Excerpt from Francisco Moyen: Or the Inquisition as It Was in South America The following work first made its appearance before the public a short time since, in a fragmentary form, in a daily paper, the Mercury of Valparaiso. The reason for its publication is fully explained by the learned author in his preface, where it will be seen, that it was intended as a reply to a most extraordinary production written by a clergyman of Santiago, the capital of Chile, for the express purpose of undeceiving the world in the almost universal but erroneous conceptions formed by the public with regard to the Spanish Inquisition. Generally speaking, most people, at least those who thought any thing at all upon the subject, have hitherto considered that institution to have been one of the greatest curses, which the cruelty and blasphemy of man ever inflicted upon the human race, that it was established expressly to prevent the exercise of God's choicest gift, the use of our reason, to stifle the freedom of thought, to crush and root out from the heart all natural and manly feelings, and thus to reduce mankind to the level of the brute creation. But what will be the astonishment and surprise of all those who have entertained these opinions, to learn that they have been all their life long labouring under a most egregious error, that their education has been the means of perverting the mind, by imbuing it with false impressions and distorting the truth of history, and that the prejudices imbibed in their youth have deceived them and led them astray. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.