The trials continued for a while, but behind closed doors, until the entire institution was abolished. For more than three hundred years of religious fervor, the people celebrated auto-da-fe, cruel orgies of public executions, but in the eighteenth century the strength of the Inquisition had begun to wane. The wealth of the condemned passed into the hands of their accusers, so that many victims burned at the stake because they were wealthy, not for any other reason. It had been founded two hundred years earlier in reaction to the power of the Inquisition, the fearsome arm of the Church that since the sixteenth century had labored to defend the spiritual unity of Catholics by persecuting Jews, Lutherans, heretics, sodomites, blasphemers, sorcerers, seers, devil worshipers, warlocks and witches, astrologers, and alchemists, as well as anyone who read banned books. "Escalante's secret society was one of many in Europe during that time. ( Jump down to read a review of House of Spirits) ( Jump over to read a review of The Island Beneath the Sea)
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