I suppose you mean the Catholic Church? From the eafrliest writers Chiliasm was taught. In the book I referred to earlier, Grattan Guinness said that the true church has always been millenialist. he was a historicist and so was Elliott who was an millenialist from the early 1800's.
Read his lecture on the inquisition and weep. Near the end of lecture 4. You afre afraid of tribulation. The martyrs thought itn worthy to suffer for Christ. Here is a short extract fro lecure 4 I suggest you read all of it.
"Stay, I will take you to the Inquisition. You shall enter its gloomy portals; you shall walk through its dark passages; you shall stand in its infernal torture chamber; you shall hear the cries of some of its victims; you shall listen to their very words. What agonies have been suffered in these somber vaults, unseen by any human eyes save those of fiendish inquisitors! What cries have been uttered in this dismal place which have never reached the open world in which we live. Locked doors shut them in; stone walls stifled them. No sound escaped, not even that of a faint and distant moan. But now and then a victim found release; one and another have come forth from the torture chamber pale and trembling, maimed and mutilated, to tell the things they experienced when in the hands of the holy inquisitors. We shall call in some of these as witnesses.
This book is Limborch’s "History of the Inquisition." It tells the story of its origin seven hundred years ago, and of its establishment and progress in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, Holland, and other parts of the world; it describes its ministers and methods, its vicars, assistants, notaries, judges, and other officials; it describes the power of the inquisitors, and their manner of proceeding. It unveils their dread tribunal; opens their blood-stained records; describes their dungeons, the secret tortures they inflicted, the extreme, merciless, unmitigated tortures, and also the public so called "acts of faith," or burning of heretics. What a record! What a world of tyranny and intolerable anguish compressed into that one word<e>the Inquisition! Tyranny over the conscience! Men in the name of Jesus Christ stretching and straining, maiming and mangling their fellow men, to compel them to call light darkness, and darkness light; to call the Gospel of Christ a lie, and the lie of Satan truth; to confess that wrong is right, and acknowledge right is wrong; to bow down to man and worship him as God; to call the teachings of Christ heresy, and the teachings of antichrist Diviner Tremendous was the power of that dread tribunal. In Spain and Portugal it completely crashed the Reformation. No secrets could be withheld from the inquisitors; hundreds of persons were often apprehended in one day, and in consequence of information resulting from their examinations under torture, thousands more were apprehended. Prisons, convents, even private houses, were crowded with victims; the cells of the inquisition were filled and emptied again and again; its torture chamber was a hell. The most excruciating engines were employed to dislocate the limbs of even tender women. Thousands were burned at the stake. The gospel was gagged and crashed, and Christ Himself in the persons of His members subjected to the anguish of a second Golgotha.
"Let us look into the chamber of horrors in the Spanish Inquisition. "The place of torture," says a Spanish historian, quoted by Limborch, p. 217, "the place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors. There is a tribunal erected in it in which the inquisitor, inspector, and secretary sit. When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured brought in, the executioner, who is waiting for him, makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all concealed with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body, when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who thus looks like the very devil."
"The degrees of torture are described by Julius Clams and other writers quoted by Limborch. They were various, and included the following:
1. The being threatened to be tortured.
2. Being carried to the place of torture.
3. The stripping and binding.
4. The being hoisted up on the rack.
5. What they called "squassation."
This was the torture of the pulley. Besides this there was the torture of the fire, or chafing- dish full of burning charcoal applied to the soles of the feet. Then there was the torture of the rack, and of another instrument called by the Spaniards "escalero"; then that of pouring water into a bag of linen stuffed down the throat; and that of iron dice being forced into the feet by screws; and of canes placed crosswise between the fingers, and so compressed as to produce intolerable pain; then the torture of cords drawn tightly round various parts of the body, cutting through the flesh; and of the machine in which the sufferer was fixed head downwards; and, lastly, the torture of red-hot irons applied to the breasts and sides till they burned to the bone."
Read it here
Historicism.com/Guinness/Romanism/Lecture4.htm
For JoJ's information. I do have a copy of this book although I can't find it at present. I was looking for it to see the footnotes as the online version gives numbers in the text but no matching footnote.
