Edited sentence: " Lea documented the Inquisition's methods and modes of operation in no uncertain terms calling it "theocratic absolutism" at its worst.At the start of the 20th century Henry Charles Lea published the groundbreaking History of the Inquisition in Spain.In the context of the polarization between Protestants and Catholics during the second half of the nineteenth century, some of Lea's contemporaries, as well as most modern scholars thought Lea's work had an anti-Catholic bias.Prescott, the Boston historian, likened it to an "eye that never slumbered".This influential work saw the Spanish Inquisition as "an engine of immense power, constantly applied for the furtherance of obscurantism, the repression of thought, the exclusion of foreign ideas and the obstruction of progress.William H