242 The Faith of Our Fathers avowed but also justified the deed in his writings; and that he established in Geneva an Inquisition for the punishment of refractory Christians. It should also be remembered that Luther advocated the most merciless doctrine towards the Jews. According to his apologist Seckendorf, the German Reformer said that their synagogues ought to be destroyed, their houses pulled down, their prayerbooks, and even the books of the Old Testament, to be taken from them. Their rabbis ought to be forbidden to teach and be compelled to gain their livelihood by hard labor. It should also be borne in mind that Henry VIII. and his successors for many generations inflicted fines, imprisonment and death on thousands of their subjects for denying the spiritual supremacy of the temporal sovereign. This galling Inquisition lasted for nearly three hundred years, and the severity of its decrees scarcely finds a parallel in the Spanish Inquisition. Prescott avows that the administration of Elizabeth was "not a whit less despotic and scarcely less sanguinary than"318 that of [251] Isabella. The clergy of Ireland, under Cromwell, were ordered, under pain of death, to quit their country, and theological students were obliged to pursue their studies in foreign seminaries. Any Priest who dared to return to his native country forfeited his life. Whoever harbored a Priest suffered death, and they who knew his hiding-place and did not reveal it to the Inquisitors had both their ears cut off. At this very moment not only in England, but in Ireland, Scotland and Holland, Protestants are worshiping in some of the churches erected by the piety of our Catholic forefathers and wrested from them by violence. Observe, also, that in all these instances the persecutions were inflicted by the express authority of the founders and heads of Protestant churches. 318 "Ferdinand and Isabella," Vol. III., p. 202.