs through Vienna into the Danube, and that whenever the water there looked a little red (as was usually the case after a storm), nothing was more common than to hear people say, ‘So, the Virgin has been at her work again.’”

Mr. Pearsall made important discoveries at Nuremberg. There he was aided by Dr. Mayer, keeper of the archives of the city. “Dr. Mayer told me,” says he, “that the passage from the Chronicle, quoted by Siebenkees, was no fable; that the machine had formerly stood in a vault near to the Sieben Zeiler, and that he himself had seen part of the machinery which belonged to it, although the figure itself had disappeared. ‘The figure,’ said he, ‘stood at the brink of a trap-door; and when the individual who had suffered by its embraces was released from them, he fell downwards through it on a sort of cradle of swords, placed in a vault underneath, and which were arranged so as to cut his body in pieces, which dropped into running water, over which the machine stood.’

“Desirous of seeing the spot where the Virgin stood, I procured permission to visit it from the city architect, who sent me the keys by a man named Kiefer. This man has been a long time in the employment of the magistrates, and he accompanied Dr. Mayer and myself to the spot in question. He was a stranger to Dr. Mayer; but he had himself, many years back, been in the vault. He found no stream of water there, although the place was extremely wet and damp; and on one side of the vault, which was drier than the other, there was a sort of grave, in which were many human skulls and bones. He told me that in his youth he had known an old man, named Kaiferlin, who had seen the machine in a perfect state. He stated, also, that Kaiferlin told him, that two or three days before the entry of the French into Nuremberg, the Virgin and all the instruments of torture formerly kept in the place where she was, were taken away by night in a cart, and that neither she nor they had ever been heard of since.”

Mr. Pearsall at length found this Virgin in the Castle of Feistritz. Baron Diedrich informed him, “I bought it of a person who obtained it, with the left hand, during the French revolution, and had with it a great part of the contents of the arsenal of Nuremberg. From him I received it in a cart, with several things which had formerly belonged to that arsenal. It came to me rusted and in bad condition, deprived of its machinery, but accompanied by the pedestal on which it now stands, and which seems to have been made for it.”

“The construction of the figure,” says Mr. Pearsall, “was simple enough. A skeleton, formed of bars and hoops, was coated over with sheet iron, which was laid on and painted, so as to represent a Nuremberg citizen’s wife of the sixteenth century. The front of the machine opened like folding doors, the two halves of the front part of it being connected by hinges with the back part. On the inside of its right breast are thirteen quadrangular poniards. There are eight of these on the inside of the left, and two on the inside of the face. These last were clearly intended for the eyes of the victim, who must have, therefore, gone backwards into it, and have received, in an upright position, in his breast and head, the blades to which he was exposed. That this machine had been formerly used cannot be doubted; because there are evident blood-stains yet visible on its breast, and on the upper part of its pedestal. How it was worked is not known, for the mechanism which caused it to open and shut is no longer attached to it; but that there was some such mechanism, is clear from the holes and sockets which have been cut out on the surface of the pedestal, showing the points where parts of the apparatus intended to work it must have been inserted. It stands, at present, on castors, and there are two iron springs, which its present proprietor has caused to be placed in it, for the purpose of making its sides to open whenever it is moved forward; but this is done to startle, by way of pleasantry, those who see it for the first time.”

Mr. Pearsall traces the origin of this machine to Spain, and in connexion with the Inquisition. He says, “In the year 1835, I met at Liege with a very well educated and accomplished man of letters; he was a Frenchman by birth, and had been attached to the court of Joseph Buonaparte, when he was promoted by his brother Napoleon to be king of Spain. There, my informant told me, that he had an opportunity of inspecting the chamber of the Inquisition at Madrid, and that, among other instruments with which it was provided, he found an image of the Virgin Mary, composed partly of wood and partly of iron. This engine was called ‘Mater Dolorosa,’ and with it was administered the last and severest degree of torture. Its ordinary position was that of a woman standing erect, with her arms crossed on her bosom; but there was a contrivance by which she was made to expand her arms, and then the inside surfaces of them were seen to be garnished with a number of small points or stilettoes. The person to be tortured was placed opposite to her, breast to breast, and then her arms were brought round his back, and by means of a powerful screwing implement made to grasp him tightly, so as to inflict great pain, and to render it impossible that he could fall from her gripe. Whilst she held him thus firmly, a trap-door was opened under his feet, so as to cause him to hang in agony over an abyss. In this position he was importuned to confess his guilt, while the arms of the machine were slowly and gradually screwed tighter and tighter, till life was squeezed out of his body. The corpse was then released, and fell through the trap-door into a sort of oubliette. Now, I am much inclined to think that the machine in the possession of Baron Diedrich was made to do its inhuman duty somewhat in the same manner as the machine in the Spanish Inquisition.”

Priestly cruelty in Spain appears to have derived this instrument from the invention of this kind by Nabis, tyrant of Sparta. See Hampton’s Polybius, vol. ii., p. 291. Mr. Pearsall remarks, “Perhaps, also, the merit of having invented the Virgin is due to the genius of Spain; and it is by no means impossible that it was thence transplanted into Germany during the reign of Charles V., who was monarch of both countries. According to M. de Pfeffel, (Abrégé de l’Histoire d’Allemagne, p. 414) there were great tumults in Germany during the years 1531 and 1532, and continual quarrels at Nuremberg, between the Protestants and Catholics. ‘In 1532 was published,’ says he, ‘the famous Criminal Code of the Empire, which was the most severe and the least observed in Europe.’ In 1533 the Iron Virgin was, according to the Chronicle cited by Siebenkees, constructed at Nuremberg.

“I cannot fix the time when this machine was first employed in Spain; but I was told by Mr. Gévay, a learned Hungarian in the Imperial Library at Vienna, that he had read of this machine in Spanish romance of the early part of the sixteenth century, which proves that it was known in Spain at the period in question. The author, also, of a French romance, published at Paris in 1828, and entitled ‘Cornelia Borogina,’ makes mention of it as Spanish, and this attributes it to the same epoch. Add to this, that it is an instrument much more congenial with the genius of the Spanish nation than with that of the Germans.

“Probably one might find in Spain other specimens of this machine; perhaps some may exist in Italy; for I have heard that at the close of 1814, there was something like it at Florence. But after having seen the engine in the possession of Baron Diedrich, one can no longer doubt that others of its species were employed as appendages to the ancient tribunals; and one is, therefore, obliged to regard the story of ‘The Kiss of the Virgin,’ not as a popular legend, but as history.”

Reflecting on popery, existing thus in Rome and other countries called Catholic, degrading all classes of the community in every nation, we cannot but consider it deserving the execration of mankind. It is a system of priestcraft grafted on the Gospel, a “mystery of iniquity,” utterly at variance with the first principles of humanity, as well as the letter and spirit of Christianity, as taught in the Scriptures. Its dreaded Inquisition, in all its various agencies, is regarded with the utmost abhorrence by the more intelligent people of Rome and of the other States of Italy. The Catholic priests, too, are hated generally, as the crafty oppressors of the laity; and, though this might be denied by the adherents of the Pope, the fact is notorious, from the late revolutions in Europe, and especially from the present condition of the Italian States, whose governments require to be severally supported by the military power of Austria, while Rome itself is occupied by a French army, as indispensable to the support of “the Most Holy Father,” against his beloved children, in his own city!

Intelligent persons, in all popish countries, regard the Romish priesthood with mingled contempt and dread. This is testified by every well-informed writer. As an evidence of this, it may be stated, that a merchant from Portugal, recently in London, being asked by an English merchant, freely, in his counting-house, whether he allowed his own parish priest familiarly to visit his family,—consisting chiefly of daughters,—replied, “No, indeed! on no account whatever would I suffer him to enter my house!” and, laying his hand upon the desk, he declared, with peculiar emphasis, “I would rather suffer this hand to be chopped off, than allow the priest to associate with my family!”

Priestly influence is reluctantly endured by the Catholics, though ignorant of pure Christianity, while sensible men groan under its oppressive intolerance. Hence, the intelligent author of “Rome in the Nineteenth Century,” referring to the jealousy and domination of the priests, remarks, concerning a Catholic friend, who had travelled in other countries, that he cherished the utmost repugnance regarding the established practice of Confession. But still he complied with the custom, for fear of the priests; arguing, “What can I do? If I neglect it, I am reprimanded by the parish priest; if I delay it, my name is posted up in the parish church; if I persist in my contumacy, the arm of the church will overtake me, and my rank and fortune only serve to make me more obnoxious to its power. If I choose to make myself a martyr to infidelity, as the saints of old did to religion, and to suffer the loss of property and personal rights, what is to become of my wife and family? The same ruin would overtake them, though they are Catholics: for I am obliged, not only to conceal my true belief, and profess what I despise, but I must bring up my children in their abominable idolatries and superstition; or, if I teach them the truth, make either hypocrites or beggars!”

Romanism, as will appear from these various facts, instead of promoting the pure and saving knowledge of Jesus Christ—by keeping the people in ignorance of the holy Scriptures, it impedes the advancement of true religion. And, while the intolerant jealousy of the priests disgusts the people, their whole system produces that infidelity which so fearfully prevails in all the states of Europe, to the hindrance and dishonour of pure Christianity. Our confidence is, however, that the whole system of popery will, in due time, be utterly destroyed, by “the brightness of the coming of Christ,” in the full light of the holy Scriptures!

J. Unwin, Gresham Steam Press, 31, Bucklersbury, London.