All 4 Uses

inquisition
in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
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People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.†
Chpt 1
She had been denounced three times before the Inquisition.
Chpt 2 *

inquisition = harsh and unfair historical religious investigations
Among her protégés was the cartographer De Blasiis (whose Maps of the New World was dedicated to the Marquesa de Montemayor amid the roars of the courtiers at Lima who read that she was the "admiration of her city and a rising sun in the West"); another was the scientist Azuarius whose treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too exciting.†
Chpt 2
Similarly he had been reduced for a time to making investigations for the Inquisition, but when he had seen several of his victims led off in hoods he felt that he might be involving himself in an institution whose movements were not evenly predictable.†
Chpt 4

Definitions:

(1) (inquisition)
intense or harsh questioning or investigation; more specifically, a church court (especially in Roman Catholic history) set up to find and punish heresy
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)